Category: angel investors

Shypyard is a New York City and Taipei-based. The operator of a digital marketing platform intended to offer business planning for modern brands. The company’s platform uses advanced analytics and intelligence to integrate sales and inventory data in one place across every channel and third-party source. In addition, it provides pre-built automation templates for multiple task automation, enabling modern omnichannel brands to grow and face economic uncertainty through better business planning.

The Shypyard was funded $3 million led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Position Ventures, and other angel investors. The company plans to employ the new funding to hire talent, expand the development of new products and features, and accelerate the onboarding of new customers.

Dan Li established the company in 2021 with Samping Chuang while working at LinkedIn. His younger sister wanted to start an e-commerce business selling jewelry but didn’t know how to do it. So, he went to business school, and as he learned more about the e-commerce market and spoke with others, he shared his sister’s problem.

Tapping into Chuang’s expertise working at a considerable Shopify agency in Japan, they started Shypyard to construct supply chain planning tools, including inventory, supply, demand, and replenishment, to grow brands. So, they reduce the number of consistent stock-outs, inventory tying up cash, and difficulty predicting and forecasting what list to have.

Now, as many upstart brands and entrepreneurs face economic uncertainty – some for the first time in their brands’ history – they must adopt fully-integrated tools like Shypyard for inventory, supply, demand, and replenishment planning.

The Shypyard is democratizing access to planning tools for entrepreneurs because those small businesses also don’t have the professional teams to implement the tools. By targeting that small merchant niche with easy and simple tools.

By delivering merchants factual, integrated planning tools for inventory, supply, demand, and replenishment, Shipyard helps alleviate the most common and costly pain points – consistent stock-outs, too much stock tying up cash, and difficulty predicting and predicting and forecasting, to call a few.

By: K. Tagura

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Theator is a Palo Alto, CA-based. The operator of a surgical intelligence platform planned to equip surgeons with artificial intelligence-powered finding aid tools. The company’s platform operates Artificial Intelligence and computer vision. In addition, it pulls and annotates key moments from real-world procedures, enabling surgeons to gain scientific insight into their performances and those of surgeons worldwide.

Theator was funded $24 million led by Insight Partners with support from existing investors, including Mayo Clinic, NFX, StageOne Ventures, Blumberg Capital, iAngels, and former Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt. In addition, new growth angel investors, including iCON and TripActions’ CEO and Co-founder Ariel Cohen, joined the round. They will use the additional investment to continue Theator’s commercial expansion and accelerate the rollout of its Surgical Intelligence Platform in operating rooms and healthcare systems across North America.

Theator is pioneering Surgical Intelligence to eliminate the paradigm that where you live determines if you live. Theator’s Surgical Intelligence Platform institutionalizes the routine capture of surgical video data, harnessing AI and computer vision to analyze every operation automatically. As a result, surgical Intelligence generates actionable insights that optimize patient outcomes, ultimately raising the standard of patient care. Theator’s unrivaled surgical video library and data contains over 30K hours of video, with nearly a billion frames analyzed.

The prospect in the market that Theator is tackling is this: In the world of surgery, a vast trove of video is already being created, specifically by the camera probes used in non-invasive procedures. Naturally, the primary purpose of most of this video is for surgeons to be able to track what they are doing in real-time.

Brad Fiedler, VP at Insight Partners, stated that Theator’s technology has proven to be the critical next step in surgical advancement. Integrating AI and computer vision into the operating room improves surgical care and is transforming surgery for the better. They’re excited to double down on their investment significantly as Theator’s expertise in AI and computer vision is now enhancing patient outcomes across an ever-growing range of commercial partners.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Syrup Tech is a New York-based developer of machine learning models designed to predict demand and optimize inventory. The company focuses on apparel and fashion and seeks to support retailers and brands to optimally produce, procure and allocate their inventory, reducing stockouts and excess inventory and enabling clients to make more sustainable and profitable inventory decisions.

Syrup Tech was funded $6.3 million led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Flybridge Capital, Firstminute Capital, Rackhouse Ventures, 1984 Ventures, and angel investors, including former executives at Adidas, Bonobos, Salesforce, ASOS, ThredUp, Casper, Zalando, and Stripe.

They will utilize the funding to service new and existing demands from Syrup’s fast-growing list of customers and develop new modules and features. For example, social media trends and even the weather spit-out predictive inventory suggestions using artificial intelligence and device learning. This way, merchandisers and planners have better data on what they need and can reduce some of the waste.

James Theuerkauf, the co-founder and CEO of Syrup Tech, explained that inventory prediction has become more complex, particularly as brands battle stockouts, which causes them to overcompensate by ordering more. This can guide excess inventory and the requirement to make reductions, which they recently saw both Walmart and Target have to do to remove their inventories. But unfortunately, all that extra usually ends up in dumps.

The supply chain sufferings are also throwing a wrench in the inventory management tools, and Syrup Tech is operating to provide recommendations sooner rather than later. So if the wait is forty days, merchandisers should get in their orders now, or if the hold is ten days, they can postpone those decisions.

Syrup Tech’s customers (currently working with eight) are seeing double-digit profit margins through reductions in stockouts, excess inventory, and destruction and time saved by eliminating the manual workflows.

Omni-channel brands and retailers examine to migrate from excel-based planning and inadequate legacy systems. Syrup delivers an intuitive, AI-based system that develops recommendations for merchandisers and planners, empowering them with data-driven decision support. The proprietary technology plugs into internal systems to analyze internal data enhanced by external sources. Syrup’s recommendations are power both by advanced forecasting and stochastic optimization models.

Theuerkauf added that the international supply chain is a bit of a blessing because now is the limelight shining on inventory, there is a lot of interest in figuring this out, and a shift from other legacy systems to modern systems.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Sortera Alloys, Inc., a Fort Wayne, Indiana-based. Developer and manufacturer of sorting method developed to recycled metals rebounded from end-of-life products. The company’s system sorts metal by its type and design through a mixture of X-ray fluorescence and optical sensor fusion, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning image processing, enabling companies to sort metal alloys and make valuable feedstocks for domestic manufacturing.

Sortera was funded $10 million led by Assembly Ventures with additional funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, other strategic angel investors, and Novelis. The new financing is intended to use in Producing High-Purity Recycled Alloys that Reduce CO₂ Emissions and Help Customers Achieve Circular Production Goals—also dedicated to providing a solution for end-of-life circular recycling in the aluminum industry.

The upgraded metals can then be recycled into the highest value applications ranging from automotive cast and flat-rolled products to the building, construction, and aerospace materials extrusions. In addition, the company’s low-cost, scalable production process enables customers to reduce their CO₂ footprint and achieve sustainability and circular production goals since recycled aluminum requires roughly 95% less energy to produce than aluminum produced from virgin raw materials.

Chris Thomas, the co-founder at Assembly Ventures, commented that automotive and manufacturing companies worldwide have been working to implement circular supply chains for decades. Sortera is poise to power efficiencies in industrial and manufacturing supply chains and creates fundamental circularity of manufacturing inputs across the Western world.

The budget follows a robust partnership with Novelis that will see Sortera provide high-quality, recycled alloy emanated from automotive junk to Novelis, who will remanufacture the material into high recycled content aluminum sheet for the automotive industry.

Sortera operates from a 10-acre production facility with plans to expand through the end of 2022. The company’s proprietary method retrieves and repurposes materials once destined for landfills or to be recycled as low-quality composite products.

Derek Prichett, Senior Vice President at Novelis, said the partnership with Sortera will allow Novelis to increase further the recycled content in our products, particularly our automotive materials. This will enable them to meet their ambitious goals of reducing our carbon footprint and help their customers achieve their sustainability objectives.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Mona is a San Francisco, CA-based developer of the metaverse platform designed to facilitate any creator to build, mint, and sell metaverse worlds. The company’s platform provides 3D environments, artifacts, and portals, enabling creators to make and earn.

Mona was funded $14.6 million led by Protocol Labs, Archetype, and Collab+Currency with the participation of other investors Placeholder, Venture Reality Fund, SV Angel, Fourth Revolution Capital, OpenSea Ventures, Polygon Studios, LongHash Ventures, Everyrealm, Ready Player DAO, POAP Ventures, Gaingels, The Grey Trust, and angel investors.

CEO of Mona Justin Melillo sees it as building an economy for artists and collectors to participate in a shared digital universe meaningfully. The company doesn’t market virtual land or tokens. It doesn’t demand creators for anything upfront and builds tools, systems, and protocols for the open metaverse.

Mona delivers the leading and only platform and network for creators to build, mint, and sell interactive metaverse worlds as NFTs. The world-building platform is complimentary for anyone to develop and access through their browser, and creators can stamp their metaverse on Ethereum/Polygon. Creators are already operating Mona to create and showcase photorealistic pieces of architecture, interesting art, dynamic 3D gardens, immersive POAP scavenger quests, special virtual events and concerts, and mysterious getaway spaces.

The metaverse directs to a connected network of virtual worlds where someone can interact with each other online. In contrast, many companies seek to capitalize on the metaverse by trading land, real estate, and other virtual assets. Mona is dedicated to building an open metaverse that does not demand to buy, enter, or use. The Mona group has been public since day one, and their platform lets collectors invest directly in experiential virtual worlds’ creators. In addition, it will enable creators to design their art willingly and make a living by creating in the metaverse without facing financial constraints.

Melillo said their mission at Mona is to make the metaverse a social network where creators can thrive. A place to build worlds, not walls. The metaverse doesn’t own big tech companies — it can, and will, be a place for everyone.

Juan Benet, CEO of Protocol Labs, stated that Mona is building the tools, systems, and protocols to grow the open metaverse. They scornfully support their clever work as they develop the infrastructure for creators and developers to build and own the open metaverse. In addition, they will spend countless hours inside the high-quality virtual experiences hosted on Mona.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Makelog is a Walnut, CA-based developer of communication tools for product teams designed to help companies communicate what they are shipping to their internal and external stakeholders. The company’s device allows sharing of product updates, big or small, with their users and internal stakeholders, by combining with data sources. Where the work creates and autogenerates product updates, helping product owners to share the product updates with their stakeholders and members to capture every relevant update.

Makelog was funded $3 million, led by Accel with participation from Basecamp Fund, Formulate Ventures, Bluewatch Ventures, and several industry angel investors.

The new funding intends to expand operations and its development platform, doubling its product capabilities, allowing continuous communication, and combining more deeply into the products and services that customers already use.

Makelog CEO and Founder JJ Nguyen started Makelog to help fast-shipping software teams match their rate of release communication with their shipping velocity, which they call continuous communication. But they’ve always had that overarching mission of helping technical and business teams grow in the same direction and converge on a common language.

Before having a product like Makelog, she found that communication was more ad hoc, where she was constantly asking engineers about upcoming changes. This task wasn’t always easy because they focused on making those changes. As a result, it took a kind of information horse-trading to get what she needed.

She said she wanted to entirely transform the traditional change log and make it more useful for everyone involved. Too considerable information is as bad as too little. So, they’re trying to take a giant hammer to traditional release notes, encouraging folks to communicate at this minimum marketable unit level, making it easy for them to route individual updates to the right folks at the right time.

Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel, said the vital scope around feature development, bug fixes, and performance advancements is routinely failed to the chaos of fast growth. Makelog programmatically structures invention data, so an organization has a more energetic pulse on what’s shipping and to whom it counts. Driving that visibility levels up the whole company and hugely impacts sales, marketing, and triumph.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

GreyNoise Intelligence, a Washington, DC-based. Develop a cybersecurity platform developed to analyze and determine malware threat attacks. The company’s platform identifies internet background noise caused by sources that increase the volume of security alerts to collect and keep a baseline of expected omnidirectional mass-scan traffic, enabling businesses to streamline and prioritize threats analysis efficiently.

GreyNoise Intelligence was funded $15 million led by Radian Capital with participation from CRV, Inner Loop, Stone Mill Ventures, strategic angel investors, and Paladin Capital. The company plans to use the new budgets to accelerate the development and distribution of its threat intelligence data solution, which helps security teams waste less on irrelevant or harmless activity and focus more on targeted and emerging threats.

A startup company is a self-styled “anti-threat intelligence” company that essentially provides a spam filter for internet threat alerts. Just as inboxes flooded with unwanted emails and unsolicited junk, security operations analysts attacked by constant, often meaningless warnings. While numerous of these can be the signs of a targeted cyberattack, most are false positives from internet background noise, such as soft scanning done by security firms, researchers, and academics. However, all these alerts require manual triage, often leading to missed threats and productivity problems.

The startup looks to solve this issue by filtering out soft security alerts, leaving security experts to deal with the ones that matter. It accomplishes this through its network of 5,000 passive sensors that sit in data centers worldwide, collecting, analyzing, and labeling data on IPs that scan the internet.

Stone Mill Ventures and Paladin Capital said GreyNoise plans to build out its product further and “drastically” grow the size and scope of data collection measures.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Calaxy, a Los Angeles, CA-based. The operator of social marketplace for creators designed to put the modern fan at the center of all the action. The company’s marketplace offers direct and intimate experiences using cutting-edge blockchain technology, enabling the blockchain industry to scale to users globally seamlessly.

Calaxy was funded $26 million co-led by Animoca Brands and HBAR Foundation with support from strategic angel investors of Polygon. The fresh capital will eventually used to expand its platform and products.

The startup company was co-founded by tech entrepreneur Solo Ceesay and NBA star Spencer Dinwiddie. The name Calaxy is a portmanteau of “creators galaxy.” The startup aims to build a new infrastructure that allows content creators, ranging from small influencers to big-time celebrities, to have ownership and equitable exchange of value compared to the current social media landscape.

Ceesay said the platform allows each creator to mint their cryptocurrencies that their fans can buy to interact with their economy or trade value for a social media engagement, Ceesay said. Its utility derives from the traditional Web 2.0 social media applications like Patreon and Cameo, where fans can engage with celebrities through social tokens.

In the future, the tokens on Calaxy can fluctuate based on market demand, and each creator could have dynamically priced assets, but they currently held at a pegged value to the U.S. dollar.

The social token represents a piece of a creator’s eventual own economy. This token is capturing your value; if the creator influences so many people, there’s no reason the creator shouldn’t have a publicly verifiable market cap or a value as a person.

YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram have large, centralized entities that make money off ads and businesses, so they’re not monetizing the creator – they’re monetizing the brand. But in Calaxy, creators should be able to control their success and take their social token and bring it anywhere to make sense specifically for them. The idea of a social token opens the playground so creators can monetize and connect with fans directly without an intermediary involved.

Yat Siu, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, remarked that social networks in their current form grant the user minimal rewards. Calaxy seeks to flip this model over to drive more significant benefits to the user. With its strong leadership and by mediating personalized fan experiences through Web3 while including digital collectibles in those experiences, they believe that Calaxy could become one of the brilliant stars of tomorrow’s social media landscape.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

LaunchNotes is a San Francisco, CA-based developer of product change communication software designed to deliver better customer experiences by keeping teams and users ahead of upcoming product changes. The company’s software centralizes all release communication in one source of truth that anyone can access, enabling businesses to get regular updates by workstream, version, team, or what maps to an organization structure.

LaunchNotes was funded $15 million, led by Insight Partners, with participation from Atlassian Ventures, The New Normal Fund, Essence VC, and existing angel investors of Cowboy Ventures and Bull City Venture Partners. This new funding will support the expansion of LaunchNotes from a product change communication solution to a complete platform for Product Success.

When LaunchNotes originators Jake Brereton and Tyler Davis worked jointly at Atlassian, they noticed it was constantly challenging to communicate shifts from the development teams to product teams and other internal and external audiences.

The internal teams required to comprehend what was coming and if the changes were substantial or not, whether that’s a transaction, sales, support, or any other department that was operating with customers. In addition, the customers needed to know what had changed and how it affected them. This company has typically done this via release notes. Still, the creators saw these as stagnant and deficient in communicating what they needed to know about the latest release to the various stakeholders.

With modern development strategies, the fast rate of changes, some small, some not, often affecting dozens or even hundreds of shifts per day, caused retaining challenging.

Brereton and Davis noticed a chance to improve this process and produce release information to different parties the information they needed to see. So, they left Atlassian and started LaunchNotes to fulfill that goal.

LaunchNotes has achieved breakout traction with its initial product offerings in just two years. Last year, the business reported revenue growth and new customer growth.

Tyle said they would be laser-focused on unlocking Product Success by modernizing the product development cycle for teams everywhere. They are excited to deliver a Product Success Platform that connects the substance parts of the expansion cycle — such as comms, feedback, and planning — into a unified customer experience. By creating this seamless loop and removing the most common pain points, we will enable today’s product teams to build the great technologies of the future.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Parallel Learning is an NYC-based startup that develops of learning assessment platform created to analyze and empower students with learning differences. The company specializes in virtual neurodevelopmental reviews and support services for conditions such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and executive dysfunction while delivering the resources and motivation to perform in the classroom, thereby helping students get to the root of their issues and build confidence.

Parallel Learning was funded $20 million led by Tiger Global with participation from Obvious Ventures, Barry Sternlich’s JAWS, and existing individual angel investors of Vine Ventures. The new funding will let Parallel scale-up, as a tech platform it’s more comfortable. They still need to scout new psychologists, speak with new school districts, and continue working on and sustaining the product itself.

The company started when it became clear that a new approach needed in the assessment and therapy space. In past years, if a kid required an assessment, they got it, and then they got the tutoring or accommodation suggested.

The number of kids qualifying for special education has increased in recent years, and districts have struggled to keep up with the assessments, let alone the particular teaching load this growing cohort needs.

As a result, parents may wait half a year before a child can be given an official diagnosis or advice, and all that time, they may be working on reading, keeping up in class, or relating to their peers. And that before the pandemic, these same numbers, along with comorbidities like depression and anxiety, shot up even higher.

Parallel’s assistance goes beyond initial psychological evaluations to deliver continuing help to students, including skill-based tutoring, executive function coaching, behavioral therapy, and speech and language therapy. In addition, services are available directly to families and school districts as part of the company’s enterprise offering.

The company standard is specific and not different from how agencies and psychologists work already, but with the extra tech-enabled streamlining of paperwork and scheduling. And then, of course, there’s the advantage of not driving anywhere to get or provide the services.

The mission of Parallel Learning is to perform hand-in-hand with school communities and families to provide the most high-quality developmental services to students across the nation. With twenty percent of children challenged by learning and thinking distinctions, they intended to offer permanent, practical, and reasonable solutions to help those learners succeed in and out of the classroom.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.