Category: angel investors

Zuddl is a startup company based in Boston, MA, and Bengaluru, India. This company is also the developer of a cloud-based virtual conference management software designed for an online conferencing service. The company’s software offers conference hosting, conference creation, attendee networking, discussion tables, polls, virtual event lobby, attendee engagement, customer sponsored tables, switches tables, and event management, enabling large organizations to create conferences online that can go live in minutes.

Zuddl was funded $13.35 million, led by Alpha Wave and Qualcomm Ventures, and backed by GrowX Ventures, Waveform Ventures, and a few angel investors. The new investment will accelerate product development, scale globally, focus on the US market, and deepen its tech team.

Bharath Varma and Vedha Sayyaparaju founded Zuddl in May 2020. Zuddl has increased by over 30x since its inception. Today, it has a desirable list of clients, including Fortune 100 and other fast-growing companies such as Kellogg’s, Microsoft, Dicks Sporting Goods, Grant Thornton, and NASSCOM.

This allows companies to create the virtual venue as they see fit, with customizable backgrounds/clickable hot zones to give the interface some show of a physical place. They provide many templates, but companies are free to make it look like a conference center, concert hall, or their actual office upload your images accordingly.

Behind the scenes, they’re also doing quite a lot to simplify the complexities of hosting live locations. Each location’s host invites their guests to go backstage where they’re able to chat privately, do A/V tests, etc., all right through the browser. They can quickly turn guests to the audience-facing stage or pull them back off stage if their internet tanks or their mic begins cutting out. There’s a dedicated chat room just for backstage hosts to communicate with onstage speakers, so you don’t have to try to pack a Slack window onto your screen between everything else. Zuddl can also handle recording sessions, stage timers, and ticketing system integration.

Manu Rikhye, the Partner in GrowX Venture, said they are excited about the strong vision, expertise, and speed of execution of Zuddl’s team. Their in-depth understanding of the needs of event organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees, coupled with their product first thinking, has made Zuddl’s offering stand out in a highly crowded space.

As simple as virtual events might look, there’s often a lot of complex machinery behind the curtain. It all works. It has been to a lot of these things. Zuddl seems to do an excellent job of boiling many of the pain points away at a cursory glance.

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.

Voyant Photonics based Long Island City, N.Y. This company manufacturer of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) is a chip intends to perform three-dimensional sensing and estimate range, velocity, and reflectivity. The company’s chips use patented nano-optic approaches to provide a range of imaging sensors for various applications, including freed vehicles, drones, robotics, and factory automation. In addition, they allow businesses to increase safety by providing systems to respond in real-time to changes in the surrounding environment.

Voyant Photonics was funded $15.4 million, led by UP Partners with earlier angel investors, Contour Ventures, and LDV Capital. The startup company plans to use the capital to move toward production by putting its development kits in the hands of partners.

Voyant’s LiDAR system, including thousands of optical parts fabricated on a single semiconductor chip, enables its customers to integrate a functional and exponentially more scalable LiDAR system than possible to date. As a result, LiDAR is a crucial technology to help 3D vision across numerous endeavors, including conveyance, robotics, industrialization, and customer electronics. Voyant developer kits are now public for select customers on its waiting list.

CEO Peter Stern entered the company just as the pandemic started. First, they examined a way to turn a good prototype developed by co-founders Chris Phare and Steven Miller into a working and marketable product. Then, after going back to basics, they ended up with a photonics-based frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) system (go with it for now) that could be manufactured at existing commercial fabs.

Voyant Photonics’ devices demonstrate a complete LiDAR system in a field-deployable package, using Voyant’s patented techniques for on-chip digital beam steering, optical signal processing, and laser control.

Stern said they’d be making about 200 units for partners in 2022 and will start taking retail orders in 2023. Of course, by that time, the automotive world may have taken note. Still, if Voyant’s strategy succeeds, it will have slipped a good piece of the industrial market out of reach of companies making more significant, more expensive units.

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.

X-Therma is a startup company based in Richmond, California. This company is a developer of a convergent biopreservation technology intended to advance regenerative medicine. It uses cold chain technology for safe and on-demand ice preservation of organs, engineered tissues, and cells, enabling patients with gene therapies.

X-Therma was funded a $13 million Series A funding round. The financing led by LOREA AG, with participation from Graphene Ventures, Zen11 Holdings, Catalytic Impact Foundation, 2b AHEAD Ventures, VU Venture Partners, Methuselah Foundation, along with notable return angel investors.

The new funding is planning to scale the commercialization of XT-Thrive® to meet customer demand for cGMP-grade cell preservation products and expand its multi-disciplinary team, filling positions remotely (both nationally and internationally).

X-Therma’s technology, a nontoxic biopreservation platform helped by biomimetic peptoids. It is transforming global accessibility to organ transplantation and allowing “off-the-shelf” cell and gene therapy products and engineered tissues providing safe & effective chemically defined cryopreservation that is DMSO-, serum-, and protein-free.

Smaller than 10% of the worldwide demand for transplantable organs being met. Unfortunately, despite numerous improvements in surgical procedures and immunosuppression, innovations to expand the time window for secure and steadfast organ preservation have, currently, fallen short. X-Therma’s turn-key resolution XT-ViVo® and TimeSeal® in organ preservation terminate this time control blockage without changing transplant workflow.

Most organs transported in a cooler loaded with ice at 4°C. This procedure provides minimal time to deliver organs to patients before they perish or to provide accurate matching. The chemistry encodes specific protein-like functions into a synthetic molecule to shape ice crystals and prevent further growth into a detrimental size. This medicine fundamentally allows them to safely store organs at sub-zero temperature, enhancing transplantation from organ accessibility and quality stands with extended time.           

Nowadays, numerous regenerative medicine companies suffer substantial logistical hindrances to rise up and from the proteomic and epigenetic transformations induced by DMSO, reducing therapy efficacy. In addition, Cryopreservatives used today are toxic to cells, leading to cell damage, reduced product yields, and inefficiencies in production.

X-Therma’s flagship product XT-Thrive®, a DMSO-, Serum-, Protein-free and chemically defined cryopreservation solution directly plugs into the current CMC workflow, resolves current bottlenecks in the cell manufacturing process, and enables “off-the-shelf” living medicines, and now is receiving hyper-growth customer demand.

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.

Qonsent is based in New York and the first data privacy enablement and consent value exchange platform built for consumers and brands. The company provides a first-of-its-kind consumer wallet that allows direct, consistent engagement with companies, enabling users to have direct access and control of personal data that companies collect and store about them.

Qonsent was funded $5 million. The grant is supported by Gary Vaynerchuk, Zekavat Investment Group, Michael Kassan, Tom Chavez, Crosscut Ventures, Marc DeBevoise, Brand New Matter, Lunch Partners, and other top tier angel investors. The firm plans to use the budget to develop further and scale its data privacy and consent solution.

Qonsent uses an encrypted and auditable ledger-based system to help brands maintain a record of customers’ consent to meet CCPA, GDPR, CPRA compliance requirements, and other applicable privacy laws.

The company created and built by leading media, advertising, entertainment, and technology executives who saw a glaring demand for a solution that would put the authority over personally identifiable information back in charge of the consumers and make first-person consent comfortable. Qonsent gives consumers complete insight into how brands collect, use, and store their data based on transparent significance exchange. The solution also helps brands, advertisers, and publishers retool their approaches, build consumer trust, and deliver a more profitable customer experience. The resolution works wherever brands employ their consumers, including via spread consent UI/UX products merged into existing privacy enablement and commerce technology offerings.

Qonsent Graph is a unique approach to tracking consumer manners that permits brands, marketers, and platforms to understand what experiences, proposals, and value exchanges will enable a two-way dialogue to rebuild brand transparency and customer trust. This offering will be the latest solution for consumer marketing to replace obsolete and now illegal procedures such as data scraping and universal cookies. Instead, the Qonsent Graph will supply granular understandings in a compliant manner forging a new era of trust and connection with loyal consumers.

Qonsent claims it provides consumers with real-time, comprehensive insight into how brands collect, use, and store their personal information based on transparent value dealings.

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.

Chainguard is a San Francisco, CA-based startup company and developer of supply chain security software designed to help organizations manage their open-source and overall software supply security risk.

Chainguard, Inc. was funded $5 million led by Amplify Partners and a few angel investors, including Eric Brewer, VP at Google. Maya Kaczorowski, former CTO at CoreOS; Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco; Joe Duffy, Product at Tailscale; Brandon Phillips, CEO of Pulumi; Solomon Boulos, former Google exec and founder of Google’s OCTO, and Gordon Chaffee, former Google executives.

The business plans to employ the funds to expand operations and bring its solutions to the market.

Matt Moore, Scott Nichols,Dan Lorenc, Ville Aikas, and Kim Lewandowski are five open-source veterans. The team performed together at Google on many of the foundational container projects.

The team considers that the resolution to ensuring software supply chains must be rooted in open source, standards, and communities. The software that companies ship is increasingly overpowered by the open-source libraries, frameworks, and runtimes they consume.

The industry has been hit hard with the wrath of software supply chain attacks over the past few years, especially attacks targeting open-source software.

Chainguard is tackling this challenge head-on, one of the most significant problem areas of the decade. Almost every piece of software has dependencies, often other open-source libraries that the project is built on. As a result, attackers have been injecting malicious code into dependencies of joint open-source projects. These attacks are brutal to recognize because they aren’t always chosen up by traditional scanning, and more so, the dependencies can suddenly change at any time. Chainguard plans to give companies confidence in the software they’re relying on and have the necessary data and tools to understand their risks and mitigate potential threats.

They believe that commented by Lenny Pruss, General Partner at Amplify will solve this massive, multi-stakeholder problem with open tools and open standards. Sigstore has emerged, in their minds, as the project to take on this challenge.

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.

Serve Robotics is the provider of robotics services intended to shape the future of delivery by connecting people via robots. Its self-driving robots serve people in public spaces, starting with food delivery, enabling customers to get their products faster.

Serve Robotics was funded $13 million with participation from strategic investors Uber Technologies Inc. Delivery Hero supported DX Ventures; 7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, LLC; and Wavemaker Partners’ food automation focused venture studio Wavemaker Labs. The latest round extends Serve’s previous seed funding and includes existing seed investors Neo, Western Technology Investment, and angel investor Scott Banister.

This company is based in San Francisco, CA; the capital will accelerate the scaling of its robotic platform, geographic support expansion, and drive continued product advancement.

Serve Robotics is forming the future of sustainable, self-driving delivery. Founded in 2017 as the robotics division of Postmates, Serve is now a self-governing company on a mission to make delivery more affordable, sustainable, and accessible for everyone. The company’s self-driving robots have completed tens of thousands of contactless deliveries in major U.S. cities.

The pandemic has reinvigorated the segment of companies developing delivery robots small enough to navigate crosswalks, sidewalks, and corporate campuses. Robots minimize human-to-human contact and can fill in at a time when the industry is facing a historic shortage of delivery drivers.

Serve’s meter-high robots sport colorful, LED-laden exteriors that conceal a suite of sensors, including RGB cameras, sonar, time-of-flight sensors, GPS, and lidar. The control panel, which sits off to the side, contains a “Help” button, a video chat display, and a touchscreen panel.

A top hatch conceals a cargo compartment that’s unlocked with a phone app or a passcode. Serve’s a robot can carry up to 50 pounds for 25 miles on one charge — enough to make more than dozen deliveries per day, Kashani claims.

Sidewalk robot delivery is just starting to heat up as an industry, and with it will be a race among companies to come up with the most sophisticated technology and the best go-to-market strategy. With this round of funding, and its accompanying partners, Serve is already prepping for national and global scale.

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.

BetaBlocks, a Miami-based digital asset marketplace infrastructure company. In addition to its blockchain labs, the company also developed an asset tokenization platform to customize, build, deploy, and manage blockchain networks, enabling businesses to leverage blockchain technologies.

BetaBlocks was funded $1.5M, led by E3 Negócios, Ocean Azul Partners, SaaS Ventures, and other strategic angel investors. E3’s Investment Director, Bruno dos Santos, will enter the BetaBlocks board and Ocean Azul’s Partner to share the investment.

The startup will apply the capital to grow its product in Miami and Brazil’s digital marketplace and engineering units, where it opened its first international office. BetaBlocks’ platform provides ready-made templates for businesses that digital market art, music, videos, and more as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It also concedes for the minting and auctioning of those assets.

An NFT is a part of data stored on the blockchain, a digital ledger that certifies an asset is one of a kind and can’t be replaced with a copy. While copies may be available for anyone to obtain, NFTs are tracked on blockchain to provide the owner with proof of ownership. The tokens can used to represent a host of virtual collectibles, including everything from art to sports trading cards.

After deciding on the Endeavor ScaleUp program, BetaBlocks chose to launch a white-label asset tokenization platform. But, betaBlocks’ CTO, Antonio Manueco said, It was a normal progression. Many tests boiled down to tooling and infrastructure for companies to offer digital assets without losing brand appeal.

BetaBlocks CEO, Roberto Machado, stated that in accession to the current hype surrounding NFTs, they believe that most current assets such as debt, real estate, stocks, art, and other physical assets will be tokenized leveraging spread ledger technology for liquidity, 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, and governance.

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.

Maker Wine is based in Marin County, California. The producer of small-batch wines intended to offer premium wines in a can. The company’s platform provides a new distribution channel for small wineries and the destination for the millennial wine drinker, enabling customers to get improved quality in a portable, single-serving format delivered at the desired location.

Maker Wine was funded $2.3 million led by over 30 angel investors and operators, including Marcy Venture Partners, Pear VC, The Chainsmokers, Rachel Mansfield, Mariam Naficy, Bryan Mahoney, Henry Davis, Inflection Capital, Context Ventures, Matt Kanness, Nikil Viswanathan, Charles Hudson, Daniel Kan, Bridgette Lau, Alyssa Rapp, James Beshara, Leah Culver, Odell Beckham Jr., Chris Fanini, and Tyler Elliston. The company plans to employ the new capital to expand to 45 states to reach wine lovers nationwide.

Maker launched in California in 2020, founded by Sarah Hoffman, Kendra Kawala, and Zoe Victor. The Maker already made its mark by being the highest-rated canned wine company on the market today.

Each wine that Maker sells is vegan-friendly, gluten-free, and keto-friendly and by their partner winemakers who believe in sustainable agriculture practices and low interference winemaking. In addition, all wines are dry, with zero grams of sugar, less than five carbs per serving, and minimal sulfur additions.

Sarah Hoffman, the co-founder at Maker, said, Antiquated liquor laws make it hard for the best small-production wineries to get their products over there. The “Big Wine” isn’t giving what modern drinkers want. They’re excited to can wines from the best independent wine producers in the country and make wine more accessible for everyone. With the expansion and new funding, they’re ushering in a new era of small wineries, transparency, and approachability for the wine industry. Modern drinkers want a high-quality, better-for-you option that fits into their lives and lifestyles. They will provide an eco-friendly, portable way to enjoy premium wine.

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.

Netography is an Annapolis, Maryland-based security company providing organizations with network detection and response. The company’s program leverages existing network project data presented by network devices, joined with cloud processing, software, and algorithms. To identify fresh signs of an attack and automatically respond, enabling clients to stop network attacks and threats before they begin and maintain security.

Netography was funded $45 million in Series A funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and SYN Ventures, with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Mango Capital, Harpoon Ventures, strategic angel investors, and Wing Venture Capital.

Will apply the company’s new capital approaching new technology innovations and improvements, channel development, and sales.

Netography claims its cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) NDR is the only product built to protect what it calls the “atomized” network — the complex mix of multi-cloud, on-premises, and legacy infrastructure that comprise most enterprise networks today.

The company’s technology uses, runs, and scales utilizing the full power of the cloud without offering additional physical or virtual sensors or appliances to operate and without the challenges of heavy full packet capture and deep packet inspection solutions.

Patrick Heim, the managing partner at SYN Ventures, said that several organizations have struggled to preserve visibility and control as the network grows and slowly goes dark through the broad adoption of encryption. He told the Netography team has cracked the code on delivering next-gen network security capabilities that overcome these challenges.

The company has recently seen strong traction, signing customers in the federal government and defense, aerospace and travel, financial services, utilities, and manufacturing verticals.

According to Roesch, adopting the zero-trust model of security with its accompanying utilization of pervasive network encryption requires rethinking how the delivery of network security capabilities in today’s atomized networks.

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.

Point One Navigation is a developer of a location and mapping system designed to assist automotive vehicles. The San Francisco-based startup has developed an API for the precise location applicable to any vehicle that moves, from urban air taxis and drones to scooters, ADAS-equipped vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and even farm equipment.

Point One Navigation was funded $10 million Series A round of funding. UP Partners led the new investment with participation from existing investors, including BOLT, IA Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and strategic angel investors.

The company plans to employ the investment to expand operations, develop more automotive mapping systems and its business reach.

Point One Navigation’s API is a helpful solution for automotive OEMs, trucking companies, drone manufacturers, heavy equipment, delivery services, and consumer electronics that rely on precise locations for safe and effective operation. The company’s technology enables centimeter-level global accuracy by combining augmented GNSS, computer vision, and sensor fusion in a powerful yet easy-to-use API compatible with a wide variety of existing platforms.

The co-founder and managing partner of UP Partners, Ben Marcus, said Precise location is vital for safe and effective operations across all areas of mobility and transportation – from automobiles and drones to trucks and heavy machinery. The team at Point One Navigation is solving a real challenge, combining unparalleled technical chops with proactive solutions for the quickly evolving moving world.

Today, Point One’s product begin shipping about a year ago, is in series production with two unname automotive customers. Point One can deploy this tech as a software product in these automotive applications since new vehicles today have the hardware already required. Point One might also need to include a chipset with other customers, like, a scooter company.

The company initially focus on automotive, including being apply to Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems. However, the 20-person company is now focusing on expanding to new segments, including micro-mobility. Point One also has production deals with agriculture customers as well in the drone delivery section.

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.