Category: angel investors

Sekr startup company based in San Diego, CA. This travel app with the most significant national database of free and dispersed campsites demonstrates growth in the booming industry.

Sekr was funded $2.25 million led by Storyteller Overland, Backstage Capital, Techstars, Ad Astra Ventures, Crescent Ridge Ventures, and angel investor Andy Ballester, co-founder of GoFundMe. The new funding will empower people to pursue a connection with the outdoors and its communities. Also, to grow Sēkr’s reservable inventory and its community initiatives, including its alliance called Project Respect Outdoors, aims to unite women and minorities to take scalable action to evolve the outdoor industry into a more inclusive space.

In 2017, Sekr’s co-founders, Breanne Acio (CEO) and Jess Shisler (COO), we’re peeking for a better way to explore our new camping locations. First, the two traveled along with their partners in their camper vans, embracing the so-called van life lifestyle. But they shortly learned it was hard to find safe places to camp and people to connect with while on the road. Plus, they both wanted a more straightforward method to discover campgrounds with the same services they required — whether that was shower facilities, bathrooms, overnight parking for vans, access to water, or free Wi-Fi.

Acio said trip planning is the number one problem for anyone going outdoors. If you would like to book a hotel or travel someplace, you’d have to call hotels individually. There’s no online website or availability. Some of these challenges weren’t just annoyances; they complicated the reality of living and working while on the road.

In the Sēkr app, you can explore campsites across the U.S., filter them by conveniences and services, save favorites, and network with others via social features. Its listings are created by public data warehouses from the government and other databases, enhanced with crowdsourced information. Sēkr’s team of ambassadors will explore areas, verify details, and take photographs to share with the community, as do the app’s members.

Now, the company is working on adding more additional reservable inventory straight to Sēkr by digitizing and aggregating campgrounds and campsites, going from private lands to campgrounds. This work is even in the early stages, though.

Jeffrey Hunter said the CEO at Storyteller Overland and lead investor of Sekr’s funding round. The camping drive is one of the only hospitality verticals yet to embrace technology successfully. As a result, Sekr grabbed the opportunity to digitize campsite inventory at scale, changing the outdoor planning procedure from a frustrating circle of hours of failed Google searches into something consumers can do by themselves. As a result, they believe the Sekr team is uniquely positioned to have the most significant effect and impact on the outdoor travel planning experience for the nearly three-fourths of Americans who experience outdoor travel yearly.

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.

Cure Health is based in New York City. The company is an operator of a health information exchange and telemedicine platform intended to help improve healthcare quality. The platform facilitates frictionless patient care between hospital systems. It surrounds post-acute facilities, accelerates reimbursements, automates charts to the bill, and enables identification, documentation, and tracking of patient diagnosis and outcomes, enabling healthcare systems and skilled nursing facilities to optimize staff allocation and reduce read missions and bill for off-site acute care and monitoring.

Cure Health was funded $12 million led by Morningside Ventures with participation from Alumni Ventures and Recover-Care Healthcare and returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners. In addition, IDEO, Inflect Health, Correlation Ventures, Rosecliff Venture Partners, Kapor Capital, WTI, and angel investor Ben Jealous. The company plans to employ the new funding is to scale nationwide.

The company delivers an award-winning care enablement platform that allows patients and providers to connect beyond the four walls of a facility. Curve, which now partners with more than 24 facilities, has a presence in Minnesota, New York, California, and Massachusetts.

Curve Health’s platform improves patient outcomes by providing more personalized care for patients and residents. Patients connected from their rooms directly with remote physicians through a tablet, allowing bedside nursing staff to execute treatment plans. Higher visibility on the individual is made available through integrations with electronic health records and diagnostics. Additionally, business intelligence analytics enable care facilities to improve staffing allocation, and innovative billing features provide appropriate reimbursement for small provider groups.

Rob MacNaughton, Curve’s CEO said, they’re seeing tremendous interest and quickly growing demand for remote care options in care facilities across the country. With this investment, they’ll scale even more rapidly, particularly as the post-acute space shifts toward value-based care. They are excited to partner with providers looking to thrive in value-based models and, more importantly, deliver better models of care to seniors nationwide.

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.

The Vets is a startup business based in Wilmington, Delaware. The company provides pet care services to focus on pet well-being and comfort. The Vets services use technology and offer wellness exams, home lab tests, vaccinations, microchipping, dental care, and surgeries and provide pets and pet owners with medicines, enabling customers and pets both to have a positive experience.

The Vets was funded $40 million, led by Target Global, PICO Venture Partners, Bolt Ventures, and other strategic angel investors. With this new investment, the company will prioritize extending its veterinarian recruitment across the country. The Vets currently serves in Miami, Tampa, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Portland, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Denver and announcing New York City’s launch today.

The startup also strives to manage the growing problem of burnout among veterinarians. To do so, The Vets promotes a four-day workweek and a daily appointment limit for veterinarians to ensure that they aren’t overworked.

Bringing pet healthcare into the house not only allows the veterinarian to create stronger connections with pets and the owners, but the pet is also comfy in a stress-free surrounding. The top causes that pet owners avoid or delay their visiting to the vet clinic are the stress of carting their pet, restrictive pet carriers, and crowded waiting rooms. In addition, the added pressure on a pet can generate incorrect vitals during the health assessment, which sets them at risk for the veterinarians overlooking or misdiagnosing possible illnesses. Pet parents can leverage online booking for approvingly personalized, at-home veterinary visits on their own time, which stops the added stress and anxiety of bringing a pet in for an in-person appointment.

The Vets give an added layer of at-home comfort, and they aren’t lacking in the technical domain – visits feature full diagnostics, including blood workup and capturing vitals. In addition, aggregating data from these comprehensive care visits across the nation allows for more accurate diagnoses and healthcare predictions and analysis of possible trends by breed.

Shmuel Chafets, Chairman at The Vets, said they energized by their willingness to challenge the pet care industry and build a consumer brand. That would bring actual value to veterinarians and owners by addressing the problem head-on.

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.

Klarity is based in San Francisco, CA. The company is a developer of a document processing technology intended to automate the contract review process. Klarity’s technology uses Artificial Intelligence to review sales contracts. Under company legal policy, it then pulls contacts from its emails and databases. Finally, it returns them inspected in a word structure with annotations and red lines along with an overview, helping organizations accelerate sales and higher compliance without thinking of a contract review anymore.

Klarity was funded $18 million, led by Tola Capital with participation from new investors Invus Opportunities and existing individual angel investors Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, and Picus Capital. The new capital intended to hire sales, marketing, and engineering. It is also poised to launch new document review automation for deal desk, renewals, and procurement teams in late 2022.

Ondrej Antos and Nischal Nadhamuni launched Klarity. Since establishing its flagship product, Klarity has expanded its enterprise customer that includes some of the world’s most innovative and well-known software companies. As the company has grown, so has customer demand for new features and capabilities. As a result, Klarity will deliver additional capacity to midmarket and enterprise customers with this significant cash infusion.

Document automation is not a new concept. An original wave of companies working on partial document automation still needs a human review, but the entire document automation market is still very nascent.

Klarity replaces humans for tasks that require large-scale document review, including accounting order forms, purchase orders, and agreements. Instead of having many accountants reading thousands of almost identical documents every month to find non-standard language, Klarity does that, helping the accountants save time and avoid mistakes.

Tony Tiscornia, CFO of Coupa said, Klarity came in and quickly helped them cure one of their most challenging headaches with technology that previously existed. As a client, the peace of mind Klarity delivers is extremely valuable. They are proud to accompany this incredible founding team on its continued journey, and they look on with great anticipation to what they have in stock.

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.

Based in New York City, Accrue Savings is also the developer of an online savings application developed to help customers plan for future purchases. The company’s application offers merchant embedded online savings account, enabling users to keep track of their savings and plan for their expenses.

Accrue Savings was funded $25 million Series A led by Tiger Global. Participation also from Aglaé Ventures, existing investors Twelve Below, Red Sea Ventures, Ground Up Ventures, Good Friends, and a group of individual angel investors, including UPS CEO Carol Tomé, Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin.

The company plans to expand retail partnerships and add employees from new funding received across all departments, including engineering, sales, and marketing.

Accrue Savings, established in June 2021 by CEO Michael Hershfield, aspires to get people saving again with its merchant-embedded shopping experience that rewards consumers for saving up for the things they want to buy.

Partner Brands with Accrue Savings are witnessing an immediate impact on their top-of-funnel marketing actions. With Accrue Savings, retailers can contend with customers earlier in the deliberation stage by offering a savings-based purchase procedure on their website and in targeted email or SMS campaigns. In addition, partner retailers lessen friction points between consumers and their purchases by alleviating shopper concerns about debt-based payment plans.

Because saving can take time, Hershfield felt it was too early to disclose growth metrics but said that the company has racked up a customer list that includes Allbirds, Casper, Poly & Bark, Smile in its short existence Direct Club, and Tire Agent. It initially went live with 15 customers, and he teased that the list expected to double in the coming months.

Hershfield said the reaction from retailers and consumers since launch had exceeded their expectations. They’re please to find so many brands that want to offer meaningful payment diversity options for consumers. In addition, an institutional investor like the venerable Tiger Global demonstrates the powerful possibility to embed more diverse financial technology to change the shopping experience for a broader range of customers.

Alex Cook, Partner, Tiger Global comment, that Accrue Savings helps brands reach more customers and gives consumers a responsible purchasing option. It’s a win-win. Accrue Savings team is building a unique platform, and they’re thrill to partner with them on the next stage of the journey.

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.

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.