Category: angel investors

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.

ChargeLab a California and Toronto-based startup that develops electric vehicle charging software designed to accelerate and commercialize electric mobility. The company’s software monetizes and creates new user experiences with an electric vehicle charger infrastructure and battery swap management, enabling clients to with an open management platform that provides flexibility and expandability.

ChargeLab was funded $15 million, led by King River Capital, a venture capital fund targeting post-revenue, high-growth software businesses in large markets, and ABB E-Mobility. With the participation of existing investors, Root Ventures, Highline Beta, Third Sphere, Maple VC, and other strategic angel investors in Construct Capital.

The new funding will help the company go from its seed stage-level solution of connecting chargers and controlling them in the cloud to more advanced milestones. To accelerate growth and expand business operations.

As part of ChargeLab’s commercial agreement with ABB, the two companies will launch a bundled hardware and software solution for fleets, multifamily buildings, and other commercial EV charging use cases, according to Zak Lefevre, founder, and CEO of ChargeLab. While the partnership with ABB will certainly give ChargeLab the resources it needs to build out and scale its enterprise software, Lefevre noted that ABB’s interest in ChargeLab stems from its need for better out-of-the-box software in North America.

ChargeLab’s core product is its cloud-based charging station management system, which provides apps for EV drivers, dashboards for fleet managers, and open APIs for third-party system integration. According to the company, the hardware-agnostic software, which runs on the edge and in the cloud, also includes automated monitoring of chargers, pricing and access rules, payment processing, and electrical load balancing.

The Head of Ventures of ABB EL Ventures, Malin Carlstrom, said the EV market continues to undergo massive growth, and the value proposition of ChargeLab’s hardware-agnostic software has become increasingly apparent to both vendors and users. They believe that Zak and his team poised to create intelligent charging techniques and that ABB can be a strategic and financial supporter, benefiting both parties.

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.

Altro is a San Francisco, CA-based platform that operates an online credit building platform designed to help users convert their subscription payments into credit history. It allows members to link their recurring payments, such as rent and subscription payments, to leverage unseen and uncounted costs to build their credit score, enabling individuals to upscale their credit scores.

Altro was funded $18 million led by Pendulum, with support from Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures, Black Capital Fund, Citi Ventures, Concrete Rose Fund, and individual angel investors such as Dick Parsons and Deborah Quazzo, among others. The software company intends to utilize the new funding to build its credit and financial literacy program and bring education and economic power to those excluded from traditional finance systems.

Before the Altro build, the founder Michael Broughton had trouble securing the necessary financing to pay his tuition in college. That experience stuck with him. Then, he met Ayush Jain at the University of Southern California, and the couple connected over their view that credit access should be free. They came up with the concept of helping people make credit via recurring payment setups such as virtual subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu.

In December 2019, they started Altro and hunkering down in a Hacker House with a few others to make out a platform that locates a person’s recurring transactions and links them to a trade line that reports to all three credit bureaus. For the unacquainted, a tradeline is a line of data that goes directly into a bureau’s system that affects a person’s FICO score, used for underwriting.

Broughton said they’re not creating their score, but instead, it is a direct correlation to your actual score enhanced over time, which a user can see in our app. The users would be spending a charge, but a percentage goes to them rather than the companies. They don’t want to charge users for access to something they already have.

Altro concentrates on educating users via a catalog of over 350 educational audio clips covering topics like cryptocurrency, investing, and trading. Watching the snippets, the company says, allows users to become more financially savvy and positively impacts users’ scores the more they engage.

Also, the company plans to allow people soon to build credit by completing rent payments on time. An offering that was open on its platform before and is being carried back in the coming months. Platforms like Altro can promote change that will improve people’s lives and help this country achieve more significant economic possibilities.

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.

New York-based Tomorrow Farms is a provider of food and beverage brands intended to solve the food system’s problems. The company’s services offer animal-free dairy chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry milk without any artificial ingredients, enabling entrepreneurs to produce and prepare foods for consumption and resolve the climate and ecological crisis.

Tomorrow Farms was funded $8.5 million led by Lowercarbon Capital and additional vital investors, including Valor Siren Ventures, Maveron, Simple Food Ventures, and strategic angel investors in SV Angel.

The company partners with creative, deep tech food companies to produce consumer-friendly, retail-ready, animal-free brands and products. This round marks the beginning of a generation for Tomorrow Farms as it prepares to launch its first products, grow its internal team, build meaningful retail relationships, and court new food technology partners to solve some of our food system’s biggest problems.

Berman began Tomorrow Farms almost a year ago after a job in the food space. He owned a food truck called Mainely Burgers, which expanded into three trucks and 16 employees. From there, he established Good Pizza from his apartment, and during the pandemic was dropping pizzas out of his windows to people as he raised funds for local charities. That business is currently part of Philabundance, a hunger relief organization in Philadelphia.

With a lot of investment funds going into the future of food companies, Tomorrow Farms. Which was incubated at the SALT Fund in early 2021 and has a mission of being the front-end partner for many of these deep tech food science companies building new products and brands.

Tomorrow Farms were gearing up for its first product takeoff and worked with an ingredients company to create a product around that company’s formulation. They are working to bring the future of food to consumers today, partnering with the most innovative food science companies to design products that make a difference for people, animals, and the planet.

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.

Cartwheel is a Los Angeles, CA-based developer of an on-demand delivery management software designed to serve courier companies, restaurants, RDS, and medical deliveries. The company’s software offers logistics data analytics, warehouse management, and asset tracking services, enabling businesses to plan and manage their dispatch schedule, delivery routes, and capacity cost-effectively.

Cartwheel was funded $3 million led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from Chingona Ventures and existing investors, including TenOneTen Ventures, Act One, Pitbull Capital, and other strategic angel investors.

The company plans to utilize the latest funds for further product development, partner integrations, and company expansion.

Cartwheel has tripled its comprehensive customer base and developed to serve brands alcohol industry in the past year. As a result, the company’s tools are now available to more than 8,000 establishments nationwide. In addition, Cartwheel is now one of the leading self-delivery providers for Olo, a top on-demand marketing platform powering the digital transformation of more than 500 restaurant brands.

Craig Cummings, General Partner of Moonshots Capital, said, That Moonshots Capital invests in extraordinary leadership. The group at Cartwheel has the leadership, knowledge, and strategic vision to change on-demand delivery. Cartwheel’s technology leverages a customizable solution that improves any delivery program to meet consumer demands.

Cartwheel’s Hybrid Delivery standard allows businesses to keep an in-house program alongside their third-party partners, helping them to self-select some orders for self-delivery and redirect the rest to third-party services. In addition, during extreme periods when an in-house fleet is occupied, Cartwheel automatically taps into outsourced driver fleets and permits businesses to set automatic rules for order routing.

The company matches driver supply with individual business needs, providing operators with additional capacity when needed. In addition, its interface offers branded tracking links, making outsourced delivery feel like an in-house order to the client.

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.

Agility Robotics, a Corvallis, OR-based. Creator of bipedal walking robot planned to offer efficient, elegant, and complete legged platforms for real-world applications. The company’s robots offer human-like abilities that permit them to work with and alongside people to complete simple tasks with minimal or no extra programming without modifying offices, factories, or homes. In addition, it provides clients with a new mobility option to automate applications that navigate various terrains.

Agility Robotics was funded $150 million was led by DCVC and Playground Global with participation from The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, MFV Partners, ITIC, Robotics Hub, Safar Partners, Sony Innovation Fund, TDK Ventures, and other strategic angel investors.

Agility’s system is unique, matching design, software, and hardware expertise to control robots that can manage virtually limitless tasks as part of a combined workforce. Despite the conventional wisdom that many endeavor problems have been addressed by automation, most robotics technologies today are purpose-built for single tasks, making them inflexible, expensive, and quickly obsolete. As described by Agility Robotics CTO Dr. Jonathan Hurst in a recent blog post, Agility’s robots are – by contrast – built to be versatile, cost-effective, and durable helpers to people.

This capital raise will accelerate the delivery of the next generation of Agility’s robots, extending its path document of performance that began with its first customer shipments in 2018. Agility’s most developed robot will be deployed at customers’ sites later this year. As has been its practice since the company’s founding, these deployments allow Agility to iterate with real-time customer feedback and gain insights into operating environments, discover new uses for its robots, and refine their capabilities.

Digit has a max speed of 1.5 m/s and can run for 3 hours doing light work. Doing heavy work, the robot will last 1.5 hours. The robot can currently move totes and packages and unload trailers, but the company hopes to expand its capabilities to last-mile deliveries soon.

CEO Damion Shelton said unprecedented consumer and corporate demand had created a great need for robots to support people in the workplace. With this investment, Agility can ramp up the delivery of robots to fill roles where there’s an unmet need.

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.

DoControl, a Software-as-a-Service security company, after dealing with various angel investors and other equity companies, recently announced that it had closed a $30 million Series B funding through the New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, together with StageOne Ventures, Cardumen Capital, RTP Global, and CrowdStrike’s early-stage investment fund, the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund.

The issue that DoControl is tackling has grown with the way that enterprises work today. As more companies change their IT activities into cloud environments, collaboration doesn’t just happen between people in the same company; increasingly, people share documents and data across different companies, too. 

Adam Gavish saw this problem first-hand when he worked on privacy and security at Google Cloud prior to funding DoControl. It was there that he first started seeing the problem however struggled to get people to want to build something to address it.

Things are speedily changing, however, with security breaches such as the one at Okta focusing on how an app authentication may not always be enough to protect data.

DoControl’s solution is built on the idea of attaching a zero-trust security principle to data access, similar to the zero-trust approach that many vendors have built around network or app access, where users are required to log in to use apps.

The investment from Insight Partners will enable DoControl to double its headcount and advance its market penetration in the United States and overseas. DoControl will also create a national channel partner program to enable MSPs, resellers, and other key partners to provide Zero Trust SaaS data access control capabilities to a broader user base. Most importantly, DoControl will leverage its funding to develop innovations that meet the needs of modern businesses reliant on SaaS tooling while extending its use cases to new vertical markets.

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.