Category: angel investors

AMP Robotics, the pioneering recycling robotics technology developer, based in Denver, CO., was funded $55 million in a Series B financing.

The investment led by XN with the participation of new investors Valor Equity Partners and GV.  The existing investor’s Sequoia, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, Congruent Ventures, and Closed Loop Partners.

The company plans to use the funds to escalate its business operations to meet its technology’s strong market demand. And advance innovative new AI product applications that combine into materials rehabilitation facilities to increase recycling rates for its customers. Expand its business reach as it works with consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, like Keurig Dr. Pepper (NASDAQ: KDP).economy.

Matanya Horowitz, the founder of AMP Robotics, applies AI and robotics to expand recycling rates and economically secure recyclables reclaimed as raw materials for the global supply chain.

Horowitz said they were thankful for an outstanding group of new investors, a mission-driven team, and amazing customers. They are putting this next round of investment to work immediately to create a unique technology for the waste industry and consciously commit to decreasing society’s impact on the environment.

Globally, more than $200 billion worth of recyclable materials goes unrecovered yearly. The economics and capability of recognizing and classifying paper, plastics, metals, and other recyclables from the waste stream create a significant challenge for material recovery.

The waste industry has also faced more stringent international quality standards for contamination-free imports of recycled materials for cost-effective alternatives to meet these requirements in current years. Pandemic occurred many businesses forced to suspend recycling operations because of concerns for worker safety. Simultaneously, the pandemic increased demand for high-quality recycled feedstock to overcome supply chain interruptions and shifts in raw material availability.

AMP Robotics’ technology helps the waste industry meet these challenges by modernizing recycling improving material quality, ensuring worker safety, increasing productivity, lowering costs, diverting waste from landfills, and reducing greenhouse gas emission while increasing overall recycling rates recovery.

Gaurav Kapadia, the founder of XN, said, They are excited to partner with AMP as Matanya. The team continues to build an exceptional and category-defining business. AMP’s technology radically improves the economics and efficiency of recycling. It creates long-term, transformational value for customers, the economy, and the environment.

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.

Fluent Forever Chicago, Illinois based. Developer company that uses a novel learning system to help its users master a new language faster.

Fluent Forever was funded $4.9 million in a Series A financing round led by Denver-based Stout Street Capital. Other investors took part in this round The Syndicate, LAUNCH, Mana Ventures, Novus VC, Flight VC, Insta VC, Up ventures, Firebrand Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Spero Ventures, and Lofty Ventures.

This company s a direct competitor to Duolingo, Babbel, and similar online language learning services. What sets it apart focuses on a personalized learning system that shows ear training, visual aids, and something akin to spaced-repetition for assisting you in memorizing unfamiliar words and phrases.

In his first languages, CEO Gabriel Wyner used the popular flashcard service Anki, wrote a book about his method, and taught classes on language learning to use his system with Anki. But as he noted, Anki is an essential tool, and only understanding how to get the highest out of it takes a lot of time and strength.

Then, Fluent Forever practices Wyner’s flashcard approach — because making those flashcards by hand is at the core of his learning system and turns it into a far-easier-to-use application.

Wyner is not hesitant to compare his method to Duolingo’s and shows that its concentrate on interpretation exercises does not interpret necessary language skills in the end. He openly acknowledges that the Duolingo user experience and gamification are far further than Fluent Forever. However, he also trusts that learners see far more excellent results with his system.

Fluent Forever currently supports nine languages: Japanese, French, Russian, Mexican and Spanish, Spanish, Italian, Korean, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, with Dutch being the next language the team is working on.

Looking ahead, Wyner says that Fluent Forever is looking at ways to bring live tutors into the loop. Live tutoring online has been done before, and some companies like Preply specialize in it already. Fluent Forever wants to join the online language learning service with quick live sessions and then use the online part to go back to the conversation over a week.

One benefit here is that these users will reasonably pay a premium for the live service and use their time with live tutors to create their personalized sentences in the Fluent Forever system, which could become content that’s available to all users.

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.

DASH System, a Los Angeles-based technology company, is developing hardware and software to enable precision airdrop cargo deliveries.

DASH System was funded $8 million in Seed funding, the investment led by 8VC with Tusk Venture Partners, Loup Ventures, Trust Ventures, Perot Jain, and Mila Capital. 

The company will use the finance to grow its track in air cargo logistics and freight. By improving technology and hardware that allow for accuracy of airdrop deliveries to rural.  Train flying partners to safely and accurately launch cargo to all parts of the world and Increase partnerships with U.S. government entities to deliver cargo to rural parts of the world.

This company relies on three parts: flight control software, automated aircraft cargo handling systems, and the smart-cargo pods that allow for accurate and soft landings of packages. It’s that third step that Joel Ifill, founder, and CEO of Dash, thought could improved. With engineering knowledge and experience building guided bombs for the military, he felt an opportunity to apply some military’s point-to-point approach to the commercial sector.

DASH’s system inspired by defense technology and is a modern update to a longstanding and legal practice of airdrops repurposed for commercial and humanitarian use. DASH’s flight control software maps the delivery route. It commands the pilot on how to fly, simplify, and streamline the method. Suppose the aircraft arrives at the correct spot. In that case, DASH’s aircraft cargo handling system immediately issues the smart-cargo pods, which land securely and softly at the desired location. This approach falls within existing FAA regulations and has supported proof-of-concept tests in disaster relief and extensive use in the defense industry.

Jake Medwell, Founding Partner at 8VC, said DASH Systems solves delivering business packages at a section of both the cost and speed of standard services. Incredibly active in the logistics industry and several largest partners are excited to work with DASH. They have already on top engineers and talent quickly join the DASH team, which is an early sign that things are working and significant problems solved.

The company has been actively working with the Air Force Special Operations Command to develop a hyper-accurate airdrop tool for small payload deliveries. It plans to launch pilot operations in rural Alaska next year.

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.

Aware produces AI-enhanced controls and data governance for the popular digital collaboration and communication technologies usually used in remote work, based in Columbus, Ohio.

Aware was funded $12 million investment headed by New York-based Spring Mountain Capital with Blue Heron Capital and Allos Ventures and existing investors Draper Triangle Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund, JumpStart, Rev1 Ventures, and JobsOhio.

The company was founded in 2017 and quickly penetrated the enterprise market by securing high-profile customers worldwide, including Wipro, AstraZeneca, Sun Life Financial, Farmers Insurance, Memorial Health System, and British Telecom.

With the enormous influx of remote work because of the pandemic, platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace from Facebook are suddenly top-of-mind for organization leaders worldwide. Purpose-built for collaboration, Aware offers a unified view across many of these tools.

Aware continuously enriches the conversation data that flow through the tools with proprietary natural language processing (NLP) and AI models, providing organizational value and insights such as ongoing employee sentiment and commonly discussed themes.

Jeff Schumann, CEO, and Co-Founder of Aware, said they are excited to partner with investors who truly understand the opportunity that lives within this unique space. The conversation data found in technologies like Slack and Teams differ from anything IT teams have faced before–they include comments, replies, emojis, @ mentions, images, attachments, and so much more. Legacy systems just aren’t set up to properly handle this unstructured data set. With these tools only increasing because of an influx in remote work, we see an opportunity to provide the controls specific to this data set and leverage our proprietary. AI to derive a wealth of knowledge and insights that leaders will find invaluable as they embrace an alternative way of working.

Aware plans to use the funds to speed up go-to-market efforts, increase partnerships, grow its integration ecosystem, and support ongoing product research and development.

Jamie Weston, Managing Director of Spring Mountain Capital said, Aware is uniquely positioned to tackle today’s remote-work-first world with the team’s extensive background in understanding digital conversations. They solve an immediate risk and compliance need that many companies didn’t realize until the pandemic hit. Meanwhile, Aware continues to push the envelope using this data set and technology to add immense value back to the organization. It thrills them to partner with Jeff and the team on this next stage of the company.

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.

BioAge, Richmond, CA-based biotechnology company developing medicines to treat aging and aging-related diseases.

BioAge was funded $90 million in a Series C financing. Andreessen Horowitz and serial entrepreneur and angel investor Elad Gil led the investment. It included new investors: Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, AARP Foundation and Phi-X Capital, and Mostafa Ronaghi. Existing investors, including Caffeinated Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pear Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and others, also participated.

The first wave of longevity industry companies to reach clinical trials and large funding rounds focuses on the well-established methodology of small molecule development. Many are also platform companies that have developed approaches to speed up the expensive and time-consuming tasks of screening and designing small molecules.

Except for the small molecule senolytics companies, these treatments presently epitomize what the SENS Research Foundation folk would call “messing with metabolism,” a low alternative to targeting and fixing underlying aging causes.

This was messing with metabolism, usually finding a molecule that can provoke cells to undertake some repair and maintenance mechanisms that occur in response to exercise, calorie restriction, heat, cold, toxins, and other stresses. The outcomes in mice are usually no better than the benefits resulting from exercise or calorie restriction.

BioAge, the company leverages a platform that identifies crucial drug targets by using datasets to identify age-related pathology’s molecular drivers. BioAge’s list of therapies targeting these key pathways will focus on an aging population’s significant unmet medical needs.

Dr. Rubin, an expert biopharmaceutical drug developer, brings comprehensive experience from early discovery, late-stage development, and the latest drug approvals across a wide variety of beneficial areas in global geographies.

Dr. Rubin said that he thrilled to be leading the BioAge clinical development team. The first two drugs from our pipeline are ready to begin Phase 2 trials in indications targeting serious conditions in elderly populations that presently have no excellent therapeutic options.

An essential aspect of their strategy is to initiate efficient human clinical trials that will demonstrate that their drugs can address age-related deficiencies in acute conditions, which may expedite approval and serve as a gateway to treating chronic diseases, resulting in healthy aging.

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.

Materialize, a New York City-based streaming SQL database startup company built on top of the open-source Timely Dataflow project.

Materialize was funded by a $32 million Series B investment led by Kleiner Perkins. Follows an $8 million Series A last year led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing the total funding to $40 million.

The company plans to use the investment to grow its engineering team, prepare the business for growth, and extend product rollout.

These firms see a reliable founding team that includes CEO Arjun Narayan, formerly of Cockroach Labs, and chief scientist Frank McSherry, who created the Timely Dataflow project on which the company based.

At Materialize, they consider it will soon be essential for all information to be always up-to-date at every business. Whether it’s delivering personalized experiences, accurately identifying fraud, building predictive AI, or discovering new business opportunities. The ability to run complex queries on multiple streams of data and keep their answers up to date is critical to making better decisions about the changing world.

Materialize is the first standard SQL interface for streaming data available to engineers looking to build complex queries and multi-way joins without specialized skills or microservices. Unlike other streaming data platforms that claim to be real-time, Materialize computes and incrementally maintains data as generated, so query results are accessible the moment it needs them. This approach provides businesses with correct answers in milliseconds – without interference from late-arriving data.

Bucky Moore, the partner at Kleiner Perkins leading the B round, sees this standard querying ability as a vital part of the technology. He said, Materialize unique ability to provide SQL over streaming data solves the problem, laying the foundation for them to build the industry’s next great data platform.

With this new funding series, they equipped to deliver on an ambitious roadmap, including a fully managed cloud service with tiered storage and replication. Narayan is also excited to broaden the SQL suite. They support and invest in a SQL optimizer, performance and benchmarking work, and making Materialize more flexible and battle-tested.

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.

Boulevard is a salon and spa management platform created to facilitate operations, boost sales, and satisfy customers. It establishes this company in Los Angeles, California, in the year 2016.

Boulevard was funded $27 million in Series B funding despite a business slowdown caused by the pandemic.

Index Ventures and Toba Capital led the funding, with VMG Partners, Bonfire Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and BoxGroup. They plan to expand their team and platform to serve further their small, medium, enterprise, and franchise partners with these funds.

Matt Danna and Sean Stavropoulos started Boulevard. Stavropoulos’s inability to book a haircut and Danna’s feeling that salons and spas’ failure to cater to customers like the busy programmer could show a more significant problem inspired this company.

To resolve a pain point they had experienced personally. They wanted to streamline the client experience at salons and eliminate inconveniences like calling to make appointments or carrying cash for gratuity. After doing door-to-door research, they learned just how underserved salons were by the technology available to them. Even though they were outsiders to an industry that they had only engaged with as consumers and believed they could create something better.

In time, they saw that other appointment-based businesses also faced the challenges salons experienced like spas, nail salons, and medispas. That realization led Boulevard’s mission to develop into something more significant—to modernize the technology powering salons and spas while improving the daily lives of professionals and the clients they serve. 

According to data provided by the company, Boulevard is giving businesses a boost. On average, enterprises increase bookings by 16%, retail revenue jumps by 18%, and gratuity paid out to stylists jumps by 24% for businesses that use Boulevard, the company said. It also reduces no-shows and cancellations and halves time spent on the phone.

Customers using the company’s software include Chris McMillan the Salon, Heyday, MèCHE Salon, Paintbox, Sassoon Salon, SEV Laser, Spoke & Weal, and TONI&GUY. Boulevard now has 90 employees and will increase that number as it continues to expand across the country.

Patrick Mathieson of Toba Capital said the secret to this company’s success has always been putting its customers first, no matter what the economy is. Also, he said, not many companies can more than double their customer count during a period when the entire industry is temporarily closed for business. Boulevard is an excellent company, and it delights them to be invited aboard for 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.

The first online social platform for athletes is moving up its game. Strava is based in San Francisco and has 70 million members, according to the company, with a presence in 195 countries globally.

Strava was funded $110 million in a Series F financing, the investment led by Sequoia Capital and TCV with participation by San Francisco-based Dragoneer Investment Group and Jackson Square Ventures, and Menlo Park-based Madrone Capital Partners.

The funding intends to propel the development of new features, and support its global community and expand to serve more athletes.

Now 2020, Strava has noticed significant growth. The company puts its activity tracking as focused on the app and service’s community and networking features, with features like virtual competitions and community goal-setting as representative of that approach.

The co-founder and CEO of Strava, Michael Horvath, said they are excited to partner with TCV and Sequoia. Making Strava indispensable to athletes everywhere, they connect athletes to what motivates them, fuel the growth of their community, and strengthen their business.

Strava provides anyone, anyplace, access to an athletic community. Staying motivated is the oldest and most significant problem in health and fitness. Still, Strava has tapped into the excellent component to keep people moving: human connection. Strava enables motivation into competition, sociability, and responsibility.

The General Partner at TCV, Neil Tolaney said, TCV an existing investor in the related fitness and health ecosystems over a long duration. As the largest and most engaged community of athletes globally, Strava is uniquely positioned and claims a vital value project for athletes and partners matched.

Strava’s community and unique product offerings motivate athletes to lead healthier, more active lifestyles. Strava’s outsized growth in community membership, activities, and subscribers demonstrates its importance for athletes to best fulfill their objectives.

This company debuted a new Strava Metro service earlier this year, leveraging the information it gathers from its users. In an aggregated and anonymized way to provide city planners and carrying managers with important information about how people get around their cities and communities. All free for these governments and public agencies to use once approved for access by Strava.

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.

JumpCloud is based in Denver, Colorado. This company is a cloud solution to control and manage employee identities and devices.

JumpCloud was funded $75 million in Series E funding. The investment led by BlackRock with participation from existing investor General Atlantic. The fund intends to expand product development, marketing, and sales globally with projects to hire an added 500 employees over the succeeding several years.

Advances in the way that IT works have been developing since the company began. Back then, most businesses used Microsoft Active Directory in a Windows-centric environment. Things have got more complicated with multiple operating systems, web applications, the cloud, and mobile since then. That has needed another way of thinking about directory structures.

Rajat Bhargava, the Co-founder of JumpCloud, says that the pandemic has only accelerated the need for his company’s kind of service as more companies move to the cloud. These changes made it much more difficult for IT to connect their users to all the needed resources. That’s one of the most critical tasks that an IT organization has is making their team productive.

The JumpCloud program enables IT to make work happen, rendering a modern, more accessible, and lower-cost cloud solution. That customers allow themselves to self-deploy without requiring a full-scale internal or external technical team.

JumpCloud is a better option for the confusion of point solutions combine with legacy directories that attempt to secure on-premise and remote user access to cloud apps, Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

Bhargava says, as far as technology goes, JumpCloud is doubling down on user experience and engineering capabilities to ensure customers can authenticate user identity, secure data, control targeted IT resources, and ensure the network is safe to traverse. JumpCloud traditionally focused on core directory services and has more recently expanded its zero-trust philosophy to components.

The company uses more than 100,000 organizations spanning over 100 countries, with more than 3,000 paying customers.

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.

Startup Concure Oncology in Mercer Island, Washington. The mission is to ease the burden for women facing early-stage breast cancer by providing an innovative new kind of radiation treatment option.

Concure Oncology was funded $2 million in capital to use the funds to grow its company and train new clinicians to bring this treatment option to even more women.

Said Scott Armstrong, CEO of Concure Oncology. This funding can build out their team and give women who have breast cancer a better and more effective form of treatment as they move forward.

Breast Microseed Treatment is a radiation therapy technique for early-stage breast cancer patients. Also known as low-dose-rate brachytherapy, based on a similar method proven successful in treating prostate cancer. This procedure, also known as low-dose-rate brachytherapy, is based on a matching process established to treat prostate cancer successfully. What identifies this treatment from regular radiation therapy is that it allows post-lumpectomy patients the chance to have a one-time, one-hour procedure. The more burdensome conventional radiation may last from three to six weeks and require daily visits to a radiation facility.

After a tumor removed, the procedure involves placing small titanium seeds filled with radioactive palladium in the patient’s body where cancer applied. These seeds, which are the size of a rice grain, release a short measure of radiation in the former tumor area, killing any cancerous cells that remain and preventing new ones from growing. Once entirely removed, the seeds become inactive, with no radioactivity remaining.

Scott Armstrong said this financing speaks to the excitement and momentum they have seen for this truly groundbreaking type of breast cancer therapy.

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.