Tag: business funding

Locket, a Los Angeles, CA-based developer of a mobile-advertising and photo sharing application. The company delivers advertising on users’ lock screens, delivering content whenever they unlock their phones and providing deals, trailers, and opportunities for engaging with commerce sites.

The Locket was funded $12.5 million led by Open AI CEO Sam Altman with participation from Sugar Capital and Costanoa Ventures, and additional strategic investment from Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and other angel investors. The new funds will fuel continued hiring efforts and product development as the company expands its community and prepares to release a steady flow of new interactive features to strengthen connections with friends and family further.

The app launched by Matt Moss, a former Apple Worldwide Developer Conference student scholarship winner and recent UC Santa Barbara grad. Moss created Locket as a personal side project for his girlfriend to capture and share a natural moment of his day with her. Moss’s friends had questioned if they could use the app with their friends and family, behind which Moss publicly opened Locket on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store momentarily after.

The Locket created to make people feel more intimate with the 10-15 people in their lives that matter the most while delivering a simple release from doomscrolling and algorithmic feeds. The widget lets you add up to 20 people to your home screen. This number is the natural limit for Locket’s core premise of focusing on your closest connections.

Currently, the team consists of three core members. However, they are planning to hire new talents to help continue expanding Locket to lead the social space to strengthen the close relationship. The Locket Team is excited to unveil additional features in the coming months.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Who we are:  Funded.com is a platform that is A+ BBB rated over 10+ years. Access our network of Investors, get instantly matched with a Lender, or get a business plan by visiting us Funded.com

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

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

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

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

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

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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