Thursday, February 28, 2019
VC Deals Only: Korean conglomerate SK leads $600M round for Chine...
VC Deals Only: Korean conglomerate SK leads $600M round for Chine...: By Rita Liao Horizon Robotics, a three-year-old Chinese startup backed by Intel Capital, just raised a mega-round of funding from domestic...
Korean conglomerate SK leads $600M round for Chinese chipmaker Horizon Robotics
By Rita Liao
Horizon Robotics, a three-year-old Chinese startup backed by Intel Capital, just raised a mega-round of funding from domestic and overseas backers as it competes for global supremacy in developing AI solutions and chips aimed at autonomous vehicles, smart retail stores, surveillance equipment and other devices for everyday scenarios.
The Beijing-based company announced Wednesday in a statement that it hauled in $600 million in a Series B funding round led by SK China, the China subsidiary of South Korean conglomerate SK Group; SK Hynix, SK’s semiconductor unit; and a number of undisclosed Chinese automakers along with their funds.
The capital and strategic investors gleaned from this round will help ramp up Horizon’s efforts in research and development as well as commercialization, the company told TechCrunch in a statement. What that means is it will continue to double down on so-called “edge computing,” the solution that is key to all connected devices that require real-time feedback, as the technology processes data from the edge of a network instead of the center. When it comes to money-making, Horizon says it hopes to enlist more partners across all sectors.
The fresh capital drove Horizon’s valuation to at least $3 billion, the company claims. The Financial Times previously reported that the chipmaker was raising up to $1 billion in a funding round that could value it at as much as $4 billion. Such a price tag could perhaps be justified by the vast amount of resources China has poured into the red-hot sector as part of a national push to shed dependency on imported chips and work toward what analysts call “semiconductor sovereignty.”
In 2015, Yu Kai left Baidu as the Chinese search engine giant’s deep learning executive and founded Horizon to make the “brains” for a broad spectrum of connected devices. In doing so, Yu essentially set himself up for a race against industry veterans like Intel and Nvidia. To date, the startup has managed to make a dent by securing government contracts, which provide a stable source of income for China’s AI upstarts, including SenseTime, and several big-name clients like SK’s telecommunication unit, which is already leveraging Horizon’s algorithms to develop smart retail solutions. Like many of its peers who are at the forefront of the AI race, Horizon has set up an office in Silicon Valley, hiring local talent for its lab.
Other investors that joined the round include several of Horizon’s returning investors, such as Hillhouse Capital and Morningside Venture Capital . There were also some heavyweight new backers, such as a fund run by conglomerate China Oceanwide Holdings, as well as the CSOBOR Fund, a private equity entity set up by China’s state-owned CITIC to back projects pertaining to China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” modern Silk Road initiative.
Updated on February 28, 2018, 11:30 am with more details of the funding round.
Source. Techcrunch, Rita Liao, February 27, 2019
Horizon Robotics, a three-year-old Chinese startup backed by Intel Capital, just raised a mega-round of funding from domestic and overseas backers as it competes for global supremacy in developing AI solutions and chips aimed at autonomous vehicles, smart retail stores, surveillance equipment and other devices for everyday scenarios.
The Beijing-based company announced Wednesday in a statement that it hauled in $600 million in a Series B funding round led by SK China, the China subsidiary of South Korean conglomerate SK Group; SK Hynix, SK’s semiconductor unit; and a number of undisclosed Chinese automakers along with their funds.
The capital and strategic investors gleaned from this round will help ramp up Horizon’s efforts in research and development as well as commercialization, the company told TechCrunch in a statement. What that means is it will continue to double down on so-called “edge computing,” the solution that is key to all connected devices that require real-time feedback, as the technology processes data from the edge of a network instead of the center. When it comes to money-making, Horizon says it hopes to enlist more partners across all sectors.
The fresh capital drove Horizon’s valuation to at least $3 billion, the company claims. The Financial Times previously reported that the chipmaker was raising up to $1 billion in a funding round that could value it at as much as $4 billion. Such a price tag could perhaps be justified by the vast amount of resources China has poured into the red-hot sector as part of a national push to shed dependency on imported chips and work toward what analysts call “semiconductor sovereignty.”
In 2015, Yu Kai left Baidu as the Chinese search engine giant’s deep learning executive and founded Horizon to make the “brains” for a broad spectrum of connected devices. In doing so, Yu essentially set himself up for a race against industry veterans like Intel and Nvidia. To date, the startup has managed to make a dent by securing government contracts, which provide a stable source of income for China’s AI upstarts, including SenseTime, and several big-name clients like SK’s telecommunication unit, which is already leveraging Horizon’s algorithms to develop smart retail solutions. Like many of its peers who are at the forefront of the AI race, Horizon has set up an office in Silicon Valley, hiring local talent for its lab.
Other investors that joined the round include several of Horizon’s returning investors, such as Hillhouse Capital and Morningside Venture Capital . There were also some heavyweight new backers, such as a fund run by conglomerate China Oceanwide Holdings, as well as the CSOBOR Fund, a private equity entity set up by China’s state-owned CITIC to back projects pertaining to China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” modern Silk Road initiative.
Updated on February 28, 2018, 11:30 am with more details of the funding round.
Source. Techcrunch, Rita Liao, February 27, 2019
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
VC Deals Only: Freight Startup Flexport Hits $3.2 Billion Valuati...
VC Deals Only: Freight Startup Flexport Hits $3.2 Billion Valuati...: By Alex Konrad His startup operates its own 747 aircraft and employs 1,066 people across 11 offices and four warehouses. He's tacklin...
Freight Startup Flexport Hits $3.2 Billion Valuation after $1 Billion Investment Led By Softbank
By Alex Konrad
His startup operates its own 747 aircraft and employs 1,066 people across 11 offices and four warehouses. He's tackling a market he calls “as ancient as mankind.” So when Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen decided to raise venture capital to pour more rocket fuel on his freight-forwarding company’s growth, it’s no surprise he turned to the fund best-known in Silicon Valley for writing massive checks: SoftBank.
Flexport, a software-focused freight forwarder that helps businesses transport their goods to their point of sale, announced a $1 billion funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund on Thursday, with existing investors Founders Fund, DST Global, Cherubic Ventures, Susa Ventures and SF Express all participating. The investment, an all-primary transaction (meaning early investors weren't selling their shares), values the San Francisco-based company at $3.2 billion, according to a source with knowledge of its terms.
As part of the capital injection, Vision Fund managing partner Michael Ronen will join Flexport’s board and director Ed Shrager comes on as a board observer. Petersen – who retains majority control of the company – will also appoint an independent board member to join Founders Fund’s Trae Stephens.
The investment comes as Flexport continues to grow its business at a clip atypical for startups at its scale. It brought in revenue of $441 million for 2018, a previously unreported total that represents annual growth of 95%.
SoftBank’s big bet on Flexport caps a two-year off-and-on courtship that heated up after Petersen read SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son’s 300-year plan unveiled in 2017. Both founders shared an ambition to use technology to connect people through an “information revolution,” Petersen says. And both speak in sweeping time horizons that can sound prophetic — or hubristic. “The audacity to have a 300 year vision, it just resonated with me,” says Petersen, who says one of the company's core values is to "play the long game." "We are an ancient industry; global trade is as ancient as mankind. All great industries are based on trade – and civilizations fall apart when they turn to plunder. We want to advance trade forward for the next few hundred years.”
Choosing SoftBank as a lead investor, however, isn’t without controversy. Much of the Vision Fund’s approximately $100 billion in capital comes from Saudi Arabia, which has faced heightened scrutiny since the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018. Son recently said it was “too early” to decide whether SoftBank would work with Saudi Arabia for its next fund. Asked whether such a connection gave him pause, Petersen says, “we gave this a lot of thought,” adding that Flexport spent time with the Vision Fund in both the U.S. and Japan. They decided they could live with it. “We found that we were aligned in our vision of how technology could create a better, more interconnected world.”
Today, that scale includes a network of 10,000 import and export experts and customers who spend millions – some more than $10 million per year – for Flexport to manage their supply chains through a combination of software, local experts and physical assets like its warehouses. Tracking and handling freight is a huge business globally, as much as several trillion dollars, Flexport estimates, with at least 5,900 freight forwarders operating in the U.S. Many depend on experts with decades of expertise, who use email, phone calls and spreadsheets to get the job done. “Of the top 100 freight forwarders, we are the only one founded after Netscape,” Petersen quips.
Modernizing that process with technology helped Flexport gain acceptance, and then participate, in startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2014. While many startups were following Marc Andreessen’s battle cry to Silicon Valley from 2011, that software would eat the world, only Petersen wanted to apply that mantra to the deeply unsexy world of logistics. It wasn’t totally out of the blue. He’d worked on multiple projects in the space in the past, including his brother David’s business that imported medical bathtubs from China. “He was clearly obsessed with the import-export business,” says Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder and former YC partner who also invested in the startup through his VC firm Initialized Capital.
Flexport now operates its own dedicated 747 plane for air freight.Flexport
If a company agrees to a trial to manage at least 10 cargo loads through Flexport, Petersen thinks he can prove the company’s value, with Flexport’s software helping optimize each route to prioritize speed, reliability, cost or a combination of the three. That’s how Flexport started to work with sound system maker Sonos, which tested Flexport with one lane of its business, its China to Australia route, in early 2016. Now it’s one of four main logistics partners Sonos uses globally, alongside two multi-billion-dollar-revenue freight forwarding giants and UPS. Sonos was initially skeptical of trusting a startup, says Sonos global operations leader Patrick Stuut. “They’ve showed their value over time,” he says. “My advice is to give them a chance.”
But at other customers, Flexport’s youth is still on display. One of its largest export customers is Georgia-Pacific, the paper company that accounts for the bulk of the freight processed by parent conglomerate Koch Industries. Georgia-Pacific now uses Flexport to send finished product from Uruguay to Latin America, the Middle East and parts of India, and works with two traditional freight forwarders elsewhere. The startup still has a long way to go to work out kinks at such a scale, and needs to add more compliance and international law expertise in markets like European ports over time, says Georgia-Pacific supply chain director Carter Noland.
Add that to a shopping list of additions and improvements Flexport is considering with its $1 billion in new cash. The company plans to hire more engineers, including out of a new second technical office in Chicago, as well as hire more local experts in its global markets. Flexport will also continue to invest in physical assets such as additional warehouses; it’s considered expanding from one plane to more of a fleet. Then there are ancillary businesses, like Flexport Capital, which offers inventory loans to its customers, and products it doesn’t yet offer, like analytics tools for studying and making predictions based on a customer’s shipping patterns.
For SoftBank, Flexport represents a key link in a growing network of logistics-focused investments and subsidiaries that range from warehouse assets, Uber’s automobile and delivery needs to driverless cars and Boston Dynamics’ robots. Add it all up, and it looks a lot like SoftBank assembling an Amazon rival. Ronen, the investor who led SoftBank’s investment, says such thinking is on the right track. “I remember I was in New York City trying to buy a car, and the dealer had no idea where the car is. Maybe they get an email that it’s reached the dock and might show up at the lot eventually. And with Amazon, you can order paper towels and see where they are until they arrive in two hours,” Ronen says. “We should be able to, outside the Amazon ecosystem, get goods delivered to us much quicker and at lower cost.”
While Flexport grows, the company also plans to expand the efforts of its non-profit arm, Flexport.org. That group, which Petersen hasn’t discussed in detail before, offers a carbon calculator to customers to see the environmental impact of their shipments, as well as the opportunity to offset their carbon footprints by donating money to projects and non-governmental organizations vetted by Flexport. The company also offers its software to non-governmental organizations to track donated goods, such as bottled water or work gloves for recovery sites, for free. More recently, Flexport.org expanded to encourage its own clients to donate goods in shipments that have extra space, subsidizing or waiving the cost of shipment. Flexport.org sent 487 cargo shipments in 2018, saving non-profits an average of more than 20% in savings and reducing waste by 3.9 million pounds, according to director Susy Schöneberg.
“They have the opportunity to be a backbone in these scenarios,” says Ashton Kutcher, the actor and investor who backed Flexport and helped it pilot that project in Iowa. “The larger their network becomes, the more efficient they can be.”
If it sounds like a lot for one startup to tackle – that’s because it is. With this funding, Flexport not only faces additional financial pressure – investors will expect it to grow 5x or 10x larger than it is today – as well as execution challenges of doing too much too fast. And that’s without Flexport expanding into blockchain (Petersen says he’s waiting for a shipping standard to emerge, or fail to do so, before he’d build one himself) or making acquisitions should partners or fellow startups stumble and look to sell.
Cue SoftBank, which has emerged as the natural choice for such a large check and similarly outsized ambitions. Petersen tells the story of meeting Son, and Son’s lesson for him about the early days of Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant in which he was an early investor. Son and founder Jack Ma agreed Alibaba would grow far faster if it didn’t charge transaction fees for years and focused on scale. The implication for Flexport – which Petersen notes does charge for its freight, but offers its software for free – to focus on building its global network at all costs was clear.
“That was an interesting story to hear first-hand,” says Peterson, who spent time with the Japanese investor at his homes near San Francisco and in Tokyo. “Plus I just really enjoyed negotiating a billion-dollar deal while wearing slippers.”
Source. Forbes, Alex Konrad, February 21, 2019
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
VC Deals Only: Mobile - Tech Company Affirmed Networks Raises $38...
VC Deals Only: Mobile - Tech Company Affirmed Networks Raises $38...: By Brian Dowling Affirmed Networks, a mobile systems software company based in Acton, MA, has raised $38 million in a strategic fund...
Mobile - Tech Company Affirmed Networks Raises $38M To Chase 5G Future
By Brian Dowling
Affirmed Networks, a mobile systems software company based in Acton, MA, has raised $38 million in a strategic funding round led by Palo Alto-based Centerview Capital Technology to help it expand into more regions around the globe and invest in new products.
The company, founded in 2010, says it develops virtualized and cloud-native network software that helps mobile network providers manage traffic in ways that previously required expensive hardware. Affirmed says it has 100 customers, including top-tier network providers.
“Affirmed has disruptive technology, deep domain expertise and a vision of mobile network transformation that no other company has,” Ned Hooper, Centerview Capital Technology partner, said in a press release. “As 5G networks continue to be deployed, Affirmed has a unique opportunity to help mobile operators create and innovate the revenue-generating services of the future.”
Qualcomm Ventures, Eastward Capital Partners and some of Affirmed’s existing investors joined in the funding round, the company says.
Affirmed says its software is used in deploying 4G networks and is being integrated in some of the latest 5G systems—the latest generation of mobile technology promising faster data speeds and larger bandwidths to accommodate the millions of Internet-connected devices (from thermostats to microwaves, cars, and dog collars) that businesses and consumers will connect to networks in the coming years.
The company raised $51 million in a Series C funding round in 2013 led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by KCK Group, Charles River Ventures, Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, T-Venture, and Vodafone Ventures, the company said.
CEO Hassan Ahmed says in a press release the company and its customers are standing “at the edge of a 5G world that promises to transform the way we communicate.”
He added: “From augmented reality to driverless cars, the future is coming into focus today, and we’re more committed than ever to helping mobile service providers deliver that future
The company, founded in 2010, says it develops virtualized and cloud-native network software that helps mobile network providers manage traffic in ways that previously required expensive hardware. Affirmed says it has 100 customers, including top-tier network providers.
“Affirmed has disruptive technology, deep domain expertise and a vision of mobile network transformation that no other company has,” Ned Hooper, Centerview Capital Technology partner, said in a press release. “As 5G networks continue to be deployed, Affirmed has a unique opportunity to help mobile operators create and innovate the revenue-generating services of the future.”
Qualcomm Ventures, Eastward Capital Partners and some of Affirmed’s existing investors joined in the funding round, the company says.
Affirmed says its software is used in deploying 4G networks and is being integrated in some of the latest 5G systems—the latest generation of mobile technology promising faster data speeds and larger bandwidths to accommodate the millions of Internet-connected devices (from thermostats to microwaves, cars, and dog collars) that businesses and consumers will connect to networks in the coming years.
The company raised $51 million in a Series C funding round in 2013 led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by KCK Group, Charles River Ventures, Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, T-Venture, and Vodafone Ventures, the company said.
CEO Hassan Ahmed says in a press release the company and its customers are standing “at the edge of a 5G world that promises to transform the way we communicate.”
He added: “From augmented reality to driverless cars, the future is coming into focus today, and we’re more committed than ever to helping mobile service providers deliver that future
Source. Xeconomy, Brian Dowling, February 25, 2019
Monday, February 25, 2019
VC Deals Only: Overtime Raises $23M Series B Fueled By Andreessen...
VC Deals Only: Overtime Raises $23M Series B Fueled By Andreessen...: By Mary Ann Azevedo Digital sports media startup Overtime has raised $23 million in a Series B round of funding led by Spark Capital....
Overtime Raises $23M Series B Fueled By Andreessen Horowitz And NBA Players
Digital sports media startup Overtime has raised $23 million in a Series B round of funding led by Spark Capital.
Founded in late 2016 by Dan Porter and Zack Weiner, the Brooklyn company has raised a total of $35.3 million. Existing investor Andreessen Horowitz participated in the latest round via its new Cultural Leadership Fund. Other repeat previous investors include Afore Capital and Correlation Ventures.
Sapphire Ventures, which put money in via its new “Sapphire Sport” investment vehicle, also participated in the round in addition to a crew of NBA players such as Carmelo Anthony, Victor Oladipo, and Baron Davis. Golden State Warriors Player Kevin Durant and former NBA commissioner David Stern have also backed the firm.
The company describes itself as a distributed sports network that offers its programming via a variety of channels including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat as well as on television and through its own app and website.
Its short-form programming focuses on high school athletes who play basketball and football, offering them a platform “to tell their stories.” Over the past year, the startup has expanded its sports coverage to include soccer, football, and esports. And last week, the company launched its first women’s sports vertical, OvertimeWBB. Paid contributors attend games and upload highlights in real-time from their mobile phones using an Overtime-created app. The company’s mission is to “create the next great sports network” by appealing to a Gen Z audience it says has been elusive to legacy sports networks.
According to a company spokesperson, the company’s videos are viewed more than 550 million times each month, up from 112 million views in January 2018. Overtime has reached “seven-figure revenue” numbers while headcount has climbed to 55 from 18 a year ago, according to a company spokesperson.
Michael Spirito, managing director of Sapphire Ventures and co-founder of Sapphire Sport, said he believes Overtime “uniquely serves the needs of consumers and major stakeholders alike across the global sport and media landscape.”
“They are not simply creating a next-generation media company; they are creating resonant, globally relevant content and stories specifically produced for next-generation consumers while providing brands, media companies, leagues, and teams opportunities to better connect to the fans, viewers, and voices they covet,” he wrote via email.
Overtime plans to use the funding to expand its team, and do more “live activations,” according to Porter. “Expect to see more merch collabs, more commerce and more shows to rival a traditional network. And expect us to go global, pushing Overtime into Europe, Asia and Africa,” he added in a blog post.
This is not Porter’s first experience with a startup. He sold his previous company OMGPop to gaming company Zynga in 2012 for $200 million. After leaving Zynga, he was hired by William Morris Endeavor (WME) to oversee its digital efforts. Meanwhile, Weiner was the founder of The Sports Quotient, a platform for college students to write about sports.
Overtime initially started as a different sports-focused project within WME. But in late 2016, Porter and Weiner left WME and established it as a standalone company.
Overtime has a diversified revenue model. According to the company, it makes money from ads on its videos. It’s also generating revenue from a growing e-commerce business.
Source. Techcrunch, Mary Ann Azevedo, February 14, 2019
Sunday, February 24, 2019
VC Deals Only: Tillable raises $8.25M Series A to grow its market...
VC Deals Only: Tillable raises $8.25M Series A to grow its market...: By Alton Zenon III Tillable, an online marketplace that connects land owners with farmers looking to expand their operations, is happily e...
Tillable raises $8.25M Series A to grow its marketplace for farmland
By Alton Zenon III
Tillable, an online marketplace that connects land owners with farmers looking to expand their operations, is happily enjoying the fruits of its own labors following its newly announced Series A raise of $8.25 million.
Agtech investor The Production Board led the round, backed up by First Round Capital. The Production Board was founded by David Friedberg, who also founded The Climate Corporation — an agtech software provider that acquired Tillable founder and CEO Corbett Kull’s last startup, an agricultural data platform known as 640 Labs.
“David and I have long history of working together. He’s been a very successful entrepreneur and investor, and is very knowledgeable in agriculture, so I’m stoked to be able to work with him,” said Kull. “First Round Capital is a very founder-friendly VC firm. They’ve got a lot of great resources for young and rapidly growing companies that we’re hoping to tap into. I feel very fortunate to be able to work with both.”
In today’s sharing economy, one can rent anything from planes to homes, so why should farmland be any different? That was Kull’s idea when he launched Tillable in 2017 to connect landowners who have excess acreage they aren’t using — or do not have the means to farm — with farmers who have extra bandwidth and want additional income.
According to Corbett, landowners nationwide leave around $8 billion unearned in underpriced rent because they lack comparable data to know what the fair market value of their property is. And the lack of data also affects farmers.
“If you’re a grower and you’re looking for farmland, there’s really no good method to find more land to farm,” Kull said. “Typically, growers will go the local coffee shop or ask their friends, and that’s just not an efficient way to find more farmland.”
And as the platform grows, Tillable hopes to provide more insightful data for both land owners and farmers, leading to more crops and cash.
To reach that end, the company is doubling its 16-person staff across engineering, sales and marketing roles this year to reach and onboard more users. It will be marketing to landowners and growers in the Midwest, but the site is already experiencing organic growth (get it?) among interested users across more than two dozen other states nationwide.
In addition to the marketing push, the company is exploring opportunities to integrate with other agricultural platforms in the future.
“We’ll be extending Tillable to work with as many of the other agtech platforms as there are out there,” said Kull.
Source. Built in Chicago, by Alton Zenon III, February 21, 2019
Tillable, an online marketplace that connects land owners with farmers looking to expand their operations, is happily enjoying the fruits of its own labors following its newly announced Series A raise of $8.25 million.
Agtech investor The Production Board led the round, backed up by First Round Capital. The Production Board was founded by David Friedberg, who also founded The Climate Corporation — an agtech software provider that acquired Tillable founder and CEO Corbett Kull’s last startup, an agricultural data platform known as 640 Labs.
“David and I have long history of working together. He’s been a very successful entrepreneur and investor, and is very knowledgeable in agriculture, so I’m stoked to be able to work with him,” said Kull. “First Round Capital is a very founder-friendly VC firm. They’ve got a lot of great resources for young and rapidly growing companies that we’re hoping to tap into. I feel very fortunate to be able to work with both.”
In today’s sharing economy, one can rent anything from planes to homes, so why should farmland be any different? That was Kull’s idea when he launched Tillable in 2017 to connect landowners who have excess acreage they aren’t using — or do not have the means to farm — with farmers who have extra bandwidth and want additional income.
According to Corbett, landowners nationwide leave around $8 billion unearned in underpriced rent because they lack comparable data to know what the fair market value of their property is. And the lack of data also affects farmers.
“If you’re a grower and you’re looking for farmland, there’s really no good method to find more land to farm,” Kull said. “Typically, growers will go the local coffee shop or ask their friends, and that’s just not an efficient way to find more farmland.”
And as the platform grows, Tillable hopes to provide more insightful data for both land owners and farmers, leading to more crops and cash.
To reach that end, the company is doubling its 16-person staff across engineering, sales and marketing roles this year to reach and onboard more users. It will be marketing to landowners and growers in the Midwest, but the site is already experiencing organic growth (get it?) among interested users across more than two dozen other states nationwide.
In addition to the marketing push, the company is exploring opportunities to integrate with other agricultural platforms in the future.
“We’ll be extending Tillable to work with as many of the other agtech platforms as there are out there,” said Kull.
Source. Built in Chicago, by Alton Zenon III, February 21, 2019
Saturday, February 23, 2019
VC Deals Only: MPM Capital raises $400M in seventh venture fund
VC Deals Only: MPM Capital raises $400M in seventh venture fund: By Alaric Dearmen Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MPM Capital said Thursday that it had raised $400 million for its seventh venture fun...
MPM Capital raises $400M in seventh venture fund
By Alaric Dearmen
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MPM Capital said Thursday that it had raised $400 million for its seventh venture fund, BioVentures 2018, or BV2018. The amount raised is consistent with what the company set out to raise in its Form D filed in February 2018 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Over two decades of investing, MPM has developed long-standing and strategic partners with academia, biotech and large pharma,” MPM co-founder Luke Evnin said in a statement. “Vital to our objective of delivering new treatments to improve the lives of patients, these relationships support our ongoing discovery of next-generation translational science and provide financing and acquisition opportunities across our portfolio.”
The firm said it is currently investing the money from BV2018 and its two oncology-focused funds, which together have more than $1 billion in capital. BV2018 in particular will be invested across multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology, immunology and neuroscience, along with cell, gene and nucleic acid therapies.
In November,MPM participated as an existing investor in a $70 million Series C funding round for South San Francisco, California-based Harpoon Therapeutics, which had been led by New York-based OrbiMed. The company is developing T-cell engager therapies, and its lead product candidate, HPN424, is in a Phase I study for prostate cancer. Last month, the company filed with the SEC for an $86.25 million initial public offering. And earlier this month, it announced that it expected to raise $75.6 million.
Another MPM portfolio company, TCR2 Therapeutics, also made its IPO earlier this month, announcing on Feb. 13 that it had been priced at $75 million. TCR2 made news last month when, along with Gossamer Bio, it reportedly sought to use a legal maneuver permitted by the SEC to go public automatically during the government shutdown, when the agency was unable to sign off on IPOs.
Source. Med City News, Alaric Dearmen, February 22, 2019
Source. Med City News, Alaric Dearmen, February 22, 2019
VC Deals Only: Tech Investors see bugs as a big business as Ÿnsec...
VC Deals Only: Tech Investors see bugs as a big business as Ÿnsec...: By Johnathan Shieber Ÿnsect (pronounced ‘insect”) is a Paris-based producer of insect protein that has just closed on $125 million as t...
VC Deals Only: By Johnathan ShieberŸnsect (pronounced ‘insect”) ...
VC Deals Only: By Johnathan Shieber
Ÿnsect (pronounced ‘insect”) ...: By Johnathan Shieber Ÿnsect (pronounced ‘insect”) is a Paris-based producer of insect protein that has just closed on $125 million as t...
Ÿnsect (pronounced ‘insect”) ...: By Johnathan Shieber Ÿnsect (pronounced ‘insect”) is a Paris-based producer of insect protein that has just closed on $125 million as t...
Friday, February 22, 2019
VC Deals Only: DoorDash raises $400M round, now valued at $7.1B
VC Deals Only: DoorDash raises $400M round, now valued at $7.1B: By Anthony Ha Delivery company DoorDash is announcing that it has raised $400 million in Series F financing. Earlier this month, ...
DoorDash raises $400M round, now valued at $7.1B
By Anthony Ha
Delivery company DoorDash is announcing that it has raised $400 million in Series F financing.
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was looking to raise $500 million at a valuation of $6 billion or more. In fact, DoorDash now says the funding came at a $7.1 billion valuation.
The round was led by Temasek and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from previous investors SoftBank Vision Fund, DST Global, Coatue Management, GIC, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator.
DoorDash has been raising money at an impressive rate, with a $535 million round last March followed by a $250 million round (valuing the company at $4 billion) in August.
Co-founder and CEO Tony Xu told me the round is “a reflection of superior performance over the past year.” Apparently, the company is currently seeing 325 percent growth, year-over-year, and it points to recent data from Second Measure showing that the service has overtaken Uber Eats in U.S. market share for online food delivery — DoorDash now comes in second to Grubhub.
“I think the numbers speak for themselves,” Xu said. “If you just run the math on DoorDash’s course and speed, we’re on track to be number one.”
He attributed the company’s growth to three factors: its geographic reach (3,300 cities in the United States and Canada), its selection of partners (not just restaurants — Walmart is using DoorDash for grocery deliveries) and DoorDash Drive, which allows businesses to use the DoorDash network to make their own deliveries.
He added that DoorDash has been “growing in a disciplined way, turning markets towards profitability.”
The funding, Xu said, will allow the company to continue investing in Drive, in its DashPass subscription service (where you pay $9.99 per month for free deliveries on orders of $15 or more from select restaurants) and in more hiring. And while DoorDash is currently available in all 50 states, Xu said there’s still plenty of room to cover additional territory in the U.S. and especially Canada.
“To me, this round … really changes the position of the company, not only as we march towards market leadership, but as we go beyond restaurants and become the last mile for commerce,” he said.
Not all of DoorDash’s recent news has been good. Along with Instacart, the company has been under scrutiny for subsidizing its driver payments with customer tips.
When asked about the criticism, Xu said the current compensation system was tested “not in a quarter, not in a month, but tested for months” before being implemented in 2017, and since then, there’s been a “significant increase” in retention among “dashers,” along with improved dasher satisfaction and on-time deliveries.
“When it comes to this pay model that has been in the press, the most important thing, I would say, is looking again at the facts and results,” he said.
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was looking to raise $500 million at a valuation of $6 billion or more. In fact, DoorDash now says the funding came at a $7.1 billion valuation.
The round was led by Temasek and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from previous investors SoftBank Vision Fund, DST Global, Coatue Management, GIC, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator.
DoorDash has been raising money at an impressive rate, with a $535 million round last March followed by a $250 million round (valuing the company at $4 billion) in August.
Co-founder and CEO Tony Xu told me the round is “a reflection of superior performance over the past year.” Apparently, the company is currently seeing 325 percent growth, year-over-year, and it points to recent data from Second Measure showing that the service has overtaken Uber Eats in U.S. market share for online food delivery — DoorDash now comes in second to Grubhub.
“I think the numbers speak for themselves,” Xu said. “If you just run the math on DoorDash’s course and speed, we’re on track to be number one.”
He attributed the company’s growth to three factors: its geographic reach (3,300 cities in the United States and Canada), its selection of partners (not just restaurants — Walmart is using DoorDash for grocery deliveries) and DoorDash Drive, which allows businesses to use the DoorDash network to make their own deliveries.
He added that DoorDash has been “growing in a disciplined way, turning markets towards profitability.”
The funding, Xu said, will allow the company to continue investing in Drive, in its DashPass subscription service (where you pay $9.99 per month for free deliveries on orders of $15 or more from select restaurants) and in more hiring. And while DoorDash is currently available in all 50 states, Xu said there’s still plenty of room to cover additional territory in the U.S. and especially Canada.
“To me, this round … really changes the position of the company, not only as we march towards market leadership, but as we go beyond restaurants and become the last mile for commerce,” he said.
Not all of DoorDash’s recent news has been good. Along with Instacart, the company has been under scrutiny for subsidizing its driver payments with customer tips.
When asked about the criticism, Xu said the current compensation system was tested “not in a quarter, not in a month, but tested for months” before being implemented in 2017, and since then, there’s been a “significant increase” in retention among “dashers,” along with improved dasher satisfaction and on-time deliveries.
“When it comes to this pay model that has been in the press, the most important thing, I would say, is looking again at the facts and results,” he said.
Source. Techcrunch, Anthony Ha, February 21, 2019
Thursday, February 21, 2019
VC Deals Only: Sources: Clutter is raising $200-250M led by SoftB...
VC Deals Only: Sources: Clutter is raising $200-250M led by SoftB...: By Ingrid Lunden Maria Kondos rise as a cultural icon shows there’s big business to be had in sorting out a mess. And startups are al...
Sources: Clutter is raising $200-250M led by SoftBank for on-demand storage and moving
By Ingrid Lunden
Maria Kondos rise as a cultural icon shows there’s big business to be had in sorting out a mess. And startups are also hoping to get in on the action.
TechCrunch has learned that Clutter, a storage-on-demand service that packs up, takes away, stores and returns your possessions at the click of an app, is raising between $200 million and $250 million in funding.
Sources tell us that term sheets are out but have yet to be finalised while investors go through due diligence, and that currently the plan is for the round to be led by SoftBank.
TechCrunch has learned that Clutter, a storage-on-demand service that packs up, takes away, stores and returns your possessions at the click of an app, is raising between $200 million and $250 million in funding.
Sources tell us that term sheets are out but have yet to be finalised while investors go through due diligence, and that currently the plan is for the round to be led by SoftBank.
Clutter’s CEO and co-founder Ari Mir declined to comment for this story, as did SoftBank. Other investors contacted for the story did not respond.
Clutter last raised money in 2017, when it picked up $64 million from backers that included Atomico, GV, Sequoia and and Fifth Wall. Pitchbook notes that the round was done at a $240 million post-money valuation. That could give Clutter a valuation of between $400 million and $500 million in this latest round — a figure our sources also mentioned.
Clutter last raised money in 2017, when it picked up $64 million from backers that included Atomico, GV, Sequoia and and Fifth Wall. Pitchbook notes that the round was done at a $240 million post-money valuation. That could give Clutter a valuation of between $400 million and $500 million in this latest round — a figure our sources also mentioned.
Clutter currently operates in the Bay Area, Southern California, Seattle, New York and Chicago, and it’s likely that this funding could be used to help it expand to more regions.
For it and a number of its competitors, the target users are consumers based in urban areas who live in smaller spaces with less storage options; have the disposable income not only to buy stuff but to pay to keep it somewhere else; and likely already use of other app-based on-demand services for food, transport, work-space and so on, making them familiar and ready to work with startups offering the same services to manage their material possessions.
But the business of storage on demand is nothing short of, well, cluttered.
For starters, there are a lot of startups in the space angling to take on a wide array of incumbents like Public Storage, U-Haul and others that offer services to clear away your possessions and store them in lockers.
As with other on-demand e-commerce services like transportation, accommodation and food delivery, there is a race for economy of scale and market penetration. In the case of storage, that race includes working with or building facilities where space can be filled out in the most optimised way, as well as building the most efficient tech platform to manage the safe collection, storage and retrieval of people’s items. That’s before the human aspect of the service is considered. As with other on-demand collaborative economy startups, Clutter and its competitors rely on being able to hire the right people to get the job done well.
Clutter will be hoping that a big cash infusion will help it come out ahead in all of these areas: when and if this round closes, it will have raised more funding than the rest of its (many) startup competitors combined.
But the business of moving things is also tricky for an other reason: companies are dealing in people’s personal possessions, and so when something doesn’t go right — an item is lost or broken in the process, for example — the bad experience takes on an especially emotional angle.
Clutter may be the biggest in its category, but it has had its share of negative feedback on platforms like Yelp, Trustpilot and Twitter. It can be hard to vet the truth of all public comments, but it will be interesting to see how and if customer feedback plays a role in the company closing this round and its bigger efforts to scale.
As with other on-demand startups, there is also the fact that it can be a capital-intensive business. From what we understand, Clutter has been working on this round for a while and had to downsize last year to cut down on its burn rate.
For it and a number of its competitors, the target users are consumers based in urban areas who live in smaller spaces with less storage options; have the disposable income not only to buy stuff but to pay to keep it somewhere else; and likely already use of other app-based on-demand services for food, transport, work-space and so on, making them familiar and ready to work with startups offering the same services to manage their material possessions.
But the business of storage on demand is nothing short of, well, cluttered.
For starters, there are a lot of startups in the space angling to take on a wide array of incumbents like Public Storage, U-Haul and others that offer services to clear away your possessions and store them in lockers.
As with other on-demand e-commerce services like transportation, accommodation and food delivery, there is a race for economy of scale and market penetration. In the case of storage, that race includes working with or building facilities where space can be filled out in the most optimised way, as well as building the most efficient tech platform to manage the safe collection, storage and retrieval of people’s items. That’s before the human aspect of the service is considered. As with other on-demand collaborative economy startups, Clutter and its competitors rely on being able to hire the right people to get the job done well.
Clutter will be hoping that a big cash infusion will help it come out ahead in all of these areas: when and if this round closes, it will have raised more funding than the rest of its (many) startup competitors combined.
But the business of moving things is also tricky for an other reason: companies are dealing in people’s personal possessions, and so when something doesn’t go right — an item is lost or broken in the process, for example — the bad experience takes on an especially emotional angle.
Clutter may be the biggest in its category, but it has had its share of negative feedback on platforms like Yelp, Trustpilot and Twitter. It can be hard to vet the truth of all public comments, but it will be interesting to see how and if customer feedback plays a role in the company closing this round and its bigger efforts to scale.
As with other on-demand startups, there is also the fact that it can be a capital-intensive business. From what we understand, Clutter has been working on this round for a while and had to downsize last year to cut down on its burn rate.
Others in the space have been tackling liquidity in other ways that also speak to some of the shifting and experimental nature of this still-young market. Omni — a storage company that also lets people rent out their possessions while they are not using them — last year took an investment from executives at Ripple and struck a partnership with the XRP company. Now it’s offering users an option to get paid in XRP instead of cash when they rent out their items.
The fact that SoftBank is the investor name that has come up to lead this round for Clutter underscores characteristics in common with other recent SoftBank investments.
Armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest across the tech industry, SoftBank has developed a reputation for wading into areas of e-commerce and other tech fields crowded with competition that will likely see inevitable consolidation — and it invests in the startup that it believes will be the winner, a pattern we’ve seen at Uber, WeWork, Fair, DoorDash, Compass and many more.
If all goes to plan, SoftBank’s investment, in turn, becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not just a financial boost to help the startup grow, but also — given that it’s SoftBank — a mark of confidence to other investors that the business is solid and supported for the longer haul.
Source. TechCrunch, Ingrid Lunden, February 20, 2019
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
VC Deals Only: Redis Labs: $60M Series E To Scale Out Its In-Memo...
VC Deals Only: Redis Labs: $60M Series E To Scale Out Its In-Memo...: By Jason D. Rowley Today, Redis Labs announces that it raised $60 million in a Series E round. Francisco Partners (“FP”), a global late-s...
Redis Labs: $60M Series E To Scale Out Its In-Memory Data Store
By Jason D. Rowley
Today, Redis Labs announces that it raised $60 million in a Series E round. Francisco Partners (“FP”), a global late-stage technology investment firm, led the round, taking a position in Redis Labs for the first time. Prior investors—including Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital—participated in the funding round.
As part of the transaction, Francisco Partners’ chief investment officer David Golob will take a seat on the company’s board of directors and FP operating partner Eran Gorev will join as a board observer, according to a statement from the company.
Including this round, Redis Labs has raised $146.6 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its new valuation. Redis Labs says it will use its new funding to accelerate business expansion globally and to “invest further in the enthusiastic Redis community.”
What Is Redis?
Redis Labs is the company behind Redis Enterprise and Redis, an open-source in-memory data structure store, which can be implemented as a database, cache, or message brokerage. According to industry tracking site DB-Engines, Redis is the seventh-most-popular database system overall, and the most popular key-value store in production use today. Redis has been deployed in nearly 1.38 billion Docker containers at the time of writing, according to its website.
Redis stores data in memory, which has the benefit of being terrifically fast but somewhat expensive to run at scale. Almost all computing hardware components (from CPUs to hard drives to solid-state storage) have gotten cheaper over the years, but RAM prices can be volatile and remain high relative to other parts.
In conjunction with a trend of bigger companies turning to managed services instead of in-house development using open source software infrastructure, the high memory requirements of Redis drove its adoption through cloud computing platforms, which offer their own versions of Redis’s key-value store as another commoditized computing service.
To an extent, this has been good for the broad adoption of open source Redis, but perhaps less good for Redis Labs itself. Financially, much of the benefit redounded to the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud computing platforms offering Redis as a software service running on platform-managed hardware. Accordingly, Redis Labs has attempted to capture more value from its software, all while trying to reconcile business needs with its roots in community-driven software.
According to a licencing page on the Redis Labs website, the core Redis database software is available via open source license (BSD). Redis Enterprise, an optimized, more full-featured database engine, is closed-source and available via commercial license through Redis Labs. There is a space in between the two offerings though, which is filled with software modules that enhance or extend the functionality of open-source Redis. Some of these modules are produced by the Redis development community, while others are produced by Redis Labs itself.
In a move that ruffled feathers of some in the open source software community back in August 2018, Redis Labs announced it would move some of the modules it developed in-house off the open source AGPL license to an Apache v2.0 license modified with a Commons Clause, which technically isn’t open source, but rather “source available.”
Proponents of the Commons Clause says it prevents massive cloud computing platforms from simply re-selling the Commons Clause-protected software as a service. Critics say it’s a way for private, for-profit companies to financially benefit from community-developed software. Licencing battles are nothing new in open source software development and the Commons Clause is one of its new fronts.
In the funding announcement Redis Labs shared with Crunchbase News, the company says its commercial products feature “a variety of data modeling techniques, such as Streams, Graph, Document and Machine Learning, with a real-time search engine.” The modules which facilitate some of those value-added services—RediSearch, RedisGraph, ReJSON, Redis-ML, and ReBloom—were the ones Redis Labs released under the new license.
Source. Techcrunch, Jason D. Rowley February 19, 2019
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
VC Deals Only: Passage Bio to tackle CNS diseases with $115M and ...
VC Deals Only: Passage Bio to tackle CNS diseases with $115M and ...: By Amirah Al Idrus Passage Bio reeled in a $115.5 million series A on Thursday, which will support the development of five programs aimed...
Passage Bio to tackle CNS diseases with $115M and UPenn gene therapy programs
By Amirah Al Idrus
Passage Bio reeled in a $115.5 million series A on Thursday, which will support the development of five programs aimed at treating rare monogenic central nervous system (CNS) diseases. Passage Bio is working on those five under a research, collaboration and license agreement with the University of Pennsylvania and could, in the future, choose to fund preclinical work for to seven more.
Specifically, the collaboration is between Passage Bio and Penn, its Gene Therapy Program, and the Penn Orphan Disease Center. Of the seven preclinical programs that Passage Bio could potentially fund, the Philadelphia-based company has the option to license IP that comes out of them, according to a statement.
“Passage Bio’s development portfolio presents an unparalleled opportunity to transform the lives of patients with rare monogenic CNS diseases,” said Stephen Squinto, Ph.D., the CEO of Passage Bio and a venture partner at OrbiMed Advisors, which led the financing. Frazier Healthcare Partners, Lilly Asia Ventures, New Leaf Venture Partners, Versant Ventures and Vivo Capital also chipped in.
The company plans to push its lead programs, in GM1 gangliosidosis and frontotemporal dementia, into the clinic in early 2020, Squinto said in the statement.
We believe this is a truly unique partnership, which gives Passage access to certain Penn AAV technologies developed at the GTP, our strong preclinical translational science capabilities and orphan drug development know-how,” said James Wilson, M.D., Ph.D., the gene therapy pioneer who wears several hats at Penn. He directs the university’s Gene Therapy Program and Orphan Disease Center and is a professor of medicine and pediatrics at its Perelman School of Medicine.
“Our team at Penn is extremely experienced and has been on the cutting edge of AAV research for over 20 years,” he said. “We are confident in this team’s ability to move new treatments for rare CNS monogenic diseases through clinical development in an effort to one day provide new treatment options for patients with chronic unmet needs with high mortality.”
Passage Bio isn’t the only company looking to treat the lysosomal storage disorder GM1 gangliosidosis. Others include Axovant and Lysogene. Last year, Axovant pivoted from Alzheimer’s disease to gene therapies, officially rebranding as Axovant Gene Therapies and picking uptreatments for GM1 and GM2 gangliosidosis, as well as for oculopharangeal muscular dystrophy. It expects data from two early-stage trials soon, including in Parkinson’s disease and GM2 gangliosidosis.
Source. Fierce Biitech, Amirah Al Idrus, February 14, 2019
Monday, February 18, 2019
VC Deals Only: Rivian has announced an equity investment round of...
VC Deals Only: Rivian has announced an equity investment round of...: PLYMOUTH, Mich., Feb. 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Rivian has announced an equity investment round of $700M led by Amazon. The investment comes ...
Rivian has announced an equity investment round of 700M led by Amazon
PLYMOUTH, Mich., Feb. 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Rivian has announced an equity investment round of $700M led by Amazon. The investment comes on the heels of Rivian's reveal of the all-electric R1T pickup and R1S SUV at the LA Auto Show last November.
Starting with a clean sheet, Rivian has developed its vehicles with adventurers at the core of every design and engineering decision. The company's launch products, the R1T and R1S, deliver up to 400+ miles of range and provide an unmatched combination of performance, off-road capability and utility. These vehicles use the company's flexible skateboard platform and will be produced at Rivian's manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill., with customer deliveries expected to start in late 2020.
"This investment is an important milestone for Rivian and the shift to sustainable mobility," said RJ Scaringe, Rivian Founder and CEO. "Beyond simply eliminating compromises that exist around performance, capability and efficiency, we are working to drive innovation across the entire customer experience. Delivering on this vision requires the right partners, and we are excited to have Amazon with us on our journey to create products, technology and experiences that reset expectations of what is possible."
"We're inspired by Rivian's vision for the future of electric transportation," said Jeff Wilke, Amazon CEO Worldwide Consumer. "RJ has built an impressive organization, with a product portfolio and technology to match. We're thrilled to invest in such an innovative company."
Rivian will remain an independent company. Amazon is leading the round, which includes participation from existing shareholders. Additional details about this investment are not being disclosed at this time.
About Rivian
Rivian is developing vehicles, technology and services that inspire people to get out and explore the world. With a team of more than 750 people, Rivian has development centers in Plymouth, Mich.; San Jose, Calif.; Irvine, Calif; and Surrey, England; along with a 2.6-million-square-foot manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill. Rivian will launch the R1T and R1S in the US in late 2020, with introduction to other global geographies starting in 2021. Rivian is now accepting preorders on its R1T and R1S. More information is available at www.rivian.com.
Source. Rivian Press Release, PR Newswire, February 15, 2019
Starting with a clean sheet, Rivian has developed its vehicles with adventurers at the core of every design and engineering decision. The company's launch products, the R1T and R1S, deliver up to 400+ miles of range and provide an unmatched combination of performance, off-road capability and utility. These vehicles use the company's flexible skateboard platform and will be produced at Rivian's manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill., with customer deliveries expected to start in late 2020.
"This investment is an important milestone for Rivian and the shift to sustainable mobility," said RJ Scaringe, Rivian Founder and CEO. "Beyond simply eliminating compromises that exist around performance, capability and efficiency, we are working to drive innovation across the entire customer experience. Delivering on this vision requires the right partners, and we are excited to have Amazon with us on our journey to create products, technology and experiences that reset expectations of what is possible."
"We're inspired by Rivian's vision for the future of electric transportation," said Jeff Wilke, Amazon CEO Worldwide Consumer. "RJ has built an impressive organization, with a product portfolio and technology to match. We're thrilled to invest in such an innovative company."
Rivian will remain an independent company. Amazon is leading the round, which includes participation from existing shareholders. Additional details about this investment are not being disclosed at this time.
About Rivian
Rivian is developing vehicles, technology and services that inspire people to get out and explore the world. With a team of more than 750 people, Rivian has development centers in Plymouth, Mich.; San Jose, Calif.; Irvine, Calif; and Surrey, England; along with a 2.6-million-square-foot manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill. Rivian will launch the R1T and R1S in the US in late 2020, with introduction to other global geographies starting in 2021. Rivian is now accepting preorders on its R1T and R1S. More information is available at www.rivian.com.
Source. Rivian Press Release, PR Newswire, February 15, 2019
Sunday, February 17, 2019
VC Deals Only: Health data startup Human API raises $10M on new l...
VC Deals Only: Health data startup Human API raises $10M on new l...: By Kevin Truong San Mateo, California-based health data startup Human API has raised $10 million in funding to support growth and expans...
VC Deals Only: Health data startup Human API raises $10M on new l...
VC Deals Only: Health data startup Human API raises $10M on new l...: By Kevin Truong San Mateo, California-based health data startup Human API has raised $10 million in funding to support growth and expans...
Health data startup Human API raises $10M on new life insurance capabilities
By Kevin Truong
San Mateo, California-based health data startup Human API has raised $10 million in funding to support growth and expansion for its health data aggregation platform.
San Mateo, California-based health data startup Human API has raised $10 million in funding to support growth and expansion for its health data aggregation platform.
The company’s technology collects and connects medical data from disparate sources including EHR systems, labs, pharmacies, wearables and health apps onto one platform.
New investors participating in the funding round were Guardian Life Insurance Company and SCOR Life & Health Ventures, the VC arm of global reinsurance company SCOR. Other participants in the round included returning investors BlueRun Ventures and SciFi VC.
Traditional insurers have gotten much more active in venture capital investing in recent years as they look to shore up their existing business against new market entrants and boost their own internal digital transformation plans.
Human API entered the life insurance space last year by launching a product specially intended to help the industry in their underwriting decisions. This tracks with how the underwriting process has changed with direct access to EHR records another sources of medical information.
The company’s technology allows both carriers and reinsurers to build more automated and efficient models to speed up the underwriting process, avoid time consuming and expensive third-party medical exams and create a more user friendly experience for potential plan purchasers.
“This partnership with Human API supports our efforts to accelerate the underwriting process through electronic health data and automated decision making,” SCOR Global Life Deputy CEO Brona Magee said in a statement.
“Human API is in a unique position to transform health data exchange and create innovation opportunities across the healthcare and insurance ecosystem.”
Human API isn’t alone in trying to collect and organize patient medical information at a single point. Other startups with the same mission include San Diego, California-based Seqster and San Francisco company PicnicHealth.
Apple has also made major strides in the rollout of its Apple Health Records application, including a recent deal with the VA to provide access to the tech giant’s personal health records system to more than 9 million veterans.
The companies’ efforts feed into larger trends like the rise the consumerization within healthcare and the need to extract meaningful information and insight from the reams of data being produced and collected daily.
Source. Med City News, Kevin Truong, February 15, 2019
The companies’ efforts feed into larger trends like the rise the consumerization within healthcare and the need to extract meaningful information and insight from the reams of data being produced and collected daily.
Source. Med City News, Kevin Truong, February 15, 2019
Saturday, February 16, 2019
VC Deals Only: Opendoor files to raise another $200M at a $3.7B v...
VC Deals Only: Opendoor files to raise another $200M at a $3.7B v...: By Ingrid Lunden The housing market is predicted to cool this year, but the market for startups selling houses? It seems to be heating up...
Opendoor files to raise another $200M at a $3.7B valuation, documents show
By Ingrid Lunden
The housing market is predicted to cool this year, but the market for startups selling houses? It seems to be heating up. Opendoor, the company that aims to bypass real estate agents and brokers by providing an online platform — by way of a mobile app — for people to buy and sell properties direct, has filed papers in Delaware indicating that it would like to raise around $200 million more, at a valuation of about $3.7 billion.
The Delaware documents (embedded below, and provided to us by Prime Unicorn Index) do not make it clear if this would come in the form of an outside round, or a conversion — secondary transactions would not be disclosed in public domain documents, or a combination of the two; nor is it clear if the funding has closed already. The documents are dated February 8th of this year.
The raise comes just one month after Knock, an Opendoor competitor, raised $400 million.
Eric Wu, Opendoor’s CEO and co-founder, did not respond to a request for comment, and a spokesperson for Opendoor declined to comment.
The shares are described as a “Series E-2”, which Justin Byers, an analyst with Lagnaippe Labs, noted likely means this is an extension on Opendoor’s last round, from September 2018, of $400 million.
That itself was an expansion of a previous E round, which Opendoor had raised in June 2018, of $325 million. Opendoor had been valued at around $2.47 billion post-money in September, according to PitchBook, and the shares in the document are around 37 percent higher — hence the $3.7 billion estimation here.
Backers of the company include SoftBank, along with some 36 others that include some of the biggest names in VC, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, General Atlantic, GV, Initialized, Khosla, NEA, Norwest and many more.
The premise of Opendoor — co-founded by Wu, Ian Wong, Justin Ross and Keith Rabois on the back of an idea that Rabois had many years before — is to cut out some of the steps, and subsequent money and time spent, that come with buying or selling a property. (For those who have been through it, you know that the extra fees and rigmarole can be a killer and sometimes feels like it could be done better; that’s what Opendoor is addressing, in part with a very transparent pricing structure.)
Opendoor does this by becoming the virtual middle man. As Opendoor describes it, “If you’re selling, sell your home to us to eliminate the hassles of showings and months of uncertainty. If you’re buying, we make it incredibly easy to tour hundreds of Opendoor homes so you can find the perfect one.” It also has created a streamlined process to cut down the paperwork and work that agents do around transactions.
As of September last year, Opendoor had raised $2 billion in debt to finance these purchases — although the company today said that it is now “buying homes at a run rate of almost $4 billion a year” and that its transaction rate is currently at over 2,000 customers per month, including both buyers and sellers, and it has served some 30,000 customers to date across 19 metro regions covering more than 20 cities.
It’s proving to be a popular proposition. In 2018, more than 800,000 people toured Opendoor homes.
While housing prices had largely recovered in a lot of U.S. cities hurt by the previous crash, experts have said that a rise in inventory, coupled with rising mortgage rates and tax uncertainly, are set to cool the overall market in 2019.
But with the housing industry regularly rebounding and growing over the longer term — the saying “safe as houses” doesn’t come from thin air — it may be that investors are still prepared to make further-reaching bets on platforms that could prove to be strong players when the market is on a high.
Interestingly, Wu has hinted that the company will be making some moves in the area of mortgages and home improvement loans, which could free up and encourage more transactions at a time when traditional mortgage rates are rising.
“We’re doing some things around mortgages that will be integrated into the shopping experience,” Wu said in September, adding that the company “also wants to enable home buyers to personalize their experience.”
Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, February 15, 2019
Friday, February 15, 2019
VC Deals Only: Honest Company Alum Raises $8 Million for ‘Natural...
VC Deals Only: Honest Company Alum Raises $8 Million for ‘Natural...: By MICHAL LEV-RAM Most venture capitalists probably aren’t looking at perfume deals. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for fresh thin...
Honest Company Alum Raises $8 Million for ‘Natural’ Perfume Startup
By MICHAL LEV-RAM
Most venture capitalists probably aren’t looking at perfume deals. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for fresh thinking in the fragrance industry—especially for startups tapping into the growing appetite for all things “natural."
On Wednesday, Skylar, a Los Angeles-based beauty brand that has developed a line of “safe scented products,” announced that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. (The round brings its total funding to $11 million.) The investment was led by FirstMark Capital, whose partner and managing director, Beth Ferreira, will now join Skylar’s all-female board. Also participating in the round are Upfront Ventures, Amplify LA, Gingerbread Capital and several individual investors, including the Honest Company’s Brian Lee, who co-founded the baby brand along with actress Jessica Alba.
“I learned a lot about natural products there [at the Honest Company],” says Cat Chen, founder and CEO of Skylar and one of the Honest Company’s first employees. (Chen is not the only alum who has left Alba’s startup, now valued at $1 billion, and started her own natural products line.)
The idea for Skylar came about in 2017, after Chen realized her infant daughter was allergic to her “traditional” perfumes. She began researching the (unregulated) fragrance industry and found out that potentially harmful chemicals like phthalates were widely used in products. Knowing her daughter wasn’t the only one with a sensitivity to perfumes, Chen realized there was opportunity for a new brand—one that would be more cautious about the ingredients it uses—in the perfume business, which is estimated at $46 billion worldwide.
Chen enlisted an expert “perfumer” she knew from her Honest Company days, Sarah Horowitz, to start tinkering with perfumes that would be free of parabens and toxic chemicals. She researched suppliers (the fragrance industry is not set up for sourcing “naturals,” according to the entrepreneur). She raised some money from friends and family, and eventually set up shop in her garage, fulfilling orders from online sales and driving to the post office each day to send her perfumes to customers. It took off, and pretty soon, investors came sniffing around.
“She has a marketing sensibility and knows how to build an audience,” says Ferreira, the FirstMark Capital partner who is joining Skylar’s board. “And this is a product that is made by women for women.”
Of course, there’s a tech angle too. Chen says she is utilizing data to better serve her customers (yes, that’s what all startups say). She is also using tech to make her brand more sticky: Skylar customers can fill out a “scent quiz” online, but to receive their result (which Skylar scents are the best fit for them), they must provide their email address.
It’s still early days for Skylar, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from the Honest Company’s trajectory, it is this: running an “all-natural” company has its unique pitfalls. Alba’s company’s growth hasn’t been without bumps, after all—including lawsuits claiming that the company’s products weren’t quite as “natural” as they stated. Still, there’s a reason VCs smell opportunity. If the Honest Company’s $1 billion valuation is any indication, there is room for disruption in products we put on our body, and the move to more natural is real—as long as startups like Skylar can live up to what their branding promises.
Source. Fortune, Michal Lev-Ram, February 13, 2019
Most venture capitalists probably aren’t looking at perfume deals. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for fresh thinking in the fragrance industry—especially for startups tapping into the growing appetite for all things “natural."
On Wednesday, Skylar, a Los Angeles-based beauty brand that has developed a line of “safe scented products,” announced that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. (The round brings its total funding to $11 million.) The investment was led by FirstMark Capital, whose partner and managing director, Beth Ferreira, will now join Skylar’s all-female board. Also participating in the round are Upfront Ventures, Amplify LA, Gingerbread Capital and several individual investors, including the Honest Company’s Brian Lee, who co-founded the baby brand along with actress Jessica Alba.
“I learned a lot about natural products there [at the Honest Company],” says Cat Chen, founder and CEO of Skylar and one of the Honest Company’s first employees. (Chen is not the only alum who has left Alba’s startup, now valued at $1 billion, and started her own natural products line.)
The idea for Skylar came about in 2017, after Chen realized her infant daughter was allergic to her “traditional” perfumes. She began researching the (unregulated) fragrance industry and found out that potentially harmful chemicals like phthalates were widely used in products. Knowing her daughter wasn’t the only one with a sensitivity to perfumes, Chen realized there was opportunity for a new brand—one that would be more cautious about the ingredients it uses—in the perfume business, which is estimated at $46 billion worldwide.
Chen enlisted an expert “perfumer” she knew from her Honest Company days, Sarah Horowitz, to start tinkering with perfumes that would be free of parabens and toxic chemicals. She researched suppliers (the fragrance industry is not set up for sourcing “naturals,” according to the entrepreneur). She raised some money from friends and family, and eventually set up shop in her garage, fulfilling orders from online sales and driving to the post office each day to send her perfumes to customers. It took off, and pretty soon, investors came sniffing around.
“She has a marketing sensibility and knows how to build an audience,” says Ferreira, the FirstMark Capital partner who is joining Skylar’s board. “And this is a product that is made by women for women.”
Of course, there’s a tech angle too. Chen says she is utilizing data to better serve her customers (yes, that’s what all startups say). She is also using tech to make her brand more sticky: Skylar customers can fill out a “scent quiz” online, but to receive their result (which Skylar scents are the best fit for them), they must provide their email address.
It’s still early days for Skylar, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from the Honest Company’s trajectory, it is this: running an “all-natural” company has its unique pitfalls. Alba’s company’s growth hasn’t been without bumps, after all—including lawsuits claiming that the company’s products weren’t quite as “natural” as they stated. Still, there’s a reason VCs smell opportunity. If the Honest Company’s $1 billion valuation is any indication, there is room for disruption in products we put on our body, and the move to more natural is real—as long as startups like Skylar can live up to what their branding promises.
Source. Fortune, Michal Lev-Ram, February 13, 2019
Thursday, February 14, 2019
VC Deals Only: Startup HiberCell gets more than $60M to focus on ...
VC Deals Only: Startup HiberCell gets more than $60M to focus on ...: By ALARIC DEARMENT Researchers at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System have launched a company grown out of research into the mechani...
Startup HiberCell gets more than $60M to focus on mechanism behind cancer metastasis, recurrence
By ALARIC DEARMENT
Researchers at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System have launched a company grown out of research into the mechanisms behind cancer metastases.
HiberCell, based in New York, launched Thursday with a $60.75 million Series A funding round, led by ARCH Venture Partners and with participation from Celgene, Hillhouse Capital, 6 Dimensions Capital, the NYC Life Sciences Fund and undisclosed institutional investors, family offices and private individuals.
The company’s pipeline page lists two potential product candidates, HC-5404 and HC-5407, in preclinical discovery for solid tumor metastasis and also recurrences of solid and liquid tumors.
The company was founded based on research conducted at Mount Sinai’s Tisch Cancer Institute showing that cancer recurrence is driven by dormant disseminated tumor cells, or DTCs, that can persist in the body for long periods of time. The company hopes to approach cancer as a systemic disease, detect and target DTCs to prevent or delay metastasis. “We know that dormant disseminated tumor cells are critical drivers of cancer metastasis,” company co-founder and chief scientific officer Alan Rigby said in a statement. “In translating this biology into the clinic, our work will be focused on further defining the characteristic genetics and transcriptonomics of dormant disseminated tumor cells and charting a course to leverage our dormancy therapies to improve patient outcomes and survival.”
Rigby referred to HiberCell as “the foundational tumor dormancy company,” but there have been efforts at numerous academic research institutions into the area of cancer cell dormancy. For example, this month’s issue of the journal Trends in Pharmacological Science includes a paper by researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia titled “Targeting Cancer Cell Dormancy.” Another, in the February issue of Advances in Cancer Research titled “Dormancy and Cancer stem cells: An enigma for cancer therapeutic targeting,” was published by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“HiberCell will build on the foundational biology that is in place by focusing on novel tools to better detect, isolate and annotate the survival mechanisms in these dormant cancer cells,” said Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, the company’s scientific founder, in a statement.
“HiberCell will build on the foundational biology that is in place by focusing on novel tools to better detect, isolate and annotate the survival mechanisms in these dormant cancer cells,” said Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, the company’s scientific founder, in a statement.
Source. Med City News, Alaric Dearment, February 7, 2019
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
VC Deals Only: Nuvaira raises $79M for lung nerve ablation proced...
VC Deals Only: Nuvaira raises $79M for lung nerve ablation proced...: By Connor Hale Nuvaira has raised $79 million in equity financing to continue late-stage clinical development of its device-based treatment ...
Nuvaira raises $79M for lung nerve ablation procedure for COPD and asthma
By Connor Hale
Nuvaira has raised $79 million in equity financing to continue late-stage clinical development of its device-based treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the U.S.
The Minneapolis-based company’s minimally invasive, one-time procedure uses a bronchoscope and a radiofrequency ablation balloon catheter to target the nerves located along the outside of the airway.
By interrupting overactive or hyper-responsive nerve signals in the lung, the Nuvaira aims to see a relaxation and opening of the airway, as well as a decrease in mucus production, to alleviate symptoms of COPD or severe asthma.
The CE-marked targeted lung denervation system has already gone through three clinical studies—including a sham-controlled randomized trial presented last year at the European Respiratory Society International Congress, which showed a relative reduction of COPD issues by 50%. While there are pharmaceutical treatments that target the same pathway, the trial appeared to show additional benefits by pairing them with the denervation procedure.
"These funds will be used to support the pivotal AIRFLOW-3 clinical trial for FDA approval and to implement a targeted clinical development strategy in key European markets," said Nuvaira CEO Dennis Wahr in a statement.
The funding round was led by U.S. Venture Partners, along with new backing from Endeavour Vision, Qiming Venture Partners, Lightstone Ventures and the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
Nuvaira's previous investors also joined the round, including Advanced Technology Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, Split Rock Partners, Versant Ventures, Vertex Venture Holdings and Windham Venture Partners.
In addition, Nuvaira also brought on Lisa Rogan to be its senior VP of market development. Rogan was previously a senior VP at PneumRx, part of BTG, leading global marketing and therapy development strategy. She has also served as VP of marketing at Pulmonx.
"We are extremely excited to have Lisa Rogan join our executive team at Nuvaira," Wahr said. "She has a deep understanding and knowledge of the pulmonary field having spent the past decade in it, and she brings with her great business acumen and expertise in accessing new markets."
Source. Fierce Biotech, Conor Hale, Feb 11, 2019
Nuvaira has raised $79 million in equity financing to continue late-stage clinical development of its device-based treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the U.S.
The Minneapolis-based company’s minimally invasive, one-time procedure uses a bronchoscope and a radiofrequency ablation balloon catheter to target the nerves located along the outside of the airway.
By interrupting overactive or hyper-responsive nerve signals in the lung, the Nuvaira aims to see a relaxation and opening of the airway, as well as a decrease in mucus production, to alleviate symptoms of COPD or severe asthma.
The CE-marked targeted lung denervation system has already gone through three clinical studies—including a sham-controlled randomized trial presented last year at the European Respiratory Society International Congress, which showed a relative reduction of COPD issues by 50%. While there are pharmaceutical treatments that target the same pathway, the trial appeared to show additional benefits by pairing them with the denervation procedure.
"These funds will be used to support the pivotal AIRFLOW-3 clinical trial for FDA approval and to implement a targeted clinical development strategy in key European markets," said Nuvaira CEO Dennis Wahr in a statement.
The funding round was led by U.S. Venture Partners, along with new backing from Endeavour Vision, Qiming Venture Partners, Lightstone Ventures and the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
Nuvaira's previous investors also joined the round, including Advanced Technology Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, Split Rock Partners, Versant Ventures, Vertex Venture Holdings and Windham Venture Partners.
In addition, Nuvaira also brought on Lisa Rogan to be its senior VP of market development. Rogan was previously a senior VP at PneumRx, part of BTG, leading global marketing and therapy development strategy. She has also served as VP of marketing at Pulmonx.
"We are extremely excited to have Lisa Rogan join our executive team at Nuvaira," Wahr said. "She has a deep understanding and knowledge of the pulmonary field having spent the past decade in it, and she brings with her great business acumen and expertise in accessing new markets."
Source. Fierce Biotech, Conor Hale, Feb 11, 2019
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