Sunday, March 31, 2019
VC Deals Only: Hyalex Orthopaedics Expands Series A Total to $33M...
VC Deals Only: Hyalex Orthopaedics Expands Series A Total to $33M...: Hyalex Orthopaedics, a Lexington, MA-based medical device company advancing new products that feature a novel polymer system that is intende...
VC Deals Only: Hyalex Orthopaedics Expands Series A Total to $33M...
VC Deals Only: Hyalex Orthopaedics Expands Series A Total to $33M...: Hyalex Orthopaedics, a Lexington, MA-based medical device company advancing new products that feature a novel polymer system that is intende...
Hyalex Orthopaedics Expands Series A Total to $33MM
Hyalex Orthopaedics, a Lexington, MA-based medical device company advancing new products that feature a novel polymer system that is intended to mimic cartilage, raised additional funding in an expansion of its original Series A.
New investors Strategic Healthcare Investment Partners and DSM Venturing, the venture arm of Royal DSM, joined existing investors Canaan, Osage University Partners and Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC Inc. (JJDC).
The Series A funding now totals $33MM.
The funding will support the development of its platform.
Led by President and CEO Mira Sahney, Hyalex Orthopaedics is a medical device company advancing new products that feature HYALEX™ materials technology, a polymer that is designed to mimic cartilage. Unlike other polymers, synthetic HYALEX material has the capability of maintaining low friction and low wear under the high loads encountered in human joints.
Hyalex Orthopaedics’ products are in the development stage and have not been approved for use in humans by any regulatory agency.
Source. Company Press Release, March 28, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
New investors Strategic Healthcare Investment Partners and DSM Venturing, the venture arm of Royal DSM, joined existing investors Canaan, Osage University Partners and Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC Inc. (JJDC).
The Series A funding now totals $33MM.
The funding will support the development of its platform.
Led by President and CEO Mira Sahney, Hyalex Orthopaedics is a medical device company advancing new products that feature HYALEX™ materials technology, a polymer that is designed to mimic cartilage. Unlike other polymers, synthetic HYALEX material has the capability of maintaining low friction and low wear under the high loads encountered in human joints.
Hyalex Orthopaedics’ products are in the development stage and have not been approved for use in humans by any regulatory agency.
Source. Company Press Release, March 28, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
VC Deals Only: Toast, the restaurant management platform, has rai...
VC Deals Only: Toast, the restaurant management platform, has rai...: By Ingrid Lunden Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the U.S., but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per bus...
Toast, the restaurant management platform, has raised $250M at a $2.7B valuation
By Ingrid Lunden
Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the U.S., but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per business, they’re always looking for an edge on efficiency and just generally running things in a smarter way. A startup called Toast, which has built a popular platform for restaurant management, has closed a hefty round of funding to double down on that opportunity to do that.
The company has raised $250 million on a valuation of $2.7 billion, money that it will use to invest in building technology to help restaurants with marketing, recruitment and operational efficiency, as well as start to think about expanding to more territories outside the U.S.
The basics of the funding were flagged earlier today by Prime Unicorn Index and we reached out to the company to confirm. It is being led by TCV and Tiger Global Management, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price Associates funds and other existing investors.
This Series E is a big bump up for the company: in its previous round in July 2018, the company was valued at $1.4 billion — partly the result of strong growth at the company. While it’s not disclosing revenue numbers or whether it is yet profitable, Toast currently serves tens of thousands of businesses — covering a range of sizes from independent venues to smaller chains — and in the last year tallied up transactions in the tens of billions of dollars, seeing growth of some 148 percent in its revenues, according to CFO Tim Barash.
The restaurant business represents a big opportunity for e-commerce companies, but there have been some notable stumbles where ambitions have not been met with success. Groupon, which spent several years acquiring and organically building a point of sale and restaurant management business, first drastically cut down and then finally called it quits and sold off its efforts, called Breadcrumb, in 2016. Amazon also pulled out of point of sale services (aimed at more than restaurants) and has in certain regions also pulled back on other restaurant efforts like its order management and delivery platform.
Barash said in an interview that he thinks the key to why Toast has steadily grown its business through all that is because a large proportion of its own employees — some 70 percent — have worked in the food service industry themselves.
“I was first a busboy, and then I worked in pizza delivery for years,” he said. “Seventy percent of our employees have worked at restaurants, including those in our product leadership, and that helps us understand the problem.”
Restaurants, as Barash points out, are complicated. “They are essentially manufacturers and retailers at the same time, all in one small physical footprint,” and so the key to building products for them is to understand that and the challenges they face in building and running those businesses.
And that’s before you consider the many other factors that can make restaurants a dicey game, from changing cuisine tastes, to changing eating habits — many get food delivered today — to the precariousness of the commercial real estate market and so much more.
The aim of Toast is to build tools to apply data science and orderly IT processes to address whichever of those variables that can be controlled by the restaurant.
Today, Toast’s products include point of sale services as well as reporting and analytics; display systems for kitchens; online ordering and delivery interfaces; and loyalty programs. It also builds its own hardware, which includes handheld order pads, payment and ordering terminals, self-service kiosks and displays for guests. It also offers links through to a network of some 100 partners, such as Grubhub for takeout food, when a restaurant does not cover those services or functions directly, to help stitch together services to work on its platform.
Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the U.S., but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per business, they’re always looking for an edge on efficiency and just generally running things in a smarter way. A startup called Toast, which has built a popular platform for restaurant management, has closed a hefty round of funding to double down on that opportunity to do that.
The company has raised $250 million on a valuation of $2.7 billion, money that it will use to invest in building technology to help restaurants with marketing, recruitment and operational efficiency, as well as start to think about expanding to more territories outside the U.S.
The basics of the funding were flagged earlier today by Prime Unicorn Index and we reached out to the company to confirm. It is being led by TCV and Tiger Global Management, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price Associates funds and other existing investors.
This Series E is a big bump up for the company: in its previous round in July 2018, the company was valued at $1.4 billion — partly the result of strong growth at the company. While it’s not disclosing revenue numbers or whether it is yet profitable, Toast currently serves tens of thousands of businesses — covering a range of sizes from independent venues to smaller chains — and in the last year tallied up transactions in the tens of billions of dollars, seeing growth of some 148 percent in its revenues, according to CFO Tim Barash.
The restaurant business represents a big opportunity for e-commerce companies, but there have been some notable stumbles where ambitions have not been met with success. Groupon, which spent several years acquiring and organically building a point of sale and restaurant management business, first drastically cut down and then finally called it quits and sold off its efforts, called Breadcrumb, in 2016. Amazon also pulled out of point of sale services (aimed at more than restaurants) and has in certain regions also pulled back on other restaurant efforts like its order management and delivery platform.
Barash said in an interview that he thinks the key to why Toast has steadily grown its business through all that is because a large proportion of its own employees — some 70 percent — have worked in the food service industry themselves.
“I was first a busboy, and then I worked in pizza delivery for years,” he said. “Seventy percent of our employees have worked at restaurants, including those in our product leadership, and that helps us understand the problem.”
Restaurants, as Barash points out, are complicated. “They are essentially manufacturers and retailers at the same time, all in one small physical footprint,” and so the key to building products for them is to understand that and the challenges they face in building and running those businesses.
And that’s before you consider the many other factors that can make restaurants a dicey game, from changing cuisine tastes, to changing eating habits — many get food delivered today — to the precariousness of the commercial real estate market and so much more.
The aim of Toast is to build tools to apply data science and orderly IT processes to address whichever of those variables that can be controlled by the restaurant.
Today, Toast’s products include point of sale services as well as reporting and analytics; display systems for kitchens; online ordering and delivery interfaces; and loyalty programs. It also builds its own hardware, which includes handheld order pads, payment and ordering terminals, self-service kiosks and displays for guests. It also offers links through to a network of some 100 partners, such as Grubhub for takeout food, when a restaurant does not cover those services or functions directly, to help stitch together services to work on its platform.
Tomorrow, the plan is to use the funding to enhance all of those with more advanced features that speak to some of the bigger issues and concerns Barash said its customers are voicing today.
That will include better and more services aimed at guest engagement and retention; better ways to recruit and keep people in an industry that has a high turnover of employees; and of course more tools to address how efficiently a business is operating to make it more profitable. The company has committed some $1 billion in the next five years to R&D to build more hardware and software.
Having access to this kind of tech and platform is a big deal, especially for independently owned places that hope to compete against bigger chains without having to compromise on their core competency: making unique and delicious food.
In the meantime, Barash said that while Toast itself is no stranger to approaches from larger players itself — he declined to say who but said many who have ambitions to do more business with the restaurant industry had approached it over the years — the company’s long-term vision is to grow bigger and remain its own boss.
It’s an ambition that has hit the spot with investors that have an appetite for high-growth businesses.
“At TCV, we invest in companies that have the potential to reshape entire industries. By providing restaurants of all sizes with access to innovative technology, Toast is leveling the playing field and leading the industry’s transition to the cloud,” said David Yuan, general partner at TCV, in a statement, who is joining the board with this round. “Our investment will enable Toast to extend their platform beyond point-of-sale and guest-facing technology, and in doing so, create a powerful SaaS platform with a superlative business model. We’re excited to partner with Toast as they accelerate the growth of the community they serve.”
Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, March 29, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, March 29, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Friday, March 29, 2019
VC Deals Only: Casper raises $100 million for Unicorn Status
VC Deals Only: Casper raises $100 million for Unicorn Status: Online mattress retailer Casper Sleep has reached unicorn status after receiving $100 million in funding at a 1.1 billion dollar valuation....
Casper raises $100 million for Unicorn Status
Online mattress retailer Casper Sleep has reached unicorn status after receiving $100 million in funding at a 1.1 billion dollar valuation.
According to Bloomberg, investors in the funding round include Target, New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners, as well as Dani Reiss, the CEO of Canada Goose Holdings and Gordon Segal, co-founder and former chairman of Crate & Barrel.
The funding will be used to boost its international expansion, as well as the growth of its physical retail stores.
“We are in the very early chapters of our growth story as demand for Casper products continues to expand across the globe,” Casper Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Philip Krim said in a statement. “Today’s financing accelerates Casper’s vision to become the world’s largest end-to-end sleep company. Our growth will continue to be catalyzed by state-of-the-art sleep products, best-in-class customer experiences, and world-class leadership.”
Casper has previously raised $240 million in equity funding from investors Leonardo DiCaprio and 50 Cent, as well as institutional investors, including Lerer Hippeau.
Founded in 2014, Casper’s revenue last year surpassed $400 million. The company isn’t profitable yet, with losses at $64 million last year, but the company is projecting that it will become profitable on an EBITDA basis this year with projected revenues of $556 million. An IPO is expected to be the company’s next step.
And last year the company revealed plans to open the doors of 200 brick-and-mortar stores after experimenting with pop-up shops. The company’s first brick-and-mortar location is in New York City and features six mini-bedrooms. In those spaces, customers are able to test out Casper’s products, such as pillows, sheets and duvets. The store will also host community events focused on sleep and wellness.
“Buying a mattress or sheets or pillows is one of the most intimate purchases you’ll make,” Krim said at the time. “You should be mentally relaxed and comfortable so you can find the right product.”
In addition to pop-up stores, the company has experimented with trucks containing four napping pods, called “Napmobiles,” which gave customers an opportunity to try out the company’s mattresses.
Source. Pymnts.com, March 28, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity & startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
According to Bloomberg, investors in the funding round include Target, New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners, as well as Dani Reiss, the CEO of Canada Goose Holdings and Gordon Segal, co-founder and former chairman of Crate & Barrel.
The funding will be used to boost its international expansion, as well as the growth of its physical retail stores.
“We are in the very early chapters of our growth story as demand for Casper products continues to expand across the globe,” Casper Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Philip Krim said in a statement. “Today’s financing accelerates Casper’s vision to become the world’s largest end-to-end sleep company. Our growth will continue to be catalyzed by state-of-the-art sleep products, best-in-class customer experiences, and world-class leadership.”
Casper has previously raised $240 million in equity funding from investors Leonardo DiCaprio and 50 Cent, as well as institutional investors, including Lerer Hippeau.
Founded in 2014, Casper’s revenue last year surpassed $400 million. The company isn’t profitable yet, with losses at $64 million last year, but the company is projecting that it will become profitable on an EBITDA basis this year with projected revenues of $556 million. An IPO is expected to be the company’s next step.
And last year the company revealed plans to open the doors of 200 brick-and-mortar stores after experimenting with pop-up shops. The company’s first brick-and-mortar location is in New York City and features six mini-bedrooms. In those spaces, customers are able to test out Casper’s products, such as pillows, sheets and duvets. The store will also host community events focused on sleep and wellness.
“Buying a mattress or sheets or pillows is one of the most intimate purchases you’ll make,” Krim said at the time. “You should be mentally relaxed and comfortable so you can find the right product.”
In addition to pop-up stores, the company has experimented with trucks containing four napping pods, called “Napmobiles,” which gave customers an opportunity to try out the company’s mattresses.
Source. Pymnts.com, March 28, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity & startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
VC Deals Only: Linear Labs’ next-gen electric motor attracts $4.5...
VC Deals Only: Linear Labs’ next-gen electric motor attracts $4.5...: By Kirsten Korosec Linear Labs, a startup developing an electric motor for cars, scooters, robots, wind turbines and even HVAC systems, ha...
Linear Labs’ next-gen electric motor attracts $4.5 million in funding
By Kirsten Korosec
Linear Labs, a startup developing an electric motor for cars, scooters, robots, wind turbines and even HVAC systems, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Science Inc. and Kindred Ventures.
Investors Chris and Crystal Sacca, Ryan Graves of Saltwater Ventures, Dynamic Signal CEO Russ Fradin, Masergy executive chairman and former-CEO Chris MacFarland, as well as Ustream co-founder Gyula Feher also participated in the round.
The four-year-old company was founded by Brad and Fred Hunstable, who say they have invented a lighter, more flexible electric motor. The pair came up with the motor they’ve dubbed the Hunstable Electric Turbine (HET) while working to design a device that could pump clean water and provide power for small communities in underdeveloped regions of the world.
Linear Labs currently has 50 filed patents, 21 of which are issued, with 29 patents pending.
The founders come with a background in entrepreneurship and electrical engineering. Brad Hunstable is former CEO and founder of Ustream, the live-video-streaming service that sold to IBM in 2016 for $150 million. Fred Hunstable, who comes with a background in electrical engineering and nuclear power, led Ebasco and Walker Engineering’s efforts in designing, upgrading and completing electrical infrastructure, environmental and enterprise projects as well as safety and commercial-grade evaluation programs.
The HET uses multiple rotors that can adapt to varying conditions, according to the company. It also produces twice as much torque density and three times the power density than permanent magnet motors. Linear Labs says its motor produces two times the output per given motor size, and minimum 10 percent more range.
The HET design makes it ideally suited for mobility applications such as electric vehicles because it produces high levels of torque without the need for a gearbox. This helps cut production cuts, the company contends.
“The holy grail in electric motors has always been high torque and no gearbox, and the HET achieves both in a smaller, lighter and more efficient package that is more powerful than traditional motors,” Linear Labs CTO Fred Hunstable said in a statement.
The upshot could be electric vehicles with better range and more powerful electric scooters.
The commercialization of the electric motor will result in substantial leaps in terms of energy savings, reliability enhancement, and low-cost manufacturing, according to Babak Fahimi, founding director of the Renewable Energy and Vehicular Technology (REVT) Laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The company plans to use the seed funding to market its invention to customers. It’s also hiring talent and recently added new people to its leadership team, including John Curry as their president and Jon Hurry as vice president. Curry comes from KLA-Tencor and NanoPhotonics. Hurry has held positions at Tesla and Faraday Future.
Source. Techcrunch, Kirsten Korosec, March 26, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications. We are you communications partner in the private equity & startup markets. We offer strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices and startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Linear Labs, a startup developing an electric motor for cars, scooters, robots, wind turbines and even HVAC systems, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Science Inc. and Kindred Ventures.
Investors Chris and Crystal Sacca, Ryan Graves of Saltwater Ventures, Dynamic Signal CEO Russ Fradin, Masergy executive chairman and former-CEO Chris MacFarland, as well as Ustream co-founder Gyula Feher also participated in the round.
The four-year-old company was founded by Brad and Fred Hunstable, who say they have invented a lighter, more flexible electric motor. The pair came up with the motor they’ve dubbed the Hunstable Electric Turbine (HET) while working to design a device that could pump clean water and provide power for small communities in underdeveloped regions of the world.
Linear Labs currently has 50 filed patents, 21 of which are issued, with 29 patents pending.
The founders come with a background in entrepreneurship and electrical engineering. Brad Hunstable is former CEO and founder of Ustream, the live-video-streaming service that sold to IBM in 2016 for $150 million. Fred Hunstable, who comes with a background in electrical engineering and nuclear power, led Ebasco and Walker Engineering’s efforts in designing, upgrading and completing electrical infrastructure, environmental and enterprise projects as well as safety and commercial-grade evaluation programs.
The HET uses multiple rotors that can adapt to varying conditions, according to the company. It also produces twice as much torque density and three times the power density than permanent magnet motors. Linear Labs says its motor produces two times the output per given motor size, and minimum 10 percent more range.
The HET design makes it ideally suited for mobility applications such as electric vehicles because it produces high levels of torque without the need for a gearbox. This helps cut production cuts, the company contends.
“The holy grail in electric motors has always been high torque and no gearbox, and the HET achieves both in a smaller, lighter and more efficient package that is more powerful than traditional motors,” Linear Labs CTO Fred Hunstable said in a statement.
The upshot could be electric vehicles with better range and more powerful electric scooters.
The commercialization of the electric motor will result in substantial leaps in terms of energy savings, reliability enhancement, and low-cost manufacturing, according to Babak Fahimi, founding director of the Renewable Energy and Vehicular Technology (REVT) Laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The company plans to use the seed funding to market its invention to customers. It’s also hiring talent and recently added new people to its leadership team, including John Curry as their president and Jon Hurry as vice president. Curry comes from KLA-Tencor and NanoPhotonics. Hurry has held positions at Tesla and Faraday Future.
Source. Techcrunch, Kirsten Korosec, March 26, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications. We are you communications partner in the private equity & startup markets. We offer strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices and startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
VC Deals Only: Lola.com raises $37M to take on SAP and others in ...
VC Deals Only: Lola.com raises $37M to take on SAP and others in ...: By Ingrid Lunden Business customers continue to be a huge target for the travel industry, and today a startup has raised a tidy sum to hel...
Lola.com raises $37M to take on SAP and others in the world of business travel
By Ingrid Lunden
Business customers continue to be a huge target for the travel industry, and today a startup has raised a tidy sum to help it double down on the $1.7 trillion opportunity. Lola.com — a platform for business users to book and manage trips — has raised $37 million to continue building out its technology and hire more talent as it takes on incumbents like SAP targeting the corporate sector.
The Series C is led by General Catalyst and Accel, with participation from CRV, Tenaya Capital and GV. All are previous investors. We are asking about the valuation but it looks like prior to this, the company had raised just under $65 million, and its last post-money valuation, in 2017, was $100 million, according to PitchBook.
“We’re happy with our valuation and think it provides a good balance between recognizing our progress growing the business and protecting employees equity by keeping a reasonable valuation,” said Mike Volpe, who took over last year as CEO, in an email to us. “We prioritize our team over everything else and we’re not going to raise too much money at overly high valuations that make it hard for employees to make money on their equity.”
There are signs that the valuation will have had a bump in this round. The company said in 2018, its bookings have gone up by 423 percent, with revenues up 786 percent, although it’s not disclosing what the actual figures are for either.
“As business travelers have become increasingly mobile, Lola.com’s mission is to completely transform the landscape of corporate travel management,” said Volpe. “The continued support of our investors underscores the market potential, which is leading us to expand our partner ecosystem and double our headcount across engineering, sales and marketing. At the core, we continue to invest in building the best, simplest corporate travel management platform in the industry.”
Co-founded by Paul English and Bill O’Donnell — respectively, the former CTO/co-founder and chief architect of the wildly successful consumer travel booking platform Kayak — Lola originally tried to fix the very thing that Kayak and others like it had disrupted: it was designed as a platform for people to connect to live agents to help them organise their travel. That larger cruise ship might have already said, however (so to speak), and so the company later made a pivot to cater to a more specific demographic in the market that often needs and expects the human touch when arranging logistics: the business user.
Its unique selling point has not been just to provide a pain-free “agile” platform to make bookings, but for the platform’s human agents to be proactively pinging business users when there are modifications to a booking (for example because of flight delays), and offering help when needed to sort out the many aspects of modern travel that can be painful and time consuming for busy working people, such as technical issues around a frequent flyer program.
Lola.com is not the only one to spot the opportunity there. To further diversify its business and to move into higher-margin, bigger-ticket offerings, Airbnb has also been slowly building out its own travel platform targeting business customers by adding in hotels and room bookings.
There are others that are either hoping to bypass or complement existing services with their own takes on how to improve business travel such as TravelPerk (most recent raise: $44 million), Travelstop (an Asia-focused spin), and TripActions (most recently valued at $1 billion), to name a few. That speaks to an increasingly crowded market of players that are competing against incumbents like SAP, which owns Concur, Hipmunk and a plethora of other older services.
Lola.com has made some interesting headway in its own approach to the market, by partnering with one of the names most synonymous with corporate spending, American Express, and specifically a JV it is involved in called American Express Global Business Travel.
“Lola.com offers an incredibly simple solution to corporate travel management, which enables American Express Global Business Travel to take our value proposition to even more companies across the middle market,” said Evan Konwiser, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing for American Express GBT, in a statement.
Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, March 25, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications; providing strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain technology, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI, and robotics.
For more information on their company please visit their website or contact James at James@Woewodacommunications.com.
Business customers continue to be a huge target for the travel industry, and today a startup has raised a tidy sum to help it double down on the $1.7 trillion opportunity. Lola.com — a platform for business users to book and manage trips — has raised $37 million to continue building out its technology and hire more talent as it takes on incumbents like SAP targeting the corporate sector.
The Series C is led by General Catalyst and Accel, with participation from CRV, Tenaya Capital and GV. All are previous investors. We are asking about the valuation but it looks like prior to this, the company had raised just under $65 million, and its last post-money valuation, in 2017, was $100 million, according to PitchBook.
“We’re happy with our valuation and think it provides a good balance between recognizing our progress growing the business and protecting employees equity by keeping a reasonable valuation,” said Mike Volpe, who took over last year as CEO, in an email to us. “We prioritize our team over everything else and we’re not going to raise too much money at overly high valuations that make it hard for employees to make money on their equity.”
There are signs that the valuation will have had a bump in this round. The company said in 2018, its bookings have gone up by 423 percent, with revenues up 786 percent, although it’s not disclosing what the actual figures are for either.
“As business travelers have become increasingly mobile, Lola.com’s mission is to completely transform the landscape of corporate travel management,” said Volpe. “The continued support of our investors underscores the market potential, which is leading us to expand our partner ecosystem and double our headcount across engineering, sales and marketing. At the core, we continue to invest in building the best, simplest corporate travel management platform in the industry.”
Co-founded by Paul English and Bill O’Donnell — respectively, the former CTO/co-founder and chief architect of the wildly successful consumer travel booking platform Kayak — Lola originally tried to fix the very thing that Kayak and others like it had disrupted: it was designed as a platform for people to connect to live agents to help them organise their travel. That larger cruise ship might have already said, however (so to speak), and so the company later made a pivot to cater to a more specific demographic in the market that often needs and expects the human touch when arranging logistics: the business user.
Its unique selling point has not been just to provide a pain-free “agile” platform to make bookings, but for the platform’s human agents to be proactively pinging business users when there are modifications to a booking (for example because of flight delays), and offering help when needed to sort out the many aspects of modern travel that can be painful and time consuming for busy working people, such as technical issues around a frequent flyer program.
Lola.com is not the only one to spot the opportunity there. To further diversify its business and to move into higher-margin, bigger-ticket offerings, Airbnb has also been slowly building out its own travel platform targeting business customers by adding in hotels and room bookings.
There are others that are either hoping to bypass or complement existing services with their own takes on how to improve business travel such as TravelPerk (most recent raise: $44 million), Travelstop (an Asia-focused spin), and TripActions (most recently valued at $1 billion), to name a few. That speaks to an increasingly crowded market of players that are competing against incumbents like SAP, which owns Concur, Hipmunk and a plethora of other older services.
Lola.com has made some interesting headway in its own approach to the market, by partnering with one of the names most synonymous with corporate spending, American Express, and specifically a JV it is involved in called American Express Global Business Travel.
“Lola.com offers an incredibly simple solution to corporate travel management, which enables American Express Global Business Travel to take our value proposition to even more companies across the middle market,” said Evan Konwiser, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing for American Express GBT, in a statement.
Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, March 25, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications; providing strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain technology, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI, and robotics.
For more information on their company please visit their website or contact James at James@Woewodacommunications.com.
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
VC Deals Only: Skymind Soars With $11.5M in Series A funding
VC Deals Only: Skymind Soars With $11.5M in Series A funding: SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Leading open-core data science company, has secured $11.5 million dollars in Series A financing led by TransLink Capit...
Skymind Soars With $11.5M in Series A funding
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Leading open-core data science company, has secured $11.5 million dollars in Series A financing led by TransLink Capital.
Skymind, the leading open-core data science company, has secured $11.5 million dollars in Series A financing. TransLink Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that helps entrepreneurs develop customer connections and partnerships in Asia, led the round with participation from ServiceNow, Sumitomo’s Presidio Ventures, UpHonest Capital, and DCode with GovTech Fund. Early investors Y Combinator, Tencent, Mandra Capital, Hemi Ventures, and GMO Ventures, also joined the round. To date, Skymind has raised $17.9 million in funding.
Skymind’s technology enables enterprises to build high-performance, predictive AI stacks. Specifically, the Skymind Intelligence Layer (SKIL) brings machine learning to a company’s big data stack and computing resources, whether that data and computing power is on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment or on edge devices like mobile phones, drones, autonomous vehicles and healthcare sensors.
“AI and machine learning are no longer on the enterprise wish list, they are a ‘must have’ as successful companies embrace the automation, predictive analytics and efficiency that AI provides,” said Chris Nicholson, Skymind’s founding CEO. “From the beginning, we have focused on creating an AI framework that will sustain companies for years to come, covering everything from data pipelines to algorithm training to model lifecycle management. Today’s financing is a validation of our approach and technology.”
Skymind will use its Series A funds to fuel customer acquisition, building out its sales teams in North America and Asia. Skymind currently has more than 40 employees and more than 20 enterprise customers, including Softbank and France Telecom’s Orange. As part of the new financing, Toshiya Otani, co-founder and managing director of TransLink Capital, will join the Skymind board of directors.
“AI is an $11 billion-dollar market set to double in a few years, and Skymind, as one of the original leaders in open-source AI technology, is well positioned to capture a significant share of the market, particularly as more and more enterprises seek to integrate AI into their core business,” said Toshiya Otani, co-founder and managing director, TransLink Capital. “We have confirmed that there is a significant market opportunity in Asia for Skymind’s technology.”
With state-of-the-art language models and natural-language processing pipelines, Skymind helps enterprise create more intelligent products as well as automate business processes.
“Applying machine learning and AI to IT operations can help IT teams scale to meet the digital needs of their business,” said Pat Casey, ServiceNow’s Senior Vice President of Platform. “We’ve leveraged Skymind’s technology in our Now Platform Madrid Release to power deep learning solutions across digital workflows. We look forward to our continued work with Skymind as we find new ways to incorporate AI technologies in our platform to drive great customer experiences.”
Skymind’s platform is designed to help companies train machine learning models on a cluster and deploy them anywhere, notably on edge devices.
“We see a lot of potential in bringing machine learning to mobile and other edge devices,” said Ted Tatsumi, president and CEO of Sumitomo’s Presidio Ventures. “The same is true for machine learning applications in the enterprise, and for businesses that seek to bring AI out into the real world.”
Prior to launching SKIL, Skymind created the most widely used open-source AI tool for the Java programming language, Eclipse Deeplearning4j, and is one of the largest contributors to the popular Python deep learning framework, Keras.
About Skymind
Skymind is an enterprise AI company offering an open-core machine-learning platform, commercial support and training for implementing state-of-the-art AI solutions. Headquartered in San Francisco, Skymind serves dozens of Fortune 500 companies that use its software to turn their big data stacks into AI stacks. Skymind’s Eclipse Deeplearning4j is the most widely used AI framework for Java and Scala, and serves as a bridge between the Python data science community and big data tools like Spark and Kafka.
About TransLink Capital
TransLink Capital invests in early stage U.S.-based technology startups that can benefit from the firm’s long-standing relationships with leading Asian corporates in technology, Internet, electronic manufacturing, telecommunications and auto space in Greater China, Japan, and South Korea. TransLink’s primary focus is on Series A investing and selectively invests in seed and later-stage companies.
Source. Company Press Release, March 24, 2019
Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications; providing strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain technology, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI, and robotics.
For more information on their company please visit their website or contact James at James@Woewodacommunications.com.
Monday, March 25, 2019
VC Deals Only: Songtradr raises $12M in latest funding round
VC Deals Only: Songtradr raises $12M in latest funding round: Music licensing platform Songtradr has completed a $12 million Series B round of funding as it looks to expand globally and develop new prod...
Songtradr raises $12M in latest funding round
Music licensing platform Songtradr has completed a $12 million Series B round of funding as it looks to expand globally and develop new products. The campaign, which was led by WiseTech Global CEO Richard White, follows close on the heels of Songtradr's acquisition of London-based rights management agency Big Sync Music.
This latest round brings Songtradr’s total funding to date to $21.5 million.
Songtradr's open music marketplace boasts over 400,000 artists from 190-plus countries, giving creators control over how they monetize their music through licensing to brands, music supervisors, filmmakers and streaming platforms. The firm's proprietary tech uses streaming and social metadata to help those media gatekeepers in the licensing process.
"The completion of our Series B funding is an exciting step that allows us to further implement our growth and acquisition plans to create the world’s most intelligent, frictionless licensing experience for both music creators and music licensees," said Paul Wiltshire, founder and CEO of Songtradr.
Added White, "Songtradr is poised to be a global leader in music licensing and I’m delighted to support this next phase. I have been watching the growth of Songtradr as an early investor for some time, and I’m keen to help accelerate its growth further as they unfold their product roadmap."
Source. Billboard, Staff, March 24, 2019
This latest round brings Songtradr’s total funding to date to $21.5 million.
Songtradr's open music marketplace boasts over 400,000 artists from 190-plus countries, giving creators control over how they monetize their music through licensing to brands, music supervisors, filmmakers and streaming platforms. The firm's proprietary tech uses streaming and social metadata to help those media gatekeepers in the licensing process.
"The completion of our Series B funding is an exciting step that allows us to further implement our growth and acquisition plans to create the world’s most intelligent, frictionless licensing experience for both music creators and music licensees," said Paul Wiltshire, founder and CEO of Songtradr.
Added White, "Songtradr is poised to be a global leader in music licensing and I’m delighted to support this next phase. I have been watching the growth of Songtradr as an early investor for some time, and I’m keen to help accelerate its growth further as they unfold their product roadmap."
Source. Billboard, Staff, March 24, 2019
Sunday, March 24, 2019
VC Deals Only: Avidbots raises $23.6 million in Series B funding ...
VC Deals Only: Avidbots raises $23.6 million in Series B funding ...: Avidbots , a company that brings robots to everyday life to expand human potential, today announced it has raised $23.6 million in Series B ...
Avidbots raises $23.6 million in Series B funding led by True Ventures
Avidbots, a company that brings robots to everyday life to expand human potential, today announced it has raised $23.6 million in Series B funding led by returning investor True Ventures. Other returning investors include GGV Capital, SOSV, Real Ventures, and 500 Startups Canada. New investors include Next47, BDC Capital, and KCPL. To date, Avidbots has raised $36 million in venture capital financing.
Avidbots is a fast-growing company that designs and builds autonomous connected robots. Its first product is Neo, a robotic floor scrubber widely deployed in commercial locations around the world, including airports, warehouses, manufacturing sites, malls, and universities. Manufactured in Avidbots’ 40,000-square foot facility in Kitchener, Ontario, Neo is in use today in over a dozen countries, cleaning floors in locations such as Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, Toronto’s Eaton Centre mall, and Rochester Institute of Technology. To date, Neo has cleaned over half a billion square feet of floor space.
“With strong worldwide demand for our Neo industrial cleaning robot, Avidbots has been growing at a tremendous pace, and we’re excited to announce the financial support of world-class investors such as True Ventures, Next47, and GGV Capital as we enter into our next phase of expansion,” said Faizan Sheikh, CEO and co-founder of Avidbots. “With this new funding, we will accelerate investment in talent acquisition, engineering, marketing, and sales to bring our cutting-edge robots to more customers worldwide.”
Avidbots created Neo to solve a real-world problem: cleaning floors in large commercial spaces. Traditionally, a janitor must push a floor-scrubbing machine every night, taking hours to complete this tedious and back-breaking work. The job has high turnover, making it difficult for facilities to efficiently manage their cleaning operations. When Neo joins the maintenance crew, it frees up human coworkers to focus on higher-value tasks, such as cleaning bathrooms and common areas. Ground staff control Neo through an easy-to-use touch screen, while facilities managers can log into an intuitive web app called Command Center to access real-time and historical reporting and video streams—getting clear visibility into cleaning operations and outcomes.
Avidbots created Neo to solve a real-world problem: cleaning floors in large commercial spaces. Traditionally, a janitor must push a floor-scrubbing machine every night, taking hours to complete this tedious and back-breaking work. The job has high turnover, making it difficult for facilities to efficiently manage their cleaning operations. When Neo joins the maintenance crew, it frees up human coworkers to focus on higher-value tasks, such as cleaning bathrooms and common areas. Ground staff control Neo through an easy-to-use touch screen, while facilities managers can log into an intuitive web app called Command Center to access real-time and historical reporting and video streams—getting clear visibility into cleaning operations and outcomes.
“We invest in industrial automation and robotics companies that have thought deeply about which types of work are best suited for machines,” said Rohit Sharma, Partner at True Ventures. “Repetitive, tedious work like commercial floor cleaning is an effective area of initial focus and we’re thrilled to support Faizan and his team as they pioneer this space.”
While most robotic floor-cleaning machines are simply existing manual models retrofitted with hardware and software that allows them to travel a few pre-programmed routes, Avidbots Neo is the first purpose-built commercial robotic floor scrubber that uses AI to optimize performance. Neo does not just follow a set path, but instead continually learns from its environment to change its route on the fly—avoiding obstacles and adapting to new floor layouts. Neo has a vertically-integrated technology stack that incorporates proprietary software and a unique hardware design, as well as the most advanced 3D sensors and cameras. Connected to the cloud through WiFi and 4G, Neo includes 24x7 monitoring and automatically receives regular software updates to continuously gain new functionality. Neo is the only floor-cleaning robot that gets smarter and more effective over time.
About Avidbots
Avidbots designs and manufactures autonomous connected robots to expand human potential. Its first product is Neo, a robotic floor scrubber widely deployed in airports, warehouses, manufacturing sites, malls, universities, and other commercial spaces worldwide. With a rapidly-expanding customer base in over a dozen countries, Avidbots is a global leader in collaborative service robots. Founded in 2014 by robotics engineers from the University of Waterloo and headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario, Avidbots is backed by top global venture capital firms including True Ventures, Next47, GGV Capital, BDC, Felicis Ventures, Real Ventures, and Golden Ventures. For more information, visit https://www.avidbots.com
Avidbots designs and manufactures autonomous connected robots to expand human potential. Its first product is Neo, a robotic floor scrubber widely deployed in airports, warehouses, manufacturing sites, malls, universities, and other commercial spaces worldwide. With a rapidly-expanding customer base in over a dozen countries, Avidbots is a global leader in collaborative service robots. Founded in 2014 by robotics engineers from the University of Waterloo and headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario, Avidbots is backed by top global venture capital firms including True Ventures, Next47, GGV Capital, BDC, Felicis Ventures, Real Ventures, and Golden Ventures. For more information, visit https://www.avidbots.com
About True Ventures
Founded in 2005, True Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups. With more than $2 billion under management, True provides seed and Series A funding to the most talented entrepreneurs in today’s fastest growing markets. The firm maintains a strong community that supports founders and their teams, helping True companies achieve higher levels of success and impact. To date, True has helped more than 250 companies launch and scale their businesses, creating over 10,000 jobs worldwide. The firm was awarded 2018 Venture Firm of the Year by the National Venture Capital Association. To learn more, visit https://trueventures.com
Source. Company Press Release, March 21, 2019
Founded in 2005, True Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups. With more than $2 billion under management, True provides seed and Series A funding to the most talented entrepreneurs in today’s fastest growing markets. The firm maintains a strong community that supports founders and their teams, helping True companies achieve higher levels of success and impact. To date, True has helped more than 250 companies launch and scale their businesses, creating over 10,000 jobs worldwide. The firm was awarded 2018 Venture Firm of the Year by the National Venture Capital Association. To learn more, visit https://trueventures.com
Source. Company Press Release, March 21, 2019
Saturday, March 23, 2019
VC Deals Only: Robotics process automation startup UiPath raising...
VC Deals Only: Robotics process automation startup UiPath raising...: By Kate Clark UiPath, a robotics process automation platform targeting IT businesses, is raising more than $400 million in Series D fun...
Robotics process automation startup UiPath raising $400M in at more than $7B valuation
By Kate Clark
UiPath, a robotics process automation platform targeting IT businesses, is raising more than $400 million in Series D funding from venture capital investors at a valuation north of $7 billion, sources have confirmed to TechCrunch following a report from Business Insider.
UiPath, a robotics process automation platform targeting IT businesses, is raising more than $400 million in Series D funding from venture capital investors at a valuation north of $7 billion, sources have confirmed to TechCrunch following a report from Business Insider.
We’ve reached out to the company for comment.
UiPath, founded in 2005, has raised $409 million to date, meaning the new round of capital will double the total capital invested in the startup, as well as its valuation. Its $225 million Series C, raised just six months ago, valued the business at $3 billion, according to PitchBook. UiPath is backed by top-tier investors CapitalG and Sequoia Capital, which co-led its Series C, as well as Accel, Credo Ventures and Earlybird Venture Capital, among others.
The latest funding round is being led by a public institutional investor.
UiPath develops automated software workflows meant to facilitate the tedious, everyday tasks within business operations. RPA is probably a misnomer. It’s not necessarily a robot in the way we think of it today. It’s more like a highly sophisticated macro recorder or workflow automation tool, letting a computer handle a series of highly repeatable activities in a common workflow, like accounts payable.
For example, the process could start by scanning a check, then use OCR to read the payer and the amount, add that information to an Excel spreadsheet and send an email to a human to confirm it has been done. Humans still have a role, especially in processing exceptions, but it provides a way to bring a level of automation to legacy systems, which might not otherwise benefit from more modern tooling.
The company began raising private capital in 2015 and has since experienced rapid growth of its valuation and annual recurring revenue (ARR). UiPath garnered a$1.1 billion valuation with its Series B in March 2018, more than doubled it with its Series C and is again seeing a 2x increase in value with this latest round. This is a result of its swelling ARR.
The company says it went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than two years. With its Series C, it counted 1,800 enterprise customers and was adding six new customers a day. Sources tell TechCrunch that UiPath did 180 million in ARR last year and is on track to do $450 million in ARR in 2019.
Source. Techcrunch. Kate Clark, March 21, 2019
Source. Techcrunch. Kate Clark, March 21, 2019
Friday, March 22, 2019
VC Deals Only: Point raises $122 million to extend equity financi...
VC Deals Only: Point raises $122 million to extend equity financi...: By Kyle Wiggers Point , a Palo Alto startup that extends equity financing to homeowners and homebuyers, today announced that it has sec...
Point raises $122 million to extend equity financing to homeowners and buyers
By Kyle Wiggers
Point, a Palo Alto startup that extends equity financing to homeowners and homebuyers, today announced that it has secured $122 million in new financing, $22 million of which was raised in a series B equity funding led by Prudential Financial and DAG Ventures, with contributions from new investors Financial Venture Studio and Enterprise Community Partners and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital, and Bloomberg Beta. The remaining $100 million is in the form of a capital commitment from Kingsbridge Wealth Management (which also participated in the equity round), bringing Point’s total platform capital to over $265 million, following a $150 capital investment from Atalaya Capital Management in 2018.
Point, a Palo Alto startup that extends equity financing to homeowners and homebuyers, today announced that it has secured $122 million in new financing, $22 million of which was raised in a series B equity funding led by Prudential Financial and DAG Ventures, with contributions from new investors Financial Venture Studio and Enterprise Community Partners and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital, and Bloomberg Beta. The remaining $100 million is in the form of a capital commitment from Kingsbridge Wealth Management (which also participated in the equity round), bringing Point’s total platform capital to over $265 million, following a $150 capital investment from Atalaya Capital Management in 2018.
CEO Eddie Lim, who cofounded the company in 2015 with Eoin Matthews and Andreessen Horowitz partner Alex Rampell, said that Point has raised $33 million in equity to date, and that origination volume has grown more than ten times year-over-year. Assuming all goes according to plan, he expects the company will fund “in excess” of 1,000 homeowners in 2019.
“We are witnessing the emergence of a whole new class of financial solution that is aligned with homeowners, and investors are taking notice,” Lim said. “2019 is proving to be a year of exponential growth for the company, and we expect that growth to continue as home equity investments open up critical liquidity for a lot more homeowners.”
In 13 states — California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington — and the District of Columbia, Point offers up to $250,000 over a 10-year term without interest rates or monthly payments for those who pass its five-minute online screener. (It applies a risk adjustment of up to 20 percent to offset declines in home value.) Point provides a provisional offer to preapproved applicants for between 5 percent and 20 percent of their home’s current value, and schedules an in-person licensed appraiser visit (for which it charges $500 to $700) before finalizing an offer. Then, it arranges a meeting with a notary, submits the necessary paperwork, and confirms the filings, at which point it releases the funds (minus escrow and processing fees).
Homeowners can buy Point out, refinance, or sell their home at any time — Point isn’t added to the title of the property. Furthermore, customers don’t need approval for renovations or home improvements outside of the house’s financing, and unlike a home equity loan or second mortgage, they aren’t on the hook for interest. A home worth for $1,338,200, for instance, would net a customer a $1,140,600 share and Point about $197,600, while a $750,000 home would be split $670,000/$80,000
“This type of initiative is only possible because we’ve built a proprietary technology platform which enables us to rapidly prototype and market-test new products based on the needs of homeowners,” said Lim. “Point’s emphasis on providing homeowners with an exceptional experience means we have to continue to build superior technology. Building great products that integrate finance and technology is what we do best.”
Lim says the latest funding round will fuel Point’s expansion to over 30 states (70 percent of U.S. homeowners) by 2020. Also on the roadmap: 30-year product offerings, which will come to market later this year.
“We know that many Americans are overburdened by debt, and too many households face impossible tradeoffs when it comes to prioritizing long-term investments like saving for retirement, paying for a child’s education, and buying a home,” Prudential VP of impact investments Miljana Vujosevic said of today’s news. “Our investment in Point is one more way we’re committing to helping consumers meet their goals and achieve lasting financial security.”
Source. Venturebeat, Kyle Wiggers, March 20, 2019
Thursday, March 21, 2019
VC Deals Only: Opendoor raises $300M on a $3.8B valuation for its...
VC Deals Only: Opendoor raises $300M on a $3.8B valuation for its...: By Ingrid Lunden Last month, we reported that Opendoor — the startup that is taking on the real estate industry with its own platform f...
Opendoor raises $300M on a $3.8B valuation for its home marketplace
By Ingrid Lunden
Last month, we reported that Opendoor — the startup that is taking on the real estate industry with its own platform for buying up homes and selling them on to interested buyers — filed to raise $200 million on a $3.7 billion valuation. Now, we can confirm that the round has closed, and it has turned out to be higher on both counts: The company has raised $300 million, and sources close to it tell TechCrunch that the valuation is now at $3.8 billion.
Last month, we reported that Opendoor — the startup that is taking on the real estate industry with its own platform for buying up homes and selling them on to interested buyers — filed to raise $200 million on a $3.7 billion valuation. Now, we can confirm that the round has closed, and it has turned out to be higher on both counts: The company has raised $300 million, and sources close to it tell TechCrunch that the valuation is now at $3.8 billion.
This latest round included previous investor General Atlantic, with participation from Hawk Equity, the SoftBank Vision Fund, Access Technology Ventures, Lennar Corporation, Fifth Wall Ventures, SV Angel, Norwest Venture Partners, NEA, GGV Capital, Khosla Ventures and GV, along with other, unnamed investors.
Opendoor has now raised $1.3 billion in equity, with some $3.0 billion in debt financing for buying properties.
Opendoor’s funding underscores a couple of big themes. The first is the “safe as houses” maxim. That is to say, the housing market — despite some huge dips resulting either from wider economic tides, or simply scandalous mismanagement around, for example, sub-prime lending — continues to be a major draw not just for investors but also consumers.
“Our business is designed to operate in up markets, down markets and flat markets,” co-founder and CEO Eric Wu said in an email to TechCrunch. “During a slowdown, it becomes increasingly more painful to sell a home, which impacts mobility for homeowners and increases the need for reliable home sales through products like Opendoor. It is our responsibility to manage that risk and charge the proper fees to account for the volatility.” The company says that in 2018, more than 800,000 people toured Opendoor homes.
And that leads to the second theme this funding touches on: the disruption of the business model for buying and selling homes.
That process has largely remained unchanged for decades, but Opendoor is part of (and arguably leading) a new guard of startups that is trying to shake that up. In Opendoor’s case, it’s doing so by creating data modelling that lets it spot opportunities and gaps in the market for homes, as well as optimal pricing for properties, which helps the company mitigate some of the risk associated with taking assets on to its own books with the understanding that it will be able to offload them in a predictable way.
“The company has not been around during a national housing recession,” admitted Anton Levy, the MD of General Atlantic, in an interview, “but it is preparing day in day out for if and when it happens, and believes it will be well equipped if it does.”
That includes, he added, data sets of housing and other economic indicators from the last five or six recessions. “That means if and when it happens, the pricing models will adjust accordingly.”
There are signs that over time, those algorithms have been getting more efficient. Eric Wu, who co-founded the company with Ian Wong, Justin Ross and Keith Rabois, told TechCrunch that the average time a home is now held on its books is 90 days, versus 140 in 2015.
Wu said this latest round of funding will be used both for product development as well as to continue expanding to more markets in North America.
On the product side, the company wants to continue making pricing more accurate (not just for selling but for buying homes at competitive rates). Another focus will be continuing to bring down the time it takes to convert interested sellers into actual sellers, and likewise with buyers. This will include integrating more services like mortgage tools — including title and escrow — as well as other service providers and contractors, who might be needed by buyers to help consider the work that would need to be done once the home is purchased.
(If you’ve ever bought a home, you will know that access to estimates and work commitments from contractors and others can be essential to comprehending the “true cost” of home purchase, as post-purchase work can sometimes be a massive and costly effort.)
Wu said that for now, the plan will be to focus all of this around the private home-buying experience, rather than move into using the Opendoor platform to tackle the selling and buying of other large assets such as commercial real estate, cars or loans. “These capabilities lend themselves well to rental/residential income,” he noted, “but that is currently not on our roadmap.”
There are a number of competitors to Opendoor, including not only incumbent channels that involve traditional agents, but others like Compass also trying to change up the old way of doing things, and Knock, which is following a model similar to Opendoor’s. Levy believes that the horse his firm has bet on, however, is the “clear leader.”
Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, March 20, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
VC Deals Only: Doctilib Raises $170M For Online Appointments, Hit...
VC Deals Only: Doctilib Raises $170M For Online Appointments, Hit...: By Mary Ann Azevedo French doctor booking app Doctolib has raised a US$170.4 million (€150 million) Series E that propels it to unicorn st...
Doctilib Raises $170M For Online Appointments, Hits $1.13B Valuation
By Mary Ann Azevedo
French doctor booking app Doctolibhas raised a US$170.4 million (€150 million) Series E that propels it to unicorn status.
The round, led by New York-based General Atlantic alongside Accel and others, takes Doctolib’s total funding to $266.5 million, according to its Crunchbase profile. It marks one of the largest e-health financings to date in a field that’s increasingly attracting investors. The round also values the startup at $1.13 billion, according to TechCrunch, and comes less than 16 months after its $42 million Series D in 2017.
Founded in 2013, Paris-based Doctolib was initially focused on scheduling for health providers, giving patients an easier way to book appointments. In January, the company branched out into telemedicine, an area our Savannah Dowling covered recently.
Per TechCrunch, Doctolib has 75,000 practitioners and 1,400 healthcare facilities using its platform.
Source. Techcrunch,Mary Ann Azevedo, March 20, 2019
French doctor booking app Doctolibhas raised a US$170.4 million (€150 million) Series E that propels it to unicorn status.
The round, led by New York-based General Atlantic alongside Accel and others, takes Doctolib’s total funding to $266.5 million, according to its Crunchbase profile. It marks one of the largest e-health financings to date in a field that’s increasingly attracting investors. The round also values the startup at $1.13 billion, according to TechCrunch, and comes less than 16 months after its $42 million Series D in 2017.
Founded in 2013, Paris-based Doctolib was initially focused on scheduling for health providers, giving patients an easier way to book appointments. In January, the company branched out into telemedicine, an area our Savannah Dowling covered recently.
Per TechCrunch, Doctolib has 75,000 practitioners and 1,400 healthcare facilities using its platform.
Source. Techcrunch,Mary Ann Azevedo, March 20, 2019
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
VC Deals Only: Imara Closes $63M Series B funding round for blood...
VC Deals Only: Imara Closes $63M Series B funding round for blood...: By Alaric Dearment Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Imara said Monday that it had raised the $63 million Series B funding round, led by n...
Imara Closes $63M Series B funding round for blood disorder development
By Alaric Dearment
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Imara said Monday that it had raised the $63 million Series B funding round, led by new investors OrbiMed and Arix Bioscience. Other participants in the round included RA Capital, Rock Springs Capital and existing investors New Enterprise Associates, Pfizer Venture Investments, Lundbeckfonden Ventures, Bay City Capital and Alexandria Venture Investments.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Imara said Monday that it had raised the $63 million Series B funding round, led by new investors OrbiMed and Arix Bioscience. Other participants in the round included RA Capital, Rock Springs Capital and existing investors New Enterprise Associates, Pfizer Venture Investments, Lundbeckfonden Ventures, Bay City Capital and Alexandria Venture Investments.
Imara said it planned to use the money to fund development of its lead product candidate, IMR-687, which is currently in a Phase IIa trial in sickle cell disease, and move it into later-stage clinical trials. It also plans to fund the drug’s development as a potential treatment for beta-thalassemia, another blood disorder, and expand its pipeline.
“This is a transformative financing for Imara – one that will allow us to greatly expand our sickle cell disease clinical development, widen our reach into thalassemia and build an exciting pipeline,” CEO Rahul Ballal said in a statement. “We are pleased to be working with leading investors who share our vision for creating a company that helps change the lives of patients living with SCD and other hemoglobinopathies.”
IMR-687 is an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase-9, working on the same pathway as hydroxyurea, a generic chemotherapy drug commonly used to treat blood disorders and blood cancers. The difference, according to the company, is that it doesn’t have the safety issues that come with hydroxyurea. Hydroxyurea’s label carries a boxed warning for severely reduced blood counts and carcinogenicity.
The company announced preclinical and Phase I data in September 2017 showing that IMR-687’s mechanism of action could be effective against the red and white blood cell pathologies associated with SCD and that it could be safely dosed in humans at levels shown as effective in preclinical models.
IMR-687 is an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase-9, working on the same pathway as hydroxyurea, a generic chemotherapy drug commonly used to treat blood disorders and blood cancers. The difference, according to the company, is that it doesn’t have the safety issues that come with hydroxyurea. Hydroxyurea’s label carries a boxed warning for severely reduced blood counts and carcinogenicity.
IMR-687 is an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase-9, working on the same pathway as hydroxyurea, a generic chemotherapy drug commonly used to treat blood disorders and blood cancers. The difference, according to the company, is that it doesn’t have the safety issues that come with hydroxyurea. Hydroxyurea’s label carries a boxed warning for severely reduced blood counts and carcinogenicity.
The company announced preclinical and Phase I data in September 2017 showing that IMR-687’s mechanism of action could be effective against the red and white blood cell pathologies associated with SCD and that it could be safely dosed in humans at levels shown as effective in preclinical models.
Source. Medcitynews, Alaric Dearment, March 18, 2019
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Woewoda Communications is one of Canada’s leading strategic communications and public relations firms. Located in Langley BC, the agency has built its reputation on creating and implementing integrated solutions that delivers what its clients value most: meaningful, positive, measurable, and impactful PR campaigns.
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Our Services. Strategic Communications, Public Relations and Investor Relations
Clients. Venture Capitalists, Private Equity Investors, Family Offices, Endowments/Trusts, Angel Investors, and Start-ups
Sectors. Information communication technology, life sciences, healthcare, artificial intelligence, robotics, clean energy, financial technology, internet of things, blockchain technology, and agribusiness
"We work with General Partners, Limited Partners, Corporate Investors and Presidents of Start-ups in Canada and the United States".
Source. Medcitynews, Alaric Dearment, March 18, 2019
About Woewoda Communications
Woewoda Communications is one of Canada’s leading strategic communications and public relations firms. Located in Langley BC, the agency has built its reputation on creating and implementing integrated solutions that delivers what its clients value most: meaningful, positive, measurable, and impactful PR campaigns.
Our mission is to provide clients with inspired, integrated communications service. Our teams of PR professionals work with the Investment Community and Start-ups to design, implement, and manage communication strategies that help our clients bridge the information gap between them and their stakeholders.
Our PR services include Campaign building, Media PR, Community PR, Relationship PR, Venture Capital PR, Start-up PR, Private Equity PR, and Investor Relation Services (IR).
Whether its campaign building, media interaction, promoting a Venture Capital (VC) or a Private Equity (PE) and their investment portfolio, positioning a Start-up company, improving a company’s relationship with their community, organizing a major business event, or reaching out to investors, we have the PR team that can help our clients reach their goals.
Our Services. Strategic Communications, Public Relations and Investor Relations
Clients. Venture Capitalists, Private Equity Investors, Family Offices, Endowments/Trusts, Angel Investors, and Start-ups
Sectors. Information communication technology, life sciences, healthcare, artificial intelligence, robotics, clean energy, financial technology, internet of things, blockchain technology, and agribusiness
"We work with General Partners, Limited Partners, Corporate Investors and Presidents of Start-ups in Canada and the United States".
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