Fundbox Raises $20M in Extended Series C Funding Round

Fundbox, a San Francisco, CA-based B2B payment and credit network, raised $20m in equity funding.

Backers in the round, which brings the total capital raised in their Series C round from September 2019 to almost $200m, included MUFG Innovation Partners, the corporate venture capital arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand its business reach. 

Led by CEO Eyal Shinar, Fundbox is a B2B payment and credit network which allows sellers of all sizes to increase average order volumes and improve close rates by offering more competitive net terms and payment plans to their SMB buyers. The company is located in San Francisco, CA, Dallas TX and Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Source. FinSMEs, May 28, 2020 

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Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

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BenchSci Raises $22M in Series B Funding

BenchSci, a Toronto, Canada-based provider of a machine learning platform to identify and resolve preclinical research inefficiencies in drug discovery, raised $22m in Series B financing.

The round was led by F-Prime Capital, with participation from Northleaf Capital Partners and existing investors Gradient Ventures, Inovia Capital, Golden Ventures, and Real Ventures. As part of the deal, Shervin Ghaemmaghami, Senior Vice President of F-Prime, will join the board of directors.

The company will use the funds to further develop its suite of products.

Led by Liran Belenzon, CEO and co-founder, BenchSci leverages machine learning to target inefficiencies and unnecessary spend in preclinical research by evaluating published experiments to identify which reagents will work for which experiments. The company’s first product, AI-Assisted Antibody Selection, focused only on antibodies. Now, BenchSci has launched its new AI-Assisted Reagent Selection product, which expands to other important reagents, including recombinant proteins, RNAi, CRISPR, cell lines, and more.

Since commercializing its AI-Assisted Antibody Selection product 18 months ago, the company has helped decrease costs and accelerate research in 15 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and more than 3,600 academic labs.

The company has also expanded its contract with Novartis. As one of the earliest pharmaceutical companies to benefit from AI-Assisted Antibody Selection, Novartis will also be the first BenchSci customer to deploy the new AI-Assisted Reagent Selection product.

Source. FinSMEs, February 4, 2020

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Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

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Blue Canoe Raises $2.5M in Seed Funding

Blue Canoe, a Bellevue, WA-based provider of an artificial intelligence (AI) B2B platform for non-native English speakers to improve their clarity and confidence in speaking English, closed its seed round, raising $2.5m.

The round, which brought the total amount raised to date to $3.9m, was led by Tsingyuan Ventures, which has joined the board, along with Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Fantail Ventures, and more.

The company will use the funding to scale both the product and revenues, with a focus on Japan and China.

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Sponsor 

myCareBase™ is a platform for seniors and their families to find, evaluate, hire and manage home support services, to improve the seniors’ ability to remain living safely in their current home for as long as possible. The caregiver marketplace currently offers candidates in Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver.

To compliment this platform the company also offers an innovative care management app that centralizes communication and task management among family members and the caregiver, along with a Care Concierge service to help family members with administrative, navigational or organizational tasks.

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Led by Sarah Daniels, CEO and co-founder, Blue Canoe provides global companies with ai AI platform to enable their employees to speak English clearly and confidently with customers and colleagues, and partners with English language training companies to improve and expand their offerings.

The company uses a brain-based methodology, the Color Vowel® System, which has improved pronunciation for more than 1 million learners globally. Blue Canoe scales this methodology with patent-pending speech recognition and machine learning, creating a virtual AI Teacher that provides targeted feedback. Learners track their progress over time with its objective pronunciation score.

Customers include multi-national corporations in the high tech, professional services, and enterprise software industries, and English language training companies in the United States, China and Japan, including EY Japan, SAP Japan and WE Education.

Source. FinSMEs, October, 11, 2019

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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.