Join raises $4M seed round to build a better construction planning platform

By Darrell Etherington

Startup Join wants to modernize the back office for an industry that’s everywhere, but maybe not top of mind, especially when it comes to project management software: Commercial construction. The company has raised a $4 million seed round, co-led by Signalfire and Building Ventures and including participation by existing investor Bolt.

The startup’s core product is a collaborative decision-making platform designed to facilitate more effective working relationships between everyone involved in the preconstruction phase of a building project, including owners, contractors, designers, tradespeople and suppliers. The platform includes visualization tool, including timeline and budget planners, along with trend predictions so that you can see how changes to the plan will affect the project overall.

It also includes permission-based account access control, so that you can ensure everyone working on the project has the visibility they need to the pieces they touch. Join’s product also provides insights based on past project performance so that future ones can benefit from the successes of the past.

Join’s foundation is based on the observation that commercial construction industry is following a path blazed by the software industry before it, from a so-called ‘waterfall’ product development mode, whereby you more or less follow rigid steps in sequence, to a more agile mode in which each phase is more fluid and the project’s scope can change in the execution. Join believes construction is following a similar path, hence the need now for a tool like this.

The founding team behind Join includes co-founder and CEO Andrew Zukoski, Drew Wolpert, Ye Wang and Jim Forester. Both Zukoski and Wolpert have experience at Flux.io, a startup borne of Google X, that focused on supporting architecture, engineering and construction industry improvement via cloud-based solutions, and Wang has a background in manufacturing design technology from past work at both Onshape and Autodesk .

Join will make use of this round, which brings its total funding to $5.2 million including a pre-seed round led by Bolt, to bring on additional product development talent to help it set up for public launch of the platform to customers.

Source. TechCrunch, Darrell Etherington, June 24, 2019

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Fincad Secures US$12m in Growth Financing

Fincad, a Vancouver, BC, Canada-based provider of enterprise solutions for derivative and fixed income portfolios, secured US$12m in growth financing.

The round was led by Vistara Capital Partners with a senior bank facility from the CIBC Innovation Banking team. In conjunction with the funding, Randy Garg, Founder and Managing Partner of Vistara Capital Partners, will also become an Observer on Fincad’s Board of Directors.

The company intends to use the funds for the rapid growth of its advanced F3 enterprise analytics solutions business.

Led by president and CEO Bob Park, Fincad provides an F3 enterprise analytics platform providing industrial strength support for modeling, pricing, valuation, and risk management of portfolios in all asset classes. It combines built-in functionality and off-the-shelf software with flexibility to customize to a firm’s specific trading strategy, workflow and reporting requirements.
The platform also integrates with existing systems and data sources.

Clients include global asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, pension funds, banks and auditors.

Source. FinSMES, Staff, April 11, 2019

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Synapse Closes US$2.5M Seed Funding Round

Synapse, a Toronto, Canada-based provider of technology for the Learning and Development market, closed a US$2.5m seed financing.

The round was led by Generation Ventures with participation from Ripple Ventures, Differential Ventures, CEAS Investments, Cathexis Ventures, Ideal Ventures and Venture Capitalist Neal Dempsey. As part of the financing, Laura Lenz of Generation Ventures will join the board.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate in sales, marketing and product expansion and to hire key personnel.

Led by CEO Ryan Austin, Synapse provides a platform that automates the instructional design process, allowing organizations to transform institutional knowledge into on-demand training. It enables planning and collaboration between subject matter experts (SMEs), instructional designers and training departments so that learning programs can be developed and deployed quickly. Learning teams are able to align learning objectives with assessment and activities to enable rapid instructional design.

Founded in 2016, Synapse has clients across numerous sectors including financial services, oil and gas, retail, healthcare, technology and manufacturing.

Sources FinSMES, Staff, April 10, 2019

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Seattle startup Igneous raises $25M to help companies manage their unstructured data

By Taylor Soper

Seattle startup Igneous has reeled in a $25 million investment round to fuel growth of its software that helps companies manage their unstructured data.

WestRiver Group led the Series C round, which pushes total funding to date to $70 million. Existing investors including Madrona Venture Group, NEA, Vulcan Capital, and Redpoint Ventures also participated. The investment values the company at around $100 million, according to PitchBook.

Founded in 2013 by veterans of Isilon Systems and NetApp, Igneous’ platform provides visibility and storage for unstructured data, or information that isn’t easily categorized, both in the cloud or on-premise.

The company’s clients span across various industries and include The Allen Institute of Brain Science, OpSec, PAIGE, Tippet Studios, Altius Institute, and Bardell. Igneous has customers in the “mid-double digits,” said CEO and co-founder Kiran Bhageshpur.

“They use Igneous to see, organize, mobilize and protect their unstructured data — and for our customers this is petabytes of mission critical, often machine generated data typically living across disparate systems onsite, offsite and in public cloud,” Bhageshpur said in an email. “Igneous helps data-centric enterprises tap into their valuable unstructured data, optimize their storage and IT resources and reduce their data risk posture.”

Bhageshpur said Igneous differentiates from competitors with its focus on enabling efficiency at scale and the ability to support any file or object protocol.

“Our customers are able to quickly (in days) get up and running, see all of their data, improve their backup SLAs and modernize their data protection services, surgically archive and migrate data to control tier 1 storage costs, organize their datasets for use in HPC/ML/EDA/RPA workflows … all without the need for a full-time system administrator,” he explained.

The startup employs 70 people and expects to grow headcount by more than 50 percent in 2019. Bhageshpur said new sales growth has increased by 10X over the past year.

Igneous originally sold a hardware data appliance for companies to help manage on-premises storage systems but has since expanded to develop services geared toward cloud computing.

The global big data market size is expected to reach $70 billion by 2022, according to Statista.

Bhageshpur is the former vice president of engineering in the Isilon Storage Division at EMC, having spent five years in senior engineering roles at the company. Another Isilon engineering vet, co-founder Jeff Hughes, is CTO at Igneous. The company’s third co-founder, Byron Rakitzis, was the first employee at NetApp.

Madrona was also an early investor in Isilon, which sold to EMC for $2.25 billion in 2010.

Anthony Bontrager, WestRiver Group managing director, will join the company’s board as a result of the funding.

“Igneous is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to unlock the value of their datasets and simultaneously reduce their risk profile,” he said in a statement. “This is a complex problem that Igneous has tackled with impressive technology services.”

Other recent Seattle-area investments by Kirkland, Wash-based WestRiver Group include Tectonic Audio Labs, Pro.

SouRCe. Geek Wire,  TAYLOR SOPER , March 14, 2019