Wild Earth, Inc., a startup reinventing pet food with biotech, today announced it has closed its Series A with an investment of $11 million led by VegInvest, a venture capital firm supporting early-stage companies striving to replace the use of animals in the food system and other industries. This is VegInvest's second investment in Wild Earth; other current investors include Mark Cuban's Radical Investments, Felicis Ventures, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and Mars Petcare, bringing total funding to $16 million. More
Roughly $165 billion worth of wholesale produce is bought and sold every year in the U.S. And while that number is expected to go up to $1 trillion by 2025, the business of agribusiness remains unaffected by technology advancements that have reshaped almost every other industry. Now Silo, a company that recently raised $3 million from investors led by Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital and including Semil Shah from Haystack Ventures, angel investors Kevin Mahaffey and Matt Brezina and The Penny Newman Grain Company, an international grain and feed marketplace, is looking to change that. More
Urban Jungle, a digital insurance startup targeting so-called “generation rent” with a range of insurance products, has raised £2.5 million in a seed funding round. The round is said to be backed by a mixture of new and previous investors, including Rob Devey, the former CEO of Prudential UK, and Simon Rogerson, CEO of Octopus Group. Described as challenging traditional insurance providers by catering to U.K. renters who have historically been underserved by the insurance industry, Urban Jungle offers contents insurance, gadget insurance and tenant-liability policies. More
As we swing into the summer tourist season, a company poised to capitalise on that has raised a huge round of funding. GetYourGuide — a Berlin startup that has built a popular marketplace for people to discover and book sightseeing tours, tickets for attractions and other experiences around the world — is today announcing that it has picked up $484 million, a Series E round of funding that will catapult its valuation above the $1 billion mark. More
Ride Report, a Portland, OR – based solution for cities to integrate new forms of micromobility, like bikes, scooters, and small electric vehicles, raised $3.4m in seed funding. The round was led by Homebrew, with Urban Innovation and Better Ventures also participating. The company intends to use the funds to strengthen partnerships with mobility operators and expand to serve more cities around the world. More
Palo Alto, California-based Cardinal Analytx Solutions, which develops and maintains predictive analytics software for health care payers and providers, today announced that it has secured $22 million in a series B round led by Kleiner Perkins chair John Doerr, with participation from strategic investors GuideWell Mutual Holding Corporation, Blue Shield California, and Premera Blue Cross. The capital infusion follows a $6.1 million series A round in 2017 and will enable the company to further invest in talent and technology, according to CEO Linda T. Hand. More
Interplay Learning, an Austin, Texas-based provider of online training for skilled trades utilizing virtual reality (VR) and 3D simulations, secured $5.5M in Series A financing. The round was led by S3 Ventures, with participation from Shasta Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Holt Ventures, Wild Basin Investments, and Shelter Capital Partners. In conjunction with the funding, Charlie Plauche, Partner with S3 Ventures, will join Interplay Learning’s Board of Directors. The company intends to use the funds to onboard talent in its Austin offices and customer success team, while accelerating expansion into new markets and developing new platform features. More
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Acquisitions
Cvent, a meetings, events, and hospitality technology provider, acquired Wedding Spot, a San Francisco, Calif.-based wedding venue sourcing platform. The amount of the deal was not disclosed. The acquisition of Wedding Spot enables Cvent to bring additional group business opportunities to the more than 260,000 hotels and venues that currently utilize its Cvent Supplier Network, further accelerating its product roadmap and global growth in the hospitality sector. More
New Funds
To Jussi Lystimäki, the VP of Barcelona’s Adevinta Ventures, the challenge with starting a Europe-focused fund is that the region isn’t “harmonic.” “In Europe, you have very local markets, very local ecosystems,” he told Crunchbase News from his Barcelona office. Adevinta Ventures has put money into three marketplace startups, and it has also put money into supporting local seed-stage venture capital firms. More
The Los Angeles ecosystem is $76 million stronger today as Fika Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm, announces its sophomore investment fund. Fika invests roughly half of its capital exclusively in startups headquartered in LA, with a particular fondness for B2B, enterprise and fintech companies. The firm was launched in 2017 by general partners Eva Ho and TX Zhuo, formerly of Susa Ventures and Karlin Ventures, respectively. The pair raised $41 million for the debut effort, opting to nearly double that number the second time around as a means to participate in more follow-on fundings. More
IPOs
More than a month after reports emerged that Endeavor had begun preparing for an IPO, the marketing and entertainment colossus has filed to go public, with The Hollywood Reporter citing insiders who say the Los Angeles-based company will raise around $500 million at a valuation of at least $6 billion. More
Exits
One of the bigger developments in customer services has been the impact of social media — both as a place to vent frustration or praise (mostly frustration) and — especially over messaging apps — as a place for businesses to connect with their users. Now, customer support specialist Zendesk has made an acquisition so that it can make a bigger move into how it works within social media platforms, and specifically messaging apps: it has acquired Smooch, a startup that describes itself as an “omnichannel messaging platform,” which companies’ customer care teams can use to interact with people over messaging platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and Messenger, as well as SMS and email. More
5G Ñews
As 5G networks launch across the world, a word that was previously unknown to consumers — “spectrum” — has become critically important to next-generation wireless devices. Wireless spectrum is invisible, but you can visualize it as a highway divided up into narrow lanes so vehicles can safely travel in parallel between destinations. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the earliest radio signals were free to travel wherever they could, but subsequent wireless devices such as televisions, radars, satellites, and cellular phones required governments to allocate specific wireless frequencies (spectrum) for individual purposes, creating unseen multi-lane data highways in the air. More
Regulatory News
Big data holds commensurately large promise for medtech and digital health companies building tools to analyze that information and develop programs to improve patient health. But these emerging technologies have run headlong into new privacy-oriented regulatory and legislative challenges. More
