RareCyte Raises $22M Financing Round

RareCyte, Inc., a Seattle, WA-based life sciences company, completed a $22M financing round.

The round was led by HealthQuest Capital, with participation from 5AM Ventures and company founder, Ron Seubert. In conjunction with the funding, David Kabakoff, PhD, Partner at HealthQuest Capital, joined the RareCyte Board of Directors. Andy Schwab, Managing Partner at 5AM Ventures also joined the RareCyte Board.

The company intends to use the funds to globally expand the sales of its instrument and consumables platform used in research and clinical markets, develop applications for its new tissue multiplexing platform, and release new liquid biopsy assays.

Led by Joe Victor, President and CEO, RareCyte offers fully integrated solutions for high resolution multiplex rare cell analysis of blood and tissue samples from preclinical through clinical and translational research enabling development of next generation precision medicines for numerous therapeutic areas including immuno-oncology.

The company’s platform which includes AccuCyte® Sample Preparation, RarePlex® Staining Kits, CyteFinder® Instruments, and the CytePicker® Retrieval Module, has been adopted by academic medical institutions and biopharma companies to gain a richer understanding of complex diseases, such as cancer.

Leveraging microscope slides as the substrate, the platform fits into clinical laboratory workflows and enables high-throughput processing of blood and tissue samples from clinical studies of all sizes. CyteFinder can analyze up to seven biomarker channels using immunofluorescent staining to facilitate deeper analysis of rare cell phenotypes.

The integrated CytePicker retrieves single cells of interest, allowing customers to build unique phenotype and genotype datasets at the single cell level to advance their research and clinical programs.

Source. FinSMEs. December 23, /2019

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Logixboard Raises $4.2M in Seed Funding

Logixboard, a Seattle, WA-based digital partner for freight forwarders, raised $4.2m in seed funding.

The round was led by Social Leverage, with participation from F-Prime Capital, Founders’ Co-op, Techstars Venture Fund, Liquid 2 VC, Bragiel Brothers, and Tom Gonser, the Founder of Docusign. In conjunction with the funding, Social Leverage Partner, Gary Benitt, has joined Logixboard’s Board.

The company intends to use the funds to expand its platform and accelerate product innovation.

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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 Julian Alvarez, CEO, Logixboard provides a web-based end-to-end customer engagement platform for freight forwarders to give real-time visibility to their customers. Existing customers, like Transborder SAS, have processed millions of dollars in shipments using Logixboard.

With the new financing, the company will accelerate its vision of becoming the digital system of engagement for the global freight forwarding industry, automating quote and booking processes, deriving data insights, and building data integrations to other critical systems across the industry.

Logixboard, a recent graduate of Techstars, has offices in Bogota, Colombia.

Source. FinSMEs, October 22, 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.

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Fred Hutch spinout SEngine raises $5.1M to test cancer treatment drugs against a patient’s tumors

Seattle startup SEngine Precision Medicine has raised $5.1 million in fresh funding as it looks to commercialize a platform that can match cancer patients to the right drug and aid in drug discovery. The Series A round was led by the Bangarang Group along with other unnamed investors.

Since every patient’s cancer is unique, it’s important to know which drug or drug combinations will work best. SEngine’s PARIS test grows a patient’s tumor cells in a lab, then analyzes them to determine the safest and most effective medications. Cancer doctors can also pick and choose which drugs they want to test for from SEngine’s library of more than 200 small molecule drugs.

Sometimes the test can lead to surprises, like when one patient’s thyroid cancer tumor responded to a drug developed for ovarian cancer. “The mutations that underlie each individual cancer can be very common, even from very disparate cancer types,” said SEngine CEO Dr. Carla Grandori.

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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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In the process of testing cancers from a range of different patients, SEngine also collects data that can be valuable in the hunt for new drugs — an application that Grandori says could be far more lucrative than screening tumors for suitable drugs. The startup recently entered a joint venture with San Francisco-based Atomwise aimed at finding new cancer drugs.

“We continue to see the immense potential for Dr. Grandori and her world-class team to radically transform cancer care through their personalized diagnostic platform and novel drug discovery program,” Elliott Burkland, an investor with the Bangarang Group, said in a statement.

The startup’s advisors include Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, as well as Dr. Leland Hartwell, a Nobel Prize Laureate and former president of Fred Hutch. The company hired former Spaceflight Industries executive Tom Neary as chief financial officer in August.

SEngine, which spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2015, previously reported raising $3 million that was part of this Series A round. It also received $755,000 in grant funding from the National Institute of Health in May 2018. The company has raised more than $9 million to date.

Source. GeekWire, , James Thorne, October 2 , 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.

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On-demand parking startup SpotHero raises $50 million

SpotHero, the Chicago-based company that has developed an on-demand parking app, has raised $50 million in a Series D round led by Macquarie Capital.

Union Grove Venture Partners participated in the round, along with existing investors, including Insight Venture Partners, Global Founders Capital, OCA Ventures, AutoTech Ventures and others, according to the company. SpotHero has raised $118 million to date.

The new capital will be used to expand its reach in the 300 U.S. and Canadian cities where it is already operating, build out its digital platform and strengthen partnerships with mobility companies, CEO and co-founder Mark Lawrence told TechCrunch.

SpotHero, which has operations in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Seattle, initially set out to develop software that connects everyday drivers to parking spots in thousands of garages across North America.

Its secret sauce is its software, which can sit on top of the 40 or so different point-of-sales systems used by parking garages. This acts as a single protocol, allowing SpotHero to bring some kind of standardization to an otherwise fragmented system. From this single protocol, SpotHero can add features that will allow for automated parking services, such as license plate recognition.

“We’ve built the pipes, so to speak, and this powers our consumer app,” Lawrence said in a recent interview. Now the company focus is on building out partnerships, features in the software and services, he added.

Capital will also be used to hire talent to support these new endeavors. SpotHero has 210 employees, and is working on hiring 50 more engineers this year.

In the eight years since its founding, SpotHero has expanded beyond its core consumer-focused competency. The company has added other services as urban density has increased and on-street parking has become more jumbled and confused thanks to an increase in traffic, ride-hailing and on-demand delivery services that take up valuable curb space. It has locked in more than 900 distribution partnerships and integrations, including Google Assistant for voice-enabled parking and Waze in-app navigation to parking. Other partners include Hertz and car2go for fleet parking, WeWork for commuter parking and Moovit for multi-modal parking.

Most recently, SpotHero launched a new service dubbed “SpotHero for Fleets” that targets shared mobility and on-demand services.

The service aims to be a one-stop shop for car sharing and commercial fleets to handle all that goes into ensuring there is access and the right number of designated parking areas on any given day within SpotHero’s large network of 6,500 garages across 300 cities. That means everything from managing the relationships between garage owners and the fleet companies to proper signage so car-sharing customers can find the vehicles, as well as flexible plans that account for seasonal demands on businesses.

Under the new service, customers are able to source and secure parking inventory in high-traffic areas across multiple cities and pay per use across multiple parking facilities on one invoice to streamline payments. 

The company has signed on car-sharing companies and other commercial fleets, although it’s not naming them yet.

Source. Techcrunch News, Kirsten Korosec, August 22, 2019

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Real estate platform Compass raises another $370M on a $6.4B valuation en route to an IPO

The real estate market regularly goes through ups and downs, but today comes big news for a startup in the space that has built a platform that it believes can help all players in it — buyers, sellers and those who help with the buying and selling — no matter what stage of the cycle we happen to be in.

Compass — a company that has built a three-sided marketplace for the industry, along with a wide set of algorithms to help make it work — has raised a $370 million round of funding, money that it plans to use to continue expanding geographically (within existing markets in the U.S. such as New York, Connecticut.

Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, SF and LA and other areas), as well as for more tech and product development. Sources tell me that it’s also now eyeing up an IPO, likely sometime in the next 24 months.

“From day one we knew, when we had just a small amount of people at the company, we had a very clear focus,” co-founder and chairman Ori Allon said in an interview. “We wanted to bring more tech and data and transparency to real estate, and I think it’s paid off.”

Based out of New York, Compass earlier this year established an engineering hub in Seattle run by the former CTO of AI for Microsoft, Joseph Sirosh . It’s continuing to hire there and elsewhere (alongside also making acqui-hires for talent).

The Series G funding — which brings the total raised by Compass to $1.5 billion — is coming in at a $6.4 billion valuation, a huge uptick for the company compared to its $4.4 billion valuation less than a year ago. Part of the reason for that has been the company’s massive growth: in the last quarter, its revenues were up 250% compared to Q2 2018.

The investor list for this latest round includes previous investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Dragoneer Investment Group and SoftBank Vision Fund. Other backers since it was first founded in 2012 have included Founders Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority (a construction and real estate giant), Fidelity and others.

The company was co-founded by Ori Allon and Robert Reffkin — respectively the chairman and CEO, pictured here on the right and left of COO Maelle Gavet. The company first caught my eye because of Allon. An engineer by training, he has a string of notable prior successes in the field of search to his name (his two previous startups were sold to Google and Twitter, which used them as the basis of large areas of their search and discovery algorithms).

In this latest entrepreneurial foray, Allon’s vision of using machine learning algorithms to improve decisions that humans make has been tailored to the specific vertical of real estate.

The platform is not a mere marketplace to connect buyers to real estate agents to sellers, but an engine that helps figure out pricing, timing for sales and how to stage homes (and more recently how to improve them with actual building work by way of Compass Concierge) to get the best prices and best sales.

It also helps real estate agents — it currently works with some 13,000 of them — manage their time and their customers (by way of an acquisition it made of CRM platform Contactually earlier this year). Starting with high-end homes for private individuals, Compass has expanded to commercial real estate and a much wider set of price brackets. Its traction in the market among its three customer bases of realtors, buyers and sellers has also meant that it’s been the subject of around 10 lawsuits from the likes of Zillow (over IP theft from former employees) and Realology (which owns firms like Coldwell Banker and Century21).

There is a wide opportunity for vertical search businesses at the moment. People want more accurate and targeted information to make purchasing decisions; and companies that are in the business of providing information (and selling things) are keen for better platforms to bring in online visitors and increase their conversions.

I understand that this has led to Compass getting approached for acquisitions, but that is not in the blueprint for this real estate startup: the longer-term plan will be to take the company public, likely in the next 24 months.

“It has been incredible to see the growth of our Product & Engineering team, including the addition of Joseph Sirosh as CTO,” said Allon, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with new investors, and deepen our relationship with our existing partners to accelerate our growth and further our technology advancements.”

Source. TechCrunch News, Ingrid Lunden, July 31, 2019

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Amperity Secures $50M in Series C Funding

Amperity, a Seattle, WA-based AI-powered Customer Data Management platform, raised a $50M Series C financing.

Backers included Tiger Global Management, Goldman Sachs, Declaration Partners, Madera Technology Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Lee Fixel.

The company, which has now raised total funding to-date to $87m, intends to use the funds to accelerate new capabilities, as well as expand into new verticals including financial services, automotive, insurance, and healthcare, while continuing to grow within the retail, travel, and hospitality industries.

Led by Kabir Shahani, CEO and co-founder, Amperity leverages artificial intelligence to provide a Customer Data Management platform for companies to connect, identify, and understand their customers, improve marketing performance, accelerate accurate customer insights, and enable customer experiences.

The company serves brands such as Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, The Gap Inc, Moët Hennessy USA, Wynn Resorts, Kendra Scott, Lucky Brand, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders, Stanley, and many more.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, July 15, 2019

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