Convoy raises $400 million to expand its on-demand trucking platform

Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, has raised $400 million in a Series D funding round as it aims to scale its business amid an increasingly competitive market.

The funding round brings Convoy’s post-money valuation to $2.75 billion.

The round was co-led by Generation Investment Management and previous Convoy investor T. Rowe Price Associates. Asset management firm Baillie Gifford, which has fondness for pre-IPO tech companies, Fidelity and Durable Capital Partners, as well as Series C investors CapitalG and Lone Pine Capital, also participated in the round.

Convoy has managed to attract a slew of high-profile investors — and their capital — such as Jeff Bezos, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and even U2’s Bono and the Edge. In the four years since its founding, Convoy has raised a total of more than $668 million. Early investors include Greylock Partners, Y Combinator, Cascade Investment (the private investment vehicle of Bill Gates) and Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi.

And that money has been put to work. Convoy co-founders Dan Lewis and Grant Goodale set out in 2015 to modernize freight brokerage, a fragmented and oftentimes analog business that matches loads from shippers with truckers.

The company has gone from hundreds of loads per week in 2016 to tens of thousands per week across the U.S. Notably, Convoy’s platform handles 100% of the matching, as opposed to having humans complete the task.

Convoy also has about 100 routes, many of them concentrated around economic hubs such as Chicago, Michigan and California, Lewis told TechCrunch.

The 850-person company wants to accelerate those efforts with capital raised in this latest round. However, it’s bound to face more competition. Uber Freight, Loadsmart and Flexport are just a few online marketplaces that are targeting freight.

Convoy has added new features to its platform as part of its scaling strategy. The company launched in 2019 an automated reloads feature that allows truckers to book multiple loads at a time. It also added Convoy Go, which allows drivers to bring their truck cab and hook up to a trailer pre-filled with cargo.

Source. TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec, November 13, 2019
 

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Mobile game startup MadBox raises $16.5 million after 100 million downloads

French startup MadBox is raising a $16.5 million (€15 million) Series A funding round from Alven. The company is developing mobile games and handles everything from start to finish, from game design to publishing and user acquisition.

MadBox is a young player in the mobile game space. The company is the result of the merger of two tiny Paris-based game studios in July 2018. After a couple of months, the startup released its first game, Dash Valley. And the game quickly ended up trending in the top 50 of top free game downloads in the App Store in the U.S.

The company has released a handful of games since then. At some point, MadBox had three games in the top 10 charts in the U.S. (once again, free game downloads) — StickMan Hook, Sausage Flip and Idle Ball Race. Overall, MadBox has generated 100 million game downloads.

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“The core method at MadBox is that we internalize everything,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Nicolas Vernin told me. “We try to automate as many thing as possible.”

In addition to reusing assets from one game to another, MadBox also tries to apply the same method when it comes to user acquisition and marketing. “People often tell us that we have a data-driven culture that is disproportionately developed in our company,” Vernin said.

MadBox has a careful approach when it comes to growth. The company hires slowly and doesn’t release dozens of games in a year.

With 30 to 40 employees and a business model mostly based on ads, the company is currently profitable. MadBox now wants to tackle a wider range of mobile games, from hyper casual to idle games and less casual games. The startup is also opening a second office in Barcelona.

“We are a generation of friends who have worked for well-known casual game studios. And we all think that big game productions will have to become simpler so that people can play them like casual games — and vice versa,” Vernin said. And MadBox wants to be there when these two worlds collide.

Source. TechCrunch, Romain Dillet , October 18, 2019

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Co-Living Keeps Growing As Tripalink Raises $10M At $100M Valuation

Tripalink, a Los Angeles-based real estate startup providing co-living space for students and  young professionals, has raised a $10 million Series B at a $100 million valuation.

Founded by University of Southern California-Los Angeles (USC) graduates in 2016, Tripalink has grown rapidly. According to CEO Donghao Li, the company has been profitable since the year it was founded and tripled its revenue in 2018.

The latest financing marks Tripalink’s third funding round in a ten-month period, Li said, bringing its total capital raised to $20 million. Existing investors Calin SJG Fund, China-based K2VC, and Tekton Ventures participated in the round, along with new investor Oriza Ventures.

Tripalink has two product lines. First, it works with small and medium-sized developers to create and manage co-living spaces. Second, it has also become a developer, building out its own co-living projects.

Tripalink helps provide furnished, all utilities-paid co-living spaces in Los Angeles, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Irvine, Austin, and Philadelphia. It claims that its properties are “fully occupied” in most of the cities where it currently operates. The new capital will mostly go toward market expansion with a goal of being in 30 cities by 2020, according to Li. By the end of this year, the company expects it will have developed itself nearly 4,000 beds via master leases or joint ventures.

“Besides building a community, our price per bedroom is much cheaper compared to most luxury apartments,” Li told Crunchbase News. “Purchasing land and then building our own co-living space is our ultimate goal in each market.”

The model is attractive to developer partners because the more bedrooms in a unit, the higher the value of their property, Li said. Tripalink purposely targets centrally located areas that are more likely to see appreciation over time.

Most apartments that the company rents have room for four people, with a total square footage of about 1,200. Each person has their own bedroom and bathroom, and each unit has a kitchen and living room. Larger units that can room up to six people are about 1500 square feet. Average rent per person varies on the market, Li said. In Los Angeles, monthly rent per person runs around $1,300-$1,500 whereas in cheaper markets, it’s less. Each unit has common indoor and outdoor space.

The trend of rising rental costs in hot job markets has brought all sorts of new ideas regarding living to the market. WeWork’s WeLive product line, hacker houses of dubious repute and more have become regular fare. And so long as jobs continue to cluster in big urban environments, the market may keep generating demand for new housing arrangements like what Tripalink and others can provide.

Source. Crunchbase News, Mary Ann Azevedo, August 6, 2019

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Just Eat and Takeaway.com merger designed to ward off younger rivals such as Uber Eats

When Alex Canter, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and the fourth-generation proprietor of Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, took over business development operations at his great-grandfather’s restaurant, he quickly became frustrated by the complexity involved in routing orders from multiple food delivery platforms. Fortunately, he met entrepreneur Mike Jacobs, who’d launched a product targeting order fulfillment for stadium concession stands and food trucks. The two cofounders, along with four others, fine-tuned a solution with partners that included Kitchen United and Epson, and in under a year their product and company — Ordermark — graduated from Boulder, Colorado-based accelerator Techstars and grew to more than 25 employees.

Now, months after moving its headquarters to a 7,200-square-foot office in Culver City (while keeping a Denver office), Ordermark is gearing up for growth with a fresh capital infusion. The startup today revealed that it recently closed an $18 million series B funding round led by Foundry Group, with participation from previous investors TenOneTen Ventures, Vertical Venture Partners, Mucker Capital, Act One Ventures, and Nosara Capital. The raise comes after a $9.5 million series A in September 2018 and brings Ordermark’s total raised to over $30 million.

CEO Canter says the funding will fuel the integration of Ordermark’s service with existing restaurant technologies, including point of sale (POS) systems, kitchen display systems, accounting tools, last-mile delivery companies, and more. Additionally, he expects it will lay the groundwork for support of emerging restaurant models, like virtual restaurants.

“I cofounded Ordermark to help my family’s restaurant adapt and thrive in the mobile delivery era and then realized that, as a company, we could help other restaurants experiencing the same challenges. We’ve been gratified to see positive results come in from our restaurant customers nationwide,” said Canter. “So we are thrilled to have the backing of Foundry Group to fuel our growth. We have some incredibly cool innovations in the pipeline and look forward to bringing them to restaurants everywhere.”

For each client, Ordermark develops a strategy and creates a bespoke rollout plan, identifying services to bring on, negotiating rates, setting up marketing strategies, and even designating delivery driver pickup zones. The company supplies ordering hardware in the form of a touchscreen Samsung tablet and custom-designed Epson printer, along with software that integrates well over a dozen delivery providers, including Uber Eats, Postmates, DoorDash, ChowNow, Caviar, Delivery.com, and popular POS systems like Brink, Dinerware, Positouch, Simphony, and Squirrel.

Hardware is an important piece of Ordermark’s approach, according to Canter. Prior to onboarding, its restaurant customers are often stuck juggling multiple tablets and laptops to field incoming delivery orders. A multitude of printers and disparate checkout workflows exacerbates the problem, particularly at peak times.

The other key to Ordermark’s solution is a dashboard from which restaurant employees can manage multiple platforms (even for restaurants that provide their own delivery drivers) and from which they can reach out directly to a U.S.-based customer care team to change hours, update menus, or even temporarily pause service. This dashboard also affords them access to analytics tools that surface real-time locations and metrics and run reports across all delivery services.

Ordermark’s success has been nothing short of meteoric, with over 3,000 restaurant brands signed on to date including Buffalo Wild Wings, Little Caesars, Sonic, Qdoba, Johnny Rockets, Subway, Popeyes, Papa John’s, Which Which, Moe’s, Togo’s, Pinkberry, Pieology, TGI Fridays, Yogurtland, and Halal Guys. Deployments rose from 20 U.S. states in September 2018 to over 40 today, and Ordermark expects to have customers in all 50 states within months.

Ordermark competes to an extent with Chowly, which similarly integrates third-party ordering platforms with POS systems, and Checkmate, whose tech suite funnels orders directly into restaurants’ POS systems. But Foundry Group partner Chris Moody believes the food delivery market’s current trajectory — from $17 billion in revenue this year to more than $24 billion in 2023, according to Statista — promises great things for Ordermark.

“Foundry Group has a long history of investing in companies that glue together disparate systems over diverse platforms — and that’s exactly what Ordermark is doing in the restaurant industry: connecting third-party ordering solutions, point-of-sale systems, and other cool innovations to help restaurants consolidate, grow, and understand their delivery business,” said Moody. “We were initially introduced to Ordermark via three of our partner funds: Techstars Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, and TenOneTen Ventures. All three were incredibly excited about what the Ordermark team is building and the tremendous progress they’ve made since their series A investment. The more we got to know Alex and the team, the more we realized what an incredible platform they’re building. Their products work in part because Alex is a fourth-generation restaurant owner and he and his team truly understand the needs of the restaurant."

Source. Venture Beat, Paul Sawers, July 29, 2019

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Nowports raises $5.3 million to become Latin America’s digital shipping answer to Flexport

Nowports, a developer of software and services to track freight shipments from ports to destinations across Latin America, has aims to become the regional answer to Flexport’s billion-dollar digital shipping business.

Almost 54 million containers are imported and exported from Latin America each year, and nearly half of them are either delayed or lost due to mismanagement.

Nowports is pitching shippers on its digital management software to keep track of each container, and has signed on a number of leading venture capital firms to fulfill its mission.

The Monterrey, Mexico-based company raised $5.3 million in its seed round of financing. The round was led by Base10 and Monashees, with participation from Y Combinator and additional investors like Broadhaven, Soma Capital, Partech, Tekton and Paul Buchheit.

“In Nowports we saw a very strong combination: well prepared and ambitious team using technology to help thousands of customers to improve their importing and exporting processes. By adding efficiency, reliability, and transparency to change a multi-billion dollar industry, Nowports has been able to attract many clients that saw significant improvements in their daily routines by using the solution” said Caio Bolognesi, general partner from Monashees, in a statement.

The company said it would use the money to expand into new markets, grow its team and integrate with more companies involved in the (very fragmented) Latin American logistics industry. It’s a market that needs a range of better logistics technologies.

“Even though over 90% of the world’s trade is carried by sea, the most cost-effective way to move goods en masse, there has yet to be a solution that’s able to connect suppliers, customs brokers, carriers and transportation companies to provide an efficient and reliable service,” said Maximiliano Casal, founder and chief executive of Nowports, in a statement. “This is why we launched Nowports, combining our 10 years of industry expertise to fill this void and are currently working with over 40 customers in the region and growing.”

The company now has offices in Chile and Uruguay, and is planning to expand to Brazil, Colombia and Peru.

“With platforms, algorithms with AI and integrations, our platform allows companies to take control of their shipments and plan and predict the best timing to move the freight based on the needs of their own company,” said Alfonso De Los Rios, founder and CTO of Nowports.

As the company looks to expand, it has a strategic road map it can follow in the growth of Flexport, the Silicon Valley startup that has become a billion-dollar business by applying technology to the outdated shipping industry.

The two co-founders of Nowports met at a program at Stanford University, with De Los Rios hailing from a family with deep ties to the shipping industry. He and Casal linked up and the two began plotting a way to make the deeply inefficient industry more modern and transparent. To familiarize himself with the market for which he’d be developing a technology, Casal worked in a freight forwarder in Kansas City that had been operating for more than 30 years.

In all, freight providers are getting paid nearly $40 billion per year to move freight into Latin America.

“Alfonso and Max are the ideal founders we look to invest in as they are industry experts and passionate about evolving the industry using technology and automation,” said Adeyemi Ajao, general partner from Base10. “We are proud to be investors in Nowports alongside our friends at Monashees and look forward to watching the company’s continued growth.”

Source. Techcrunch, Jonathan Schreiber,  June 20, 2019

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PayFit raises $79 million for its payroll service

French startup PayFit is raising a new $79 million funding round (€70 million) from Eurazeo and Bpifrance. The company first started with a payroll service for small and medium companies in France. It has evolved into a full-fledged HR solution for multiple European countries.

PayFit uses a software-as-a-service approach so that small companies can easily manage payroll and HR information from a web browser. Everything stays up-to-date and compliant with labor regulation.

After you enter information about your employees, PayFit automatically generates pay slips every month. Your employees receive an email when their pay slips are ready. If somebody is getting a raise, you can connect to your PayFit account and modify an amount for all pay slips going forward.

When it comes to payroll taxes, the service automatically reminds you when you have to pay them and how much you’re supposed to pay. You also can generate exports for your accountant, see reports about your staff, etc.

And PayFit doesn’t want to stop at payrolls. You also can manage absences and leaves, expense reports and shifts. It makes sense to build those tools in-house as they have a direct effect on your payroll.

In order to approve expense reports and vacation days, you also can build an organizational chart in PayFit and decide who’s managing who.

While it’s easy to build an HR giant in the U.S., it’s a bit more complicated in Europe, as labor laws vary so much from one country to another. But the startup has managed to launch its service in France, Spain, Germany and the U.K. — Italy is coming soon.

The company says that it has developed its own programming language called Jetlang in order to transform labor code into computer code.

There are 3,000 companies relying on PayFit and 300 people working for the company. With today’s funding round, PayFit plans to double its workforce by 2020.

Source. TechCrunch, Romain Dillet, June 17, 2019

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BetterUp raises $103M to fast-track employee learning and developmen

By Kate Clark

BetterUp, a company that connects employees with expert career and leadership development coaches online, has secured a $103 million Series C from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Threshold Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Crosslink Capital, Tenaya Capital and Silicon Valley Bank.

For access to its mobile coaches, which are meant to expedite development among employees and foster purpose and passion within the workplace, BetterUp offers a SaaS service to enterprises. Its customers include Airbnb, AppDynamics and Instacart, as well as 28 of the Fortune 1000.

The company said recently that the influx of Fortune 1000 customers has led to tripled revenue growth year-over-year.

“We are proud to be enabling innovative companies who recognize that their biggest asset—their people—deserve an elevated employee experience that speaks to who they are as whole persons, not just employees,” BetterUp co-founder and chief executive officer Alexi Robichaux said in a statement. “By combining human expertise, the latest advances in scientific research, and digital technologies including AI and machine learning we’re delivering unprecedented levels of personalized learning at scale.”

San Francisco-based BetterUp has previously raised about $43 million in venture capital funding since it was founded in 2012. It reached a valuation of $125 million with a $30 million Series B in March 2018, according to PitchBook. BetterUp declined to disclose its Series C valuation

BetterUp says its latest round is the largest ever for a “tech-enabled coaching, behavior change and wellness” platform. There isn’t a whole lot of competition in that space just yet. Nonetheless, $100 million is a sizable capital infusion for any startup.

Though career coaching hasn’t become VCs new favorite space — yet — startups creating tools for other startups is a trend that’s taken off in the last couple of years. Just look at Brex. In just two years, the company, which creates corporate cards for startups, has garnered a valuation of $2.6 billion. Gusto, WeWork, Plaid, Stripe, Atrium, Intercom and Outreach are just a few more examples in this emerging category.

“BetterUp is the one company fundamentally investing in the most important part of the future of work — human beings, Lightpseed’s Will Kohler said in a statement. “No other company drives measurable outcomes that change lives and workplaces.”

Source. Techcrunch, Kate Clark, June 11, 2019

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Sheltr Raises $3.2M in Funding

Sheltr, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a home maintenance software platform, raised $3.2m in funding.

Backers included South Park Commons, MetaProp, NYCA Partners, Ben Porterfield, Co-Founder of Looker Data Sciences, Misha Esipov, Co-Founder of Nova Credit, and Marcus Ridgway, Co-Founder of Invitation Homes, among others.

The company intends to use the funds to make key hires at its San Francisco-based headquarters, grow its platform of service providers, and expand into new cities.

Founded in 2018 by Andrew Wynn and Praveen Chekuri, Sheltr provides a home maintenance software platform that leverages tech and a network of vetted contractors to reduce instances of repair and simplify the consumer booking and scheduling process.

Through the app, Sheltr members schedule and pay for twice-annual home check-ups performed by trained professionals. Each check-up includes routine preventative maintenance, like replacing furnace filters and changing smoke and carbon monoxide detector batteries, as well as technology-driven home assessments that catalog appliances, monitor the home’s exterior condition, and provide proactive recommendations for home services.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, June 4, 2019

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LevelTen Energy raises $20.5 million for its renewable energy marketplace

By Jonathan Shieberpple

LevelTen a marketplace that consolidates renewable energy projects and potential buyers to lower prices for aggregated buyers and expand the market for sellers, has raised $20.5 million in a new round of funding.

Investors in the round included the venture arms of utility and energy companies like Constellation Technology Ventures (the investment arm of Exelon Corp.), Equinor Energy Ventures and Total Ventures. The financing was led by Prelude Ventures, with participation from other financial investment firms including Element 8 Fund, Founders’ Co-op, Techstars Ventures and Wireframe Ventures.

Founded in 2016 and accelerated by TechStars as a clearinghouse for clean energy projects for corporate and utility energy buyers, the company expanded its services in 2018 with the launch of the LevelTen marketplace — providing details on every clean energy, utility-scale project in North America.

That launch was followed by the release of a price-matching and request for proposal automation tool to give companies the ability to post their own projects and find available projects more efficiently.

Overall, companies have procured more than $1 billion of renewable energy through LevelTen. The company has also aggregated a procurement deal for Bloomberg, Cox Enterprises, Gap, Salesforce and Workday.

The company said it would use the money to expand its footprint internationally.

“Historically, excessive market opacity, cost and risk prevented all but a select group of Fortune 500 buyers from signing utility-scale power purchase agreements. This exclusionary problem is one we’re committed to addressing,” said Bryce Smith, CEO and founder of LevelTen Energy.

Source. TechCrunch, Jonathan Shieberpple, June 4, 2019

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Koho raises $42 million Series B inside round led by Portag3 Ventures

By Douglas Soltys

Toronto-based FinTech startup Koho announced the close of a $42 million Series B round today, led by Portag3 Ventures, with participation from Greyhound Capital and other unnamed strategic investors. Sources familiar with the deal put the company’s post-money valuation north of $100 million. Koho has raised $52.6 million to date.

Launched publicly in 2017, Koho positions itself as a modern alternative to Canada’s traditional banking oligarchy. While it doesn’t have a Canadian banking license, it does have partnerships with Visa and Peoples Trust Company to provide similar services: e-transfers, ATM and purchase use with the Koho prepaid card, insights on spending habits, and financial coaching. The company says it now has over 120,000 accounts and has reached $500 million in annualized transactions.

This is Koho’s second funding round led by Portag3, which also led the company’s $8 million Series A round in 2017. The startup’s connection to Portag3 (and the money behind it, Power Financial), runs deeper, however. Koho raised an undisclosed bridge round in July 2016, led by Power Financial with participation from angel investor Adam Felesky, who later became Portag3’s CEO. Following the company’s Series A round, Felesky and Power Financial SVP and Portag3 executive chairman, Paul Desmarais III, joined Koho’s board of directors, along with Wealthsimple co-founder and CEO, Michael Katchen (Power and its subsidiaries own a majority stake in Wealthsimple).

The overlapping interconnections are entirely by design. For years, Desmarais has been working to build through Power and Portag3 what this publication has glibly dubbed Canada’s FinTech Justice League: an archipelago of financial services distributed via a portfolio of startups to combat the institutional incumbents. Borrowell provides the lending, Wealthsimple the investing, Koho the spending (and saving – 17 percent of the money that comes into Koho ends up in a savings account), etc. Opportunities within Portag3’s portfolio to partner and stack services on top of an overlapping customer base abound.

Both the size of Koho’s new funding and the round’s familiar lead are notable. Inside rounds (i.e., a round entirely or predominantly led by existing investors) typically give VCs fits because they’re stuck pricing their past investments rather than having someone else validate them. It can also send mixed signals to the market, meaning a lack of interest from external investors, a necessary bridge round to additional funding or an exit, or a double-down from the lead to keep away a frothy list of suitors. As Spring Lane Capital’s Rob Day describes it, “in short, inside rounds can be a signal that a company is doing great, doing OK, or is close to collapse.”

Koho has several data points pointing towards a positive interpretation. For one, $42 million in funding at a significant jump in valuation is no bridge round. For another, the round matches the pricing of similar FinTechs at Koho’s current size. In 2017, UK challenger bank Monzo (Koho can’t technically be considered a challenger bank because it has no Canadian banking license, but the feature set is similar) raised a £22 million Series C at an £87 million post-money valuation with a similarly sized user base. The company is currently closing in on a £2 billion valuation as it pursues a US launch (now might be a good time to mention that Koho’s new participating investor, Greyhound Capital, is a UK-based VC with sector expertise in challenger banks, having invested in both N26 and Revolut).

This new funding is both validation of what we’ve done and a vote of confidence for the work left to do,“ Daniel Eberhard, founder and CEO of Koho, told BetaKit.

That said, $42 million is a lot of growth capital for a company with 120,000 account signups. Eberhard’s sense of validation comes from a belief that Koho is positioned for a “better outcome by owning a really small percentage of a larger market.” The reason? “We are going for the lynchpin of the financial relationship. That is the bet that Portag3 is making.”

Being the lynchpin means acting as the daily touchpoint for the way Koho’s users spend, save, and deposit money. Eberhard said that close relationship leads to a much higher customer lifetime value than other financial services. It’s also why the company cares so much about its 80 Net Promoter Score (if incumbent financial institutions beat FinTech startups on consumer trust, they most certainly lose on likability).

“The two things that are essential to our success are a great customer experience and [development] velocity,” Eberhard said. “Our theory is that if our roadmap is public and our users participate in that and we have a community we can listen to, and that we can deploy technology and new versions of the app faster than anyone else, we have a higher probability chance of finding value.”

On the development side, Koho has rolled out two new features this year: joint account support, and a tool to help users find hidden bank fees. Eberhard told BetaKit that the new funding will be dedicated to product development over customer acquisition (75 percent of Koho’s current account growth is organic or through referrals), as new product features will continue to drive what he said was the company’s best-in-class ARPU and churn. Those metrics would likely also be aided by some Portag3 portfolio partnerships noted above now that Koho has the funding and customer base to capitalize, but Eberhard declined to comment on specific plans.

As the company rises in prominence as part of Portag3’s FinTech suite, the CEO did note, however, that Koho is taking steps to diversify its own portfolio. That includes a restructuring of the company’s board, adding independent board members while reducing Portag3’s presence to make Koho a more palatable investment vehicle for larger private equity placements.

“The intention of this funding is to do two things: it’s to continue to accelerate Koho as the market leader in Canada, and to position the company for longer term private equity and capital plays,” Eberhard said. “Part of that is restructuring the board so we look more and more like a traditional venture-backed company and less like a Portag3 company.”

The repositioning is supported by the VC firm, and reflects Portag3’s own evolution, starting as a partnership between Power Financial, IGM Financial, and Great-West Lifeco before taking on external investors and expanding internationally to Europe.

Put another way, everyone expects a new firm to lead Koho’s Series C. The focus now is on the work left to do to get there.

Source. Betakit, Douglas Soltys, May 15, 2019

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Pocketpills Raises $2M Seed Round For Virtual Pharmacy Software.

By Isabelle Kirkwood

PocketPills, a Vancouver-based tech-driven healthtech company that has been called the ‘UberEats” of pharmacies, has fully subscribed a $2 million seed round led by WaterBridge Ventures.

Funding from the seed round will be used toward the company’s Canada-wide expansion, which has been a primary focus of the company over the past six months. The company has also announced that it will be fully licensed and operational in Ontario and Manitoba this June, adding to the company’s current operations in British Columbia, Alberta, Yukon and Northwest Territories. PocketPills is currently available to nine million Canadians and will be available to 23 million Canadians upon expansion this June. The round was completed in September 2018.

PocketPills is also using funds from its seed round to further implement machine learning and AI to predict medication adherence, disease progression, and incidences of new diseases. The app also lets users search the price of the drugs you need so you can compare prices with other pharmacies.

Founded in 2018, PocketPills’ platform was formed with the goal of making medication management simple, through a $7 dispensing fee and free delivery. Its automation technology seeks to free up pharmacists to focus on patient consults, improving the patient experience and providing a higher quality of care. PocketPills co-founder Abhinav Gupta previously founded San Francisco-based Rocket Fuel, which was valued at $2 billion when it went public in 2013 and also served as director of engineering at Yahoo.

PocketPills’ software allows patients to fill and manage medications online, keep a record of their medication history, and find the cost of a prescription before they fill it. The company’s goal is to leverage AI software to calculate adherence and predict instances of new diseases, using data like dates of prescription refill and patient consultations.

The company’s hardware packages medications by the dose and time of day into easily manageable packages. This increases medication management and adherence for the 50 percent of Canadians who don’t take medication on time.

In April, PocketPills partnered with Pacific Blue Cross, an extended health care benefits provider in British Columbia, to become a member of the Pacific Blue Cross Preferred Pharmacy Network.

Source. Betakit, Isabelle Kirkwood, May 17, 2019

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Avalanche Technology Raises $33M in Funding.

Avalanche Technology, a Fremont, CA-based MRAM technology platform, raised over $33M in funding.

The round was led by Thomvest Ventures.

The company will use the funds to accelerate the development of its P-SRAM™ memory devices for the Internet of Things, aerospace and defense markets and higher densities of persistent DRAM required for the next generation of machine learning architectures.

Led by Petro Estakhri, President and CEO, Avalanche Technology has developed Perpendicular STT-MRAM technology, which aims to replace traditional Flash and SRAM for unified memory architectures in future SOC systems, delivering high performance and low power at 55, 40 and 28nm with scalability to 22 and 14nm.

With a proven STT-MRAM portfolio at multiple geometry nodes combined with an intellectual property portfolio of over 280 patents and applications, Avalanche Technology aims to enable the next generation of scalable embedded unified memory architecture for use in GPUs, MCUs, DSPs, ASSPs and ASICs.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, May 28, 2019

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OpenSesame Raises $28 Million Series C to Add Workers for Corporate Learning Marketplace

OpenSesame, a Portland, Ore.-based online corporate learning marketplace, has raised a $28 million Series C round of funding. FTV Capital led the round with participation from Altos Ventures.

Founded in 2011, OpenSesame claims to host more than 20,000 courses, in subjects ranging from machine learning to leadership. These classes are hosted by third-party creators, who set the price and get to keep about 60 percent of the revenue, the rest going to OpenSesame, according to the company’s website. The company says it currently serves businesses like Siemens and Caterpillar.

OpenSesame’s co-founder and general manager, Josh Blank told The Oregonian that the company “began breaking even on its operations last all” and described the fundraise as “gasoline” to help it grow faster. It will use the money toward hiring about 60 employees, according to GeekWire, which will push its headcount to 140 by the end of the year.

The company has raised at least $45.1 million in total funding. Altos Ventures has also invested in Quizlet.

Source. Edsurge, May 28, 2019

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U.S. smartphone financing tech startup PayJoy raises $20 million

By Anna Irrera,

PayJoy, a startup that has developed smartphone technology to facilitate access to credit in emerging markets, has raised $20 million from venture capital firm Greylock Partners, the company said on Thursday.

Union Square Ventures, EchoVC and Core Innovation Capital also participated in the round, PayJoy said. The San Francisco-based startup said it will use the funding to expand, secure more partners and develop new technologies.

PayJoy enables consumers with no bank accounts or formal credit history to purchase smartphones on installment payments and get cash loans. It does so by turning the smartphone into collateral through software that locks the phone when payments have not been made.

It believes that making smartphones more affordable can be a stepping stone toward increasing financial inclusion since more financial services are now being provided digitally.

“We’re building technology to help people carve a path into the financial system,” Mark Heynen, the company’s co-founder and chief business officer, said in an interview.

Globally, 1.7 billion adults do not have a bank account, but two-thirds of them own a mobile phone which could help them access financial services, the World Bank said in a 2018 report.

It is launching in six more countries through new partnerships with local companies, Heynen said. These include Mutual in Brazil, Waynimovil in Argentina, MyBucks in South Africa, Panacredito in the Dominican Republic, Omnipagos in Honduras and COINFIN in Colombia.

PayJoy’s technology does not make underwriting reliant on traditional credit scores, but seeks to increase consumers’ willingness to pay by taking advantage of their desire to access the phone, which in turn can help keep default rates in check, Heynen said. He declined to disclose default rates.

“Customers like it because it makes the phone pay-as-you-go,” Heynen said. “In some cases, if they decide they can’t pay, they can send in the phone and have their contract canceled.” 

Source. Reuters, Anna Irrera, May 18, 2019

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Israeli drone insurance startup VOOM raises $5 million

By Andrii Degeler

Tel Aviv-based “specialised mobility” insurance startup VOOM has landed $5 million in a funding round led by Arbor Ventures with participation from F2 Capital, Verizon Ventures, Kaedan Capital, and Plug and Play Ventures. This capital injection brings the total amount raised by the company to $7 million.

VOOM, which also incorporates SkyWatch.AI, offers insurance products for drones and “on-demand insurance for episodic usage mobility including e-scooters, powersports, motor boats, small planes, and other modes of transport,” the startup said in a press release.

The startup uses the telemetry-based risk analysis engine developed by SkyWatch.AI for commercial drones. VOOM’s platform collects mobility data points to provide real-time risk assessment in order to customise insurance policies.

“With the rise of on-demand mobility services such as e-scooters, we discovered that in most cases, riders are not covered in case of an accident,” said Tomer Kashi, CEO and Co-Founder of VOOM. “And much more importantly, they are not aware of this fact. VOOM will ensure that users of unique mobility platforms can grab insurance on-the-go from their mobile devices whether they ride, fly, or sail.”

Source. Tech.EU, Andrii Degeler, May 22nd, 2019.

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DoorDash picks up $600M Series G as valuation soars

By Ian Agar

DoorDash, the on-demand food delivery service, cannot stop delivering funding rounds, either.

The company has officially gone parabolic with a $600 million Series G on a stunning $12.6 billion valuation, a nearly 78% surge from its $7.1 billion valuation in February. Newcomer investors Darsana Capital Partners and Sands Capital joined existing investors Coatue Management, Dragoneer, DST Global, Sequoia Capital, Softbank Vision Fund, and Temasek.

DoorDash said Thursday that in 1Q, it saw an astronomical 280% YoY increase in annualized gross merchandise value to $7.5 billion. It's unclear if this figure is compared with 2017's results or if that is a forecast for the rest of 2019. The company did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

The delivery service also reported operations in over 4,000 cities in the US and Canada, with a goal of growing to 100 Canadian cities by the end of the year, up from around 50 currently. 

Perhaps most pivotal in this regard was the company's Series D in March 2018, which saw SoftBank's Vision Fund leading a massive $535 million round. This funding injection reportedly allowed DoorDash to grow from its comparatively tiny 600-city footprint to the enormous list it now oversees.

While DoorDash was happy to expand so quickly thanks to the windfall, SoftBank is also happy to diversify its food delivery bets. The Tokyo-based firm is Uber's largest shareholder, and in turn, has helped fund DoorDash's competitor, Uber Eats.

Profitability question

The topic of profitability is not mentioned in DoorDash's blog post, continuing a wider investment trend of turning a blind eye to blood-red profit/loss statements in favor of pursuing industry disruption.

In hindsight, such priorities were apparent in DoorDash's massive Series D round last year. In allocating the funds, geographical growth was favored over working toward a consistently profitable operation, allowing the company to uproot local, in-house delivery services at restaurants.

The company has also sought to achieve a presence through corporate partnerships and white-label services. For example, on May 2, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts announced a partnership to offer free DoorDash delivery services to guests staying in over 3,700 of the hotel company's locations. Such a partnership complements DoorDash's existing white-label services provided to dining chains such as Denny's and Wingstop.

If DoorDash can continue striking high-profile corporate partnerships while replacing traditional in-house delivery employees at restaurants, a profitable business model could be worked out later to take advantage of an enormous established network.

Source. Pitchbook, Ian Agar, May 23, 2019

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