Self-driving vehicle startup Zoox has expanded to Las Vegas

Zoox, the autonomous vehicle startup, is expanding to Las Vegas, CTO Jesse Levinson said at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

The startup, which has raised $800 million and has been testing on public roads in San Francisco, said Las Vegas is a target market for its autonomous driving fleet and service. Las Vegas will serve as an anchor market for Zoox. The company plans to test, validate and refine its technology with future plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service there, Levinson said.

Zoox received permission from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles in early 2019 to drive autonomously on state roads. The startup is currently mapping and test-driving new routes in the greater Las Vegas region. The permit also allows Zoox to transport passengers, although that is not happening at this time, the company said.

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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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For now, Zoox is doing strategic testing to keep costs in line, CEO Aicha Evans told TechCrunch during Disrupt. That means, Zoox is sending its retrofitted Toyota Highlander autonomous vehicles to Las Vegas for blocks of time, maybe six weeks or so. The company, which has a fleet of more than 30 of these modified vehicles, has now completed five of these deployments.

Over time, Zoox will expand its time and footprint in the city. Zoox plans to start demonstrating its ground-up vehicles on public roads in 2020, with commercial operations soon to follow, the company said,

Zoox says it selected Las Vegas because the region offers an opportunity to extend learning in a second dense urban environment and one that it says has diverse and unique use cases compared to driving in San Francisco. For instance, Las Vegas has reversible lanes, complex pick-up and drop-off zones, high temperatures and more night-time activity, the company said.

Source. TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec, October 3, 2019

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VC Deals Only: Fred Hutch spinout SEngine raises $5.1M to test ca...

VC Deals Only: Fred Hutch spinout SEngine raises $5.1M to test ca...: Seattle startup SEngine Precision Medicine has raised $5.1 million in fresh funding as it looks to commercialize a platform that can matc...

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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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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VC Deals Only: India’s NoBroker raises $50M to help people buy an...

VC Deals Only: India’s NoBroker raises $50M to help people buy an...: An Indian startup that is attempting to improve the way how millions of people in the nation lease or buy an apartment — by not paying ...

India’s NoBroker raises $50M to help people buy and rent without real estate brokers

An Indian startup that is attempting to improve the way how millions of people in the nation lease or buy an apartment — by not paying any brokerage — just raised a significant amount of capital to further expand its business.

NoBroker said on Wednesday it has raised $50 million in a new financing round. The Series D round for the Bangalore-based real estate property operator was led by Tiger Global Management and included participation from existing investor General Atlantic. The five-year-old startup, which closed its previous financing round in June, has raised $121 million to date. The new round valued NoBroker at about $325 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

NoBroker operates in six cities in India: Bengaluru, Chennai, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune. The startup has established itself as one of the largest players in the local real estate business. It operates over 3 million properties on its website and serves about 7 million users. It is adding more than 280,000 new users each month, Amit Kumar, cofounder and CEO of NoBroker, told TechCrunch in an interview.

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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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Real estate brokers in India, as is true in other markets, help people find properties. But they can charge up to 10 months worth of rent (leasing) — or a single-digit percent of the apartment’s worth if someone is buying the property — in urban cities as their commission. NoBroker allows the owner of a property to directly connect with potential tenants to remove brokerage charges from the equation.

The startup makes money in three ways. First, it lets non-paying users get in touch with only nine property owners. Those who wish to contact more property owners are required to pay a fee. Second, property owners can opt to pay NoBroker to have its representatives deal with prospective buyers — in a move that ironically makes the startup serve as a broker.

NoBroker also offers end-to-end services such as rent agreements, home loans, and movers and packers, for which it also charges a fee. The startup says it uses machine learning to speed up the transactions and make it service low-cost.

The startup processes about $14 million in rent each month, Kumar said. This is increasing by 25%-30% each month, he said. NoBroker’s business in Bangalore and Mumbai, two of its largest cities, are already profitable, Kumar said.

The startup will use the fresh capital to expand its business and build more products. It recently launched a community and digital management app to keep a digital log of all the entries — say a Flipkart delivery personnel comes to your house — occurring in a society, and maintain a dialogue with other people in a vicinity. The app also allows users to exchange goods with one another and pay their utility bills, startup’s executives said.

The new financing round is oddly smaller than $51 million NoBroker had raised in June this year. Saurabh Garg, chief business officer of NoBroker, told TechCrunch in an interview that the founding team did not want to dilute their stake in the startup, hence they opted for a smaller round.

NoBroker is competing with a number of players including Proptiger, 99Acres, and heavily backed NestAway, which counts Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global among its investors. NestAway operates in eight Indian cities and has raised north of $100 million to date. Budget hotel startup Oyo, which has already become one of the largest hotel businesses in the world, also operates in NoBroker’s territory with Oyo Living.

But NoBroker’s Kumar said he does not see Oyo and other startups as competition. Instead, “these other players are some of our largest clients,” he said. India’s real estate industry is estimated to grow to $1 trillion in worth by 2030.

The business model of NoBroker has also created new local challenges for the startup. Brokers are unsurprisingly not happy with startups such as NoBroker and have grown hostile in recent years. In recent years, they have attacked and harassed NoBroker employees. So much so that the startup had to delist its address from Google Maps. But Kumar said the mindset of people is changing.

Source. TechCrunch, Manish Singh,  October 1, 2019

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VC Deals Only: Amboss, the knowledge platform for medical profess...

VC Deals Only: Amboss, the knowledge platform for medical profess...: Amboss , the Berlin-based “medtech” startup that originally offered a learning app for students but has since pivoted to a knowledge platfo...

Amboss, the knowledge platform for medical professionals, scores €30M Series B

Amboss, the Berlin-based “medtech” startup that originally offered a learning app for students but has since pivoted to a knowledge platform for medical professionals, has raised €30 million in Series B funding.

The round is led by Partech’s growth fund, with Target Global acting as a co-investor. Existing investors Cherry Ventures, Wellington Partners and Holtzbrinck Digital, also participated.

Launched in 2014 as a study platform for medical students, Amboss has since evolved to offer what it claims is the “most comprehensive and technologically-advanced” knowledge platform for medical professionals. It has been developed by a group of 70 doctors and 40 software engineers who work together in small cross-functional teams.

“Medical Knowledge does not find its way into practice efficiently,” argues Amboss co-CEO Benedikt Hochkirchen. “This has two main root causes: the way we educate doctors is outdated, and the way doctors access knowledge is inefficient.”

Specifically, he says that medical students are still taught to memorize facts, which become outdated quickly, and there isn’t enough emphasis on understanding and application. In contract, Amboss’ “smart learning” technology claims to not only help students achieve higher scores in their medical exams but furthers their contextual understanding and therefore lays the foundation “to be better prepared for clinical practice.”

“In clinical practice, doctors would adapt 50% of their decisions if they had the latest and precise knowledge at hand,” says Hochkirchen. “In real life on the wards, doctors lack the time to research and find the relevant knowledge. For them, Amboss’ smart guidance app is there to provide instant, convenient and reliable medical knowledge to carry out the best possible care.”

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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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The end result, says the Amboss co-CEO, is that the startup’s app reduces the average research time needed for doctors to make a clinical decision from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. Crucially, its knowledge base contains the most recent medical facts and guidelines “in every single case.”

“Young doctors have to take over a lot of responsibility early in their career,” adds Hochkirchen. “Career starters are regularly the first touch point with a doctor when a patient enters a hospital. Often young doctors do not feel properly prepared for the real-life challenges in those situations. Amboss is the source of choice to master those decisions, e.g. with emergency algorithms and lead symptoms.”

Likewise, more experienced and specialised doctors can also find utility in Amboss, as guidelines and therapies of choice are constantly changing. “It is almost impossible for the doctor to stay up to date for every possible indication,” he says. “Amboss provides them with precise knowledge based on latest guidelines to ensure doctors choose the best therapy possible.”

Or, put a another way, Amboss is attempting to build a “Google for medicine.” “They are tackling a very exciting space which will have a positive impact on society, bringing knowledge levels and skillsets of medical doctors to a higher level,” Cherry Ventures’ Christian Meermann tells me.

Meanwhile, armed with new capital, Amboss says it will accelerate the global rollout of its product with a focus on the U.S. In addition, the startup will further develop its product, for both generalist and specialist doctors, “to help improve their daily clinical decision-making.”

Source. TechCrunch, Steve O'Hear,  September 30, 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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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