Sunday, November 17, 2019
VC Deals Only: VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. DroneDeploy raises...
VC Deals Only: VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. DroneDeploy raises...: VC Deals Only HealthCare.com , a NYC-based provider of technology-enabled health insurance solutions, secured $18m in Series B funding. Th...
VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. DroneDeploy raises $35 million for drone management and logistics tools
VC Deals Only
HealthCare.com, a NYC-based provider of technology-enabled health insurance solutions, secured $18m in Series B funding. The round, which brought the total capital raised to over $27m, was led by Second Alpha Partners, with participation from Axis Capital and CNO Financial Group.The company intends to use the capital to fund technology, engineering and data-science investments, expand consumer experience solutions and accelerate the development and marketing of its proprietary insurance products. More
Chip, the London-based fintech that created an automatic savings account, has raised £7.3 million, with £3.8 million crowdfunded by customers and the remainder from unnamed angel investors. The campaign ran for three weeks in September and is currently Crowdcube’s most participated-in crowdfund, with 7,182 investors. More
LawnStarter, an Austin, TX-based on-demand platform for outdoor services, raised $10.5m in growth funding. The round was led by Edison Partners with participation from existing investor Lerer Hippeau.The company intends to use the funds to continue its growth in lawn care across the US and add new outdoor service lines including landscaping, fertilization, pest control, and tree care.More
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.More
Mobile monetization gets harder and harder every year (heck, I’d bet this gets more difficult by the week in this ultra-competitive market). Companies have long been trying to solve this problem for studios and publishers, and the latest one to offer tools to help here is Wappier.Wappier is a platform that uses AI models to predict consumer and user behavior, and it just raised $4 million in a seed round More
DroneDeploy, a startup developing a holistic cloud-based drone mapping and analytics platform, today announced that it’s closed a $35 million series D round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Energize Ventures, AirTree, Emergence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital also participated in the tranche, which follows on the heels of a $20 million series C in June 2018 and brings DroneDeploy’s total raised to $90 million.More
Sponsor
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.
New Funds
CVC Capital Partners, a private equity and investment advisory firm, closed CVC Growth Partners Fund II, at $1.6 billion.Fund II exceeded its $1 billion target and, including a sidecar co-investment vehicle, has secured commitments of $1.6 billion. Fund II enjoys a diverse global investor base, spread across North America, Europe, the Middle-East and Asia. More
Angular Ventures, the early-stage enterprise and “deep tech”-focused VC firm founded by former DFJ Esprit partner Gil Dibner, is announcing the closing of its debut fund at $41 million. Targeting startups in Europe and Israel, Angular Ventures has been operating in so-called “stealth mode” for almost two years, seeing its portfolio grow to 12 companies. The VC typically invests between $250,000 and $1.5 million, from writing a startup’s first cheque to Series A. It says it aims to do five-seven new investments per year.More
Alibaba
Group Holding, the record holder of the largest global initial public
offering, has unveiled a secondary listing plan in Hong Kong, in a vote
of confidence for the local financial market as the worst political
crisis in the city’s history threatens its status as a global financial
centre.The
e-commerce giant aims to sell 500 million new shares, with 487.5
million set aside for international offering and the rest for Hong Kong
public, according to a filing in New York. More
When Beyond Meat's post-initial public offering expired on October 29, the company's stock fell 24% as roughly 48 million shares suddenly became eligible to trade on the market.In the weeks since, the post-IPO lockup expiration has continued to add downward pressure on shares of the plant-based meat alternatives company. The stock has fallen an additional 6% percent from October 29 through Monday's close. More
Sponsor
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.
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.
HealthCare.com, a NYC-based provider of technology-enabled health insurance solutions, secured $18m in Series B funding. The round, which brought the total capital raised to over $27m, was led by Second Alpha Partners, with participation from Axis Capital and CNO Financial Group.The company intends to use the capital to fund technology, engineering and data-science investments, expand consumer experience solutions and accelerate the development and marketing of its proprietary insurance products. More
Chip, the London-based fintech that created an automatic savings account, has raised £7.3 million, with £3.8 million crowdfunded by customers and the remainder from unnamed angel investors. The campaign ran for three weeks in September and is currently Crowdcube’s most participated-in crowdfund, with 7,182 investors. More
LawnStarter, an Austin, TX-based on-demand platform for outdoor services, raised $10.5m in growth funding. The round was led by Edison Partners with participation from existing investor Lerer Hippeau.The company intends to use the funds to continue its growth in lawn care across the US and add new outdoor service lines including landscaping, fertilization, pest control, and tree care.More
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.More
Mobile monetization gets harder and harder every year (heck, I’d bet this gets more difficult by the week in this ultra-competitive market). Companies have long been trying to solve this problem for studios and publishers, and the latest one to offer tools to help here is Wappier.Wappier is a platform that uses AI models to predict consumer and user behavior, and it just raised $4 million in a seed round More
DroneDeploy, a startup developing a holistic cloud-based drone mapping and analytics platform, today announced that it’s closed a $35 million series D round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Energize Ventures, AirTree, Emergence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital also participated in the tranche, which follows on the heels of a $20 million series C in June 2018 and brings DroneDeploy’s total raised to $90 million.More
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.
New Funds
CVC Capital Partners, a private equity and investment advisory firm, closed CVC Growth Partners Fund II, at $1.6 billion.Fund II exceeded its $1 billion target and, including a sidecar co-investment vehicle, has secured commitments of $1.6 billion. Fund II enjoys a diverse global investor base, spread across North America, Europe, the Middle-East and Asia. More
Angular Ventures, the early-stage enterprise and “deep tech”-focused VC firm founded by former DFJ Esprit partner Gil Dibner, is announcing the closing of its debut fund at $41 million. Targeting startups in Europe and Israel, Angular Ventures has been operating in so-called “stealth mode” for almost two years, seeing its portfolio grow to 12 companies. The VC typically invests between $250,000 and $1.5 million, from writing a startup’s first cheque to Series A. It says it aims to do five-seven new investments per year.More
IPOs
When Beyond Meat's post-initial public offering expired on October 29, the company's stock fell 24% as roughly 48 million shares suddenly became eligible to trade on the market.In the weeks since, the post-IPO lockup expiration has continued to add downward pressure on shares of the plant-based meat alternatives company. The stock has fallen an additional 6% percent from October 29 through Monday's close. More
Sponsor
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.
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.
Exits
Epic Games announced it has acquired Quixel,
a startup that created a huge “photogrammetry” asset library of real
world imagery that can be used in animated films or video games. More
Friday, November 15, 2019
VC Deals Only: AMP Robotics raises $16 million to sort recyclable...
VC Deals Only: AMP Robotics raises $16 million to sort recyclable...: AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that sort recyclable material, this morning announced that it has ...
AMP Robotics raises $16 million to sort recyclable materials autonomously
AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems
that sort recyclable material, this morning announced that it has closed
a $16 million series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. BV, Closed
Loop Partners, Congruent Ventures, and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners
(an infrastructure firm spun out of Sidewalk Labs and backed by
Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan) also participated in
the round, which brings AMP Robotics’ total raised to nearly $20 million
following a seed round totaling $3.5 million.
The news comes just over a month after AMP Robotics installed 14 of its AI-guided
robots at Single Stream Recyclers in Florida — the single largest
global deployment in the recycling industry, the company claims —
following deployments at facilities in California, Colorado, Indiana,
Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and
elsewhere in the U.S. CEO Matanya Horowitz said the newfound capital
will bolster AMP Robotics’ operations in the nearly $12.26 billion waste sorting robotics market and drive product research and development.
"Our new partners at Sequoia have a history of building category-defining
businesses, and we are deeply excited to be executing on this vision
with their experience, along with our existing world-class consortium of
investors,” said Horowitz, who founded AMP Robotics in 2015. “We are
perfectly positioned to expand the scope of our technology and the
geographies where we do business, furthering our mission to change the
fundamental economics of recycling and help make the circular economy
possible.”
AMP Robotics asserts its platform delivers higher and more consistent
pick rates than typical manual processes and that it offers holistic
monitoring of material streams without requiring retrofitting. It’s
modular in design, enabling facilities mangers to adapt it to existing
workflows, and it’s tailored to individual brands and SKUs of recyclable
objects. To this end, AMP Robotics’ products can process not only
metals, batteries, capacitors, plastics, PCBs, wires, cartons,
cardboard, cups, aluminum, and thin film, but also materials made of
metal, mixed wood, asphalt, bricks, concrete, and mixed plastics.
AMP Cortex, AMP Robotics’ robotics control system, leverages a
combination of AI algorithms and physical robots to orchestrate sorting,
picking, and placing tasks. A three-armed picker machine with an
adaptable frame area and height sits over a conveyor belt, held in place
by a moveable steel frame. It’s fed data from AMP Neuron, which uses
computer vision to distinguish visual features and self-improves by
processing “millions” of images in the cloud across AMP Robotics’
network, such that it’s able to more accurately sort objects and learn
new classes of materials while adapting to packaging design and lighting
changes.
All that data feeds into AMP Insights, an online visualization tool
that monitors material stream activity and performance. Real-time
notifications sent via text and email keep managers abreast of
goings-on, including potential equipment issues and hazards. And AMP
Insights tracks key commodities to determine things like material
composition per bale, known value created or lost on residual lines, and
per-hauling load.
“We are excited to partner with AMP because their technology is
changing the economics of the recycling industry,” said Sequoia partner
Shaun Maguire, who plans to join the company’s board of directors. “Over
the last few years, the industry has had their margins squeezed by
labor shortages and low commodity prices. The end result is an industry
proactively searching for cost-saving alternatives and added
opportunities to increase revenue by capturing more high-value
recyclables, and AMP is emerging as the leading solution.”
Source. Venture Beat, Kyle Wiggers, November 14, 2019
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.
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.
***
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.
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.
Thursday, November 14, 2019
VC Deals Only: Convoy raises $400 million to expand its on-demand...
VC Deals Only: Convoy raises $400 million to expand its on-demand...: Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, has raised $400 million in a Series D funding round as it ai...
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 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
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.
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.
***
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
VC Deals Only: LawnStarter Raises $10.5M in Growth Funding
VC Deals Only: LawnStarter Raises $10.5M in Growth Funding: LawnStarte r , an Austin, TX-based on-demand platform for outdoor services, raised $10.5m in growth funding. The round was led by Ed...
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