|
Top News
According to Bloomberg, Apple is working on a new service that will let consumers pay for any Apple Pay purchase in installments over time, rivaling the offerings of services like Affirm, PayPal, and Klarna. The service, known internally as Apple Pay Later, will use Goldman Sachs as the lender for the loans. More here.
|
|
Massive Fundings
Amperity, a five-year-old, Seattle-based starter that helps large, consumer-focused enterprises organize their own data troves to develop better profiles of their customers, has raised $100 million in Series D funding at a post-money valuation of more than $1 billion. HighSage Ventures led the round, joined by earlier backers Tiger Global, Declaration Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Madera Technology Partners. The company has now raised $187 million altogether.
Arctic Wolf, a nine-year-old, Eden Prairie, Mn.-based cybersecurity company that provides security monitoring for small and mid-sized organizations, has raised $150 million in Series F funding at a post-money valuation of $4.3 billion. Viking Global Investors, Owl Rock and earlier investors cobbled together the newest round; the company has now raised just shy of $500 million altogether, says TechCrunch. More here.
Flock Safety, a four-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based public safety startup that says its cameras and devices detect objective evidence, decode it with machine learning, and deliver it to police departments, has raised $150 million in Series D funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Previous Flock Safety investors Meritech, Bedrock, Matrix Partners, and Initialized Capital also participated in the round. Hypepotamus has more here.
Foundry, a months-old, Dallas, Tex.-based platform that aims to acquire, nurture and grow enduring online brands, has raised $100 million from LightBay Capital and Monogram Capital Partners. The company is being run by Helen Vaid, who most recently spent nearly five years as the global chief customer officer of Pizza Hut. More here.
Impact, a 13-year-old, Santa Barbara, Ca.-based maker of software that manages an enterprise’s partnerships and integrations, has raised $150 million in funding at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion led by Qatar Investment Authority, with participation from Providence Public. Judging by Crunchbase data, the company has now raised at least $260 million from investors to date. TechCrunch has more here.
Prime Medicine, a two-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based gene editing startup co-founded by biochemist David Liu, has raised $200 million in Series B funding and (and disclosed an earlier, previous unannounced, $115 million Series A round). The company is backed by Arch Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital, GV, Newpath Partners, Casdin Capital, Cormorant, Moore Strategic Ventures, PSP Investments, Redmile Group, Samsara BioCapital and T. Rowe Price. Endpoints News has more here.
Remote, a 2.5-year-old, North Holland, Netherlands-based startup whose HR platform allows businesses to onboard, pay and work with remote employees and contractors wherever they’re based, has raised $150 million in funding at a post-money valuation of $1 billion. Accel led the round, joined by earlier investors Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. The company has now raised roughly $200 million altogether. CNBC has more here.
Sourcegraph, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that says its tools can find and fix things across all code, no matter the repository or language, has raised $125 million in Series D funding at a post-money valuation of $2.6 billion, which is triple where it was valued just six months ago. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, joined by Insight Partners, Geodesic Capital and other, earlier investors. The company has now raised almost $225 million, according to Crunchbase data. TechCrunch has more here.
Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings
Bayesian Health, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based startup that's building models for sepsis detection, patient deterioration and bedsores, has emerged from stealth mode with backing $15 million led by Andreessen Horowitz. MedCity News has more here.
Eucalyptus, a two-year-old, Sydney, Australia-based Telehealth platform, has raised $22.3 million in Series B funding led by NewView Capital, with participation from earlier investors Blackbird Ventures and W23, and new investor AirTree Ventures. The company has now raised $32.8 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.
Heart Aerospace, a three-year-old, Göteborg, Sweden-based startup at work on an electric regional airliner, has raised $35 million in Series A funding co-led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, United’s venture arm and Mesa, with participation with seed investors EQT Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital. TechCrunch has more here.
Mytonomy, a 10-year-old, Bethesda, Md.-based, healthcare-focused customer relationship management platform that aims to inspire consumer-internet-like user engagement by managing and delivering short form video content with integrated surveys and real-time communications, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Level Equity, which has taken a minority ownership stake in the company. Philips and Carilion Clinic also participated in the Series B. More here.
Nas Academy, an 18-month-old, Singapore-based startup whose online platform gives creators the tools to create their own classes and academies for fans to attend, has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other backers in the round include angel investor Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase COO Emilie Choi, TechAviv Founder Partners, 500 Startups and Metapurse. TechCrunch has more here.
Syfe, a four-year-old, Singapore-based startup that makes an investment app, has raised $30 million in Series B by returning investor Valar Ventures, which led the company's Series A round nine months ago. Returning investors Presight Capital and Unbound also participated in the round, which brings the company's total funding to $52.4 million. TechCrunch has more here.
Smaller Fundings
Superfluid Finance, an 18-month-old, Tallinn, Estonia-based, Ethereum-based money streaming protocol that says it automates recurring transactions, has raised $9 million in seed funding. Multicoin Capital led the round, joined by Semantic Ventures, DeFiance Capital, Delphi Digital, DeFi Alliance, Divergence Ventures, and others, including angel investor Balaji Srinivasan. The Block has more here.
|
|
New Funds
Electric Capital, a 3.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based venture firm writing seed and early-stage check s to cryptocurrency layer one protocols, crypto and blockchain infrastructure businesses, and applications of blockchain and privacy-preserving technologies, has filed SEC paperwork for a $398 million fund, the firm's second. Cofounder Avichal Garg was formerly a director of product management and a part-time advisor to Y Combinator; his cofounder, Curtis Spencer, was previously CTO at Cruxlux, a semantic search company. More here.
Lachy Groom, a former Stripe product manager, has finished raising his third, $250 million venture fund, according to The Information. The new fund, called LGF3, follows Groom’s second, $110 million fund, launched last year, and will similarly focus on investing in seed and Series A deals. More here.
Hyperplane Venture Capital, a six-year-old, Boston VC investment firm focused on early-stages startups, is raising an $80 million opportunities-type fund, per an SEC filing first flagged by Boston Business Journal. The outfit typically makes initial investments ranging from $250,000 to $3 million in companies that are leveraging AI to solve enterprise and industrial problems. It currently has 53 (known) companies in its portfolio. More here.
Japanese chipmaker Rohm has launched a 5 billion yen ($45.3 million) venture capital fund to invest in next-generation semiconductor technologies. Nikkei Asia has more here.
Shortly after raising an oversubscribed €445 million ($540 million) fund to support clinical-stage healthcare companies, Sofinnova Partners has gathered €63 million ($75 million) for its third fund aimed at nascent medtech developers. The European venture capital firm’s MD Start III is geared toward company building and early-stage financing. FierceBiotech has the story here.
|
|
Exits
The online chat platform Discord is buying Sentropy, a company that makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate. Terms of the deal aren't being disclosed. Sentropy launched out of stealth last summer with an AI system designed to detect, track and cleanse platforms of online harassment and abuse. At the time, it also revealed it had raised $13 million in funding from Initialized Capital, King River Capital, Horizons Ventures and Playground Global, among others. TechCrunch has more here.
The Baltimore-area fund of funds group Greenspring Associates has an agreement in place to be acquired by the New York-based investment firm StepStone Group, the companies said last week. The deal is worth $725 million: $185 million in cash and $540 million in stock and partnership units, the companies said. With the acquisition, Greenspring joins a publicly traded company. Technical.ly Baltimore has more here.
LeBron James’s SpringHill Company is exploring a potential sale, according to The Information. The company, founded by James and partner Maverick Carter in 2007 as SpringHill Entertainment, is courting interest for either a partial investment or an outright sale a valuation of up to $750 million, says the outlet, noting that the company "includes a constellation of businesses such as its entertainment studio for movies, TV shows and podcasts, as well as Uninterrupted, a digital media brand producing content for multiple platforms and selling apparel and other products online, and a brand consulting firm called Robot." Last year, Springhill, which looks to empower Black creators, raised $100 million from investors, including Guggenheim Partners, Main Street Advisors, Elisabeth Murdoch and Jason Stein.
More here.
Publicly traded ZoomInfo announced this morning it intends to acquire the six-year-old conversational sales intelligence tool Chorus.ai for $575 million. (It had raised $100 million from investors). Sales intelligence, Chorus’s market, is a hot space that uses AI to “listen” to sales conversations to help improve interactions between salespeople and customers, notes TechCrunch; it adds that ZoomInfo -- which IPO'd last year -- is mostly known for providing information about customers, so the acquisition expands the acquiring company’s platform in a significant way. More here.
|
|
People
Sarah Du has joined Bessemer Venture Partners as an investor after spending 10 months as a fellow with Pear VC and helping to build Princeton's first student venture fund. More here.
Last month, the talent agency WME signed Nait Jones, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who has become a leading personality on Clubhouse. More here in the Hollywood Reporter.
Maxim Owen has been hired as a principal by the Pasadena, Ca.-based, healthcare-focused venture outfit Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health (though Owen is and will remain in New York). He formerly led the ventures team at StartUp Health.
Steven Woods, the head of Google's engineering operations in Canada, is leaving his role to join the Canadian venture firm Inovia. He takes up his new position as partner and CTO of the organization next month. The Record has more here.
|
|
Sponsored By ...
Anduin’s data rooms are forged from our market-leading fundraising and investor workflows. We’ve packaged all the best-in-class features fund managers expect from a VDR, like document analytics and audit trails — along with industry-grade security — into a modern and intuitive interface that’s reassuring to investors. Make an impression with custom branded landing pages; while benefiting from Anduin’s interoperable suite of products that gather your investor management needs under a single universal login. Arrange a demo today!
|
|
Data
The most active North American startup investors right now.
|
|
Essential Reads
Beijing’s tech crackdown could imperil the innovation that brought modern finance to underserved people — but also led to concerns about reckless lending and borrowing.
Amazon has acquired a team of more than a dozen wireless internet experts from Facebook in an effort to boost its multibillion-dollar effort to launch thousands of satellites and offer broadband service in the U.S. and abroad, reports The Information.The deal, it says, marks an end to Facebook’s years-long experimentation with using its own equipment to deliver broadband via satellite to remote areas, and an acceleration of Amazon’s push to do so.
|
|
Retail Therapy
Sotheby’s is set to sell the sketches from Christo’s final artwork this fall.
|
Sponsored By ...
SaaStr, the world's largest non-vendor B2B software community, is back - in person! Don't miss this year's Annual on Sept 27-29 at the San Mateo County Event Center. The three-day conference will bring together more than 10,000 global SaaS founders, executives, and venture capitalists for a series of high-quality content sessions and networking opportunities. Across five stages more than 300 SaaS leaders will share their hard-earned learnings and actionable insights to help you scale up and grow your company faster. Readers can grab 20% off tickets with code StrictlyVC.
|
StrictlyVC StrictlyVC, LLC, 1 Blackfield Drive, No. 239, Tiburon, CA 94920 Unsubscribe - Unsubscribe Preferences |
|
|
|
|
|
