Category: angel investors

Mona is a San Francisco, CA-based developer of the metaverse platform designed to facilitate any creator to build, mint, and sell metaverse worlds. The company’s platform provides 3D environments, artifacts, and portals, enabling creators to make and earn.

Mona was funded $14.6 million led by Protocol Labs, Archetype, and Collab+Currency with the participation of other investors Placeholder, Venture Reality Fund, SV Angel, Fourth Revolution Capital, OpenSea Ventures, Polygon Studios, LongHash Ventures, Everyrealm, Ready Player DAO, POAP Ventures, Gaingels, The Grey Trust, and angel investors.

CEO of Mona Justin Melillo sees it as building an economy for artists and collectors to participate in a shared digital universe meaningfully. The company doesn’t market virtual land or tokens. It doesn’t demand creators for anything upfront and builds tools, systems, and protocols for the open metaverse.

Mona delivers the leading and only platform and network for creators to build, mint, and sell interactive metaverse worlds as NFTs. The world-building platform is complimentary for anyone to develop and access through their browser, and creators can stamp their metaverse on Ethereum/Polygon. Creators are already operating Mona to create and showcase photorealistic pieces of architecture, interesting art, dynamic 3D gardens, immersive POAP scavenger quests, special virtual events and concerts, and mysterious getaway spaces.

The metaverse directs to a connected network of virtual worlds where someone can interact with each other online. In contrast, many companies seek to capitalize on the metaverse by trading land, real estate, and other virtual assets. Mona is dedicated to building an open metaverse that does not demand to buy, enter, or use. The Mona group has been public since day one, and their platform lets collectors invest directly in experiential virtual worlds’ creators. In addition, it will enable creators to design their art willingly and make a living by creating in the metaverse without facing financial constraints.

Melillo said their mission at Mona is to make the metaverse a social network where creators can thrive. A place to build worlds, not walls. The metaverse doesn’t own big tech companies — it can, and will, be a place for everyone.

Juan Benet, CEO of Protocol Labs, stated that Mona is building the tools, systems, and protocols to grow the open metaverse. They scornfully support their clever work as they develop the infrastructure for creators and developers to build and own the open metaverse. In addition, they will spend countless hours inside the high-quality virtual experiences hosted on Mona.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Makelog is a Walnut, CA-based developer of communication tools for product teams designed to help companies communicate what they are shipping to their internal and external stakeholders. The company’s device allows sharing of product updates, big or small, with their users and internal stakeholders, by combining with data sources. Where the work creates and autogenerates product updates, helping product owners to share the product updates with their stakeholders and members to capture every relevant update.

Makelog was funded $3 million, led by Accel with participation from Basecamp Fund, Formulate Ventures, Bluewatch Ventures, and several industry angel investors.

The new funding intends to expand operations and its development platform, doubling its product capabilities, allowing continuous communication, and combining more deeply into the products and services that customers already use.

Makelog CEO and Founder JJ Nguyen started Makelog to help fast-shipping software teams match their rate of release communication with their shipping velocity, which they call continuous communication. But they’ve always had that overarching mission of helping technical and business teams grow in the same direction and converge on a common language.

Before having a product like Makelog, she found that communication was more ad hoc, where she was constantly asking engineers about upcoming changes. This task wasn’t always easy because they focused on making those changes. As a result, it took a kind of information horse-trading to get what she needed.

She said she wanted to entirely transform the traditional change log and make it more useful for everyone involved. Too considerable information is as bad as too little. So, they’re trying to take a giant hammer to traditional release notes, encouraging folks to communicate at this minimum marketable unit level, making it easy for them to route individual updates to the right folks at the right time.

Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel, said the vital scope around feature development, bug fixes, and performance advancements is routinely failed to the chaos of fast growth. Makelog programmatically structures invention data, so an organization has a more energetic pulse on what’s shipping and to whom it counts. Driving that visibility levels up the whole company and hugely impacts sales, marketing, and triumph.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

GreyNoise Intelligence, a Washington, DC-based. Develop a cybersecurity platform developed to analyze and determine malware threat attacks. The company’s platform identifies internet background noise caused by sources that increase the volume of security alerts to collect and keep a baseline of expected omnidirectional mass-scan traffic, enabling businesses to streamline and prioritize threats analysis efficiently.

GreyNoise Intelligence was funded $15 million led by Radian Capital with participation from CRV, Inner Loop, Stone Mill Ventures, strategic angel investors, and Paladin Capital. The company plans to use the new budgets to accelerate the development and distribution of its threat intelligence data solution, which helps security teams waste less on irrelevant or harmless activity and focus more on targeted and emerging threats.

A startup company is a self-styled “anti-threat intelligence” company that essentially provides a spam filter for internet threat alerts. Just as inboxes flooded with unwanted emails and unsolicited junk, security operations analysts attacked by constant, often meaningless warnings. While numerous of these can be the signs of a targeted cyberattack, most are false positives from internet background noise, such as soft scanning done by security firms, researchers, and academics. However, all these alerts require manual triage, often leading to missed threats and productivity problems.

The startup looks to solve this issue by filtering out soft security alerts, leaving security experts to deal with the ones that matter. It accomplishes this through its network of 5,000 passive sensors that sit in data centers worldwide, collecting, analyzing, and labeling data on IPs that scan the internet.

Stone Mill Ventures and Paladin Capital said GreyNoise plans to build out its product further and “drastically” grow the size and scope of data collection measures.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Calaxy, a Los Angeles, CA-based. The operator of social marketplace for creators designed to put the modern fan at the center of all the action. The company’s marketplace offers direct and intimate experiences using cutting-edge blockchain technology, enabling the blockchain industry to scale to users globally seamlessly.

Calaxy was funded $26 million co-led by Animoca Brands and HBAR Foundation with support from strategic angel investors of Polygon. The fresh capital will eventually used to expand its platform and products.

The startup company was co-founded by tech entrepreneur Solo Ceesay and NBA star Spencer Dinwiddie. The name Calaxy is a portmanteau of “creators galaxy.” The startup aims to build a new infrastructure that allows content creators, ranging from small influencers to big-time celebrities, to have ownership and equitable exchange of value compared to the current social media landscape.

Ceesay said the platform allows each creator to mint their cryptocurrencies that their fans can buy to interact with their economy or trade value for a social media engagement, Ceesay said. Its utility derives from the traditional Web 2.0 social media applications like Patreon and Cameo, where fans can engage with celebrities through social tokens.

In the future, the tokens on Calaxy can fluctuate based on market demand, and each creator could have dynamically priced assets, but they currently held at a pegged value to the U.S. dollar.

The social token represents a piece of a creator’s eventual own economy. This token is capturing your value; if the creator influences so many people, there’s no reason the creator shouldn’t have a publicly verifiable market cap or a value as a person.

YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram have large, centralized entities that make money off ads and businesses, so they’re not monetizing the creator – they’re monetizing the brand. But in Calaxy, creators should be able to control their success and take their social token and bring it anywhere to make sense specifically for them. The idea of a social token opens the playground so creators can monetize and connect with fans directly without an intermediary involved.

Yat Siu, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, remarked that social networks in their current form grant the user minimal rewards. Calaxy seeks to flip this model over to drive more significant benefits to the user. With its strong leadership and by mediating personalized fan experiences through Web3 while including digital collectibles in those experiences, they believe that Calaxy could become one of the brilliant stars of tomorrow’s social media landscape.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

LaunchNotes is a San Francisco, CA-based developer of product change communication software designed to deliver better customer experiences by keeping teams and users ahead of upcoming product changes. The company’s software centralizes all release communication in one source of truth that anyone can access, enabling businesses to get regular updates by workstream, version, team, or what maps to an organization structure.

LaunchNotes was funded $15 million, led by Insight Partners, with participation from Atlassian Ventures, The New Normal Fund, Essence VC, and existing angel investors of Cowboy Ventures and Bull City Venture Partners. This new funding will support the expansion of LaunchNotes from a product change communication solution to a complete platform for Product Success.

When LaunchNotes originators Jake Brereton and Tyler Davis worked jointly at Atlassian, they noticed it was constantly challenging to communicate shifts from the development teams to product teams and other internal and external audiences.

The internal teams required to comprehend what was coming and if the changes were substantial or not, whether that’s a transaction, sales, support, or any other department that was operating with customers. In addition, the customers needed to know what had changed and how it affected them. This company has typically done this via release notes. Still, the creators saw these as stagnant and deficient in communicating what they needed to know about the latest release to the various stakeholders.

With modern development strategies, the fast rate of changes, some small, some not, often affecting dozens or even hundreds of shifts per day, caused retaining challenging.

Brereton and Davis noticed a chance to improve this process and produce release information to different parties the information they needed to see. So, they left Atlassian and started LaunchNotes to fulfill that goal.

LaunchNotes has achieved breakout traction with its initial product offerings in just two years. Last year, the business reported revenue growth and new customer growth.

Tyle said they would be laser-focused on unlocking Product Success by modernizing the product development cycle for teams everywhere. They are excited to deliver a Product Success Platform that connects the substance parts of the expansion cycle — such as comms, feedback, and planning — into a unified customer experience. By creating this seamless loop and removing the most common pain points, we will enable today’s product teams to build the great technologies of the future.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Parallel Learning is an NYC-based startup that develops of learning assessment platform created to analyze and empower students with learning differences. The company specializes in virtual neurodevelopmental reviews and support services for conditions such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and executive dysfunction while delivering the resources and motivation to perform in the classroom, thereby helping students get to the root of their issues and build confidence.

Parallel Learning was funded $20 million led by Tiger Global with participation from Obvious Ventures, Barry Sternlich’s JAWS, and existing individual angel investors of Vine Ventures. The new funding will let Parallel scale-up, as a tech platform it’s more comfortable. They still need to scout new psychologists, speak with new school districts, and continue working on and sustaining the product itself.

The company started when it became clear that a new approach needed in the assessment and therapy space. In past years, if a kid required an assessment, they got it, and then they got the tutoring or accommodation suggested.

The number of kids qualifying for special education has increased in recent years, and districts have struggled to keep up with the assessments, let alone the particular teaching load this growing cohort needs.

As a result, parents may wait half a year before a child can be given an official diagnosis or advice, and all that time, they may be working on reading, keeping up in class, or relating to their peers. And that before the pandemic, these same numbers, along with comorbidities like depression and anxiety, shot up even higher.

Parallel’s assistance goes beyond initial psychological evaluations to deliver continuing help to students, including skill-based tutoring, executive function coaching, behavioral therapy, and speech and language therapy. In addition, services are available directly to families and school districts as part of the company’s enterprise offering.

The company standard is specific and not different from how agencies and psychologists work already, but with the extra tech-enabled streamlining of paperwork and scheduling. And then, of course, there’s the advantage of not driving anywhere to get or provide the services.

The mission of Parallel Learning is to perform hand-in-hand with school communities and families to provide the most high-quality developmental services to students across the nation. With twenty percent of children challenged by learning and thinking distinctions, they intended to offer permanent, practical, and reasonable solutions to help those learners succeed in and out of the classroom.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

ChargeLab a California and Toronto-based startup that develops electric vehicle charging software designed to accelerate and commercialize electric mobility. The company’s software monetizes and creates new user experiences with an electric vehicle charger infrastructure and battery swap management, enabling clients to with an open management platform that provides flexibility and expandability.

ChargeLab was funded $15 million, led by King River Capital, a venture capital fund targeting post-revenue, high-growth software businesses in large markets, and ABB E-Mobility. With the participation of existing investors, Root Ventures, Highline Beta, Third Sphere, Maple VC, and other strategic angel investors in Construct Capital.

The new funding will help the company go from its seed stage-level solution of connecting chargers and controlling them in the cloud to more advanced milestones. To accelerate growth and expand business operations.

As part of ChargeLab’s commercial agreement with ABB, the two companies will launch a bundled hardware and software solution for fleets, multifamily buildings, and other commercial EV charging use cases, according to Zak Lefevre, founder, and CEO of ChargeLab. While the partnership with ABB will certainly give ChargeLab the resources it needs to build out and scale its enterprise software, Lefevre noted that ABB’s interest in ChargeLab stems from its need for better out-of-the-box software in North America.

ChargeLab’s core product is its cloud-based charging station management system, which provides apps for EV drivers, dashboards for fleet managers, and open APIs for third-party system integration. According to the company, the hardware-agnostic software, which runs on the edge and in the cloud, also includes automated monitoring of chargers, pricing and access rules, payment processing, and electrical load balancing.

The Head of Ventures of ABB EL Ventures, Malin Carlstrom, said the EV market continues to undergo massive growth, and the value proposition of ChargeLab’s hardware-agnostic software has become increasingly apparent to both vendors and users. They believe that Zak and his team poised to create intelligent charging techniques and that ABB can be a strategic and financial supporter, benefiting both parties.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

Altro is a San Francisco, CA-based platform that operates an online credit building platform designed to help users convert their subscription payments into credit history. It allows members to link their recurring payments, such as rent and subscription payments, to leverage unseen and uncounted costs to build their credit score, enabling individuals to upscale their credit scores.

Altro was funded $18 million led by Pendulum, with support from Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures, Black Capital Fund, Citi Ventures, Concrete Rose Fund, and individual angel investors such as Dick Parsons and Deborah Quazzo, among others. The software company intends to utilize the new funding to build its credit and financial literacy program and bring education and economic power to those excluded from traditional finance systems.

Before the Altro build, the founder Michael Broughton had trouble securing the necessary financing to pay his tuition in college. That experience stuck with him. Then, he met Ayush Jain at the University of Southern California, and the couple connected over their view that credit access should be free. They came up with the concept of helping people make credit via recurring payment setups such as virtual subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu.

In December 2019, they started Altro and hunkering down in a Hacker House with a few others to make out a platform that locates a person’s recurring transactions and links them to a trade line that reports to all three credit bureaus. For the unacquainted, a tradeline is a line of data that goes directly into a bureau’s system that affects a person’s FICO score, used for underwriting.

Broughton said they’re not creating their score, but instead, it is a direct correlation to your actual score enhanced over time, which a user can see in our app. The users would be spending a charge, but a percentage goes to them rather than the companies. They don’t want to charge users for access to something they already have.

Altro concentrates on educating users via a catalog of over 350 educational audio clips covering topics like cryptocurrency, investing, and trading. Watching the snippets, the company says, allows users to become more financially savvy and positively impacts users’ scores the more they engage.

Also, the company plans to allow people soon to build credit by completing rent payments on time. An offering that was open on its platform before and is being carried back in the coming months. Platforms like Altro can promote change that will improve people’s lives and help this country achieve more significant economic possibilities.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.

New York-based Tomorrow Farms is a provider of food and beverage brands intended to solve the food system’s problems. The company’s services offer animal-free dairy chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry milk without any artificial ingredients, enabling entrepreneurs to produce and prepare foods for consumption and resolve the climate and ecological crisis.

Tomorrow Farms was funded $8.5 million led by Lowercarbon Capital and additional vital investors, including Valor Siren Ventures, Maveron, Simple Food Ventures, and strategic angel investors in SV Angel.

The company partners with creative, deep tech food companies to produce consumer-friendly, retail-ready, animal-free brands and products. This round marks the beginning of a generation for Tomorrow Farms as it prepares to launch its first products, grow its internal team, build meaningful retail relationships, and court new food technology partners to solve some of our food system’s biggest problems.

Berman began Tomorrow Farms almost a year ago after a job in the food space. He owned a food truck called Mainely Burgers, which expanded into three trucks and 16 employees. From there, he established Good Pizza from his apartment, and during the pandemic was dropping pizzas out of his windows to people as he raised funds for local charities. That business is currently part of Philabundance, a hunger relief organization in Philadelphia.

With a lot of investment funds going into the future of food companies, Tomorrow Farms. Which was incubated at the SALT Fund in early 2021 and has a mission of being the front-end partner for many of these deep tech food science companies building new products and brands.

Tomorrow Farms were gearing up for its first product takeoff and worked with an ingredients company to create a product around that company’s formulation. They are working to bring the future of food to consumers today, partnering with the most innovative food science companies to design products that make a difference for people, animals, and the planet.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

Funded.com is the leading platform for accredited investors network worldwide. We monitor and provide updates on important funding events. Angel Investors and Venture Funding can be a key growth for a startup or existing business. Whether it is a first, second or third round financing having a strategic alliance with an Angel Investor or Venture Capital financing can propel a business to the next level and give the competitive edge.