Category: angel investors

Cartwheel is a Los Angeles, CA-based developer of an on-demand delivery management software designed to serve courier companies, restaurants, RDS, and medical deliveries. The company’s software offers logistics data analytics, warehouse management, and asset tracking services, enabling businesses to plan and manage their dispatch schedule, delivery routes, and capacity cost-effectively.

Cartwheel was funded $3 million led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from Chingona Ventures and existing investors, including TenOneTen Ventures, Act One, Pitbull Capital, and other strategic angel investors.

The company plans to utilize the latest funds for further product development, partner integrations, and company expansion.

Cartwheel has tripled its comprehensive customer base and developed to serve brands alcohol industry in the past year. As a result, the company’s tools are now available to more than 8,000 establishments nationwide. In addition, Cartwheel is now one of the leading self-delivery providers for Olo, a top on-demand marketing platform powering the digital transformation of more than 500 restaurant brands.

Craig Cummings, General Partner of Moonshots Capital, said, That Moonshots Capital invests in extraordinary leadership. The group at Cartwheel has the leadership, knowledge, and strategic vision to change on-demand delivery. Cartwheel’s technology leverages a customizable solution that improves any delivery program to meet consumer demands.

Cartwheel’s Hybrid Delivery standard allows businesses to keep an in-house program alongside their third-party partners, helping them to self-select some orders for self-delivery and redirect the rest to third-party services. In addition, during extreme periods when an in-house fleet is occupied, Cartwheel automatically taps into outsourced driver fleets and permits businesses to set automatic rules for order routing.

The company matches driver supply with individual business needs, providing operators with additional capacity when needed. In addition, its interface offers branded tracking links, making outsourced delivery feel like an in-house order to the client.

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.

Agility Robotics, a Corvallis, OR-based. Creator of bipedal walking robot planned to offer efficient, elegant, and complete legged platforms for real-world applications. The company’s robots offer human-like abilities that permit them to work with and alongside people to complete simple tasks with minimal or no extra programming without modifying offices, factories, or homes. In addition, it provides clients with a new mobility option to automate applications that navigate various terrains.

Agility Robotics was funded $150 million was led by DCVC and Playground Global with participation from The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, MFV Partners, ITIC, Robotics Hub, Safar Partners, Sony Innovation Fund, TDK Ventures, and other strategic angel investors.

Agility’s system is unique, matching design, software, and hardware expertise to control robots that can manage virtually limitless tasks as part of a combined workforce. Despite the conventional wisdom that many endeavor problems have been addressed by automation, most robotics technologies today are purpose-built for single tasks, making them inflexible, expensive, and quickly obsolete. As described by Agility Robotics CTO Dr. Jonathan Hurst in a recent blog post, Agility’s robots are – by contrast – built to be versatile, cost-effective, and durable helpers to people.

This capital raise will accelerate the delivery of the next generation of Agility’s robots, extending its path document of performance that began with its first customer shipments in 2018. Agility’s most developed robot will be deployed at customers’ sites later this year. As has been its practice since the company’s founding, these deployments allow Agility to iterate with real-time customer feedback and gain insights into operating environments, discover new uses for its robots, and refine their capabilities.

Digit has a max speed of 1.5 m/s and can run for 3 hours doing light work. Doing heavy work, the robot will last 1.5 hours. The robot can currently move totes and packages and unload trailers, but the company hopes to expand its capabilities to last-mile deliveries soon.

CEO Damion Shelton said unprecedented consumer and corporate demand had created a great need for robots to support people in the workplace. With this investment, Agility can ramp up the delivery of robots to fill roles where there’s an unmet need.

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.

DoControl, a Software-as-a-Service security company, after dealing with various angel investors and other equity companies, recently announced that it had closed a $30 million Series B funding through the New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, together with StageOne Ventures, Cardumen Capital, RTP Global, and CrowdStrike’s early-stage investment fund, the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund.

The issue that DoControl is tackling has grown with the way that enterprises work today. As more companies change their IT activities into cloud environments, collaboration doesn’t just happen between people in the same company; increasingly, people share documents and data across different companies, too. 

Adam Gavish saw this problem first-hand when he worked on privacy and security at Google Cloud prior to funding DoControl. It was there that he first started seeing the problem however struggled to get people to want to build something to address it.

Things are speedily changing, however, with security breaches such as the one at Okta focusing on how an app authentication may not always be enough to protect data.

DoControl’s solution is built on the idea of attaching a zero-trust security principle to data access, similar to the zero-trust approach that many vendors have built around network or app access, where users are required to log in to use apps.

The investment from Insight Partners will enable DoControl to double its headcount and advance its market penetration in the United States and overseas. DoControl will also create a national channel partner program to enable MSPs, resellers, and other key partners to provide Zero Trust SaaS data access control capabilities to a broader user base. Most importantly, DoControl will leverage its funding to develop innovations that meet the needs of modern businesses reliant on SaaS tooling while extending its use cases to new vertical markets.

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.

Landed, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of an end-to-end recruiting workers platform to help restaurants and hospitality employers hire candidates. The company’s conversational AI technology connects candidates to employers based on each employer’s custom criteria, screening candidates based on data points, enabling employers to hire better candidates faster.

Landed was funded $7 million in the round led by Javelin Venture Partners and Blockchain Capital with support from Lightspeed Venture Partners, the angel investor, and founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s, the creators of celebrity chef José Andrés’ ThinkFood Group, and Allbirds’ Good Friends fund.

The funding will help fuel the aggressive development of Landed’s user base and new product offerings to provide end-to-end support for hiring at big diner and hospitality chains. Landed will even be adding new services for blue-collar employees on its platform to enable financial wellness, including fair and acceptable financial products such as earned wage access and crypto-enabled bank accounts.

The company was established in March 2020 by Vivian Wang, who watched her parents start as a dishwasher and waitresses at local Chinese restaurants and two decades later become software engineers.

Vivian Wang said she learned that blue-collar workers want to have a career and move up the ladder. Then she watched the gig economy, characterized by companies like Uber, Instacart, and Lyft, take off primarily by commoditizing labor. She felt like their methods were a bit short-sighted. Blue-collar workers want to earn skills.

The concept for Landed came when Wang was working for Gap Inc., advising the administrative team on corporate strategy connected to workforce management, where she saw firsthand the challenge that works turnover had for the brand and its operations. Their solution was to leverage mobile technology to reduce turnover rates in the stores while also providing long-term livelihood opportunities for workers.

In expansion, the company is developing financial products for its more than 150,000 employee users that, in the future, will have upskilling via certification and education programs.

Wang commented that the company was looking for partners, like Javelin, skilled at marketplaces, and Blockchain Capital, as Landed has plans to leverage some cryptocurrency technologies.

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.

Based in Oakland, CA, Antimatter provides data security for SaaS applications. With SaaS evolving as the standard for most business software, the security demands on SaaS companies are constantly increasing.

Antimatter, which is reaching out of stealth today and launching its service into private beta, offers a different solution to these issues. It provides SaaS companies with the cryptographic infrastructure to guarantee that a service meets their residency, governance, and tenancy requirements, using secure enclaves that keep data encrypted in transit, rest, and execution.

Antimatter was funded $12 million led by NEA with participation from General Catalyst, UNION Labs, and the angel investors founders of Snowflake, Okta, Dropbox, VMware, Segment, and Databricks.

The company will use this round to accelerate the hiring of its world-class engineering team as the company continues the development of its full-scale infrastructure solution. In addition, early access to this beta solution offered to a select group of design partners.

Data security is one of the numerous crucial problems in technology. Many malicious threats and accidental vulnerabilities pose enormous risks for companies that view their data as core to their competitive ability and reputation. SaaS teams and their customers are an annual problem. Everyone loses with an exhausting process involving a growing number of compliances and standards to meet—and ultimately lost or delayed sales.

With Antimatter’s solution, the data sits in secure enclaves within Kubernetes. The company then uses that to give hardware guarantees that the data is always encrypted, even while being processed. Michael Andersen (CTO) of the company said this gives SaaS vendors a way to prove that their customer data is secure. To secure to a higher standard than anyone has ever really aimed for before because the app could be malicious, the employees could be harmful, all these things could go wrong — and the customer data would still be secure.

Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D., the Venture Partner of NEA, said the crypto tech and years of university R&D that do Antimatter’s foundation are a huge step forward for highly usable—yet provably correct—secure computing and data privacy. They’re super excited to partner with Antimatter and the team as they empower companies to definitively safe customer computing and data.

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.

Shoreline is a Redwood City, CA-based developer of an operational automated platform designed to mitigate technical issues before creating widespread solutions. The company’s platform automates scanning for known problems and performing mitigation, orchestrates across clouds and on-premises, providing equivalent service across all machines, and integrates with any command-line interface, Linux command, or shell and python scripts without requiring any rewrites, enabling technical operators to reduce tickets and improve availability.

Shoreline was funded $35 million funding Series B led by Insight Partners with participation from Dawn Capital and other strategic angel investors. The new grant allows the company to grow the team and its mission to help customers enhance availability, reduce toil, and free up time for engineers to create.

The company has created Jupyter-style notebooks to document and automate the response to common problems for a given solutions, providing step-by-step instructions for solving an issue while automating the response whenever possible. The objective is to help relieve the stress of reacting at the moment.

Gupta said the SRE function is growing exponentially to keep up with the increasing need to solve system problems as they happen. Still, he said that simply throwing bodies at the problem is not a sustainable approach.

Louis-Philippe Kronek, GM, Dataiku Online, said they use Shoreline to reduce manual work and improve the reliability of our cloud infrastructure that helps any company harness the power of Everyday AI. They estimate that Shoreline has saved one engineer ten days of work a month and expect the value to grow as Dataiku Online does. Shoreline makes their engineers make solutions to more effective and allows them to spend more time doing what they love — building, coding, and producing results.

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.

Biopharmaceutical company Nitrome Biosciences in San Francisco, CA, developing a platform around a newly identified class of enzymes to target Parkinson’s disease and other age-related disorders.

In development, the therapies will target these enzymes and potentially help slow or halt the progression of diseases such as Parkinson’s while the initial focus is on Parkinson’s disease, the company target to expand its proprietary platform to include other disease indications.

The Series A financing has closed of $38 million funded co-led by Sofinnova Partners and AbbVie Ventures. AbbVie’s corporate strategic venture capital arm, with further participation from the Dementia Discovery Fund, Mission Bay Capital, and Alexandria Venture Investments and some strategic angel investors.

The financing planned to support the advancement of Nitrome’s lead program targeting Parkinson’s Disease toward human clinical proof of hypothesis studies and to explore the execution of the company’s platform technology in other age-related disorders. Because globally have Parkinson’s disease is around 7 million to 10 million individuals and some 1 million in the United States.

Conducted by Doctor Irene Griswold-Prenner, Ph.D., Founder, CEO, and CSO, Nitrome Biosciences is a platform company developing drugs against a newly identified class of enzymes called Nitrases, initially targeting Parkinson’s disease.

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.

Ordermark is based in Los Angeles, CA, one of the leading online ordering management solutions for restaurants and virtual restaurant concepts.

Ordermark was funded $120 million series C round funding. The funding was led by prominent technology investor SoftBank Vision Fund, joined by returning investor Act One Ventures and strategic angel investors. The grant will use to help more restaurants transition to online ordering during the pandemic and beyond.

The company’s software consolidates incoming orders from multiple platforms and sends them to a single printer. Ordermark also operates a company called Nextbite, a portfolio of 15 readymade virtual brands such as CraveBurger, Firebelly Wings, and HotBox by Wiz, a collaboration with rapper Wiz Khalifa. Restaurants can offer these delivery-only brands out of existing kitchens, opening up additional revenue streams.

Jeff Housenbold, the Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said. They believe Ordermark is a leading technology platform and innovative virtual restaurant concepts transform the restaurant industry. And they are excited to support their mission to help independent restaurants optimize online ordering and generate incremental revenue from under-utilized kitchens.

The rise of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, often referred to as the 3rd wave of food delivery, have paved the way for a broader addressable market for online food delivery.

The statement of Alex Canter, the chief executive officer behind Ordermark 2020, has been a tough year for restaurants. That’s why they are focus on providing products and services to help keep their doors open. This funding allows them to offer more restaurants with innovative ways to reach more consumers.

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.

Popchew is a startup company based in New York City. This company is an operator of a food plug-and-play platform intended to build, launch, and grow brands nationally in just weeks. The company’s platform has built products at food delivery applications and worked with casual restaurants, enabling creators to launch food brands.

Popchew was funded $3.6 million, led by Long Journey Ventures with Anti Fund, Flybridge, the Uber Alumni Syndicate, WndrCoand, a group of angel investors. The funds’ infusion will help the company launch a new digitally native food brand each month with creators.

This startup company founded in 2021 by Rushir Parikh and Nick Sopchak. In the company’s first six months, established two trademarks, Bitcoin Pizza with investor Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano and Wing SZN, collaborating with YouTuber Zias. They are known for delivery through third-party apps and the Popchew website.

The concept for the company derived from Parikh’s childhood growing up working at his uncle’s restaurant and Sopchak’s background in the hospitality industry. They sensed the food was fun and could open the food delivery market to help creators expand their brand, connect with fans and create a new revenue stream.

To support creators in establishing a new revenue stream, Popchew taps into restaurants’ new capability and helps them make a new revenue stream and optimize it. With more than 600,000 restaurants in the U.S., Popchew’s brands can resume expanding their reach without changing restaurants’ existing operations.

Popchew’s brands are already public in dozens of cities across the U.S., including New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.

Paul, an investor through Anti Fund said, food is a new vertical for creators, and it’s vital to both partners and invest in a team that understands the audience and technology to deliver a great experience. Popchew is a scalable key that will open new opportunities for creators to engage with their fans everywhere.

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.

Fast Break Labs is a startup based in San Francisco, CA. The company is a developer of blockchain-based basketball games and experiences platforms intended to empower people to create the future of sports, gaming, and entertainment. Fast Break Lab offers a gaming platform, competitive compensation, company equity, and benefits, allowing users to own teams of fictional non-fungible tokens (NFT) athletes to compete in simulated games, tournaments, and leagues for crypto prices.

Fast Break Lab was funded $6 million led by Patron with participation from Pantera Capital. Additional participants in the early round include Collab+Currency, Solana Ventures, South Park Commons, and Angel investors Brooklyn Nets. The new funding plans to use for the growth team and both the development and deployment of the VBA.

Established in late 2021 by Charles Du and John Wu, Fast Break Labs is the brainchild of the ex-Meta teammate’s longtime habit with sports and gaming. As the imagination basketball fanatics envisioned the theoretical decisions they’d make as professional team owners, the idea for Fast Break Labs and its first product, the Virtual Basketball Association (VBA), was born. Du and Wu quickly created a talented roster, including several experts who have competed in the former’s dream basketball league for almost a decade.

The new game allows basketball fans to strategize as general managers of their virtual teams and compete for rewards via pretend games. Users create rosters by drafting and trading collectible, fictional athletes with unique attributes and skill levels. The VBA integrates traditional fantasy sports UI with web3 technology to make the game available and intuitive. Aspiring GMs also can bridge the real and digital worlds and craft original storylines for their VBA players.

Du said they are creating a sports game that offers all basketball fans an opportunity to have an actual ownership experience. They are mainly focused on making a new and fun experience. However, it was also important to give power back to gamers by allowing them to shape the game’s direction and accrue the economic benefits.

Paul Veradittakit, partner at Pantera Capital said, they are proud to support Fast Break Labs and its vision to democratize the ownership, control, and economics of sports gaming. Also, they are excited to see this group continue to elevate engagement across the intersection of collectibles, sports, and gaming on the blockchain.

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.