Category: angel investors

Chainguard is a San Francisco, CA-based startup company and developer of supply chain security software designed to help organizations manage their open-source and overall software supply security risk.

Chainguard, Inc. was funded $5 million led by Amplify Partners and a few angel investors, including Eric Brewer, VP at Google. Maya Kaczorowski, former CTO at CoreOS; Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco; Joe Duffy, Product at Tailscale; Brandon Phillips, CEO of Pulumi; Solomon Boulos, former Google exec and founder of Google’s OCTO, and Gordon Chaffee, former Google executives.

The business plans to employ the funds to expand operations and bring its solutions to the market.

Matt Moore, Scott Nichols,Dan Lorenc, Ville Aikas, and Kim Lewandowski are five open-source veterans. The team performed together at Google on many of the foundational container projects.

The team considers that the resolution to ensuring software supply chains must be rooted in open source, standards, and communities. The software that companies ship is increasingly overpowered by the open-source libraries, frameworks, and runtimes they consume.

The industry has been hit hard with the wrath of software supply chain attacks over the past few years, especially attacks targeting open-source software.

Chainguard is tackling this challenge head-on, one of the most significant problem areas of the decade. Almost every piece of software has dependencies, often other open-source libraries that the project is built on. As a result, attackers have been injecting malicious code into dependencies of joint open-source projects. These attacks are brutal to recognize because they aren’t always chosen up by traditional scanning, and more so, the dependencies can suddenly change at any time. Chainguard plans to give companies confidence in the software they’re relying on and have the necessary data and tools to understand their risks and mitigate potential threats.

They believe that commented by Lenny Pruss, General Partner at Amplify will solve this massive, multi-stakeholder problem with open tools and open standards. Sigstore has emerged, in their minds, as the project to take on this challenge.

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.

Serve Robotics is the provider of robotics services intended to shape the future of delivery by connecting people via robots. Its self-driving robots serve people in public spaces, starting with food delivery, enabling customers to get their products faster.

Serve Robotics was funded $13 million with participation from strategic investors Uber Technologies Inc. Delivery Hero supported DX Ventures; 7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, LLC; and Wavemaker Partners’ food automation focused venture studio Wavemaker Labs. The latest round extends Serve’s previous seed funding and includes existing seed investors Neo, Western Technology Investment, and angel investor Scott Banister.

This company is based in San Francisco, CA; the capital will accelerate the scaling of its robotic platform, geographic support expansion, and drive continued product advancement.

Serve Robotics is forming the future of sustainable, self-driving delivery. Founded in 2017 as the robotics division of Postmates, Serve is now a self-governing company on a mission to make delivery more affordable, sustainable, and accessible for everyone. The company’s self-driving robots have completed tens of thousands of contactless deliveries in major U.S. cities.

The pandemic has reinvigorated the segment of companies developing delivery robots small enough to navigate crosswalks, sidewalks, and corporate campuses. Robots minimize human-to-human contact and can fill in at a time when the industry is facing a historic shortage of delivery drivers.

Serve’s meter-high robots sport colorful, LED-laden exteriors that conceal a suite of sensors, including RGB cameras, sonar, time-of-flight sensors, GPS, and lidar. The control panel, which sits off to the side, contains a “Help” button, a video chat display, and a touchscreen panel.

A top hatch conceals a cargo compartment that’s unlocked with a phone app or a passcode. Serve’s a robot can carry up to 50 pounds for 25 miles on one charge — enough to make more than dozen deliveries per day, Kashani claims.

Sidewalk robot delivery is just starting to heat up as an industry, and with it will be a race among companies to come up with the most sophisticated technology and the best go-to-market strategy. With this round of funding, and its accompanying partners, Serve is already prepping for national and global scale.

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.

BetaBlocks, a Miami-based digital asset marketplace infrastructure company. In addition to its blockchain labs, the company also developed an asset tokenization platform to customize, build, deploy, and manage blockchain networks, enabling businesses to leverage blockchain technologies.

BetaBlocks was funded $1.5M, led by E3 Negócios, Ocean Azul Partners, SaaS Ventures, and other strategic angel investors. E3’s Investment Director, Bruno dos Santos, will enter the BetaBlocks board and Ocean Azul’s Partner to share the investment.

The startup will apply the capital to grow its product in Miami and Brazil’s digital marketplace and engineering units, where it opened its first international office. BetaBlocks’ platform provides ready-made templates for businesses that digital market art, music, videos, and more as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It also concedes for the minting and auctioning of those assets.

An NFT is a part of data stored on the blockchain, a digital ledger that certifies an asset is one of a kind and can’t be replaced with a copy. While copies may be available for anyone to obtain, NFTs are tracked on blockchain to provide the owner with proof of ownership. The tokens can used to represent a host of virtual collectibles, including everything from art to sports trading cards.

After deciding on the Endeavor ScaleUp program, BetaBlocks chose to launch a white-label asset tokenization platform. But, betaBlocks’ CTO, Antonio Manueco said, It was a normal progression. Many tests boiled down to tooling and infrastructure for companies to offer digital assets without losing brand appeal.

BetaBlocks CEO, Roberto Machado, stated that in accession to the current hype surrounding NFTs, they believe that most current assets such as debt, real estate, stocks, art, and other physical assets will be tokenized leveraging spread ledger technology for liquidity, 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, and governance.

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.

Maker Wine is based in Marin County, California. The producer of small-batch wines intended to offer premium wines in a can. The company’s platform provides a new distribution channel for small wineries and the destination for the millennial wine drinker, enabling customers to get improved quality in a portable, single-serving format delivered at the desired location.

Maker Wine was funded $2.3 million led by over 30 angel investors and operators, including Marcy Venture Partners, Pear VC, The Chainsmokers, Rachel Mansfield, Mariam Naficy, Bryan Mahoney, Henry Davis, Inflection Capital, Context Ventures, Matt Kanness, Nikil Viswanathan, Charles Hudson, Daniel Kan, Bridgette Lau, Alyssa Rapp, James Beshara, Leah Culver, Odell Beckham Jr., Chris Fanini, and Tyler Elliston. The company plans to employ the new capital to expand to 45 states to reach wine lovers nationwide.

Maker launched in California in 2020, founded by Sarah Hoffman, Kendra Kawala, and Zoe Victor. The Maker already made its mark by being the highest-rated canned wine company on the market today.

Each wine that Maker sells is vegan-friendly, gluten-free, and keto-friendly and by their partner winemakers who believe in sustainable agriculture practices and low interference winemaking. In addition, all wines are dry, with zero grams of sugar, less than five carbs per serving, and minimal sulfur additions.

Sarah Hoffman, the co-founder at Maker, said, Antiquated liquor laws make it hard for the best small-production wineries to get their products over there. The “Big Wine” isn’t giving what modern drinkers want. They’re excited to can wines from the best independent wine producers in the country and make wine more accessible for everyone. With the expansion and new funding, they’re ushering in a new era of small wineries, transparency, and approachability for the wine industry. Modern drinkers want a high-quality, better-for-you option that fits into their lives and lifestyles. They will provide an eco-friendly, portable way to enjoy premium wine.

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.

Netography is an Annapolis, Maryland-based security company providing organizations with network detection and response. The company’s program leverages existing network project data presented by network devices, joined with cloud processing, software, and algorithms. To identify fresh signs of an attack and automatically respond, enabling clients to stop network attacks and threats before they begin and maintain security.

Netography was funded $45 million in Series A funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and SYN Ventures, with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Mango Capital, Harpoon Ventures, strategic angel investors, and Wing Venture Capital.

Will apply the company’s new capital approaching new technology innovations and improvements, channel development, and sales.

Netography claims its cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) NDR is the only product built to protect what it calls the “atomized” network — the complex mix of multi-cloud, on-premises, and legacy infrastructure that comprise most enterprise networks today.

The company’s technology uses, runs, and scales utilizing the full power of the cloud without offering additional physical or virtual sensors or appliances to operate and without the challenges of heavy full packet capture and deep packet inspection solutions.

Patrick Heim, the managing partner at SYN Ventures, said that several organizations have struggled to preserve visibility and control as the network grows and slowly goes dark through the broad adoption of encryption. He told the Netography team has cracked the code on delivering next-gen network security capabilities that overcome these challenges.

The company has recently seen strong traction, signing customers in the federal government and defense, aerospace and travel, financial services, utilities, and manufacturing verticals.

According to Roesch, adopting the zero-trust model of security with its accompanying utilization of pervasive network encryption requires rethinking how the delivery of network security capabilities in today’s atomized networks.

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.

Point One Navigation is a developer of a location and mapping system designed to assist automotive vehicles. The San Francisco-based startup has developed an API for the precise location applicable to any vehicle that moves, from urban air taxis and drones to scooters, ADAS-equipped vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and even farm equipment.

Point One Navigation was funded $10 million Series A round of funding. UP Partners led the new investment with participation from existing investors, including BOLT, IA Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and strategic angel investors.

The company plans to employ the investment to expand operations, develop more automotive mapping systems and its business reach.

Point One Navigation’s API is a helpful solution for automotive OEMs, trucking companies, drone manufacturers, heavy equipment, delivery services, and consumer electronics that rely on precise locations for safe and effective operation. The company’s technology enables centimeter-level global accuracy by combining augmented GNSS, computer vision, and sensor fusion in a powerful yet easy-to-use API compatible with a wide variety of existing platforms.

The co-founder and managing partner of UP Partners, Ben Marcus, said Precise location is vital for safe and effective operations across all areas of mobility and transportation – from automobiles and drones to trucks and heavy machinery. The team at Point One Navigation is solving a real challenge, combining unparalleled technical chops with proactive solutions for the quickly evolving moving world.

Today, Point One’s product begin shipping about a year ago, is in series production with two unname automotive customers. Point One can deploy this tech as a software product in these automotive applications since new vehicles today have the hardware already required. Point One might also need to include a chipset with other customers, like, a scooter company.

The company initially focus on automotive, including being apply to Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems. However, the 20-person company is now focusing on expanding to new segments, including micro-mobility. Point One also has production deals with agriculture customers as well in the drone delivery section.

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.

NeuraLight is a developer of neurology software intended to help patients affected by neurological disorders. The company is based in Austin, Texas, and Tel Aviv, Israel. This platform offers a proprietary, de-identified oculometric database to attain subpixel resolution using just a standard smartphone or webcam. Enabling clinicians with neurological screening, diagnosis, and care is highly personal and dependent on hand-operated examination with many signs and symptoms that are non-trivial to extract.

NeuraLight was funded $5.5 million led by Breakstone, with Operator Partners, MSAD, VSC Ventures, Kli, Tuesday, and Angel investors include Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, Clover Health CEO Vivek Garipalli, and Noam Solomon, the CEO of Immunai.

The new seed funding intends to advance drug development for neurological disorders and decrease development costs. The company also strives to help pharma companies reduce their time for drugs to enter the market.

NeuraLight aims to support people experiencing neurological disorders by digitizing neurological evaluation and care. Breakstone and Benami have hired talent from the research and pharmaceutical industries.

The team has developed a platform that automatically extracts microscopic eye movement measurements as reliable digital endpoints for neurological disorders. In addition, the platform can remove light and movement from videos using AI and machine learning to get a more precise video. The forum is ultimately meant to help accelerate clinical trials and increase the probability of prospective therapies for Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Breakstone says there aren’t numerous contenders within that term and that those that do need dedicated devices, such as camera eye-trackers and pupilometers. He notes that NeuraLight, aside from these companies, is that its platform only relies on video from a regular smartphone or webcam. The company has presented a passing patent to protect the technology that it’s developing.

NeuraLight records that more than 1 billion people globally suffer from neurological disorders. Unfortunately, current neurological evaluation is highly subjective and depends on a manual examination of symptoms, which is why pharmaceutical companies haven’t had practical tools to develop precise therapies.

Breakstone said they want to transform neurology entirely and allow the new generation of drugs to be developed. So, we made sure to hire and bring on people that care about changing the environment and want to help us create an iconic company that will transform the way neurological care evaluation is done today.

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.

Selfbook is a developer of a hotel payment software startup based in New York. The company’s platform empowers hotels to accept a one-tap payment system. They are supporting all global credit and debit card brands and digital wallets, and alternative payment methods. It removes barriers to direct bookings, enabling hotels to drive better conversions, capture mobile bookings, boost revenues, and unify the payment flow by effortlessly connecting all their existing reservation systems. As a result, the customers have the easiest and safest way to pay for a hotel stay.

Selfbook was funded $25 million, which values the company at $125 million and raises its total funding to $30 million. This new investment led by Tiger Global Management, Valia Ventures, Fin Venture Capital, early Stripe employee turned investor Lachy Groom, and strategic angel investors participated in the financing.

The new financing intends to use additional hiring employees to expand partnerships with fintech partners and existing hospitality systems.

Selfbook, launched in April 2021, enables hotels to accept one-click payments directly on their websites while eliminating fraud and reducing chargebacks. The proprietary software streamlines the payment process for hotels by supporting Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal as traditional credit and debit cards.

This company also groups multiple services such as restaurant reservations, spa appointments, and activities into a single payment flow to drive upsells and increase revenue quickly. The startup has seen a “10x” increase in Selfbook users using single sign-on and digital wallets in the past six months. Additionally, 67% of bookings were using digital wallets on mobile.

With today’s consumers expecting and relying on mobile and digital wallet payments, Selfbook gives hotels new opportunities to recover from the pandemic’s destructive effects. This performance driven by a modern, secure, and unified payment experience that encompasses new values travelers have now come to expect — simplicity, flexibility, and privacy.

Alex Cook, Partner in Tiger Global, said they are excited to back the Selfbook team as they modernize the hospitality system experience, increase conversion for hotel operators, and improve guests’ booking experience. In addition, they believe Selfbook well-positioned to rapidly grow share based on the positive customer feedback and a robust pipeline of hotel partners.

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.

TripleBlind, based in Kansas City, MO. A developer of a cryptographic platform designed to share, leverage, and monetize regulated data privacy.

TripleBlind was funded $24 million led by General Catalyst and Mayo Clinic with participation from AVG Basecamp Fund, Accenture Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Dolby Family Ventures, Flyover Capital, KCRise Fund, NextGen Venture Partners, Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, and other strategic angel investors.

The company aims to use the new investment to expand operations and its business reach—also, the Comprehensive Data Privacy Solutions at the enterprise level.

TripleBlind’s platform, which officially launched in November 2020, is compliant today with data privacy and data residency regulations in some 100 countries, with HIPAA, GDPR, and California’s CCPA among them. However, the company estimates there are some 43 zetabytes of data store by enterprises globally that not use as possible because of the limitations impose both by these and other data protection rules and general hesitancy over-sharing IP and other issues around sharing data.

The company today, interest has grown exponentially. It now includes leaders in financial services, media and telecommunications, energy, and many other industries where sharing data assets is critical to sustained, long-term growth.

Quentin Clark, Managing Director of General Catalyst, said, TripleBlind is an incredible platform for empowering companies to collaborate on data while preserving privacy, data rights, and intellectual property.  Significant today in the healthcare industry, as data mobility results in fragmented and non-optimal care. They believe that TripleBlind’s platform for enabling teams to work together with the most private and sensitive data is a necessary part of how companies will be able to have agility while respecting the privacy of their customers and the intellectual property of their partners.

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.

RoboTire is a startup, and Developer of automated vehicle maintenance machines design to facilitate the speedy replacement of automotive tires.

RoboTire was funded a $7.5 million financing round, begun by The Reinalt-Thomas Corporation, which gives business as Discount Tire and America’s Tire. In joining, automotive Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, 640 Oxford Ventures, and several angel investors participated in the round.

RoboTire CEO and Founder Victor Darolfi said their focus is to revolutionize the way tires are change. Cooperating with Discount Tire an iconic automotive and tire industry leader will make their innovative technology more broadly available to consumers who need both agility and service as part of their daily lives. They are immensely please to receive this support from their investors and understand this is just the first round down a long road to success for their partnership.

This company trademarked system uses robots to replace tires part of the time human operators can—reducing multiple-hour activities to under 15 minutes. This invention of manufacturing-level automation to traditional automotive repair shops transforms the conventional business and operational factors used by fleet operators and automotive service providers for tire and the wheel services.

Tom Williams, CEO at Discount Tire, said they are excited to support RoboTire in developing the latest and innovative technologies that drive a more satisfying customer experience. As customer expectations about the ‘buy and book online’ expertise and their ability to deliver reduced wait times continue to grow, they will continue to pursue automation and enhancements that ensure an inviting, easy, and safe experience for all their customers.

RoboTire is transformative for the tire industry and for developing more innovative automotive technologies and future-proofing the workforce of skilled technicians. RoboTire is excited to build out and scale their operations and team in Detroit and Michigan, the heart of American automotive engineering, with the support of their new partners.

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.