Guidewheel is a manufacturing tech leader in San Francisco, CA. That cloud-powered FactoryOps, empowering all the world’s factories to digitize their operations and reach sustainable peak performance.
Guidewheel was funded an $8 million Series A funding round led by Greycroft was joined in the round by leading firms, angels funding, and Fortune 500 executives. This company aims to use the new capital to expedite growth, expand the factories to digitize their operations, and reach sustainable peak performance and business reach.
The funding brings Guidewheel closer to its vision of empowering all factories to reach sustainable peak performance. While the world’s most giant factories use complicated systems to optimize efficiency, small and midsize manufacturers often mix the different machine makes models and ages with information in silos that don’t connect. It leaves teams to struggle with manual data entry and bring out fires. Manufacturers commonly lose more than 20 percent of production time as a result, at the cost of over $3 trillion in waste each year.
Mark Terbeek, Partner at Greycroft, said Guidewheel had built the real-time data platform we believe will help create manufacturing. It is a straightforward yet powerful platform that comes when factory performance is critical to survival for manufacturers and the supply chain overall.
Guidewheel’s plug-and-play FactoryOps platform turns the real-time of any machine into a connected, actively learning system for continuous improvement. Actively learning system delegate teams to diminish lost production time, increase output, and improve over time. As a result, groups can lengthen and progress at their own pace—the more they use Guidewheel, the more they get out of it.
Guidewheel platform helps any factory team get to operational excellence quickly, cost-effectively, and swiftly expanded to 100+ plants across Mexico, East Africa, and the USA.
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.
Lightyear, a New York City startup that develops cloud-based software to produce IT services, telecom network infrastructure, and manages service contracts.
Lightyear was funded $13.1 million, led by Ridge Ventures with participation from Zigg Capital and a slew of individual angel investors. This company plans to use the investment to boost hiring and resources development and new product features platform.
The company started in mid- 2019 intending to fix the problems that had plagued enterprise telecom buyers for decades, but they vastly underestimated the scope of the issue ahead of them. Data on serviceability and pricing is hard to come by and frequently inaccurate. The provider universe is in the thousands, and processes across carriers for a quote through renewal are not standardize.
Lightyear has two primary offerings. First, Lightyear’s procuring dashboard allows enterprises to buy telecom network infrastructure services. They are spanning internet and WAN connectivity, collocation services, and voice systems. Second, once contracts signed, Lightyear Manage lets customers oversee implementation, track network inventory, handle carrier issues and automate renewal bidding.
These solutions cover the entire life cycle of services, including configuring a more extensive array of services, assisting in managing the installation of the services, and helping reduce the number of delays and errors in installs.
The good reasons why Lightyear hadn’t successfully built a software business before. It’s their deep appreciation and respect for the problem set ahead of them that has given them attain so much in so little time to date.
Dennis Thankachan, CEO and co-founder, says the company has acquired customers by giving the latest way to procure network resources, which was a significant improvement over manual negotiating.
Today, Lightyear boasts 500+ vendor relationships spanning the globe and has processed quotes for tens of thousands of services. In addition, they manage millions of dollars of telecom spend for hundreds of enterprise users, including several public companies.
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.
Rootly is a developer and operator of an incident management platform designed to help companies resolve incidents faster by automating manual admin tasks based in San Francisco, CA. A new early-stage startup wants to help by building an incident-response solution inside of Slack.
Rootly funded $3.2 million in seed funding led by XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC and Y Combinator, and several angel fund and individual tech executives.
Funds will expand the Rootly team and accelerate product development as the company continues to add innovative features and extend its product suite.
Rootly’s incident management platform and Slackbot are design to help companies resolve incidents faster by automating manual admin tasks and providing insight to prevent them in the future. This problem has become increasingly important in 2021. Companies such as Slack, Robinhood, and most recently Fastly have experienced headline-grabbing outages, demonstrating that no company is immune to chaotic, manual, and expensive incidents.
Quentin Rousseau, Rootly co-founder, and CEO says that companies’ experience has been exacerbated over the past 18 months as teams have gone remote. As a result, more incidents become harder to resolve, but engineers are trying to fix issues in less than optimal conditions.
The Rootly solution helps SREs connect quickly to their various tools inside Slack, whether that’s Jira or Zendesk or DataDog or PagerDuty. It compiles an incident report in the background based on the conversation inside of Slack around resolving the incident. That will help when the team meets for an incident postmortem after the issue is resolved.
Ross Fubini, the managing partner at XYZ Venture Capital, says that the Rootly team understands the problem at a practical level; they know where all the pain points are. In addition, Rootly’s elegant solution eliminates the need for any company to try to build something similar in-house. No one can do it better.
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.
Microverse is a provider of an online and full-time software development course designed to sharpen IT skills and find jobs globally. It is enabling student coders to become professional remote software developers on a global scale.
Microverse funded $12.5 million led by Northzone with additional participation from General Catalyst, All Iron Ventures, and many angel investors from companies such as Google, GitHub, Spotify, and Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz also participated.
Edtech startup Microverse new investment is intend to use in increasing their global impact and grow our team. Also, to help train student coders across the globe through its online school requires zero upfront cost, instead of relying on an income-share agreement that kicks in when student coders find a job.
Microverse started with the idea that while talent is everywhere, opportunities are not. But, as we know, it is changing, and the system requires amazingly skilled technical skills to help us take new challenges in this digital world. The adoption of remote work was necessary, but this past year has accelerated that transition.
They have seen companies transition to fully remote and choose to stay that way, at a dramatically faster step, exposing themselves to the worldwide talent provisions. They are focus on helping talented individuals worldwide prepare for and connect to opportunities in that global market. Microverse has now brought English-speaking students from over 188 countries through its program.
Microverse fully distributed team is currently made up of 20 unique and mission-driven people who have enabled it to get where it is today. However, to support people in every corner of the world and invest in our partnerships, plan, platform, and knowledge model, we need to expand our team.
As they enter this next stage, they have work cut out for them, but they’re excited to continue growing and improving Microverse. They are focus on tripling their school’s size over the next year and a half and will be doing the same with their team. With ambitious global goals, they’re focusing on making joining Microverse possible for more talented people around the world than ever before.
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.
OROS is an online outdoor apparel platform provider intended to offer aerogel technology-based clothing products based in Portland, Oregon.
The company’s platform sells lightweight coats, snow pants, hats, and gloves developed from NASA technology. Used for space suit insulation, it has made outerwear thinner, warmer, and more flexible to help advance in adventures, enabling users to withstand extreme cold regulate body heat.
OROS funded $14.5 million in Series A funding, led by Elizabeth Street Ventures and Enlightenment Capital with participation from entrepreneur Thomas Tull, the Chairman of Snap Inc. Michael Lynton, and angel funding Brandon Shainfeld, among others.
The received fund would help develop a first-to-market insulation technology to transform advanced thermal materials into technical fabrics. In addition, OROS noted that the facility would convert recycled fibers into “novel thermal performance fiber” and create garments with 3D knitting. The private manufacturing line will also enable OROS to customize machinery, equipment, and engineering processes while consolidating the supply chain to effectively and sustainably scale production.
Jeff Nash, CTO and VP of Product at OROS, said OROS has aspired to convert insulated apparel applying only the best materials and technologies. Some have developed with exclusive access to NASA IP and used for their most demanding applications in space. He has been in the industry for decades, and OROS is completely doing things differently. He strongly believes they are on the cusp of something groundbreaking: recreating insulated products for the industry.
In addition, industry veteran Hap Klopp serves as a board observer. Klopp is best established to take The North Face in 1968 and turn it into an international apparel business that he ran for 20 years.
Klopp said, what energizes him about OROS is its unique approach to building products. They do not imbue OROS with the same principles that traditional outdoor companies hold, such as the idea that broader outerwear means better outerwear. Instead, OROS has changed, owning an entirely new concept that can equate thinness with passion. In addition, the brand’s strength to take an existing idea and flip it on its head is what excites them most about working with them.
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.
Transform is the developer of a data platform design based in San Francisco, CA, to establish and rely upon a single source of truth for critical business metrics.
Transform was funded $24.5 million in Series A financing. The funding includes $20 million and the following $4.5 million — both led by Redpoint Ventures and Index Ventures with participation from dozens of angel investors, including Lenny Rachitsky of Airbnb, Elad Gil of Color Genomics, and Cristina Cordova of Notion.
The new investment will allow them to double their team size this year. In addition, the company will hire incredible technical talent to ensure their product is scalable and reliable, and broadly accessible for every employee.
Businesses rely on metrics and KPIs to align with stakeholders, define company performance, and track outcomes. Unfortunately, establishing a single source of truth for these metrics today is nearly impossible because metric definitions spread across spreadsheets, wiki pages, internal dashboards, or sometimes shoehorned into data pipelines. As a result, teams stuck in disagreements about definitions, ownership, governance, and accuracy, which means analysts end up wasting significant time doing manual work to make sense of it all.
That is why Transform comes in. The first centralized metrics store empowers data analysts to deliver accurate, timely, confident, and fast insights. The metrics store they have built is a centralized repository that sits on top of your data warehouse and enables metrics governance at scale while making data accessible to every other tool in the modern data stack.
The motivation for building the product came to Nick Handel, James Mayfield, and Paul Yang. These are Transform’s CEO, COO, and software engineer — when they all worked together at Airbnb in a blend of roles that included product management and engineering. They saw how it transformed the way teams decided and leveraged metrics for executive reporting, product experimentation, and so much more.
Transform, as the startup, it’s doing so with an impressive amount of early backing. First, it gained investor confidence in these particular founders. Second, it understood a division in the market for, as the company describes it, a specific source of legitimacy for business data that could usefully filled.
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.
Aserto is a provider of cloud-native authorization services intended to provide enterprise-ready permissions and RBAC for SaaS applications.
Aserto funded $5.1 million led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from Heavybit Industries and Angel Funding Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake; Mathias Biilmann Christensen, co-founder/CEO of Netlify; and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub.
This company intends to apply the new funds to speed up product development and broaden access to its private beta.
Omri Gazitt, a CEO, and Gert Drapers, CTO, have long experience developing some of the industry’s identity building blocks, consisting of SAML, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID. The two founders dealt with what to do next year, and they felt that authorization would extend their work in identity and an area with few reasonable solutions for developers.
The Seattle startup launched earlier this year and is in private beta to help early-stage B2B software-as-a-service companies with authorization needs.
Authorization as a service is an architectural, shared systems challenge. It requires 100% availability and a millisecond latency budget while implementing centralized control through a managed service. Aserto leverages its founders’ unique expertise to create the definitive developer API for authorization in SaaS applications.
Aserto, creating a modern service that does much of the work for developers. Giving them bright-grained control over roles access control based on policies using what they call a “policy-as-code approach to authoring, editing, storing, versioning, building, deploying, and managing authorization rules.” They built the solution using the CNCF Open Policy Agent (OPA) project.
Casey Aylward, leading the investment at Costanoa, said it excited her about extensive ecosystem plays in the open-source world. She thinks this Aserto’s better team to do it about the problem and approaching the ecosystem.
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.
The Boston-based company Realtime Robotics is a developer and the leader of industrial robot technologies for manufacturing and logistics operations.
Realtime Robotics funded $31.4 million from new strategic investors, including HAHN Automation and SAIC Capital Management, Soundproof Ventures, and Heroic Ventures. In addition, with selected existing investors SPARX Asset Management, Omron Ventures, Scrum Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, and Duke Angels Investors.
The company was founded to transform automation with flexible robot control capabilities, built on its innovative, real-time collision-free motion planning technology.
Realtime is one of some startups building control on top of industrial robotics. Specifically, the startup looks to help companies deploy systems with limited programming, offering adjustable controls that work for multiple systems at once.
This new fund will speed up its product rollouts and continue its innovative enhancements and solutions. Also, deepen its reach in the warehouse automation industry while serving global automotive manufacturers and their supply chain.
Peter Howard, the CEO of Realtime Robotics said, the new investment by some of the world’s leading manufacturers and automation providers stands as a testament to their ability to improve the value proposition for robotic implementations.
It works closely with long-term partners and customers. Realtime will continue to perfect its collaborative system, which incorporates its good real-time planning technology with other certified system components. To enable industrial robots to adapt their motions and avoid unwanted contact with humans while continuously accomplishing their intended tasks.
Because of the determination and reasonable plans of Realtime. Philipp Unterhalt, CEO of the HAHN Group, was impressed with what Realtime can do to solve problems with a unique approach. Using integrated planning software and controls to speed programming, improving flexibility, and improving throughout, simply making industrial automation more affordable and effective.
Also, the SAIC Capital Management and Soundproof Ventures investors are proud and thrilled to partner with them and work closely with the team. Because Realtime Robotics technology is groundbreaking and will transform robotic automation across a range of industries. They help their customers remove the friction, cost, and complexity of automation and drive forward the future of manufacturing.
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.
Wysa, the heading global AI-powered mental health platform in Boston, MA, designed by Touchkin eServices.
Wysa was funded $5.5 million led by Boston’s W Health Ventures with participation from Google Assistant Investment Program, pi Ventures, and Kae Capital.
The company will use this capital to support its offering to employers who want to expand their mental health benefits and scale up Wysa’s sales team and therapist network.
This company provides AI-driven mental health support, available both to individuals and through employer benefits programs. For example, a chat-bot can respond with words of affirmation or guide a user through one of 150 different therapeutic techniques.
Jo Aggarwal, the CEO of Wysa, said this platform’s goal is not to diagnose mental health conditions. Instead, the platform helps deal with stress, depression, and anxiety with the support of an “emotionally intelligent” bot, which runs evidence-based cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBT), meditation, breathing, mindfulness exercises, and micro-actions that allow users to build mental resilience skills.
Many employers have some solutions of mindfulness support and Employee Assistance Programs (EAP). However, it is tough to tell if this supports employees and even tougher to tailor this to any definite concerns they may have, especially during the pandemic. Wysa offers to customize the support to workplace solution that caters to the full spectrum of mental health needs.
Although Wysa has been refining in the field, research institutions have played a role in Wysa’s ongoing development and had several tests in the actual world. For example, to develop a module specifically targeted toward COVID-19 anxiety and to help people handle mental health effects from chronic pain, arthritis, and diabetes.
Dr. Pankaj Jethwani, Executive Vice President at W Health Ventures, fascinated with Wysa’s uncompromising clinical safety and unique patient-centricity. It keeps a near-perfect rating from approximately 100,000 reviews resulting from over 100 million conversations. Also, Wysa is a precedent of how technology serves millions of people access everyday mental health support and self-care tools without barred by a clinical diagnosis. That’s why they thrilled to deepen their relationship to support Wysa’s next phase of growth.
The Wysa platform operated by 20 enterprise partners worldwide and facilitated over 100 million conversations with over 3 million users, and covers over 10 million lives in 65+ countries worldwide.
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.
When you have a small business, and you are serious about its growth and expansion, you have to use every option available to you to get the funds you need. In some cases, venture capitalists are not really a good fit for funding the startup or small businesses. They focus a lot on the returns they get from their investments, and somewhere in that attempt, they forget to pay enough attention to the needs and limitations of small businesses. One of the best solutions for small businesses to get the required funds is angel investors.
What Is an Angel Investor?
The name angel investor should give away why the industry calls them that. Other names for angel investors include angel funders, informal investors, business angels, etc. An angel investor is mostly one person, but may also be a very small group of investors. They invest in startups and small businesses that most venture capitalists would consider too risky for investment. They try to be extra helpful for startup and small business owners by providing the required funding and also helping with advice on matters.
In many cases, the angel investor will put his/her own money on the line to help your business. The reason for their investment in the risky business is that they are independent in their decisions. They might find your product interesting even when others don’t see any scope in it. You would not expect them to invest huge funds compared to those from venture capitalists but with their popularity increasing with time on the internet, angel investors can also invest huge amounts now.
A Detailed View of Angel Investors for Small Business Owners
Types of Investments
The first thing to know about angel investors is the type of investments they are leaning towards usually. The interest and motivational factors are different for angel investors compared to those of venture capitalists.
An angel investor is willing to invest in startups. It is easier to convince an angel investor to invest in a startup than it is to convince a VC. However, even a VC will show interest in a small business in its early stages if they are 100% sure of its potential and future success.
One of the most important things to point out here is that angel investors are highly interested in local businesses. If you run a business in New York, you would want to find investors in New York. Angel investors like to support their local communities and economy. Furthermore, local businesses are easy for them to test for their validity. As for the market type, angels prefer to invest in businesses that are playing against small competitors. If your business is about to become a part of a contemporary market with several giants already monopolizing it, the angel might not show interest.
Their Favorite Places
When looking for investment for your business, you must know where you can possibly find angel investor. There is no specific place that you can say has the best angel investors. However, you can try fundraising advisors to help you find the investors that would be interested in investing in your business. You can search for angel investment groups in your area or on the internet. The good thing about such a group is that you have a higher chance of persuading someone to invest in your idea.
You will be glad to know that angel investors love to be a part of events where they get to see various business owners from around the country pitching their ideas. Their events are more common than VC events. In fact, it is much easy to attend their events because the entry is not expensive and you can find them even in small cities. You can also find angel investors online. There are websites that specifically put small business owners in touch with angel investors. All you have to do is create a compelling pitch, so investors can see how serious you are with your investment needs.
The Way to Compel and Persuade Them
It would be wrong to say that angel investors are interested in ideas alone. In fact, that’s where the angel investors differ entirely from venture capitalists. They don’t focus solely on the business idea and its scope in future. An important part of their decision-making process is to know the entrepreneur and his/her team. It does not matter how unique your business idea is because if you and your team are not convincing enough, they will not invest in you. They love people who like to get to the point, and that comes off as your strength.
For example, you would want your presentation to be not more than five or six slides. Don’t waste too much time trying to convince them that your idea is different. Get to the point, tell them what you want and how you are going to achieve the targets you have set, and that should be enough. When you sit down with angel investors, be sure to value your company reasonably and offer them a sensible share. A crucial thing to remember is that it takes you much more time to find the right angel investors than it takes to convince them. Miss one opportunity and you could end up spending months and years looking for another investor to listen to you. Don’t blow your opportunities away once you get them.
From the information above, it might sound angel investors are much more flexible than VCs, and that’s true to some extent. However, this should not give you the impression that angel investors are non-professional. They expect due diligence from you before finalizing a deal.
Make sure you have protected your unique ideas with patents and proper technology before you present them with your idea. Secondly, have the right permissions, certificates and other documentation on hand to show that you have everything in place. In the end, be on top of your security game, i.e., you must know how new security-related regulations around the world are going to affect your business and how you will tackle them.
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