Category: angel investors

Immunai is based in New York. A biotech startup company combines multi-omic single-cell analytics and structure learning to determine novel. Immunological observations that lead to the discovery and development of more effective and targeted immune therapies.

Immunai was funded $60 million in Series A funding. The investment contributed by Schusterman Family Investments, Duquesne Family Office, Catalio Capital Management, and Dexcel Pharma, with participation in existing investors Viola Ventures and TLV Partners.

Eased by this new funding, it’s now ready to expand into the development of entirely new therapies based on its data and ML’s strength and breadth.

The startup’s unique edge combines the most important and most vital data set of its type available, made in cooperation with world-leading immunological research organizations, with its machine learning technology to deliver analytics at an unprecedented scale.

Noam Solomon, the Immunai’s co-founder and CEO said, implicates the immune system in nearly every illness, making their technology critical for identifying, diagnosing, and treating the disease from cancer and infectious disease autoimmune disorders. Since Immunai’s founding in 2018, they have been mapping the immune system through observational genomics, using multi-omic single-cell technologies and machine learning to understand better how the immune system operates.

Immunai has already shown that its platform can help identify optimal points for existing therapies with the Baylor College of Medicine. They assisted it with a cell therapy product for treating neuroblastoma (a type of cancer that spreads from immune cells, often in the adrenal glands).

The General Partner, Dr. Kenan Turnacioglu, at Catalio Capital said, it’s progressively clear that the immune system is even more challenging than they imagined, and advancing their understanding combining contemporary techniques with practical data approaches. It reflects this intersection in Immunai’s founding team and leadership, and they are excited to be working with Immunai on this next stage of growth. As they bring together the smartest cares for the fields of single-cell genomics, machine learning, immunology, and data engineering to collect on this task.

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.

Because of the pandemic, most of us spend necessary amounts of time at home, and our concern has changed increasingly to how and what food we eat. Alike for those who love to cook, but especially for those who might not have the time, it’s challenging to come up with tasty, nutritious, and new things to eat all the time.

Tovala the meal service paired with a smart countertop oven that scans, steams, bakes, and broils its chef-crafted meals, based in Chicago, IL.

Tovala was funded $30 million for Series C funding. The investment led by Left Lane Capital, an investment group focused on high-growth internet and consumer companies, with participation in existing investors Finistere Ventures, Comcast Ventures, OurCrowd, Origin Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and angel investor Joe Mansueto.

The investment intends to open a new production facility, increase the team, enhance the customer experience, and continue building its food and consumer technology brand.

This company started in 2017. Tovala’s up trajectory reached additional levels in 2020 as consumers invested in at-home meal solutions that met their twofold needs of satisfaction and quality. Unlike competitors that rely on time-intensive cooking or microwaved solutions, Tovala gives the coveted experience of an excellent home-cooked meal without the work usually required.

Customers also can tap into the scan-to-cook technology when they are not eating a Tovala meal. The smart oven comes with an additional specification that scans barcodes on brand-name grocery items and cooks them in a pre-programmed setting.

David Rabie, CEO of Tovala, said during when everyday life was impossible and collectively faced unexpected hardships, the Tovala team rallied to provide their customers with a source of comfort meals they could rely upon it. Regardless of the pandemic, weather disasters, and a range of external challenges, they focused on addressing 10,000 meals each week to houses dependent on their services. They are grateful to be a growing company during a difficult economic moment. They appreciate Left Lane Capital’s partnership to help their business reach more people in the months and years to come.

Tovala has a deal with LG to install its Scan-to-Cook technology in select LG smart ovens so that when a consumer scans a Tovala Meal’s barcode scanning system. LG’s smart oven immediately sets the optimal temperature and cooking time. Beginning in 2021, select Tovala Meals will be available for purchase on the LG ThinQ app.

That partnership results from how the hardware companies that are setting up connected appliances, and services around them, are connecting more closely with incumbents to take their next scaling steps.

The co-founder and managing partner at Left Lane Capital, Jason Fiedler, said their team brings a proven investment experience in category-defining consumer subscription businesses. We are passionate about Tovala’s potential to be the next major food tech company.

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 pandemic has required stores to shut down and return under strict social distancing and health guidelines. One service that helped throughout is appointment-booking apps.

One of those is Booksy, a San Francisco, CA-based beauty and wellness appointment-booking app. Booksy was funded $70 million in a Series C financing. Cat Rock Capital led the funding round, with Sprints Capital, Open Ocean, VNV Global, Piton Capital, Hansen, angel investor Zach Coelius, and Manta Ray Ventures.

The funding intends to use for expansion plans across North America, expanding to new verticals, and gaining complementary businesses.

Polish entrepreneurs Stefan Batory and Konrad Howard found the company. Customers use the Booksy app to schedule and pay for beauty appointments with local businesses. Salons, nail bars, and barbershops can arrange the bookings, payments, and customer base via the accompanying Booksy Biz app. The platform also allows salons to market other products via Booksy E-Commerce, which serves as a marketplace allowing customers to recognize and book other local stylists, nail technicians, etc.

Like so many sectors negatively hit by the pandemic, Said Batory has been a turbulent time for the beauty and wellness industry. Still, they’re confident in its ability to come back from this. It is fantastic to see their latest group of investors share their optimism and vision. Giving a cost-effective way to offer, manage and develop digital bookings, reduce no-shows and provide customers what they could help make small businesses and entire industries more resilient.

Booksy deals with the challenges of day-to-day operations for service providers. They empower small business owners worldwide by bringing them with the tools they need to run their businesses successfully.

Instead of missed calls or text messages, help providers can focus on their profession. Booksy allows users to immediately schedule at a time that suits them, resulting in 38% of customers booking after-hours and increasing appointment frequency by 20%, generating more revenue for the service provider.

The founder and managing partner of Cat Rock Capital, Alex Captain, said they are amazingly excited to invest in Booksy. It creates the leading global software platform for digitizing the beauty and wellness industry around the world.

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.

CloudNatix a startup company based in Saratoga, CA. This company provides an infrastructure for businesses with multiple cloud and on-premise operations.

CloudNatix was funded $4.5 million Seed round financing. The new investment led by DNX Ventures, an investment firm that focuses on the United States and Japanese B2B startups. Support from a new investor Cota Capital and existing investors: Incubate Fund, Vela Partners, and 468 Capital.

The new funding will boost the company scale the engineering and sales organizations to satisfy the great demand for their product over various geographies and vertical market shares.

CloudNatix was founded in 2019 by chief executive officer Rohit Seth, who previously held lead engineering roles at Google. CloudNatix is transforming how enterprises adopt and use Cloud and On-prem infrastructure. They have developed an auto-pilot platform that works over multiple Cloud providers delivering highly cost-effective infrastructure and operations.

The CloudNatix platform allows customers to decrease their infrastructure spend by up to 50%. Simultaneously, the Developer and DevOps teams can handle legacy, storage, or micro-service-based applications inseparable from a single management pane, occurring in sound and more agile business application rollouts.

Seth said CloudNatix competes most directly with VMware and Red Hat OpenShift. But they limit both services to their base platforms, while CloudNatix’s benefit is agnostic to base platforms and cloud service providers.

The cloud business is one of the fastest-growing and most extensive technology sectors, dominated by Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Cloudnatix operates, estimated to be $12B, according to Gartner. While hybrid and multiple cloud environments and Kubernetes have been defining as the most efficient way of running modern workloads, adopting this structure is not simple. Cloudnatix makes working in these different environments orders of measure simpler by enabling developers to perform their applications by applying the auto-pilot technology and a single management pane.

Managing Partner of DNX Ventures Hiro Rio Maeda said one of CloudNatix’s critical assets is its cloud-agnostic infrastructure management that gives hassle-free, highly efficient enterprises’ operations. CloudNatix has opened its board of directors to include Mr. Maeda.

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.

Mosaic is based in San Diego, CA. This company builds a strategic finance platform constructed to ingest data from many systems in the alphabet sequence of enterprise IT — ERPs, HRISs, CRMs, etc.

Mosaic was funded $18.5 million of Series A financing. General Catalyst led the funding, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Village Global, and XYZ Ventures.

This new round of funding will help Mosaic speed up realizing the strategic finance vision by growing their world-class team across engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, and more.

They found Mosaic in April 2019 by Bijan Moallemi, Brian Campbell, and Joe Garafalo, who served closely at Palantir in the company’s finance team for beyond 15 years accordingly. While there, they saw the enterprise grow from a small organization with a little over one hundred people with thousands of employees, over one hundred customers, as we saw last year with Palantir’s IPO and incoming revenue of more than a dozen countries.

After Palantir, they each led Finance for other high-growth venture-backed companies where they faced the same problems and once again created customized solutions to solve them.

It became increasingly clear to them that these issues were universal and that the CFO’s office was fundamentally broken. Previous FP&A software failures to keep pace with a growing constellation of disconnected cloud-based tools have left Finance leaders struggling to keep up. Tracking financial health was confusing, requiring extraordinary amounts of manual data entry and manipulation. The resulting information was often out of date by the time it got into decision-makers’ hands. In today’s fast-paced world, a slow view of what happened is no longer acceptable.

They tackled the problem head-on. There is no reason that Finance, the team tasked with managing, organizing, and making sense of data from across the business to inform its trajectory ultimately, should be forced to use technology from generations ago.

At Mosaic, they believe that getting a real-time understanding of your financial health and strategically planning for the future shouldn’t be confusing or require manual labor.

The program combines with updated financial factors across the tools CFOs are previously using it. It combines artificial intelligence and machine understanding to help future forecast versions, enabling people to focus on their job’s strategic elements.

It is more significant than ever for CFOs and business leaders to adapt and plan for the future with speed and precision during this extreme uncertainty. Mosaic is correctly positioning to provide this superpower for the business.

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.

Atalanta Therapeutics based in Boston, MA. Provider of biotechnology principles to create therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases.

Atalanta Therapeutics was funded $110 million in Series A financing. F-Prime Capital provided the investment exclusively. Atalanta started meaningful collaborations with Biogen (Nasdaq: BIIB) and Genentech, a Roche Group member.

Atalanta founded to address the significant constraint for today’s RNAi therapeutics: the struggle of achieving distribution, ultimately the brain and spinal cord. Atalanta’s proprietary technology, named branched siRNA, licensed from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, based on over 30 years of research in RNA biology and its clinical applications.

Being part of Biogen’s strategic collaboration, Atalanta will develop RNAi therapeutics for multiple targets, including HTT, to treat Huntington’s disease and added unnamed CNS targets. Atalanta will be qualified to receive development and milestone payments on these programs and royalty payments on any producing products.

The strategic collaboration with Genentech entails developing RNAi therapeutics for multiple CNS targets for neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Alicia Secor, the President, and CEO of Atalanta, said the launch of Atalanta Therapeutics marks a hopeful new era for treating neurodegenerative diseases with several or no existing treatments. Patients, their caregivers, and society more commonly have an urgent need for improved therapies. Atalanta’s branched siRNA principles offer the promise to potentially leverage RNAi procedures in the central nervous system, starting a whole new class of diseases to RNAi intervention. It delights them to deploy this exciting technology with the end goal of delivering effective new therapies to patients.

Stacie Weninger, Ph.D., the President of F-Prime Biomedical Research Initiative (FBRI), said Atalanta’s founders, and strong preclinical data-position it for success. F-Prime is excited to included at this early stage of the company. She is looking forward to working collaboratively with Atalanta’s directors and management to improve our shared mission of pioneering new medication options for recalcitrant neurodegenerative diseases.

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.

AMP Robotics, the pioneering recycling robotics technology developer, based in Denver, CO., was funded $55 million in a Series B financing.

The investment led by XN with the participation of new investors Valor Equity Partners and GV.  The existing investor’s Sequoia, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, Congruent Ventures, and Closed Loop Partners.

The company plans to use the funds to escalate its business operations to meet its technology’s strong market demand. And advance innovative new AI product applications that combine into materials rehabilitation facilities to increase recycling rates for its customers. Expand its business reach as it works with consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, like Keurig Dr. Pepper (NASDAQ: KDP).economy.

Matanya Horowitz, the founder of AMP Robotics, applies AI and robotics to expand recycling rates and economically secure recyclables reclaimed as raw materials for the global supply chain.

Horowitz said they were thankful for an outstanding group of new investors, a mission-driven team, and amazing customers. They are putting this next round of investment to work immediately to create a unique technology for the waste industry and consciously commit to decreasing society’s impact on the environment.

Globally, more than $200 billion worth of recyclable materials goes unrecovered yearly. The economics and capability of recognizing and classifying paper, plastics, metals, and other recyclables from the waste stream create a significant challenge for material recovery.

The waste industry has also faced more stringent international quality standards for contamination-free imports of recycled materials for cost-effective alternatives to meet these requirements in current years. Pandemic occurred many businesses forced to suspend recycling operations because of concerns for worker safety. Simultaneously, the pandemic increased demand for high-quality recycled feedstock to overcome supply chain interruptions and shifts in raw material availability.

AMP Robotics’ technology helps the waste industry meet these challenges by modernizing recycling improving material quality, ensuring worker safety, increasing productivity, lowering costs, diverting waste from landfills, and reducing greenhouse gas emission while increasing overall recycling rates recovery.

Gaurav Kapadia, the founder of XN, said, They are excited to partner with AMP as Matanya. The team continues to build an exceptional and category-defining business. AMP’s technology radically improves the economics and efficiency of recycling. It creates long-term, transformational value for customers, the economy, and the environment.

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.

Fluent Forever Chicago, Illinois based. Developer company that uses a novel learning system to help its users master a new language faster.

Fluent Forever was funded $4.9 million in a Series A financing round led by Denver-based Stout Street Capital. Other investors took part in this round The Syndicate, LAUNCH, Mana Ventures, Novus VC, Flight VC, Insta VC, Up ventures, Firebrand Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Spero Ventures, and Lofty Ventures.

This company s a direct competitor to Duolingo, Babbel, and similar online language learning services. What sets it apart focuses on a personalized learning system that shows ear training, visual aids, and something akin to spaced-repetition for assisting you in memorizing unfamiliar words and phrases.

In his first languages, CEO Gabriel Wyner used the popular flashcard service Anki, wrote a book about his method, and taught classes on language learning to use his system with Anki. But as he noted, Anki is an essential tool, and only understanding how to get the highest out of it takes a lot of time and strength.

Then, Fluent Forever practices Wyner’s flashcard approach — because making those flashcards by hand is at the core of his learning system and turns it into a far-easier-to-use application.

Wyner is not hesitant to compare his method to Duolingo’s and shows that its concentrate on interpretation exercises does not interpret necessary language skills in the end. He openly acknowledges that the Duolingo user experience and gamification are far further than Fluent Forever. However, he also trusts that learners see far more excellent results with his system.

Fluent Forever currently supports nine languages: Japanese, French, Russian, Mexican and Spanish, Spanish, Italian, Korean, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, with Dutch being the next language the team is working on.

Looking ahead, Wyner says that Fluent Forever is looking at ways to bring live tutors into the loop. Live tutoring online has been done before, and some companies like Preply specialize in it already. Fluent Forever wants to join the online language learning service with quick live sessions and then use the online part to go back to the conversation over a week.

One benefit here is that these users will reasonably pay a premium for the live service and use their time with live tutors to create their personalized sentences in the Fluent Forever system, which could become content that’s available to all users.

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.

DASH System, a Los Angeles-based technology company, is developing hardware and software to enable precision airdrop cargo deliveries.

DASH System was funded $8 million in Seed funding, the investment led by 8VC with Tusk Venture Partners, Loup Ventures, Trust Ventures, Perot Jain, and Mila Capital. 

The company will use the finance to grow its track in air cargo logistics and freight. By improving technology and hardware that allow for accuracy of airdrop deliveries to rural.  Train flying partners to safely and accurately launch cargo to all parts of the world and Increase partnerships with U.S. government entities to deliver cargo to rural parts of the world.

This company relies on three parts: flight control software, automated aircraft cargo handling systems, and the smart-cargo pods that allow for accurate and soft landings of packages. It’s that third step that Joel Ifill, founder, and CEO of Dash, thought could improved. With engineering knowledge and experience building guided bombs for the military, he felt an opportunity to apply some military’s point-to-point approach to the commercial sector.

DASH’s system inspired by defense technology and is a modern update to a longstanding and legal practice of airdrops repurposed for commercial and humanitarian use. DASH’s flight control software maps the delivery route. It commands the pilot on how to fly, simplify, and streamline the method. Suppose the aircraft arrives at the correct spot. In that case, DASH’s aircraft cargo handling system immediately issues the smart-cargo pods, which land securely and softly at the desired location. This approach falls within existing FAA regulations and has supported proof-of-concept tests in disaster relief and extensive use in the defense industry.

Jake Medwell, Founding Partner at 8VC, said DASH Systems solves delivering business packages at a section of both the cost and speed of standard services. Incredibly active in the logistics industry and several largest partners are excited to work with DASH. They have already on top engineers and talent quickly join the DASH team, which is an early sign that things are working and significant problems solved.

The company has been actively working with the Air Force Special Operations Command to develop a hyper-accurate airdrop tool for small payload deliveries. It plans to launch pilot operations in rural Alaska next year.

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.

Aware produces AI-enhanced controls and data governance for the popular digital collaboration and communication technologies usually used in remote work, based in Columbus, Ohio.

Aware was funded $12 million investment headed by New York-based Spring Mountain Capital with Blue Heron Capital and Allos Ventures and existing investors Draper Triangle Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund, JumpStart, Rev1 Ventures, and JobsOhio.

The company was founded in 2017 and quickly penetrated the enterprise market by securing high-profile customers worldwide, including Wipro, AstraZeneca, Sun Life Financial, Farmers Insurance, Memorial Health System, and British Telecom.

With the enormous influx of remote work because of the pandemic, platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace from Facebook are suddenly top-of-mind for organization leaders worldwide. Purpose-built for collaboration, Aware offers a unified view across many of these tools.

Aware continuously enriches the conversation data that flow through the tools with proprietary natural language processing (NLP) and AI models, providing organizational value and insights such as ongoing employee sentiment and commonly discussed themes.

Jeff Schumann, CEO, and Co-Founder of Aware, said they are excited to partner with investors who truly understand the opportunity that lives within this unique space. The conversation data found in technologies like Slack and Teams differ from anything IT teams have faced before–they include comments, replies, emojis, @ mentions, images, attachments, and so much more. Legacy systems just aren’t set up to properly handle this unstructured data set. With these tools only increasing because of an influx in remote work, we see an opportunity to provide the controls specific to this data set and leverage our proprietary. AI to derive a wealth of knowledge and insights that leaders will find invaluable as they embrace an alternative way of working.

Aware plans to use the funds to speed up go-to-market efforts, increase partnerships, grow its integration ecosystem, and support ongoing product research and development.

Jamie Weston, Managing Director of Spring Mountain Capital said, Aware is uniquely positioned to tackle today’s remote-work-first world with the team’s extensive background in understanding digital conversations. They solve an immediate risk and compliance need that many companies didn’t realize until the pandemic hit. Meanwhile, Aware continues to push the envelope using this data set and technology to add immense value back to the organization. It thrills them to partner with Jeff and the team on this next stage of the company.

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.