Category: angel investors

BioAge, Richmond, CA-based biotechnology company developing medicines to treat aging and aging-related diseases.

BioAge was funded $90 million in a Series C financing. Andreessen Horowitz and serial entrepreneur and angel investor Elad Gil led the investment. It included new investors: Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, AARP Foundation and Phi-X Capital, and Mostafa Ronaghi. Existing investors, including Caffeinated Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pear Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and others, also participated.

The first wave of longevity industry companies to reach clinical trials and large funding rounds focuses on the well-established methodology of small molecule development. Many are also platform companies that have developed approaches to speed up the expensive and time-consuming tasks of screening and designing small molecules.

Except for the small molecule senolytics companies, these treatments presently epitomize what the SENS Research Foundation folk would call “messing with metabolism,” a low alternative to targeting and fixing underlying aging causes.

This was messing with metabolism, usually finding a molecule that can provoke cells to undertake some repair and maintenance mechanisms that occur in response to exercise, calorie restriction, heat, cold, toxins, and other stresses. The outcomes in mice are usually no better than the benefits resulting from exercise or calorie restriction.

BioAge, the company leverages a platform that identifies crucial drug targets by using datasets to identify age-related pathology’s molecular drivers. BioAge’s list of therapies targeting these key pathways will focus on an aging population’s significant unmet medical needs.

Dr. Rubin, an expert biopharmaceutical drug developer, brings comprehensive experience from early discovery, late-stage development, and the latest drug approvals across a wide variety of beneficial areas in global geographies.

Dr. Rubin said that he thrilled to be leading the BioAge clinical development team. The first two drugs from our pipeline are ready to begin Phase 2 trials in indications targeting serious conditions in elderly populations that presently have no excellent therapeutic options.

An essential aspect of their strategy is to initiate efficient human clinical trials that will demonstrate that their drugs can address age-related deficiencies in acute conditions, which may expedite approval and serve as a gateway to treating chronic diseases, resulting in healthy aging.

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.

Materialize, a New York City-based streaming SQL database startup company built on top of the open-source Timely Dataflow project.

Materialize was funded by a $32 million Series B investment led by Kleiner Perkins. Follows an $8 million Series A last year led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing the total funding to $40 million.

The company plans to use the investment to grow its engineering team, prepare the business for growth, and extend product rollout.

These firms see a reliable founding team that includes CEO Arjun Narayan, formerly of Cockroach Labs, and chief scientist Frank McSherry, who created the Timely Dataflow project on which the company based.

At Materialize, they consider it will soon be essential for all information to be always up-to-date at every business. Whether it’s delivering personalized experiences, accurately identifying fraud, building predictive AI, or discovering new business opportunities. The ability to run complex queries on multiple streams of data and keep their answers up to date is critical to making better decisions about the changing world.

Materialize is the first standard SQL interface for streaming data available to engineers looking to build complex queries and multi-way joins without specialized skills or microservices. Unlike other streaming data platforms that claim to be real-time, Materialize computes and incrementally maintains data as generated, so query results are accessible the moment it needs them. This approach provides businesses with correct answers in milliseconds – without interference from late-arriving data.

Bucky Moore, the partner at Kleiner Perkins leading the B round, sees this standard querying ability as a vital part of the technology. He said, Materialize unique ability to provide SQL over streaming data solves the problem, laying the foundation for them to build the industry’s next great data platform.

With this new funding series, they equipped to deliver on an ambitious roadmap, including a fully managed cloud service with tiered storage and replication. Narayan is also excited to broaden the SQL suite. They support and invest in a SQL optimizer, performance and benchmarking work, and making Materialize more flexible and battle-tested.

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.

Boulevard is a salon and spa management platform created to facilitate operations, boost sales, and satisfy customers. It establishes this company in Los Angeles, California, in the year 2016.

Boulevard was funded $27 million in Series B funding despite a business slowdown caused by the pandemic.

Index Ventures and Toba Capital led the funding, with VMG Partners, Bonfire Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and BoxGroup. They plan to expand their team and platform to serve further their small, medium, enterprise, and franchise partners with these funds.

Matt Danna and Sean Stavropoulos started Boulevard. Stavropoulos’s inability to book a haircut and Danna’s feeling that salons and spas’ failure to cater to customers like the busy programmer could show a more significant problem inspired this company.

To resolve a pain point they had experienced personally. They wanted to streamline the client experience at salons and eliminate inconveniences like calling to make appointments or carrying cash for gratuity. After doing door-to-door research, they learned just how underserved salons were by the technology available to them. Even though they were outsiders to an industry that they had only engaged with as consumers and believed they could create something better.

In time, they saw that other appointment-based businesses also faced the challenges salons experienced like spas, nail salons, and medispas. That realization led Boulevard’s mission to develop into something more significant—to modernize the technology powering salons and spas while improving the daily lives of professionals and the clients they serve. 

According to data provided by the company, Boulevard is giving businesses a boost. On average, enterprises increase bookings by 16%, retail revenue jumps by 18%, and gratuity paid out to stylists jumps by 24% for businesses that use Boulevard, the company said. It also reduces no-shows and cancellations and halves time spent on the phone.

Customers using the company’s software include Chris McMillan the Salon, Heyday, MèCHE Salon, Paintbox, Sassoon Salon, SEV Laser, Spoke & Weal, and TONI&GUY. Boulevard now has 90 employees and will increase that number as it continues to expand across the country.

Patrick Mathieson of Toba Capital said the secret to this company’s success has always been putting its customers first, no matter what the economy is. Also, he said, not many companies can more than double their customer count during a period when the entire industry is temporarily closed for business. Boulevard is an excellent company, and it delights them to be invited aboard for the journey.

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 first online social platform for athletes is moving up its game. Strava is based in San Francisco and has 70 million members, according to the company, with a presence in 195 countries globally.

Strava was funded $110 million in a Series F financing, the investment led by Sequoia Capital and TCV with participation by San Francisco-based Dragoneer Investment Group and Jackson Square Ventures, and Menlo Park-based Madrone Capital Partners.

The funding intends to propel the development of new features, and support its global community and expand to serve more athletes.

Now 2020, Strava has noticed significant growth. The company puts its activity tracking as focused on the app and service’s community and networking features, with features like virtual competitions and community goal-setting as representative of that approach.

The co-founder and CEO of Strava, Michael Horvath, said they are excited to partner with TCV and Sequoia. Making Strava indispensable to athletes everywhere, they connect athletes to what motivates them, fuel the growth of their community, and strengthen their business.

Strava provides anyone, anyplace, access to an athletic community. Staying motivated is the oldest and most significant problem in health and fitness. Still, Strava has tapped into the excellent component to keep people moving: human connection. Strava enables motivation into competition, sociability, and responsibility.

The General Partner at TCV, Neil Tolaney said, TCV an existing investor in the related fitness and health ecosystems over a long duration. As the largest and most engaged community of athletes globally, Strava is uniquely positioned and claims a vital value project for athletes and partners matched.

Strava’s community and unique product offerings motivate athletes to lead healthier, more active lifestyles. Strava’s outsized growth in community membership, activities, and subscribers demonstrates its importance for athletes to best fulfill their objectives.

This company debuted a new Strava Metro service earlier this year, leveraging the information it gathers from its users. In an aggregated and anonymized way to provide city planners and carrying managers with important information about how people get around their cities and communities. All free for these governments and public agencies to use once approved for access by Strava.

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.

JumpCloud is based in Denver, Colorado. This company is a cloud solution to control and manage employee identities and devices.

JumpCloud was funded $75 million in Series E funding. The investment led by BlackRock with participation from existing investor General Atlantic. The fund intends to expand product development, marketing, and sales globally with projects to hire an added 500 employees over the succeeding several years.

Advances in the way that IT works have been developing since the company began. Back then, most businesses used Microsoft Active Directory in a Windows-centric environment. Things have got more complicated with multiple operating systems, web applications, the cloud, and mobile since then. That has needed another way of thinking about directory structures.

Rajat Bhargava, the Co-founder of JumpCloud, says that the pandemic has only accelerated the need for his company’s kind of service as more companies move to the cloud. These changes made it much more difficult for IT to connect their users to all the needed resources. That’s one of the most critical tasks that an IT organization has is making their team productive.

The JumpCloud program enables IT to make work happen, rendering a modern, more accessible, and lower-cost cloud solution. That customers allow themselves to self-deploy without requiring a full-scale internal or external technical team.

JumpCloud is a better option for the confusion of point solutions combine with legacy directories that attempt to secure on-premise and remote user access to cloud apps, Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

Bhargava says, as far as technology goes, JumpCloud is doubling down on user experience and engineering capabilities to ensure customers can authenticate user identity, secure data, control targeted IT resources, and ensure the network is safe to traverse. JumpCloud traditionally focused on core directory services and has more recently expanded its zero-trust philosophy to components.

The company uses more than 100,000 organizations spanning over 100 countries, with more than 3,000 paying customers.

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.

Startup Concure Oncology in Mercer Island, Washington. The mission is to ease the burden for women facing early-stage breast cancer by providing an innovative new kind of radiation treatment option.

Concure Oncology was funded $2 million in capital to use the funds to grow its company and train new clinicians to bring this treatment option to even more women.

Said Scott Armstrong, CEO of Concure Oncology. This funding can build out their team and give women who have breast cancer a better and more effective form of treatment as they move forward.

Breast Microseed Treatment is a radiation therapy technique for early-stage breast cancer patients. Also known as low-dose-rate brachytherapy, based on a similar method proven successful in treating prostate cancer. This procedure, also known as low-dose-rate brachytherapy, is based on a matching process established to treat prostate cancer successfully. What identifies this treatment from regular radiation therapy is that it allows post-lumpectomy patients the chance to have a one-time, one-hour procedure. The more burdensome conventional radiation may last from three to six weeks and require daily visits to a radiation facility.

After a tumor removed, the procedure involves placing small titanium seeds filled with radioactive palladium in the patient’s body where cancer applied. These seeds, which are the size of a rice grain, release a short measure of radiation in the former tumor area, killing any cancerous cells that remain and preventing new ones from growing. Once entirely removed, the seeds become inactive, with no radioactivity remaining.

Scott Armstrong said this financing speaks to the excitement and momentum they have seen for this truly groundbreaking type of breast cancer therapy.

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.

Perch based in Boston, MA. This company is a technology-enabled consumer quality brands that acquire and operate Amazon Marketplace businesses to win products in their respective categories.

Perch was funded $123.5 million in a new round of financing. Spark Capital led the funding with participation from past investor Tectonic Ventures and new backer Boston Seed. Perch intends to use the capital mainly to acquire category-leading products and companies, make out its core team, and invest in its technology platform.

Third-party sellers are growing gross revenue at a rate greater than 50% in 2020. Yet, even though 86 percent of third party sellers are profitable, there are often limited options and resources available for these entrepreneurs to take their products to the next level. That’s where Perch comes in. Perch acquires high-quality consumer products and brands that have a steady history of strong customer reviews. They are consistently one of the top products within their category and demonstrate the opportunity for continued growth.

Said Chris Bell, the CEO of Perch; they currently count women’s athleisure brand Satina, kitchenware from Flathead and Aulett and others, health and personal care brands among its stable companies. There are just ten on the platform today. The funding is getting on the back of success and ambitious plans to grow 50 by the end of 2021, eventually hundreds or thousands of brands.

Bell adds that technology is the most crucial part of our model because some 40% of the startup’s team works on its platform, which is used to onboard. Eventually, thousands of brands at scale in an e-commerce-native environment.

The platform helps run analytics on sales, determine pricing and ad strategy, inventory positioning, and other marketing decisions. Longer-term, it will also use to help figure out how to sell and balance products on social and retail channels.

Said Alex Finkelstein, General Partner of Spark Capital. The Perch team has the M&A, eCommerce, and Amazon experience to know what makes a quality and scalable consumer product and take those products to the next level post-acquisition. Moreover, they exceed excited to begin this round because Perch is already off to a solid start. Given the booming eCommerce market, he expects they will continue to see record numbers and added acquisitions this 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.

Yotascale, a Menlo Park, CA-based the industry leader in next-generation cloud cost management software, was funded $13 million for its Series B round funding.

The round was led by Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, with existing investors’ participation in Crosslink Capital, Pelion Ventures, and Engineering Capital. This funding intends to continue to expand operations and its business reach.

When you encountered a startup, you don’t go out and purchase a rack of servers. And you don’t produce an in-house data center team. Instead, you spread out your infrastructure needs to the major cloud platforms, namely Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

That’s all fine, but any startup’s cloud setup will become more complex, varied, and perhaps multi-provider over time. Start in microservices, and one can turn up with significant confusion and an even higher bill. That’s the difficulty that Yotascale wants to beat.

Most startups they expand, so too does their outflow of dollars to the major tech companies. So paying less on AWS or Azure would be best for startups.

Yotascale wants to be the supporter for many companies to understand and attribute that spend to the right part of their platform or service, perhaps reducing aggregate spend at the same time.

Yotascale’s software provides engineering teams, the subject matter experts, for their cloud workloads and applications. Complete visibility of cloud costs, making more cost-effective decisions, and independently validating planned usage for faster buying cycles increased savings of 50%.

Yotascale’s next-generation approach to cloud cost management provides three pillars for a genuinely collaborative, optimized framework: unified cost management, joint cost optimization, and predictive capacity planning. Yotascale’s solution focuses on understanding cloud spend seamlessly and builds trust with engineering teams. Not just providing piecemeal reports requiring manual administrative configuration and sealed communications.

Yotascale has widely adopted industry-wide by leading fortune 1000 companies globally, such as Zoom Video Conferencing, Hulu, and Doordash, driving its revenue growth year over the year.

According to Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner at Felicis, Yotascale provides complete visibility and significant savings and allows for accurate cost attribution, including usage of microservices. That’s why they are pleased to be a partner and to invest with Yotascale on their journey.

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.

Agoura Hills, California based A2 Biotherapeutics is a biotechnology company developing innovative cell therapies for stable tumor cancer patients, was funded $71.5M Series B financing.

The investors in this financing are The Column Group, Vida Ventures, Samsara BioCapital, Nextech Invest, Casdin Capital, Euclidean Capital, UC Investments, and Hartford HealthCare Endowment. The fund will proceed to the advancement of its Tmod (T-cell module) platform and the clinical development and in-house manufacturing of its three near-term product candidates.

A2 Biotherapeutics, established in 2018, is an entirely integrated discovery, development, and manufacturing organization that is applying its cell therapy Tmod platform for the treatment of solid tumor cancers.

Said Scott Foraker, the CEO of A2, is the first company to create vital engineered T cells that can combine two signals to harness the incredible power of immune cells to attack tumors that have lost specific genes while sparing normal cells whose genomes are intact.

Tmod design and proof-of-concept paperwork explain the Tmod dual-targeting system and demonstrate its ability to recognize and selectively destroy tumor cells that have lost expression of defined target molecules.

Tmod provides a practical solution to cancer research’s two significant problems: distinguishing tumor vs. normal cells and accessing new cancer targets. The Tmod platform can provide many products using various activator/blocker combinations.  By allowing these combinations, the Tmod platform has the potential to treat nearly all solid tumor cancers.

A2 has an accomplished team of previous Amgen and Kite Pharma drug and cell therapy developers to fulfill these vast potential therapies. Said Alexander Kamb, co-founder of A2, they have first-rate discovery scientists who can deliver on pioneering cancer programs and technology. Professional development and manufacturing staff allow us to innovate on both sides of the cell-therapy product—the Tmod target/receptor system and the T cells.

By: K. Tagura

Author statement:

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

New York-based company ButterflyMX a smart intercom creator, a secure and convenient smartphone-based technology, was funded $35 million in a growth equity round.

This newest round was led by Volition Capital, with support from Egis Capital, RiverPark Ventures, and Stifel Venture Bank. As part of the financing, Roger Hurwitz and Robert Chefitz of Volition Capital and Egis Capital will join ButterflyMX’s board of directors.

A company spokesperson said that the fresh capital would expand into new markets, hire on 80 new employees by 2021, and introduce products that extend ButterflyMX’s intercom experience from the front door to the rest of the building.

The company started in 2014. Their mission is to let people open and manage doors from a smartphone. ButterflyMX does design to eliminate the unnecessary building wiring and in-unit hardware that comes with common video intercoms, significantly reducing installation costs for property owners and developers.

ButterflyMX enables easy property access control from anywhere at any time. With ButterflyMX, tenants enjoy seeing, speaking, grant building access to visitors via their smartphone, and building staff benefit from simplified property operations and management — allowing their teams to focus on higher-value tasks rather than managing and granting property access.

Cyrus Claffeey, the founder of ButterflyMX, said, Their smartphone-based platform does build to provide a better living and working experience by solving the access challenges associated with modern properties. Their products also simplify building staff by enabling them to focus their time effectively and efficiently, which has never been more important.

He is also thankful to their investors that allowed them to continue to develop products and services that help the real estate world move away from antiquated keys, fobs, and keycards for managing property access.

ButterflyMX is installed in more than 4,500 properties across the U.S. and internationally. It has adopted in buildings developed, owned, and operated by the most trusted names in real estate, including Greystar, AvalonBay Communities, Bozzuto, CA Ventures, Lennar, Lincoln Property Company, and Equity Residential.

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.