Happy Monday
Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend.
We’ve got 32 more days of the best year ever. Let’s finish strong 😤
Stuff I’m Reading:
Moderna Designed Coronavirus Vaccine in Just Two Days — Business Insider
The Next 20-Year Cycle in Business Software — Ajay Agarwal & Kevin Zhang
For (One Way Ventures), risk taking is a safe bet — Boston Globe
Anti-aging biotech Elevian raises $15M as it looks to the clinic — Fierce
New SEC Proposal to Give Gig Workers Equity as Income — Reuters
Shoobx is offering a free 1-year subscription to underrepresented founders
VC Financing Deals:
Friday 💡 (Maine)
Back in February, I connected with Luke Thomas when Portland, ME-based Friday closed its $450K pre-seed round after bootstrapping to six figures in revenue. We mused at the time about what this new virus thing in China will mean for the future of remote work. Last week, the company announced its $2.1M seed round led by Bessemer, with participation from Active Capital, Underscore, El Cap Holdings, TLC Collective, and New York Venture Partners.
Friday isn’t a new productivity app meant to clutter your current workloads, it’s more of a system that stiches together your team’s existing goals without introducing new friction. The SaaS product makes it easy for teams to create customized workflows for updating teammates in an asynchronous fashion, built with existing tools in mind.
If you work on a team that regularly shares the same type of information in meetings, it only makes sense to automate the repetitive, well-defined stuff and spend meeting time focusing on deeper context around it — or don’t have it at all.
Once an entire team’s workload is systematically uploaded, you can understand everyone’s bandwidth in an activity feed style. It also creates a clearer paper trail of accountability and system of record — all very useful when working on a team scattered across the globe.
Over the last nine months, Friday has introduced a host of new features around these ideas. One of the most exciting ones is the Digital Planner tool. It pulls information from within the app and outside sources to create a dashboard for triaging immediate tasks that need to be done. It’s a fascinating hybrid for people who love to treat calendars as to-do lists or obsessively track action items in productivity apps. Give it a try.
Logz.io 🔍
Tel Aviv and Boston-based Logz.io announced a $23M funding round led by Pitango Growth (largest Isreal-based VC fund). They offer an open source observability platform that 800+ customers use worldwide to monitor and secure distributed cloud workloads. Total raised is now $120M+.
Photomedics 🦷
Oral care company Photomedics just raised $2.3M, according to a Form D. This comes about a year after their IndieGogo campaign.
According to the company, the mouth hosts over 700 types of bacteria that coexist with us, but some of that bacteria causes bad breath and gum disease — while potentially even leading to more serious conditions like cardiovascular disease, stroke, and premature birth.
Photomedics has developed a device supposedly targets and kills any pathogenic bacteria with blue light, while keeping the healthy parts of your mouth’s microbiome intact. The scientific research driving the device was developed out of The Forsyth Institute.
Resilience 🧬
An SF and Boston-based biopharmaceutical manufacturing moonshot called Resilience just emerged from stealth with $800M in funding led by ARCH Venture Partners and 8VC, with participation form GV, NEA, and others.
They hope to fix the key vulnerabilities involved in medical supply chains, which have been made painfully obvious in 2020.
“Similar to Amazon Web Services, RESILIENCE will empower drug developers with the tools to more fully align discovery, development, and manufacturing; while offering new opportunities to invest in downstream innovations in formulation and manufacturing earlier, while products are still being conceived and developed.” — TechCrunch
OneShield Software 🛡️
OneShield Software just raised a growth round from Bain Capital Credit and Pacific Lake Partners for an undisclosed amount. The 21-year-old SaaS company primarily develops pre-built core applications for use in the property and causality insurance industry.
SparkCharge 🔋
Boston and NY-based SparkCharge has raised $1M, according to a Form D. They’ve created high-capacity portable EV chargers that can be used by roadside assistance teams and EV fleet managers. They previously raised a $3.3M seed round led by PJC in April 2020. This latest round, which is targeting $3M, would put their total raised at over $7.3M.
Givinga 🎁
Five-year-old corporate giving software company Givinga raised $2.4M, according to a Form D. I wrote about them last December when they raised $185K in convertible debt. The company has created a corporate philanthropic giving platform on top of its “Philantech” API. The platform helps companies enable their employees to engage with charitable causes through employee benefits programs.
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That’s all from me until next week — If you’d like to connect with me, you can find me on Linkedin and Twitter or check out my website at nickstu.art.
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