Boston Tech Raised $150M+ Last Week

Gifting-as-a-Service, Drones for Farmers, Battery Recycling, and More

Nick Stuart

Apr 12, 2021

Happy Monday!

It was way too beautiful out this weekend to be indoors and write too much.

~Enjoy the week~

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Stuff I’m Reading:

Boston Tech Financings:

Firefly Health 🏥

Andreessen Horowitz just led the $40M in Series B for four-year-old Firefly Health, with other investors including F-Prime and Oak HC/FT. It’s a virtual-first primary care company that provides users with a cross functional team for all of their needs — a physician, behavioral health specialist, nurse practitioner, and health guide. They want to be a “digital Kaiser” that offers employees a modern benefits stack at a lower cost than traditional care.

Vizgen 🧬

Advanced spatial transcriptomics company Vizgen just raised a $37M Series B co-led by Novalis LifeSciences and Northpond Ventures. Other investors included Tao Capital Partners and Pura Vida Investments. They’re the developer of MERFISH: “multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization.” Basically the current way that we look at genetic data involves grinding it down into fragments then putting it through a machine for analysis. Vizgen’s MERFISH product allows scientist to see images of the molecules in their native context to better understand their 3D organization. I wrote about them last in Feb’20 when they raised a $14M Series A from ARCH Venture Partners and Northpond.

Alyce 🎁

Corporate gifting startup Alyce just raised $30M in Series B funding led by General Catalyst, with additional support from Boston Seed Capital, Golden Ventures, Manifest, Morningside, and Victress Capital. They use AI to help enterprises level up their gifting game by providing personalized recommendations. They’ve grown 300% YoY following an $11.5M Series A back in 2019. Hopefully they can broaden to B2C and help me choose gifts for friends and relatives.

LineVision 🔌

LineVision, which helps utility companies monitor electrical overhead lines and pipelines using advanced sensors, secured $12.5M in new funding led by UP Partners, with participation from National Grid’s investment arm and ZOMA Capital. They put an EMF sensor near the assets that can collect real time data on their electrical properties without direct contact — which can then be viewed on a cloud dashboard.

Guardian Agriculture 🌱

Guardian Ag, a company building autonomous eVTOL vehicles for crop dusting farms, just announced a $10.5M seed round led by Bayer’s Venture Arm, with participation from FMC Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Fall Line Capital, E14 Fund, Pillar, and Neoteny.

The startup will use the funds to ramp up manufacturing and help fulfill the $20 million worth of preorders…Each device can autonomously spray up to 40 acres an hour on pre-planned routes. The eVTOL can be programmed to fertilize in specific areas, which allows farmers to only hit crops that need it and to use whichever treatment or chemical they already use. — Forbes

Ziflow 📈

Boston and London-based Ziflow just raised $6M in new expansion funding led by Companyon Ventures, with participation from Riverside Acceleration Capital. They help marketing teams streamline the creative review process using “online proofing” software. Marketing teams can centralize content that needs to be reviewed to go live in a sort of Figma-style collaborative environment. No more emailing drafts back and forth while losing context around the editing process.

QSimulate 🔬

According to a new filing, Cambridge-based QSimulate just raised $5.8M for its computational R&D platform. They want to use quantum mechanical simulations to help researchers in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries develop new products. They’re using proprietary software, cloud computing, and partnerships with emerging quantum computing companies to make the cost of doing such simulations affordable and fast.

Ark 💰

Ark, a SaaS investor portal for private equity funds, just raised a $3.4M Series A led by Vitruvian Partners. “Built for CFOs, by CFOs,” Ark’s web portal product makes it easy for funds to automate processes like reporting, capital calls, distributions, and fundraising. It’s led by former consultants and ex-Standish Management employees (one was their former Director of Technology and the other a Product Manager).

Nth Cycle 🔋

Nth Cycle believes that much of the critical minerals necessary for the clean energy revolution are already in circulation. That’s why they just raised $3.2M from Clean Energy Ventures to mine them more efficiently. They’re building a recycling technology that extracts metals from things like lithium batteries, e-waste, and iron ore. That technology is centered around electroextraction, which is apparently far cleaner than the current standard of pyrometallurgy, which is basically just melting everything together to extract target materials.

Hearby 🎵

Hearby, a three-year-old company based out of Cambridge that aggregates local live music listings, announced a $1.5M seed round from Namier Capital Partners and Simon Murdoch. “The company's platform combines big data and anthropology to provide the comprehensive collections of local music listings and allows users to discover all live shows and artists playing in their local music scene, enabling users to avail live music experience at the comfort of their home.”

inBalance ⚡

According to a new Form D, electricity price forecasting company inBalance just raised $665K. Led by Thomas Marge, Rajan Troll, and Edwin Fennell, the company wants to make electricity markets more efficiently priced by predicting energy needs with machine learning. They believe this will make energy storage companies, grid operators, and market participants more efficient at allocating assets.

Suspect Technologies 👮

Six-year-old Suspect Technologies, which provides facial recognition software to law enforcement, raised $400K in a $2M round according to a new filing. I thought in December we passed some laws to ban this exact practice, but not if Charlie Baker ever officially signed off on it…