Last Week in Boston Tech Deals
A Look at Deal Count, YTD
I’m relatively selective about the deals I put in this newsletter, so I think graphing them out might be a solid representation of tech investment activity for the Boston area. I summed up the weekly deal count for each tech company I’ve written about since the year started:
Last week marks the sixth time that VC deal count for tech companies in Boston equaled the level of deal count on the week of the WHO declaring a pandemic. We still have a ways to go before we start seeing weeks with 15+ new deals announced on a regular basis, which makes writing this a little easier 😀.
Note: This data is compiled by me, from companies I’ve written about every week. It’s my personal interpretation of the ecosystem. If you’re a regular reader, you probably have a good idea of the type of companies I cover.
Stuff I’m Reading:
Rolling Venture Funds Through The Good Times and Bad — LawOfVC
Rolling Funds & The Rise of Micro LPs - The Curious Investor
VC Financing Deals:
Labster 👩🔬
EdTech company Labster just raised $9M from GGV Capital to bring university laboratories online. Other participating investors included Owl Ventures, Balderton, and Northzone. Mirroring millions of dollars worth of equipment in a virtual environment lowers the barriers for those looking to learn how to run experiments and properly manage a laboratory.
What’s more exciting to me is how the future of virtual laboratories and virtual research might converge. Plenty of companies are working on simulating chemical interactions in a way that could only be done with either millions of dollars of raw materials, or millions of hours worth of time. We can already run virtual experiments to develop new drugs or materials or understand how they might interact with humans in a closed environment.
I’m sure Labster isn’t quite going for this, but imagine a day when the two ideas combine and actual laboratories running real research — not just training — are fully hosted in the cloud and in VR.
Root AI 🌿
Two-year-old robotic agriculture company Root AI received $7.2M in a seed round led by PJC, with participation from First Round Capital, Accomplice, Launch (Jason Calacanis), AgFunder, and the Outsiders Fund. PJC’s General Partner Rob May outlined why he invested in the company in a Medium post:
Indoor farming is so good because the yield is better than outdoor and weather conditions are controlled perfectly year-round.
The biggest bottleneck in making indoor farming more scalable has historically been manual labor. Not just the cost of labor, but literally finding people that can do it.
Root solves this by using computer vision to detect ripeness in indoor crops and automatically harvesting them at the perfect time, eliminating major labor needs.
Stavvy 🏘️
Just after publishing a list of PropTech companies that have recently raised last week, Stavvy also just raised $1.5M. Stavvy is a SaaS company making it easier for mortgage lenders to access vendor data, store and share documents, and virtually close on properties. They’ve now raised ~$3M since being founded.
actnano 🌊
Actnano, the developer of protective coating for cars, IoT devices, and electronics, has raised $10M in an $11M funding round. I mentioned them in October when they had raised $850K from undisclosed investors. The eight-year-old company specializes in making water-resistant nanocoating materials that require no special technology to apply to electronic components.
“actnano has a number of nano coatings that can be applied to electronic devices in a way that makes them water-resistant to IPx7 levels. In other words, a cell phone or notebook computer will work just fine after being dropped in a bucket of water.”
That would be pretty cool…
Vicarious Surgical 👩⚕️
Vicarious Surgical, a company combining virtual reality and robotics to improve surgical outcomes, just raised $13.2M led by E15 Capital, with additional participation from Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and AME Cloud Ventures. In the past, I’ve also covered Boston’s Activ Surgical, who’s also working on autonomous surgery tech with a focus on making it collaborative.
GoPeer 🏫
Online tutoring startup GoPeer just raised a $2M round led by former Uber VP Ed Baker and joined by other individual investors from Matrix Partners, GSV Ventures, Facebook, and Highland Capital Partners. Founded by Ethan Binder, the company helps college students make extra income by tutoring K-12 students on a variety of subjects. What’s neat is the platform lets tutors keep 100% of their hourly rate by having students pay a monthly/annual membership fee for unlimited tutoring. According to Crunchbase, they previously raised $265K from the Slater Technology Fund and Deborah Quazzo last August.
Reify Health 🏥
Reify Health, a startup building software to help recruit patients for clinical trials, just raised a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures with participation from Sierra Asset Management. It’s focusing on making patient recruitment and trial enrollment simpler for medical staff with its StudyTeam product, leading to faster and more efficient trials (including some for COVID-19 related research). They’ve now raised ~$40M across five rounds since 2012.
“The company claims that its software can accelerate enrollment by six weeks on average and is used by 1,800 sites in 26 countries, as well as several large drugmakers.” — MedCity News
Solstice 🌞
Community solar startup Solstice just raised $3.1M in a $3.5M round. I wrote about them in June when they raised $1M. In total, they’ve raised around $6.6M since February of last year. The company offers a turnkey solution for communities to get solar power, without needing the actual panels. They connect communities to solar gardens/shared solar farms nearby so they can immediately get renewable energy for a small upfront cost. Their most recent investors include Total Ventures, AmplifyHer Ventures, True Ventures, Mass CEC, and Able Partners.
Lumeon 💉
Patient care engagement and automation platform Lumeon just raised a $30M Series D led by Optum Ventures and Endeavor Vision. Other investors included IPF Partners, Gilde, and Amadeus Capital Partners. They focus on improving patient “care pathway orchestration” in a healthcare system crippled by siloed data and a lack of system interoperability.
Pliant.io 🤖
A new Form D indicates that low-code IT Process Automation Platform Pliant has raised $1.4M, with $1.2M in equity remaining to be sold. The three-year-old company helps organizations build workflows that eliminate manually driven IT infrastructure activities. They aggregate blocks of code from publicly available APIs from vendors to make it easy for companies to spin up workflow automations that save them time. According to Crunchbase, they did a $400K pre-seed in 2018 followed by a $2M seed in 2019. Previous investors include VT Technology Ventures, New Stack Ventures, Leading Edge Ventures, and Newfund Capital.
Zmags 📚
Zmags, a PE-backed company making software for eCommerce experiences, just raised $5.3M in equity financing. According to Crunchbase, the first money in was Denmark-based Northcap and Boston’s Openview. They’ve since raised several rounds of debt financing and were acquired by PE firm The Gores Group in 2014. It’s a low-code platform for adding shoppability features to any website, a market that’s becoming increasingly saturated by eCommerce aggregators like Shopify and low-code web development companies like Webflow.
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