Last Week in Boston Tech Deals
Boston Companies are Still Building
Thirteen Boston companies raised over $100M in capital last week
How do You Stay Connected?
I hope you’re all getting used to staying indoors and socially distancing. My school just announced we are staying online for the remainder of the semester, so I’ve got plenty of time to get used to it between crying sessions. Being stuck in a makeshift basement office has given me time to think about how I socialize with others and get new information.
It seems like the more interesting conversations I have these days are the Twitter DM group chats, niche Slack channels, and Snapchat groups with friends and colleagues. Does anyone else feel this way? I think this tweet from Chapter One’s Jeff Morris Jr. sums up the topic well:
What would you, as subscribers, think about an exclusive group chat for Boston Tech Deals readers? Just a simple group chat for community members to share links, stories, memes, etc. that you don’t have anywhere else to share? I’d love to set this up and I have some ideas on how it might work. Let me know if you have any thoughts.
Also, YC Digital Demo Day
YCombinator hosted its first fully-digital demo day for their Winter Batch. Around 200 startups presented via video. You can read about all of these companies on TechCrunch: B2B Companies, Consumer Companies, Hardware/Robots/AI/Dev Tool Companies, and Healthcare/Biotech/Fintech/Nonprofits. I dug into them this week, and here are ten that caught my eye:
Fly.io — Deploys your app on severs that are physically closest to users.
Riot Security — Asking $199/mo to regularly try to hack your company.
Jet Admin — No-code product to help companies build internal tools.
HYPHY — Helps creators easily sell digital content to brands.
Taiv — Help sports bars better monetize their television screens.
Datasaur — Simple tool for humans to label machine data.
Teleo — Make any construction equipment remote-controlled.
Agnoris — Analyzes restaurant sales data, recommends price changes.
Cortex — Audits the health and efficiency of all the microservices you use.
Grain — Transform your debit cards into credit cards based on your income.
If you’re subscribed to TechCrunch’s “Extra Crunch,” you can listen to the YC staff break down how the day went over a call here.
What I’m Reading This Week:
Anyways, onto the good stuff:
VC Financing Deals:
Addapptation (New Hampshire) ☁️
I find Salesforce to be such an interesting company because everyone uses their products, but nobody loves them. They’re clunky, confusing, and a huge pain for most sales organizations. Sumner and Carla Vanderhoof noticed this too, and it inspired them to start Addapptation. The company has developed a platform that helps enterprises build simple UXs on top of Salesforce.
The Exeter, NH-based company just announced a $1.3M Seed Round led by 2048 Ventures, with participation from New Hampshire’s eCoast Angels and Millworks Fund. Back in 2017, they went through the New Hampshire AlphaLoft Accelerate program, winning $100K. In 2018, they participated in MassChallenge and won the Gold Award. Other than competition winnings, this is the company’s first official round of outside funding.
ZeroNorth 🔍
ZeroNorth, an enterprise cybersecurity service for production environments, just raised a $10M Series A1 led by Crosslink Capital, with additional participation from ClearSky, Rally Ventures, and Petrillo Capital. Their total raised is now $27.5M. The company helps enterprises embed security throughout the entire software development lifecycle instead of integrating vulnerability scanning tools into every piece of your software infrastructure. They call this “Risk-Based Vulnerability Orchestration.”
Businesses are building new software products at a faster rate than ever before. Getting them to market at high speed without compromising safety and security is difficult, and requires a lot of automation. The attack surface across all products used in the software development lifecycle gets larger by the day. The more parts of the software development lifecycle that are automated, the more chances there are that a critical vulnerability goes unnoticed.
ianacare 👪
Boston’s Founder Collective just led a $3M round into ianacare, the app designed to make the lives of family caregivers easier. “Iana” is short for “I am not alone,” which is the essence of what the app encourages. It makes it easy for caregivers to mobilize a loved one’s network to make their lives better. On the app, you can invite everyone you care about into a private online group and deliver medical updates or receive support. This is called your “team.” Supporters can let caregivers know how they may be able to help a patient within the app, with things like watching a patient in certain parts of the day, feeding them, or running household errands.
There’s also a social aspect. For those who have had a friend or family member in need of a caregiver, it’s always heartwarming to get a positive group message with updates on someone’s condition. Now there’s a centralized location to view, like, and comment on them. Their total raised is now $3.64M, with previous investors including Cue Ball Capital, MassChallenge, and various angels. Ianacare is led by Jessica Kim, a third-time founder and previous EiR at Brown University and Charles River Ventures.
Hi Marley 👋
Boston-based InsurTech startup Hi Marley just secured an $8M round of funding, according to a Form D filing from last week. This follows an $8.75M Series A raised back in January of 2019 from True Ventures and Underscore VC. The three-year-old startup has developed an AI-driven texting solution for insurance carriers to communicate with their clients to increase customer satisfaction. The backend of the product integrates with an insurance carrier’s current systems so they can send automated, customized information to end-users.
Lumo ✈️
Lumo, the company that predicts and manages flight delays, has joined the SAP Foundry accelerator program, which typically doles out between $20K and $250K to participants based on what I can see from their portfolio. The company claims to have built complex machine learning algorithms to predict possible flight changes days or weeks in advance. Unfortunately, you don’t need AI to do this right now. They’ve already raised from various accelerators and grant programs like JetBlue Technology Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center, and NASA.
amwell 🏥
Telehealth company Amwell has raised $60M from Cowen Healthcare Investments in a time where the industry is seeing some explosive growth. Aside from traditional telemedicine video tech, they also develop video carts and on-site telehealth kiosks for patients. More from BostInno here.
WEVO 🖥️
Boston-based MarTech company WEVO Conversion has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the NH-based investment and advisory firm York IE. The company specializes in providing individually targeted website interfaces to end-users. They help enterprise marketing teams understand why visitors aren’t converting and recommend changes to the website interface before going live on a redesign. Previous investors include Elevate Capital, JKS Ventures, and Half Court Ventures, as well as a host of New England-based angels.
Fritz AI 📱
Fritz, the developer of pre-trained AI models for mobile applications, just raised $5M from so far undisclosed investors. Previous backers include Agile Angel, Eniac Ventures, Hack VC, Hemisphere Ventures, Nextgen Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital. The company focuses on teaching mobile apps to “see, hear, sense, and think.” The pre-trained models help app developers quickly spin up AI-driven products.
All of these models are embedded within the app on-premise, as opposed to being cloud-based. Fritz sees this as a benefit for developers because it makes apps faster, more scalable, secure, and cheaper. It’s led by Jameson Toole, an ex-Googler, MIT PhD, and previous co-founder of a Boston-based geospatial data analytics startup that has since shut down called Wherehouse. Want to stay involved with what Fritz users and team members are up to? Check out their Slack community here.
ZwitterCo 🧬
In mid-November of last year, I wrote about ZwitterCo closing a $1.12M in angel funding from investors like ImagineH20, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Greentown Labs, and Tufts Gordon Institute. They have since added a $950K tranche of funding to that round, bringing their total raised to around $2.1M. From my post last year:
“ZwitterCo is the creator of a “reverse osmosis membrane technology built for industrial water treatment.” The company claims that its nanofiltration technology can filter more than 98% of organic molecules. Zwitter’s technology utilizes zwitterionic copolymers, which sounds completely fake but I promise it’s very real and has some fascinating potential applications.”
They cheaply and efficiently treat industrial wastewater in a way that requires less water to be disposed of (it can instead be permeated back into the ground safely) or it can be treated before going through other waste management equipment to mitigate damage to machines.
KingsCrowd 👑
According to Crunchbase, Boston-based KingsCrowd has (appropriately) raised $1M in equity crowdfunding. The company aggregates private market investment opportunities from a variety of sources and puts them into one feed to surface the most popular qualified investment opportunities. According to Crowdwise and SEC data, qualified equity crowdfunding deals in the US surpassed 725 in 2019. Read more about equity crowdfunding rules and regulations here.
Attestiv ✔️
Attestiv, a platform that helps businesses guarantee the authenticity of digital assets, has closed a $2M+ round of Seed Funding. The round was led by Boston’s Castle Island Ventures, with participation from the Plug and Play Tech Center and Mentors Fund, where Attestiv CEO Nicos Vekiarides is also a partner. The company uses AI and blockchain to fingerprint pieces of digital media to ensure its authenticity. Why is this important? According to the founders, there are many businesses that need to be able to validate that the digital content they handle has not been tampered with.
They see this as being especially important in industries such as insurance underwriting, IoT network communications, and media. They’re already partnering with various insurance agencies and real estate tech companies. The founders were inspired to start the company to stop the spread of misinformation. If you’re curious about this topic, check out the latest Stratechery pieces: Zero Trust Information and Defining Information.
Vanu 📶
Lexington-based wireless infrastructure company, Vanu, just raised $8.82M from so far undisclosed investors. Their base stations help carriers deliver connectivity to previously off-grid communities that were seen as unprofitable to cover. It’s sort of like Eero for the outdoors. Most of their work so far has helped bring mobile networks to off-grid communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Evy Tea ☕
The beverage fundraising spree in Boston continues. I’ve covered a variety of beverage startups raising capital in Massachusetts in the last six months. The majority of these are not really tech, but I like writing about them and nobody has complained yet. Evy Tea is the latest, raising $580K in equity crowdfunding on CircleUp. I’m a big fan of cool social handles, so props to the team for securing @ColdBrewTea on Instagram. Founded by Evy Chen, the company brews organic cold brew tea that is sold in bottles via retail. Back in 2013, they raised $8K on Kickstarter, followed by an additional $1M in equity crowdfunding on CircleUp in 2017.
Thanks for reading!
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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