Last Week in Tech Deals
Twelve Boston Companies Raised $263M
Black Lives Matter
It’s been a tragic week across the country. It’s difficult to type this newsletter and pretend like everything is normal because it’s not. To be honest, it’s been very uncomfortable to find the right way to speak up from a place of privilege.
It’s impossible for me to truly empathize with what George Floyd’s family and the black community as a whole are going through right now. I think the best thing to do if you’re in a position like me is to spend time more time listening and lifting up other voices and being an ally to those making change. Here are a few places you can put your money to help the cause:
Stuff I’m Reading:
VC Financing Deals:
Wasabi ☁️
Wasabi has raised a $30M Series B led by Forestay Capital, bringing its total investment to $110M. Wasabi is a cloud storage company that can store data at 1/5th of the cost of competitors’ services. The company’s product eliminates the need for complex tiers of storage. Instead of storing data in different places based on the frequency of use or speed that it must be accessed, it can all instantly be uploaded and retrieved using a “hot storage” technique. The funds will be used to drive global expansion.
RemoteHQ 🌐
Boston-based RemoteHQ has raised $2.7M from TECHU and Underscore VC. The four-year-old company provides a virtual workspace for activities like team meetings, product demos, customer support, training, and more. Founded by Waikit Lau, RemoteHQ is supposed to “replicate the natural flow of connection” found in traditional office environments, which is somewhat missing from the current remote workforce solutions (Think whiteboard sessions and sticky notes on easels). The product allows users to collaboratively use web apps and view files in “rooms” that simulate an office environment.
It’s a neat space that’s gaining traction from VCs and remote-first companies. Lots of consumer-focused VCs are focused on where the “third place” or “metaverse” will be for socializing online. It’s important to think about this for enterprises as well. For example, Spatial just raised $23M to help businesses create a VR-enabled workspace with similar functionality to RemoteHQ. I think the “remote metaverse” will be clunky for a long time. However, as remote work continues to take hold of the economy, people might get sick of thinking about their work-life existing only on a 13” Macbook screen and instead vouch for something more immersive.
Floating Point Group (₿)
Floating Point Group, a two-year-old startup building settlement technology for cryptocurrency exchanges, has raised $2M in seed funding from Seabury Global Markets, Pay It Forward, BoxOne Ventures, Steve Kokinos (Algorand CEO), and Naval Ravikant. They’ve previously received capital from the Dorm Room Fund and MIT’s Delta V.
Floating Point Group helps institutional investors deploy custom trading applications with a simple API. Their backend aggregates pricing data from multiple crypto exchanges to get investors accurate pricing data and actionable information. This can help lower the transaction costs of buying and selling crypto and reduce the deployment time of new trading strategies.
Ginkgo Bioworks 🧬
Synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks has raised $70M in new capital from Illumina, General Atlantic, and Viking Global Investors. This comes about six months after they raised a $290M Series E, solidifying them as one of Boston’s highest-valued startups. Founded in 2008, the company genetically engineers microbes for use in industries like agriculture, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and more. Here’s a cool writeup on Ginkgo from Axial, which writes about life science financing.
RentalBeast 🏠
Rental listing startup RentalBeast is raising $14.3M in what looks like a Series A. Founded in 2003, the previously angel-backed company focuses on curating a database of rental listings to help agents, brokers, landlords, and tenants connect with each other. According to Linkedin, they have dozens of employees and have property listings in all 50 states.
Locus Robotics 🤖
Six-year-old Locus Robotics is raising $46M. The company creates robots that help improve logistics in warehouses, similar to Kiva Systems/Amazon Robotics. Their end-to-end robotics solution focuses on optimizing productivity by prioritizing order sequences and movement patterns on warehouse floors and limiting the need for workers to follow the robots. Bostinno has a great writeup and video on them here.
Codio 👩🎓
An 11-year-old computer science education company called Codio is raising $3M. They’re previously backed by a Swiss family office called Armada Investment. They offer customized learning experiences, a built-in IDE, and back-end grading infrastructure for teachers.
Mabl 🧪
Mabl, a startup that creates automated UI tests for product development, is raising $8M. The three-year-old company has now raised ~$36M and is backed by GV, Amplify Partners, and CRV. Their automated and low-code test development product helps speed up the release pipeline for new software products. Mabl allows you to record an action using its Chrome extension to create an automated UI test that can be easily replayed to test for QA issues.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems 🔋
MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised an additional $84M in Series A2 funding to commercialize the use of fusion energy. The round was led by Temasek, and other participating investors included Equinor and Devonshire Investors. Previous investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and The Engine.
The three-year-old company is working on developing a facility to demonstrate nuclear fusion in the next year and commercialize it by 2025. Right now, their focus is using high-temperature superconductor (HTS) magnets for their tokamak concept, which is a large magnetic device that will hopefully create a confined and controlled nuclear fusion reaction when completed. According to the company, funding will go towards the continued development of its new SPARC headquarters and other new manufacturing facilities.
Boston Materials 🏗️
Four-year-old carbon fiber composite manufacturer Boston Materials has raised $2.1M from undisclosed investors and $750K from the National Science Foundation. The Northeastern spinout creates a variety of cutting-edge composites for applications like wind turbines, aerospace, and EVs. Previous investors include Clean Energy Ventures, SABIC, and Ansys.
Solstice 🌞
Following a $2.5M round in February of 2019, Solstice has raised about $1M in convertible debt. The company offers a turnkey solution for communities to get solar power, without having the 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.
Alloy Enterprises 👻
Alloy Enterprises, a brand new advanced manufacturing company out of Somerville, has raised $400K. There’s little online about the company, other than it being founded by Andrea Bedell, Alison Forsyth, and Nicholas Mykulowcyz. According to their description, the company is, “developing industrial engineering technology to tackle deficiencies in conventional manufacturing.”
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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