PropTech is Back
Boston Tech Companies Raised Over $360M Last Week
This April, PropTech companies have raised $80M to develop technologies that improve the tenant and landlord experience. Last week I wrote about HqO raising a $60M Series C to build an operating system for tenant experiences. This week, four other companies in PropTech announced fundraises:
Knox Financial 💸
Following a $3M seed round last February, Knox Financial has raised a $10M Series A led by G20 Ventures, with support from Greycroft, Pillar, 2LVC, and Gaingels. They help homeowners convert their home into an investment property through their “Frictionless Ownership Platform.” Knox handles all the boring parts of renting like finances, insurance, legal, and property management — in exchange for a 10% cut in rental income.
HomeBinder 🏠
Burlington-based HomeBinder wants to centralize all of your home’s data to help you easily interact with vendors for all your home’s needs. It’s actually quite similar to a consumer version of HqO. They just announced a $1.6M fundraise from SixThirty and Matt Hansen.
Breezeway 🔧
Property operations and services platform Breezeway just raised $6.2M, according to a Form D filed yesterday. Their product helps landlords with lots of property coordinate maintenance tasks, communicate with property managers and tenants, and ensure maintenance quality. They raised $8M last August.
SplitSpot ⌚
York IE, One Way Ventures, and PJC just backed a flexible leasing platform called SplitSpot in a $2M round. They intermediate the renting process to provide more flexible leases that are as short as four months while eliminating big fees and inefficient background checks.
Stuff I’m Reading:
Other Boston Tech Financing Rounds:
SES 🔋
Woburn-based SES just raised a large $139M Series D led by General Motors, with participation from SK, Temasek, Applied Ventures, Shanghai Auto, and Vertex. They develop rechargeable lithium batteries for electric vehicles. They also notably develop the recycling process, modules, and optimization algorithms for the batteries in-house.
Empyrean Solutions 🏦
Balance sheet management company Empyrean Solutions just announced a $74M growth round for a minority stake led by Spectrum Equity, with participation from Information Venture Partners. They make software for banks to manage risk by simulating liquidity stress tests, analyzing deposit data, and providing other forward-looking modeling capabilities. Notably the 11-year-old company’s first publicly disclosed round of funding.
Current Health 🩺
Current Health just raised an oversubscribed $43M Series B led by Northpond Ventures, with support from LRVHealth, OSF HealthCare, Section 32, and Elements Health Ventures. They’re a remote monitoring company that helps hospitals manage at-home patients and patients in decentralized clinical trials. They use a custom wearable and software suite to monitor patient vitals and communicate with them. It has all the sensors that leading athletic performance wearables have like respiration rate, oxygen saturation, movement, heart rate, and body temperature. Basically a medical-grade Whoop.
Multiverse 🎲
Gaming development platform Multiverse raised a $17M Series A from Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Crunchyroll co-founder Kun Gao, Oculus VR co-founder Nate Mitchell — as well as VCs Anthos Capital and Makers Fund.
The platform is still in private beta, but its purpose is to allow anyone to build and run virtual TTRPGs (table top role-playing games) like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a web-based platform that serves as a collaborative sandbox for creating these games with others. Eventually, they want to create a marketplace where users can sell the games they’ve developed.
Anumana 💓
The Mayo Clinic recently launched a new technology platform called the Remote Diagnostics and Management Platform (RDMP) — and spun out two companies in the process. One was a telemetry data aggregation company called Lucem Health that’s also backed by SF-based Commure, which raised a $6M Series A upon announcement.
The other is a Cambridge-based joint venture with nference called Anumana that wants to use AI to find early signs of heart disease from ECG data. They’re based out of Cambridge and raised a $25.6M Series A from Matrix Capital Management, Matrix Partners, and NTTVC.
ConnectRN 👨⚕️
ConnectRN, which offers mobile app for nurses to pick up shifts on their own terms, just raised $13.1M per a new filing. They’ve previously raised a total of ~$20M across six rounds, the latest being a Series C in March 2020 from HBM Healthcare Investments. Nurses, aids, and assistants can join the platform and sign up for available shifts that fit their schedule and skills.
Regent 🛥️
Electric sea glider ferry company Regent just raised $9M from Caffeinated Capital, Mark Cuban, Founders Fund, and YC. They aim to make a vehicle that can take off on water out of harbors before launching into the air to fly over waves at up to 180mph. It’s meant to be used for passenger travel across coasts.
Till Financial 💳
Family banking app Till Financial just raised $5M to empower kids to save and spend smarter. Investors included Elysian Park Ventures, Pivotal Ventures, Magnify Ventures, Afore Capital, the founders of Drizly, and several others. It gives kids a virtual and physical debit card to practice saving up for purchases and managing recurring subscriptions. Its goal is to show children not just how to store away money, but how to spend it wisely.
CapShift 🎁
A new filing shows that CapShift just raised $4.9M in fresh funding. Led by Adam Rein, the company is developing an impact investing platform for financial institutions that want to mobilize for social change. They help donor advised funds, financial advisors, endowments, and family offices make and monitor impact investments.
Quala 🤝
Customer success platform Quala just announced a $4M seed round led by Underscore VC. The company is led by Sonciary Honnoll and Jonathan Tushman, who discovered that most existing customer success platforms fail to accurately capture, normalize, and leverage the valuable insights generated from customer interactions. The built team built Quala to make it fast and easy measure quantitative and qualitative customer sentiment data in a way that’s actionable for a company on day one.
Monit 🏦
A new filing shows that SMB financial intelligence platform Monit has raised $2.9M. It gives banks the ability to help business owners forecast expenses, complete sensitivity analyses, and optimize for PPP forgiveness.
Riff Analytics 📹
Riff Analytics, which analyzes user activity during video calls to show teams how they interact, appears to have raised $1.9M in a $2.4M round. It’s run by Beth Porter, who’s also the co-founder and Managing Director of Esme Learning Solutions which raised $7.6M from Adit Ventures back in February.
It’s similar to Boston-based Macro, which raised from FirstMark, General Catalyst, and Underscore last summer to make a collaborative and customizable overlay for Zoom meetings. It also looks like they’re in the middle of an interesting rebrand and new beta 👀.
Voatz 🗳️
Voatz has been working on a mobile voting solution with blockchain ledger since 2015. A new Form D shows that they’ve raised $1.3M out of a $10M round.
Back in early 2020, they faced some negative press after a team of researchers claimed their voting service had severe vulnerabilities — a crippling allegation before an election cycle. By July of 2020, the company embarked on a PR tour to clear concerns by partnering with a third party organization which verified its compliance with federal voting guidelines. They’ve also dished out thousands of dollars through a bug bounty program to stress test their systems.
Between phony cries of election fraud, questionable voting laws being passed, and Dogecoin’s market cap passing $35B — it’s an interesting time to be selling a blockchain-based voting system.
Raise Green 🌞
Somerville-based Raise Green, which operates a marketplace for crowdfunded impact investing in local sustainability projects, raised $810K out of a $1.5M round.