TikTok Investors Come to Boston
Plus Ten Boston Companies That Raised $200M
Last week, Axios reported TikTok star Josh Richards is joining the Boston-based early-stage VC fund Remus Capital as a venture partner. The 18-year-old influencer has over 22 million followers, a podcast deal with Dave Portnoy, and is “Chief Strategy Officer” of TikTok’s US-based competitor, Triller.
Vine birthed a new breed of social media influencers before abruptly dying in 2016. They were guinea pigs testing how internet celebrities should monetize massive audiences. Where the old guard was high-profile influencers using their status and fan base to promote products for fees, the new guard is leveraging their status and fanbase to own equity in those products:
Charli D’Amelio co-invested with Stripe, Coatue, Justin Timberlake, and Collaborative Fund into Step’s Series B.
Josh Richards, Griffin Johnson, and Bryce Hall have co-invested with Bedrock Capital, Khosla Ventures, and other high profile VCs into the seed rounds of Atmos, AON3D, and Lendtable.
Jack “Nasjaq” Kirchman has amassed 780K+ followers making videos about his favorite hard tech startups. Now he’s gained investor accreditation status and plans to leverage his audience to build deal flow for a rolling fund.
Other Stuff I’m Reading:
Local Startups are Building Huge eCommerce Businesses — Boston Globe
SVB and Clearbanc Partner to Provide Capital to Pre-Venture Businesses
Boston VC Financing Deals:
DynamiCare Health 💊
DynamiCare Health, a four-year-old company building a platform to tackle substance abuse, raised $1M per a Form D. Based around a mobile app, the platform has a host of offerings:
Text, voice, and video-based recovery coaching.
Self-guided therapies.
At-home substance testing devices.
An “accountability wallet” that syncs up with your debit card that blocks access to risky spending (bars, casinos, cash withdrawals).
They raised a seed round in 2019 led by Hyperplane.
Clockworks Analytics 🏢
Somerville-based Clockworks Analytics (fka KGS Buildings) just raised $8M from Carom Growth Partners, Evans Capital Management, and Schneider Electric — bringing their total raised to $13M. They’re the developer of a cloud-based building analytics platform that helps facility managers understand energy consumption, air quality, and equipment health.
Einblick 📊
Einblick Analytics just launched out for stealth from MIT and Brown University with $6M in funding from Amplify Partners, Flybridge Capital, Osage University Partners, and Samsung Next. They’re building a visual data computing platform for enterprises, with DARPA as one of their initial customers. The product is an interface that helps enterprises piece together dashboards from raw data with the help of a built-in ML engine.
Verana Networks 📡
5G networking equipment developer Verana Networks just raised an $11M Series A from Spark Capital, Aspiro Capital, DC Investment Partners, and Bold Capital.
Trilio ☁️
Trilio, a seven-year-old company building cloud-native data protection for Kubernetes, Red Hat, and OpenStack, just raised $13M in Series B funding from SKK Ventures, .406 Ventures, Jack Egan, and Plug and Play. ($12M in growth equity and $3M venture debt from Avid Bank). They make it easy to back up, recover, and migrate workloads in the cloud.
Pear Therapeutics 🍐
SoftBank Vision Fund II and Novartis just backed a digital therapeutics company called Pear Therapeutics in an $80M Series D. The company already offers three FDA-approved software products for treatment of insomnia and substance abuse disorders.
Back in June, the FDA also approved Boston-based Akili Interactive’s video game EndeavorRx as a treatment for ADHD.
Fairmarkit 🤝
Fairmarkit, a three-year-old startup that helps organizations purchase goods and services by digitizing the procurement process, just raised a $30M Series B from GGV Capital, Insight Partners, 1984 VC, New Stack, and NewFund. The Fairmarkit platform helps procurement teams secure mission-critical orders, find new suppliers, and mitigate supply chain risks.
Hunters 🔍
After raising a Series A in July, Isreal and MA-based Hunters announced that CVCs Snowflake Ventures, Okta, and M12 have joined as follow-on investors for an undisclosed amount. The cybersecurity company offers open XDR (Extended Detection & Response) as a service. It scrapes petabytes worth of organizational data across endpoints, cloud, network, and identity to find potential threats and triage their management.
DataRobot 🤖
Last month, eight-year-old enterprise AI platform DataRobot closed a massive $270M Series F at a valuation of $2.7B+. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from other investors including T. Rowe Price, Blackrock, Silverlake, NEA, and Tiger Global. Last week, the company raised an additional $50M from Snowflake Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and HPE — adding $100M to its valuation in the process.
Heartbeat 💗
A company under the name Heartbeat just raised $1.7M, per a Form D. No public details, and the only related person listed on the filing is Jim McQuade, who most recently worked as a Director at Simplisafe.
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