| Wednesday! |
| Top News |
| Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced a bit ago that he is retiring this summer. The move is likely to have huge consequences, including when it comes to privacy. Lyft has raised an additional $600 million in a Series I financing round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company in a deal that pushes its post-money valuation to $15.1 billion, says TechCrunch. That’s more than double what the company was valued at 14 months ago. Snap is launching a gaming platform this fall, according to The Information. According to the report, Snap will let outside developers create games to be played through the Snapchat app; Snap has also lined up at least one gaming publisher to make a game for the new platform. |
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| New Fundings |
| AIpark, a three-year-old, Beijing, China-based company that makes “smart” urban parking management software, has raised “hundreds of millions” in Series B funding led by NIO Capital, the venture arm of the China-based electric car company of the same name. China Money Network has more here. Ambit Analytics, a 10-month-old, San Francisco-based company that spun out of SRI international to build a behavior-change program that emphasizes empathy in the workplace (it will use AI to quantify verbal communication and use those metrics to train people to communicate better) has raise $1.1 million in pre-seed funding from Romulus Capital. More here. Bento, a five-year-old, Chicago- and San Francisco-based company that sells financial software to small and mid-size businesses to help them control employee spending at the point of sale, has raised $9 million in funding from Edison Partners. More here. Cedar, a two-year-old, New York-based patient financial management platform for hospitals, health systems and independent medical groups, has raised $36 million in Series B funding. Kinnevik led the round, and was joined by investors including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Lakestar, Sound Ventures, Kevin Systrom of Instagram and Nat Turner of Flatiron Health. More here. Cibus, a 17-year-old, San Diego, Ca.-based developer of application of gene editing technologies for directed mutagenesis, has raised $70 million in Series C funding led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, with participation from Alexandria Venture Investments and Cormorant Asset Management. More here. Cleeng, a seven-year-old, Amsterdam-based company whose video platform is used by Canal+, FIFA, and others to sell their videos live and on-demand, has raised €5 million ($5.8 million) in Series B funding. Walvis led the round, with participation from earlier investor C4 Ventures. More here. CloudBees, an eight-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based enterprise DevOps startup that tries to help companies accelerate their software development and delivery, raised $37 million in new funding. Delta-v Capital led the round; earlier backers also joined in, including Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Unusual Ventures and Verizon Ventures. The company also secured $25 million in debt financing from Golub Capital. TechCrunch has more here. Codefresh, a four-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based continuous integration and delivery platform built for the Kubernetes container ecosystem, has raised $8 million Series B funding led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Viola Ventures, Hillsven and CEIF also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $15.1 million. TechCrunch has more here. Cordial, a four-year-old, San Diego-based email marketing startup, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by PeakSpan, with participation from Upfront Ventures and High Alpha. TechCrunch has more here. Cynet, a three-year-old, New York- and Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity platform, has raised $13 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, serial cyber investor Shlomo Kramer and returning investor Ibex Investors. More here. Cypress.io, a four-year-old, Atlanta-based automated testing framework, has raised $4 million in seed funding co-led by LOVC and Bessemer Venture Partners. The Atlanta Business Chronicle has more here. Dreem, a five-year-old, Paris- and San Francisco-based company that says its headband improves sleep by monitoring brainwaves, has raised $35 million in new funding co-led by CPG giant Johnson & Johnson and the French state bank Bpifrance. The company has now raised almost $60 million altogether. VentureBeat has more here. Faraday Future, a four-year-old, Gardena, Ca.-based car company that has been called a “financial house of cards,” has landed a new investor in Evergrande Health, a division of a publicly listed Hong Kong-based company. It just took a 45 percent stake in Faraday for $2 billion, after which its shares shot up 80 percent, reports the Financial Times. More here. FirstVet, a two-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based provider of telehealth services for pets, has raised €5.1 million ($5.9 million) in Series A funding led by Creandum. TechCrunch has more here. Noodle.ai, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company that says its enterprise AI system can manage complex business operations for its customers, has raised $35 million in Series B funding. Dell Technologies Capital led the round with TPG Growth. VentureBeat has more here. Parachute, a five-year-old, Venice, Ca.-based home essentials brand company, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by H.I.G. Growth Partners, with participation from Upfront Ventures, Susa Ventures, Suffolk Equity, JAWS Ventures, Grace Beauty Capital and Daher Capital. More here. Puppet, a 13-year-old, Portland, Ore.-based company that makes software to automate and manage the administration of data centers and other large computing systems, has raised $42 million in funding from numerous strategic and key financial investors. Cisco led the round, with Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, Singapore’s EDBI and VMware also participating. The company has now raised $128 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here. Roadster, a five-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based online marketplace for buying and leasing new cars, has raised $15 million in funding led by Costanoa Ventures. The company has now raised nearly $30 million altogether. Automotive News has more here. Signal Media, a five-year-old, London-based AI-driven media monitoring company, has raised $16 million in Series B funding co-led by MMC Ventures and GMG Ventures (its limited partner is the owner of the Guardian news organization), with participation from Frontline, Hearst Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures and LocalGlobe, among others. TechCrunch has more here. Silverfort, a two-year-old, Israel-based authentication platform for enterprises, has raised $11.5 million Series A in funding led by TLV Partners, with participation from StageOne Ventures and Singtel Innov8. More here. SimpleNexus, a 7.5-year-old, Lehi, Utah-based mobile mortgage platform, has raised $20 million from Insight Capital Partners. More here. Social SafeGuard, a four-year-old, Charlottesville, Va.-based company that sells security services to enterprises aimed at mitigating a range of digital risks that lie outside their corporate firewall, has raised $11 million in Series B funding fromAllegisCyber and NightDragon Security. TechCrunch has more here. WaterBit, a three-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company that makes autonomous irrigation software that takes into account growth stages, soil conditions, and weather, has raised $11.4 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Heuristic Capital and TJ Waters. More here. |
| New Funds |
| Bahrain Development Bank has officially closed its $100 million venture capital “fund of funds” to support startups in Bahrain and across the MENA region. The fund, announced last month (and mentioned here in SVC) will invest in venture firms with a presence in Bahrain, as well as occasionally make direct investments in startups in Bahrain and the Middle East. Entrepreneur has more here. Highland Europe, a European growth-stage firm, has closed a new €463 million (roughly $537 million) fund — its third fund in just six years. Targeting European software and internet-enabled businesses, Highland typically writes initial checks of between €10 million and €30 million. TechCrunch has more here. Rain Capital, a new, San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm led by security technologist Chenxi Wang has held a first close of $10 million for a debut fund that is targeting $20 million. The firm’s primary focus will be on early-stage cybersecurity companies. Wang was long a VP at Forrester Research; in more recent years she has held posts at McAfee, CipherCloud, and Twistlock. More here. Wave Capital, a new seed-capital firm that is focused on marketplaces and was founded by David Rosenthal, formerly with Madrona Venture Group and Meritech Capital; Riley Newman, an early employee at Airbnb; and Sara Adler, also formerly with Airbnb, has officially launched, according to the three. Bloomberg reported on the outfit in March, saying that it had raised $50 million. |
| Exits |
| Peloton, the unicorn spin and treadmill business that lets users work out via live-streamed classes, has made its first acquisition, picking up 17-year-old, Atlanta-based Neurotic Media, a B2B music aggregation and streaming service. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. TechCrunch has more here. |
| Jobs |
| Canaan is looking for an analyst to work alongside industry veterans on enterprise/deep tech deals. Canaan is an early-stage firm with a history of company building across life sciences and tech. It’s currently investing its eleventh, $800 million, vehicle; the 30-year-old firm has $5 billion in assets under management altogether. More here. |
| People |
| Alex Kurland, an investor who spent the last five years at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is becoming the sixth partner at the later-stage venture firm Meritech Capital, effectively slotting in for longtime partner Mike Gordon, who has retired. Forbes has more here. Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has hired former Netflix and Cruise Automation executive Tawni Nazario-Cranz as its chief people officer. TechCrunch has more here. |
| Lawsuits! (And Settlements) |
| Apple and Samsung have finally put an end to their long-running patent battle whose central question was whether Samsung copied the iPhone. In a court filing today, the Judge Lucy Koh said the two companies had informed her that they had reached a settlement. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, says The Verge. Apple’s Beats Electronics owes $25 million in royalties to one of the early designers of the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, reports Bloomberg. A jury in L.A. today agreed with Steven Lamar that under a 2007 settlement with Beats’ founders, rapper Dr. Dre and Interscope Records’ Jimmy Iovine, he was entitled to a cut of the sales of the headphones that were based on the original Studio model. More here. RetailMeNot is suing rival Honey over patent infringement, the company announced this week. Honey is the maker of a deal-finding browser extension that helps consumers shopping online get the best price by automatically applying coupon codes at checkout. It also helps with finding the best price on Amazon purchases, doles out digital coupons, offers cash back, helps users track price drops and more. As Sarah Perez of TechCrunch notes in a report about the lawsuit, it “comes at a time when Honey is growing in popularity among online shoppers, while RetailMeNot is getting a bit long in the tooth.” More here. |
| Essential Reads |
| A closer look at Google Duplex, the company’s human-like phone AI. From secret dinners to private meetings with the RNC, Twitter and Facebook arescrambling to assuage conservative leaders who have sounded alarms — and sought to rile voters — with accusations that the country’s tech giants are censoring right-leaning posts, tweets and news. |
| Detours |
| The best movies of 2018, so far. How not to f*ck up your hamburgers this summer. A man on an exit sign shut down an L.A. highway earlier today before dismounting with an epic backflip. |
| Retail Therapy |
| $5,000 cycling socks made of silk. (We do not know how to explain this.) |