Daily Archives: February 23, 2021

News: Electric raises $40M Series C to put small-business IT in the cloud

• February 23, 2021
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It would be an understatement to say that enterprise-focused startups have fared well during the pandemic. As organizations look to go remote, and the way we work has been flipped on its head, quickly-growing tech companies that simplify this transition are in high demand. One such startup has, in fact, raised $61.5 million in the

It would be an understatement to say that enterprise-focused startups have fared well during the pandemic. As organizations look to go remote, and the way we work has been flipped on its head, quickly-growing tech companies that simplify this transition are in high demand.

One such startup has, in fact, raised $61.5 million in the last 12 months alone. Electric, a company looking to put IT departments in the cloud, just announced the close of a $40 million Series C round. This comes after an extension of its Series B in March of 2020, when it raised $14.5 million, and then an additional $7 million from 01 Advisors in May of 2020.

This Series C round was led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, GGV Capital, 01 Advisors, Primary Venture Partners as well as new investors including Atreides Management and Vintage Investment Partners.

Electric launched in 2016 with a mission to make IT much simpler for small and medium-sized businesses. Rather than bringing on a dedicated IT department, or contracting out high-priced local service providers, Electric’s software allows one admin to manage devices, software subscriptions, permissions and more.

According to founder Ryan Denehy, the vast majority of IT’s work is administration, distribution, and maintenance of the broad variety of software programs at any given company. Electric does most of that job on behalf of IT, meaning that a smaller business only needs to worry about desk-side troubleshooting when it comes up, rather than the whole kit and caboodle.

Electric charges a flat price per seat per month, and Denehy says the company more than doubled its customer base in the last year. It now supports around 25,000 users across more than 400 individual customer organizations, which puts Electric just shy of $20 million ARR.

This is the first time Denehy has come anywhere close to sharing revenue numbers publicly, but it’s a good time to flex. The company has recently introduced a new lighter-weight offering that includes all of the same functionality as its more expensive product, but without access to chat functionality.

“The name of the game is just simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” said Denehy. “Part of this is in response to the fact that people are realizing the permanence of hybrid work. During the pandemic, people stopped paying their landlords but they didn’t stop paying us. So in the summer, we started to focus on how we can create more offerings that we can get in the hands of more businesses and let them start their journey with us.”

Denehy says that a little less than half of Electric’s client base are tech startups, which makes sense considering the company launched in New York in a tech and media-centric ecosystem. As a way to expand into other verticals, Electric acquired Sinu, an IT service provider who happened to have an impressive roster of clients outside of Electric’s comfort zone, such as legal, accounting and non-profit.

Here’s what Denehy said at the time:

Organic market entry, even in adjacent markets can be extremely time consuming and expensive. Sinu’s team has done an excellent job winning and pleasing customers in a lot of industries where we currently don’t play but probably should. The combination of our two companies is a massive shot in the arm to our national expansion strategy.

Alongside growth, both of the Electric team and its customer base, the company is also investing in expanding its diversity programs and philanthropic efforts.

The Electric team is currently made up of just under 250 full-time employees, with 32.5 percent women and around 30 percent of employees being non-white. Specifically, nearly 12 percent of employees are Black and 10 percent are Latinx.

Denehy explained that he thinks of the company’s payroll, which is in the tens of millions of dollars, as one of the biggest ways he can make a change in the world.

“We will wait longer to fill a role to make sure that we have the most diverse pipeline of candidates possible,” said Denehy. “A lot of founders will say that nobody applied. Well, the reality is you didn’t look hard enough. We’ve just accepted that like it may take us longer to fill certain roles.”

This latest round brings Electric’s total funding to more than $100 million.

News: Ag monitoring startup Flurostat merges with soil carbon expert Dagan to form Regrow

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Flurostat and Dagan, two startups that both are tackling the monitoring and management of agricultural inputs and outputs for a better understanding of the role sustainable agriculture can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, have merged and are launching a package of services under a new brand, Regrow. The merge, announced yesterday, will create a

Flurostat and Dagan, two startups that both are tackling the monitoring and management of agricultural inputs and outputs for a better understanding of the role sustainable agriculture can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, have merged and are launching a package of services under a new brand, Regrow.

The merge, announced yesterday, will create a company that combines Flurostat’s data driven agriculture management services with Dagan’s soil biogeochemical modeling technology, the companies said in a joint statement. 

The combined companies will have the ability to provide satellite collected data to optimize crop management and adoption of conservation practices along with site-specific analysis and custom interventions for different crops, fields, farms, and regions.

Dagan co-founder Dr. William Salas said that the combined companies will be able to have a better handle on the market for carbon emissions — thanks in no small part to Dagan’s work on soil carbon.

“Soil carbon sequestration is finally emerging as a globally relevant strategy for drawing down excess atmospheric carbon dioxide. Shortcuts, misconceptions and over-hyping have the potential to stunt the tremendous potential of soil carbon,” Salas said in a statement. “But the merger of FluroSat and Dagan will give the industry the confidence and integrity it needs with best-in-class soil health data that can prescribe site-specific strategies and provide accuracy and transparency that will help companies succeed in carbon markets.”

Terms of the merger were not disclosed, but FluroSat had previously raised roughly $8.6 million in equity and grant funding led by Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, according to data from Crunchbase.

“Over the next decade, we need to grow and produce enough food to nourish 10 billion people around the world in a way that protects our land and stems climate change,” says Ranveer Chandra, Chief Scientist, Azure Global at Microsoft. “Regrow’s computational agriculture, using machine learning and scientific modeling, will help improve the accuracy of accounting for soil carbon, and bring farmers closer to benefitting from carbon markets.”

News: The Midwest Fund launches, brings The Fund’s innovative investment strategy to a fifth market

• February 23, 2021
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A new investment fund is coming to Midwest cities, and it’s lead by names familiar to the local scenes. The aptly-named Midwest Fund targets early-stage startups from Pittsburgh to Chicago, from Detroit to Cincinnati, and everywhere in between. Unlike traditional venture capital funds, this one gets its funding from successful entrepreneurs looking for ways to

A new investment fund is coming to Midwest cities, and it’s lead by names familiar to the local scenes. The aptly-named Midwest Fund targets early-stage startups from Pittsburgh to Chicago, from Detroit to Cincinnati, and everywhere in between. Unlike traditional venture capital funds, this one gets its funding from successful entrepreneurs looking for ways to reinvest in their regions.

The Midwest Fund was born from The Fund, an NYC-based venture capital group. Founded in 2018 by an all-star cast of Jenny Fielding, Katie Hunt, Adam Carver, and Matthew Brimer, The Fund has since expanded with micro-funds in Los Angeles, London, and the Boulder/Denver region. And with each expansion, local founders and investors are tapped to lead each region.

The Midwest Fund’s founding general partners are familiar names to the Midwest. This includes Ted Serbinski and Tops Kataria of Detroit, Chris Bergman of Cincinnati, Lynsie Campbell of Pittsburgh, Jennifer Fried of Chicago. With this diverse team, The Midwest Fund follows the example set-out by The Fund of having equal gender representation on investment committees.

“The Fund has always set out to have equal gender representation on the investment committee,” said Ted Serbinski, a GP at The Midwest Fund, “and believed that this composition, not an explicit mandate, would lead to more balanced investing. Three years in and across the other geographies, The Fund has invested in over 40 percent female founders. We think the same will be true in The Midwest, and we’re excited to advance this mission.”

The Midwest area has long been a foundry of notable industries and startups, with more popping up every day. Nearly eight years ago, Ted Serbinki, then a partner at Detroit Venture Partners, mapped this area, calling it a diamond with key cities at each point. Now with The Midwest Fund, he’s part of a team ready to write seed-stage checks to young companies.

Serbinski tells TechCrunch this fund is unique to this area because of its speed. He explains the fund intends to invest in two Midwest companies a month for two years, which he believes would make it the most active in the region.

The Midwest Fund’s limited partners come from the local areas in which the fund operates including Chicago’s Amanda Lannert, CEO of Jellyvision, Pittsburgh’s Patrick Colletti, founder of Newthealth, and Cincinnati’s Charlie Key, founder of Losant. Across all six funds ran by The Fund, notable LPs come from Zillow, ClassPass, Soundcloud, Casper, Quartz, and InVision.

News: Maple launches with $3.5 million in funding to become the SaaS backoffice for the family

• February 23, 2021
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Much of our daily lives have been transformed in one way or another by technology – and often through intentional efforts to innovate thanks to the advent of new technology. Now more than ever, we rely on shared collaboration platforms and digital workspaces in our professional lives, and yet most of the changes wrought by

Much of our daily lives have been transformed in one way or another by technology – and often through intentional efforts to innovate thanks to the advent of new technology. Now more than ever, we rely on shared collaboration platforms and digital workspaces in our professional lives, and yet most of the changes wrought by tech on our home and family lives seem like the accidental effects of broader trends, rather than intentional shifts. Maple, a new startup launching today, aims to change that.

Founded by former Shopify product director and Kit (which was acquired by Shopify in 2016) co-founder Michael Perry, Maple is billed as “the family tech platform,” and hopes to ease the burden of parenting, freeing up parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and kids to spend more quality time together. The startup, which is launching its app on iPhone and Android for all and onboarding new users from its waitlist over the next few weeks, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding – an impressive round for a company just about seven months into its existence. The round was led by Inspired Capital, and includes participation by Box Group, but is also supported by a number of angels who were Perry’s former colleagues at Shopify, including Shopify President Harley Finkelstein.

Perry and his co-founder Mike Taylor, who also co-founded Kit, decided to leave Shopify in order to pursue Perry’s vision of a platform that can help parents better manage their family lives – a platform made up of a social layer, a task-focused list of shared responsibilities, and a bourgeoning service marketplace that looks and feels a lot like the ecosystem Shopify has built for empowering e-commerce entrepreneurs. That’s by design, Perry says.

“I think you’re gonna see a lot of Shopify inspiration in this product – we think we’re the back office of every family,” Perry told me in an interview. “And we think we’re building the app ecosystem of apps, services, all kinds of things that are going to live on this platform that’s going to revolutionize parenting.”

In its current early incarnation, Maple’s primary interface for parents is a list of various tasks they need to take care of during the day. During onboarding, Maple asks parents what they’re typically responsible for in the household, and then uses some basic machine learning behind the scenes to build a customized schedule for getting those things done. Maple has signed on three initial partners to assist with accomplishing some of these tasks, including Evelyn Rusli’s Yumi food and nutrition brand for infants; Lalo, a DTC baby and toddler furniture and gear brand; and Haus, which will be providing date night packages for parents to enjoy for some getaway time.

Maple co-founder Micheal Perry with his son.

The platform will offer users the ability to tap others for help with tasks – these could be other family members added to the household, or the partners mentioned above (the plan is to bring on more, but to gate admittance initially while developing API endpoints that any company can potentially tap into). When interacting with family members, Maple also encourages smalls social interactions, like thanking someone for their help on a particular task or just showing general appreciation. Perry says this is a key ingredient he prioritized in product design.

“We have this cool thing that every day at eight o’clock, we give you an end of the day recap with your family,” Perry said. “So you click on it, and it will show me that, for example, Alex [Perry’s wife] completed three responsibilities for our family today, and how many I did for my family today, and how much help I received from other people today. And directly in app, you can send these cool little ‘Thank you ‘messages and say, you know, I love you, I appreciate you – we’re a great team. And Alex will get those messages. We believe in a world where this can be incredibly dynamic, in many different ways kto kind of bring some love and appreciation and make parenting feel more rewarding and easier.”

Perry is quick to note that what Maple offers today is only the beginning, and it’s clear he has bold ambitions for the platform. He talked about building “the family graph,” or a trove of data that can be used to not only build intelligent recommendations and develop ever more advanced machine learning to optimize family management, but also to provide partners with the tools they need to build products to best serve families. I asked Perry what that means for privacy, given that people are likely to be far more reluctant to share info around their families than they are about their work lives. He said the they team plans to go slow in terms of what it exposes to partners, when, and how, and that they’ll have user privacy in mind at each step – since, after all, Perry himself is a father and a husband and is wary of any incursions on his own private life.

For now, partners like Yumi only receive what users share with them through their own account creation and login mechanism, and they only pass back a basic attribution token – essentially letting Maple know the task was completed so it can mark it off in a user’s list.

Image Credits: Maple

Maple’s partners today are representative of the kind of businesses that might make use of the platform in future, but Perry has a much broader vision. He hopes that Maple can ultimately help parents handle their responsibilities across a wide range of needs and income levels. Right now, Perry points out, a lot of what’s available to parents in terms of support is only available to higher income brackets – ie., nannies and dedicated caregivers. Perry says that his experience growing up relatively poor with a single mother supporting the entire family led him to want to provide something better.

“You have 125 million households in America, you have 3 million children being born every year, you have 30% of the households in America being single parent-run households,” Perry said. “It’s hard. Some people are working one two jobs, most couples are working couples. Every industry that’s changed has been about making things more accessible. In the case of Shopify, at one point building, an online store required hundreds of thousands of dollars and a bunch of skilled people. Now you can start a store for $20 in five minutes – 20 years ago, that was unfathomable.”

For Perry, Maple represents a path to that kind of shift in the economics of parenting and a network of family services, including goods, care, leisure and more. The startup has plans to eventually enlist other parents to provide services, which Perry says will unlock part-time income generation for full-time parents, allowing parents to help each other at the same time.

I asked him if he thought people would be reluctant to treat their family lives with the same kind of optimization approach favored by enterprise and commercial platform tools, but he suggested that in fact, not taking advantage of those same technologies in our personal lives is a missed opportunity.

“We believe that, uniquely, we’re living through a generation where we can start creating more time for people,” Perry said. “I think what makes Maple so unique is that no company has approached this by asking ‘How do we create more time for you so that you can spend more time with your kids?’ in the consolidated way that we have.”

Disclosure: I worked at Shopify from 2018 to 2019 while Perry was employed there, but we did not work together directly.

News: Furniture startup Burrow raises $25M

• February 23, 2021
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Burrow, a startup that first launched with a modular sofa, eventually aims to sell you furniture for every room in your home. Today, it’s announcing that it’s raised $25 million in Series C funding. Burrow participated in the Y Combinator accelerator in 2016 with an initial aim of building sofas that, by virtue of being

Burrow, a startup that first launched with a modular sofa, eventually aims to sell you furniture for every room in your home. Today, it’s announcing that it’s raised $25 million in Series C funding.

Burrow participated in the Y Combinator accelerator in 2016 with an initial aim of building sofas that, by virtue of being modular, were easier to move and adapt to a variety of living spaces. Now its product lineup also includes armchairs, ottomans, tables, rugs, lights and other accessories. In fact, the company says it launched 19 new products last year, including a modular shelving system.

When I asked via email about this expansion, co-founder and CEO Stephen Kuhl told me that the company follows “a very rigorous research process” involving customer surveys, focus groups, online search data and more.

“The goal is to match the largest customer needs with the biggest market opportunities,” Kuhl said. “Once it’s clear what category to enter, we use our research to define how we’re going to develop the best version(s) of each product for our customer base, and how we’re going to build the best end-to-end customer experience around that product. I’m probably going to jinx it, but every single product we’ve ever launched has exceeded projections, a testament to our customer-centric, research-driven design process.”

Burrow says it saw triple-digit revenue growth last year, a trend it anticipates continuing in 2021. Kuhl suggested that the startup is also benefitting from broader trends accelerated during the pandemic, including the shift to e-commerce, an increased focus on the home and people moving to the suburbs (and buying more furniture in the process).

“Over the last 18 months, we launched innovative new products in every category of living room furniture,” he said. “In 2021, we’ll continue that expansion into every room of the home.”

The startup has now raised a total fo $55 million. Its Series C was led by Parkway Venture Capital, with Managing Partner Gregg Hill joining Burrow’s board of directors. NEA, Red & Blue Ventures, Winklevoss Capital and Michael Seibel also participated in the new round.

Burrow says it will use the new funding to launch new products while also investing in operations and building out its international supply chain.

“Parkway looks for brands that are changing how we live today as well as innovating to stay ahead,” Hill said in a statement. “We believed in Burrow’s business model from the beginning, having invested in their Series B round, and recognize all their future potential.”

News: Rokk3r acquires AdMobilize and Matrix Labs for $19.5M

• February 23, 2021
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Miami-based AdMobilize and its spin-off, Matrix Labs, announced this morning that they are being acquired for $19.5 million. The buyer is Rokk3r, a Miami-based holding company that invests in creating, acquiring and integrating companies. AdMobilize quantifies digital advertising in the physical world, so marketers can better reach their target audiences. “If you’re walking on 5th

Miami-based AdMobilize and its spin-off, Matrix Labs, announced this morning that they are being acquired for $19.5 million. The buyer is Rokk3r, a Miami-based holding company that invests in creating, acquiring and integrating companies.

AdMobilize quantifies digital advertising in the physical world, so marketers can better reach their target audiences.

“If you’re walking on 5th Avenue and you pass by a bus shelter that has a digital screen, AdMobilize analyzes [peoples’] age, gender, emotion and even how long the person was looking at the ad. We created a platform that mimics the click-through rate. So we kind of created Google Analytics for the outside world,” said Rodolfo Saccoman, CEO and founder of AdMobilize.

The company, which has raised $13 million since its launch in 2012, also has offices in Saccoman’s native Brazil, as well as Colombia and London. 

AdMobilize operates as a SaaS with an average monthly subscription fee of $50 per screen or billboard. 

“Our tech is 95% accurate, and it’s based on undeniable computer vision data,” Saccoman said. If a digital ad screen doesn’t have a camera built-in, AdMobilize can provide one. But Saccoman made it very clear that the company doesn’t do any facial recognition and really is only interested in the data in a broader sense.

Matrix Labs, on the other hand, is a hardware company with products that look similar to Raspberry Pi, but with a lot more oomph.

“Our Matrix Labs development boards give the Raspberry Pi superpowers. It transforms the Pi to be AI-ready for computer vision, sensor fusion, voice recognition and more. It democratizes AI at the edge by removing barriers to entry, shortening the learning curve, and increases adaptability,” Saccoman said.

Rodolfo Saccoman Image Credits: Saccoman

The company offers two boards. One is called the Matrix Creator and sells for $99, while the other is the Matrix Voice which goes for $75.

“It [Matrix boards] enables people to not spend millions of dollars making a piece of hardware,” Saccoman said. In fact, it levels the playing field for developers, he added. “It allows them to create solutions in the physical world with inexpensive edge AI hardware.”

Rokk3r was an early investor in AdMobilize, along with Azoic Ventures, Fuel Venture Capital, VAS Ventures and Axel Springer.

“Rokk3r has always believed in the potential of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and computer vision, hence it seeded and helped build AdMobilize. Where we stand today with what AdMobilize/Matrix Labs has achieved, it is clear that the technology created is critical to the future of AI/IOT/CV, and with Rokk3r’s focus on AI/IOT and IP creation, the fit was clear,” said Nabyl Charania, chairman and CEO of Rokk3r.

Saccoman is a Brazilian-born serial entrepreneur who moved to the U.S. to attend college at Cornell in 1995 and never left. He made his way down to South Florida with his first job out of college, where he was head of Digital Innovation at the ultra-lux Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. While the AdMobilize/Matrix Labs deal is his first exit, his first “venture” was when he was just 13 years old. It was called the PiPi bag. São Paulo, the financial capital of Brazil, is notorious for awful traffic. It can often take people three hours to get to the airport, and when you’re trying to catch a flight, stopping to use the restroom isn’t usually an option. As the name suggests, the Pipi bag was a handheld portable toilet of sorts for those moments when nature calls.

Years later, in 2007, Saccoman also founded a company with his brother who has a PhD in psychology. It was called MyTherapyJournal.com and was the first online journaling platform with cognitive behavior therapy. 

“It would measure your varying emotions when you answered key questions. For example, people could start to understand what would trigger their anxiety. It had early traces of AI,” Saccoman said. MyTherapyJournal closed in 2012.

Of his various ventures, he said, “My mind was always running to find problems.”

Saccoman will stay on board and lead Rokk3r’s AI and IoT division.

News: Codecademy eyes the enterprise with $40 million in new capital

• February 23, 2021
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After going over four years without raising any capital, coding class platform Codecademy has raised a new tranche of money: a $40 million Series D round led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Prosus and Union Square Ventures. The startup is the latest edtech business to bring on capital after years without it, a list

After going over four years without raising any capital, coding class platform Codecademy has raised a new tranche of money: a $40 million Series D round led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Prosus and Union Square Ventures.

The startup is the latest edtech business to bring on capital after years without it, a list that includes ClassDojo, CourseHero, Quizlet and Udacity. But founder Zach Sims, who began the company in 2011 as a Columbia student, says that Codecademy’s growth, and hunger for new capital, isn’t due to a pandemic bump.

“A lot of that edtech bump came in K-12 and college solutions, or in leisure educational things like MasterClass,” Sims said. “Ours was less pandemic-induced.”

The business, which helps students and employees learn how to code in an interactive environment, is currently bringing in $50 million in annual recurring revenue. That figure is on track with Codecademy’s normal growth trajectory, which has been doubling since 2018. The startup has still seen some areas of growth. It took Codecademy four years to reach their first 100,000 users; however, they added 50,000 more paying users in their fifth year alone.

Codecademy’s funding signals that investors aren’t just looking for exponential growth, they are looking for sustainable, historical growth. The startup has been cash-flow positive for years, and has $20 million of its $30 million Series C, closed in 2016, still in the bank. Two-thirds of today’s capital is going straight to the bank, Sims says.

Still, raising itself costs money in the form of equity for founders and a startup. So why raise if you still have cash and aren’t struggling to keep up demand?

Sims says that the new cash will be used to acquire businesses, grow internationally in India and other countries, and hire. He also wants to “invest deeply” in a paid product it launched in the wake of the pandemic, Codecademy For Business. The product is Codecademy’s foray into selling coding classes for the enterprise, a shift from its direct-to-consumer route.

Codecademy For Business launched in beta last year and grew to 600 paying clients. Half of those customers are non-technology companies like banks, consulting firms and small businesses that want to train employees in data literacy and tech-specific programing. Sims says that the product was launched due to customer demand, and piggybacks on what investors see as an awakening among companies that it is necessary to train and reskill employees.

The growth mirrors the gains recently enjoyed by Udemy. The re-skilling company similarly has an enterprise and consumer product, but is seeing more monetary gains in the former. We scooped last month that Udemy for Business has secured 7,000 customers, and is bringing in roughly $200 million in ARR.

Sims says that its enterprise operation, which competes with products like Udemy or Coursera, requires upfront research and development “before it starts to pay itself back.” He thinks that building a bottoms-up enterprise product, fueled by tens of millions of Codecademy users, will be both the big opportunity and a big challenge for the company. The end goal here for Codecademy is to have a 50% split between its consumer and enterprise business.

“The number one biggest differentiator has been interactivity,” Sims said. “Everyone is tired of Zoom, and our thesis since the beginning is that video is not the best way to learn, and that learning by doing is.”

While the startup wouldn’t disclose valuation, Codecademy’s growth feels mature and unicorn-like. The startup is diversifying revenue, adding offensive cash to its bank, and even not-so-subtly added a CFO from Chegg to its ranks. IPOs are in the air.

News: Y Combinator company Axle Health is bringing on-demand home testing services to telehealth providers

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While usage of telehealth services have surged during the COVID-19 epidemic, there are some times when health professionals need to be around in person to conduct diagnostics tests. To help those telehealth companies bridge that gap is Axle Health, a company currently enrolled in the latest cohort from the Y Combinator accelerator. “In terms of

While usage of telehealth services have surged during the COVID-19 epidemic, there are some times when health professionals need to be around in person to conduct diagnostics tests. To help those telehealth companies bridge that gap is Axle Health, a company currently enrolled in the latest cohort from the Y Combinator accelerator.

“In terms of the professionals that we send in home, they’re phlebotomists, NAs, RVNs, and RNs as well,” said Axle co-founder Connor Hailey.

In a sad reflection of the times, most of the calls the company’s getting are COVID-19 related, Hailey said.

And while the company currently doesn’t accept insurance, many of the companies on the platform choose a price they want to charge their patients and then seek reimbursement from insurers from those costs, according to Hailey.

“There are very few patients that are paying cash. Our services in the home are what would come out of pocket,” Hailey said. Those fees vary by the licensure level of the visiting health care worker. An in-home COVID-19 test could be $40 and a phlebotomist providing a blood draw would cost about the same amount, said Hailey.  

The company launched its service at the end of January and is seeking to expand its treatment options to more than just COVID-19 testing, but for now, it’s simply responding to market demand.

Hailey launched the business after spending a few years working at ZocDoc and then spending some time at Uber. What motivates Hailey and company co-founder Adam Stansell is providing similar concierge services at lower costs for a broader base of patients, Hailey said.

“The rich have access to in-home care can we make it economical enough so that we can bring it to everyone,” he said. 

News: Plume picks up $270M at a $1.35B valuation to power smart home WiFi for broadband providers

• February 23, 2021
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The last year of life under a global health pandemic has seen a massive surge of people working from home — a shift that has thrown a stark light on the iffy quality of our broadband networks. Today a startup called Plume — which has built a mesh-WiFi platform that helps optimize broadband connectivity and

The last year of life under a global health pandemic has seen a massive surge of people working from home — a shift that has thrown a stark light on the iffy quality of our broadband networks. Today a startup called Plume — which has built a mesh-WiFi platform that helps optimize broadband connectivity and then uses it to deliver a range of smarter home services to some 22 million homes globally — is announcing a major funding round of $270 million that underscores the opportunity to fix that, and more.

“We’re the best at optimizing WiFi connectivity in the home, but that is not what we’re about,” said Fahri Diner, Plume’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We see it as the foundation. We cut our teeth on it but have gone way beyond that to services like advanced parental controls, secure access controls, which devices can access networks and what passwords they use. We focus on sophisticated security, which we believe will be the next big area that consumers will start paying attention to.

“The ultimate product for Plume is a comprehensive, cloud-driven platform that enables consumers to curate, manage and deliver these services. That’s what the company is about.”

The investment, a Series E, is coming from a single investor, Insight Partners, and values the company at $1.35 billion. This is a significant step up for the company, which almost exactly a year ago raised $85 million in a combination of equity and debt at a valuation of $510 million.

Unless you have been following the business of home broadband networking, you may not be familiar with the name Plume. But if you are not already be using it, chances are that you may be getting pitched a service using its technology, or will be soon.

The company, based out of Palo Alto, has deals in place with some 170 carriers around the globe that provide residential broadband services, reselling Plume’s mesh technology as a way to improve home WiFi connectivity — especially critical in older or bigger homes, and dwellings where you have many people connecting to and straining your broadband network — providing Plume-powered services like network security, parental access controls and motion awareness on top of that.

Plume brands those added services as HomePass, and on top of this it also provides a cloud-based operations tools to carriers, Haystack and Harvest, which help them with customer support, to manage their networks, glean better performance analytics and provide insights on customer usage and churn.

Plume also works with a number of big and less well-known hardware makers who design the routing devices and the processors and related software that power them.

Some of its customers, like Comcast, Charter, Qualcomm, Belkin, Cablevision, Liberty Global and Shaw Communications have become strategic investors in the company over the years, which speaks to its traction with the big players in the market. (It has raised $397 million to date.)

There have been a number of efforts over the years to improve WiFi in the home, from faster networks through to better routers and WiFi extenders.

Plume’s technology is based on one of those alternatives, mesh architecture — also used by others like Google in its Nest WiFi system — which uses a single router and then a series of nodes that operate as if they are a single device on the network (extenders by contrast use different SSIDs and passwords).

On top of the mesh architecture, Plume then runs a software-defined network to identify and better measure the traffic, using automation to, for example, then detect and fix when a device is on the network, may need more power to work properly, and so on.

In all, it appears that Plume has some 170 patents and patent applications in play to underpin what it has built.

It’s interesting to note that at one time Plume was compared to Eero, the mesh-based wifi router startup that was eventually acquired by Amazon, which now resells its routers as part of its own mesh WiFi solution.

But the two have some critical differences, based mainly on the business premise behind the two. As Diner points out, Plume’s service stack is based not around a router (as Eero’s primarily was) but on mesh technology that plus an open source silicon-to-cloud framework platform for building services to run on the mesh network that it calls OpenSync. This essentially allows service providers to build their own services on top of Plume’s mesh architecture.

(Diner, I should point out, has a pretty long-standing and deep understanding of what carriers need, what they actually use and also how they think. He himself trained as an engineer and worked in increasingly senior roles at a number of vendors at the cusp of when carriers were making their switch from legacy copper to fiber and optic networks. In the heyday of telecoms capital expenditures, he sold a previous company that he founded, Qtera, a pioneer in long-haul photonic networking solutions, to now-defunct Nortel for $3.2 billion. He’s also a long-standing investor and board member at a range of major next-generation communications vendors.)

In a telecoms world that has long fretted over the idea of being cannibalized and relegated to the role of a “dumb pipe”, it provides a way for those carriers to build services — apps, as it were — on top of that WiFi connectivity.

That existential crisis has been even more compounded as the promise of “triple play” — carriers selling voice, broadband and video services to their customers — has failed to deliver not least because no one is particularly interested in using or keeping their fixed landlines, and carriers have been completely outplayed on content by the giant rush of tech and media companies building their own, more attractive alternatives for consumers.

That has left carriers with a focus on broadband, which itself then gets commoditized on price, with everyone more or less offering the same speeds and reliability.

“How to differentiate?” is the question they all ask now, said Diner. Plume’s answer: “We differentiate inside the home, with a new bundle of services.”

Realistically, however, Diner points out that only the very biggest carriers (and not even all of them) might have the resources and appetite to do so. Of the 170 customers it has today, only five are building their own customized services on top of the platform, he said.

This is why Plume builds services that it white-labels and resells to carriers to sell on to consumers, and why those services have seen a lot of traction among those service providers. OpenSync, Plume says, now covers some 26 million access points and is seeing a sharp rise as more people fill out their homes with more equipment that they use throughout the day.

You might argue that those home services will also start to look too similar to each other as well, and so frankly the hope is that the open platform will eventually lead to more companies and services innovating around it.

In the meantime, it’s a win-win for Plume.

“Growth in the smart home category is exploding, but the quality of consumer experience has fallen short,” said Insight Partners Managing Director Ryan Hinkle, in a statement. “We are convinced that Plume, with its scalable cloud data platform approach, highly efficient go-to-market strategy, strong momentum, top-quartile financial performance across all SaaS KPIs – including revenue, growth rates, gross margin, efficiency and retention metrics – and world class team is transforming this category. We’re delighted to join and support this exciting journey.” Hinkle is joining Plume’s board with this round.

News: Anuvia raises $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer

• February 23, 2021
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Anuvia Plant Nutrients has raised $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer technology. The company, backed by investors like TPG ART, Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, Generate Capital andPiva Capital, is now ready to roll out its tech, which is already used on roughly 1200 farms and is projected to be on 20 million

Anuvia Plant Nutrients has raised $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer technology.

The company, backed by investors like TPG ART, Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, Generate Capital andPiva Capital, is now ready to roll out its tech, which is already used on roughly 1200 farms and is projected to be on 20 million acres of farmland by 2025. 

Now led by longtime agriculture executive Amy Yoder, who represents the sixth generation of a Michigan farm family, Anuvia pitches its tech as a supplement for crops that can boost productivity by taking excrement, food waste and agricultural processing waste and converting that into useful fertilizer using a proprietary catalytic process. 

By treating the waste with a specific blend of chemicals Yoder said Anuvia’s technology can control the release of nutrients as plants grow to make more productive crops and reduce leaching into soil, protecting groundwater and restoring carbon to the soil.

Anuvia is one of a growing number of agriculture technology companies trying to juice crop productivity and capture carbon to provide additional revenues from more abundant crops and carbon capture and storage. Other startups, including Pivot Bio, Indigo Agriculture, AgBiome, and Agrinos, are all developing other crop treatments that can purportedly boost agricultural production.

“Most of what I see would be very complimentary to us,” said Yoder. “Because we put the carbon back into the soil, because the nutrients are held in different way. You could utilize the pivot technology and the Anuvia technology. Those things when they could piggyback together could make really nice solutions in the longterm.”

The Winter Garden, Fla.-based company has a 1.2 million ton facility for production, but the company wants to build out additional capacity and continue developing new fertilizers to take to market, Yoder said.

Farmers using the product see increased yields of around five times their previous production levels and the product can be used on all the main row crops, according to Yoder.

That claim has been verified by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), a leading global environmental consulting firm, versus traditional fertilizer on corn, rice, and cotton.

Anuvia’s treatment can also reduce greenhouse gases on production by up to 32% compared to commercial fertilizers. Anuvia estimates that its products could provide emissions reductions equivalent to removing 30,000 cars from roads. If the company can get farmers to apply its treatment to the 90 million acres of corn in the U.s. that would reduce the equivalent emissions of 1.8 million cars, according to a statement.

“With the world’s population expected to hit 10 billion by 2050, we need technology-enabled, large-scale agriculture to meet this growing demand,” says Dr. Geoff Duyk, Founder and Managing Partner of Circularis and Anuvia Board Member. “Anuvia’s technology will help farms continue to feed the world, while also advancing the circular economy, increasing sustainability, and enhancing resource efficiency.”