Daily funding roundup - Dec. 3, 2015

Mitos Suson · December 3, 2015 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/41d1

True North Therapeutics bagged $40M; Allocadia raised $16.5M; Younity received $8M funding

  • Younity, an iOS app for streaming media from your Mac, today announced an $8 million Series A round of funding led by venture capital firm Marker LLC with participation from Tim Draper’s Associates and PROfounders Capital. Rick Scanlon of Marker will join younity’s board. Draper and PROfounders in 2013 invested in Younity’s $3.5 million seed round, which also saw contributions from Crosslink Capital, Draper Associates, PROfounders Capital, Lowercase Capital, Bebo creator Michael Birch, Tekton Ventures, Knight & Bishop, Kamran Pourzanjani, Brian Lee, Brad Jones, and others.

  • Codeship, a Boston startup that helps software companies quickly update their applications, has raised $1.5 million in a new funding round, the company said Thursday. The investment came mostly from earlier investors Sigma Prime Ventures, Boston Seed Capital, and F-Prime Capital. The company has now raised a total of $4.4 million.

  • Vancouver-based Wiivv, a wearables company that creates custom 3D printed body gear, has closed $3.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Eclipse VC, Real Ventures, Asimov Ventures, Evonik Industries, and MAS Holdings. The company also said that it would prepare to enter the market with a Kickstarter in 2016 as it looks to attract early adopters to BASE, a 3D printed insole that would be the company’s first product to hit the market. The funds raised by the Kickstarter campaign will go towards the manufacturing and fulfilment of the BASE insoles as the company looks to ship in January 2016, according to their website.

  • Contessa Health, Inc., today announced it has secured $3.5 million in Series A Financing from BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Sandbox Advantage Fund and Martin Ventures. Contessa Health creates and manages home hospitalization programs, a new form of value-based care, that optimizes the initial site of care delivery and provides in-patient level acute care in a home environment.

  • LiveSafe, an Arlington-based maker of safety and alert technology for universities and businesses, has raised $4 million in venture capital and named a new chief executive as it prepared for significant growth, the company plans to announce today. The Series A funding, which comes from Hearst Ventures and IAC, is to be used to market the company’s mobile app to businesses, sports teams and other enterprises as LiveSafe looks beyond college campuses for growth.

  • Bevi, Boston-based start-up that develops smart beverage machines, has announced a $6.5 million Series A led by Horizons Ventures, the Hong Kong based private investment fund of Mr. Li Ka-shing. The Series A will build on the sales momentum that Bevi has seen in the Boston area and enable geographic expansion. The company is also investing in major R&D projects to improve and expand the offerings of its beverage machines.

  • OpsClarity, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based operations analytics and monitoring company, emerged from stealth with $11 million in Series A funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Pinnacle Ventures, AME Cloud, Morado Venture Partners and other angels. The company intends to use the funds to expand the engineering team and ramp up go-to-market efforts.

  • Figma, an online tool for interface design, has raised $14 million in Series A funding. Greylock Partners led the round. In addition to the funding, Greylock’s John Lilly has been named to Figma’s board of directors. Figma was founded in 2012 by Brown classmates Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, when Field was named to Peter Thiel’s “Thiel Fellowship” program for young entrepreneurs. To date, the company has raised $18 million, including its latest $14 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners.

  • Israeli startup Cellwize, which provides optimization solutions for mobile networks, has raised $14.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Carmel Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners and a further $10 million in a credit facility from Viola Credit (formerly Plenus). The financing will be used to boost Cellwize’s SON customer-centric optimization capabilities and to expand its market presence including a planned significant increase in its workforce.

  • EatStreet, a Madison company that supplies restaurants with software for handling online orders, said Thursday it has raised $15 million of outside funding to support future growth. The funding round was co-led by Madison-based 4490 Ventures and Lumia Capital, a San Francisco venture capital firm. It brings to $30 million the total amount the nearly 4-year-old company has raised.

  • Allocadia, a Vancouver, Canada-based provider of Marketing Performance Management (MPM) platform, raised $16.5 million (approx. CAD$22 million) in Series B financing. The round was led by Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), with participation from existing investors iNovia Capital, Altos Ventures, Nanon de Gaspé Beaubien-Mattrick of Beehive Holdings, Illuminate Ventures, Don Mattrick, and Norm Francis of Boardwalk Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, Martin Angert of SGE will join Allocadia’s Board of Directors. The company, which has raised US$24m (CAD$30m) in total, intends to use the funds to continue to accelerate product innovation, drive channel investments, further expand the team with subject matter experts, and deliver value-add content and best practices.

  • David Kalt is getting a $25 million boost for his online music equipment exchange, Reverb.com, from a familiar backer. The Chicago-based startup tapped Summit Partners for the funding, which will be used for international expansion and a new foray into music education. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture fund also invested in Kalt's previous company, online brokerage Options Xpress, which went public 10 years ago and later was sold to Charles Schwab for $1 billion. Reverb, an online market for guitars and other music gear, is the latest Chicago startup launched by a veteran entrepreneur to raise a large amount of venture capital.

  • True North Therapeutics, a biotechnology company developing novel therapies that selectively inhibit the Complement system to treat rare diseases, announced today that it has completed a $40 million Series C equity financing. Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance the clinical development of its lead complement inhibitor. The Series C round is led by New Leaf Venture Partners, a leading institutional healthcare fund, and includes participation by other new investors Perceptive Advisors and Cowen Private Investments, as well as existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, MPM Capital, OrbiMed, SR One, and Baxalta Ventures.

  • Health IT company Welltok is capping a busy two-year streak of acquisitions and financing with another deal. The Denver-based maker of software that aims to keep users healthy is acquiring Burlington, MA-based Silverlink Communications for an undisclosed price. Welltok has raised a $45 million round of venture capital to help make the deal happen. The funding, which will also be used for product development and market expansion, came from Toronto-based Georgian Partners, EDBI (the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board), and Boston-based Flare Capital, as well as other existing institutional and strategic investors.

If you are interested in being included in our funding roundup, submit your press release or blog post about your financing round to mitos@vator.tv. 

Image source: www.investmentyogi.com

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Mitos Suson

I produce Vator Events and enjoy the challenge. I am learning and growing a lot, being involved with Vator and loving every moment of it!

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younity

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

younity creates a personal cloud for all your files, built from your devices and your online services, so that all your devices work as if they were a single device. With younity, you can grab whichever device is most convenient without ever thinking about where a file is.

younity is a ubiquitous data protocol that integrates into device OSes, making them inherently multi-device aware. With younity, users can use any device they own and have access to any file as if it was stored locally on that device, regardless of available storage. With younity, devices simply become screens. Customer Problem:  Consumers today are overwhelmingly multi-device users, yet OSes are still designed around single device usage. Consumers have lots of data stuck on their devices. They are unable to put it all in the cloud and/or it costs too much; existing solutions are also management intensive, requiring constant user interaction.

Solution / Product:  younity makes all a consumer’s devices work as if they were a single device. By extracting the file system from an OS and putting it into the cloud, younity establishes a singular file system from multiple devices that is pushed back into the native OS. Thus, the OS does not know where files are stored – on the local hard drive, on another device or some online service or all of those places. This eliminates a file’s stored address from a device to an identity. Any device registered to a user has all that person’s files and all devices look the exact same. The only difference between devices is whether there is enough storage to store local or virtual copies.

 Competitors:  younity is most similar to iCloud. However, unlike iCloud, younity is OS agnostic, application agnostic, file-type agnostic, vastly easier to use and cheap or free for any amount of data. 

Target Market:  Consumers with 3 or more Internet-enabled devices (over 220M people in the US alone). Research shows: the average household will have 2.2TB of data by 2013; consumers will have an average of 5.8 devices/person by 2015; and 51% of households have both MS and Apple products (as of late 2011). Data synchronization products that accommodate partial data start at about $450/year for 250GB of online storage, with utility online storage costing vastly more. There are currently no cross-platform solutions for users that can accommodate all their data, let alone deliver it into their native device functionality.

Questions and Answers

Q. You've been around since 2010, What's the traction been like?

A. The idea for younity was born in 2010, but the company was angel funded and started hiring in summer of 2011. Our product is not a strong fit for "lean methodology"- it is enormously complicated and simply requires a lot of hands working the keyboard to make it work (typical for heavy duty, client-server software). 

The additional challenge was making it simple for consumers. After hiring our team late in 2011, we were able to take our prototype and get a private beta done by July, then launch into public beta in December 2012. Traction has been good since launching in December 2012, we've been adding thousands of users/month and engagement is high.

Q. How are you marketing this? Is there a viral component?

A. Our product is inherently personal (it's a "personal cloud"), which makes the viral coefficient low. However, we've been developing a unique way for people to share any file that is stored on any device making them sharable directly to another person via a private Facebook post. This will be launched the week of Vator Splash.

Q. What's the distribution model? What's the business model? How much will you be charging for this service?

A. younity has a direct to consumer strategy and will be offered as a freemium service that is free for up to 3 devices. For 4 or more, there is a flat annual fee that we anticipate will be around $24/year (although we have not finalized this yet). Other than the limit on devices, the free version of younity is not limited in any way- it is the same as the premium version.

Q. Where do you go from here? What other services could you offer?

A. Currently we are working with a variety of app vendors to enable offline data in their apps via our API. As a ubiquitous data protocol, younity is really about unifying data around a user's identity. This has a variety of applications, with younity being the first. 

Q. Is this a consumer-only product? Are you making something for the enterprise?

A. For now, we are focused on leading in the consumer market. However, we are well aware of a variety of enterprise applications to enable an on-premise younity server with a policy engine attached to it. In fact, we regularly are asked if this would be available now (it isn't).

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