#3: (4/29/24) Early & Growth Stage B2B Tech Startup Funding Recap!
Check Out This Week's Venture Capital Investment Summary Spanning Early & Growth-Stage US Based B2B Tech Startups!
Every Monday, the team here at Bearhug Recruiting aggregates, researches, and publishes a recap of the prior week's fundraising activity within the early and growth-stage B2B tech startup ecosystem.
This research not only allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of the markets we serve, but also benefits others who, like us, enjoy analyzing the latest trends that signal investor confidence AND startup growth within what we believe are the most exciting and impactful segments!
We also hope the people and companies we feature enjoy both a virtual fist bump from the team at Bearhug, plus benefit from some additional free market exposure to amplify their mission. So, make sure to give each one a look!
Here’s this week’s startup funding recap:
Exowatt, led by Hannan Parvizian, has raised a $20 million Seed funding round. Backers included a16z, Atomic (Jack Abraham), and Sam Altman. Exowatt provides a modular energy platform designed to power energy-intensive data centers. Its flagship product, the Exowatt P3, consists of a modular, 3-in-1 system, a heat collector, a heat battery, and a heat engine capable of providing dispatchable power and heat throughout the day. Exowatt stores solar energy in a thermal battery, which can retain this energy for up to 24 hours per day. The P3 modules are designed to fit the space of a standard 40-foot shipping container. They can be deployed on small and large commercial and industrial projects, linearly scaling with workload size and infrastructure requirements. [Link]
Nominal, led by Cameron McCord, has raised both a $7.5M Seed + a $20M Series A funding round. The Seed round was led by Lux Capital (Bilal Zuberi, Josh Wolfe) with participation from Founders Fund (Delian Asparouhov, Trae Stephens) and the Series A was led by General Catalyst (Paul Kwan). Nominal provides a comprehensive data analysis platform and modern workflows specifically tailored to the needs of engineering teams that develop, validate, and monitor hardware to allow for rapid and accurate review of test data and the validation of critical systems. The company currently supports mission-critical data analysis and testing at companies across the aerospace, defense, energy, and industrial spheres including Varda Space, Muon Space, REGENT, Radiant Nuclear, the U.S. Air Force, and others. [Link]
Campus, led by Tade Oyerinde, has raised a $23 million Series A extension round. The round was led by Founders Fund (Trae Stephens), with participation from 8VC. Campus is on a mission to maximize access to a world-class education. A community college for the future, Campus offers accredited, career-focused degree programs to kickstart your education. They prioritize student success by providing resources to nurture their academic experience from day one through graduation. Their online associate degree in business program allows students to complete their first two years of college taking live, online classes with professors who also teach at top universities, including Princeton, UCLA, NYU, Howard, and more. [Link]
Prime Intellect, led by Vincent Weisser, has raised a $5.5 million Seed funding round. The round was led by Distributed Global and CoinFund (Jake Brukhman) with participation from Compound, Collab+Currency and Filecoin Creator Juan Benet with Protocol Labs, as well as angel investors including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. Prime Intellect is a decentralized AI platform and protocol giving access to compute and intelligence. The platform enables the training of state-of-the-art AI models through globally aggregated compute, enabling decentralized training across instances and empowering you to co-own AI models by contributing compute, code, data, capital, or expertise. [Link]
HighByte, led by Tony Paine, has raised a $12 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Standard Investments (Ben Sampson), with participation from Exposition Ventures and Maine Venture Fund. HighByte is an industrial software company that has developed an Industrial DataOps software solution, HighByte Intelligence Hub, that enables manufacturers to merge, prepare, and deliver modeled industrial data to and from IT systems without writing or maintaining code. [Link]
Clarity Pediatrics, led by Christina LaMontagne, has raised a $10 million Seed funding round. The round was led by Rethink Impact (Heidi Patel) with participation from Homebrew, Maverick Ventures, January Ventures, Vamos Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Citylight VC. Clarity Pediatrics provides pediatric chronic care, starting with ADHD. The company builds a virtual pediatric clinic for all families. Its new clinical model is tech-enabled, backed by science, and has the potential to deliver health outcomes to transform a child’s trajectory. In the future, its pediatric care platform will expand rapidly to other common chronic conditions like asthma, allergies, and obesity. [Link]
Auxa Health, led by Monica Chopra, has raised a $5.2M Seed funding round. The round was led by Zeal Capital Partners (Emily Zhen) with participation from existing investor AlleyCorp and new investors K50 Ventures, Laconia Capital Group, and Chaac Ventures. Auxa Health is a care management co-pilot that supports benefit navigation. Its payer-agnostic platform demystifies benefit and drug coverage details, surfaces eligibility and prior authorization requirements, and enrolls patients into high-value health benefits across health plans, state and federal programs, and community organizations. [Link]
Summer Health, led by Ellen DaSilva, has raised a $11.65M Series A funding round. The round was co-led by new investor 7wire Ventures (Alyssa Jaffee) and returning investor Lux Capital (Deena Shakir). Summer Health is a text-based companion to a family’s primary pediatrician, removing the need for unnecessary visits and serving as support anytime and anywhere. The company’s flagship product, text-based care in under 15 minutes, has been used by thousands of parents to manage urgent medical guidance and prescribe medications as-needed. [Link]
Nooks, led by Dan Lee, has raised a $22 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Lachy Groom with participation from Tola Capital (Sheila Gulati) and Stifel Venture Banking. Nooks provides a platform for sales teams prospecting over the phone. It multiplies sales productivity by automating manual call tasks, providing strategic insights, and up-skilling reps with AI training & collaboration. [Link]
Chemix, led by Kaixiang Lin, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Ibex Investors (Jeff Peters) with participation from Mayfield Fund (Ursheet Parikh), Berkeley SkyDeck, Urban Innovation Fund, BNP Paribas Solar Impulse Venture Fund (SIVF), Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III (KDDI CVC), and Porsche Ventures. Chemix is an EV battery developer that uses GenAI. Its battery designs are compatible with existing Li-ion battery manufacturing, providing a transition from R&D to pilot and eventually high-volume production at the GWh level. [Link]
Radical, led by James Thomas, has raised a $4.5 million Seed funding round. The round was led by Scout Ventures (Brad Harrison) with participation from Inflection Mercury Fund and Y Combinator. Radical makes high altitude solar-powered aircraft engineered to operate autonomously in the stratosphere, flying over targeted areas for months without the need to land. This capability allows the company to provide continuous cell service, collect high-resolution imagery, and carry weather and climate sensors, all while maintaining zero emissions. This has the potential to transform telecommunications, environmental monitoring, and many other fields. [Link]
Anon, led by Daniel Mason, has raised a $6.5 million Seed funding round. The round was led by Union Square Ventures (Nick Grossman) and Abstract Ventures (Ramtin Naimi), as well as early support from Impatient Ventures and ex/ante (pre-seed lead investors), with participation from Ryan Hoover (Founder, Product Hunt), Gokul Rajaram (early Google, Square, Doordash), Scott Belsky (founder of Behance; CPO at Adobe), and Amjad Masad. Anon is building the infrastructure to unlock the potential of AI applications by providing a secure way for billions of agents to authenticate and operate across the internet. By leveraging user-permissioned authentication, Anon handles secure credential collection, 2FA handling, CAPTCHAs, IP proxying, and more to deliver reliable integrations for services that don't have APIs. With Anon, developers can embed an SDK in their application and use the API to authenticate users, manage user sessions, and take actions on behalf of users across popular sites on the internet. [Link]
Alaffia Health, led by TJ Ademiluyi, has raised a $10 million Series A funding round. The round was led by FirstMark Capital (Amish Jani), with participation from GingerBread Capital and existing investors including Anthemis, Aperture Venture Capital, 1984 Ventures, Remarkable Ventures, and Tau Ventures. Alaffia Health is a healthtech company that uses machine learning and AI to proactively eliminate provider fraud, waste, and abuse in healthcare claims. The company offers an AI-driven payment integrity service to healthcare payers such as health plans, third-party administrators, self-insured employers, stop-loss carriers, and government agencies to eliminate overpayments and reduce healthcare costs. [Link]
Dripos, led by Jack Pawlik, has raised a $11 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Base10 (Caroline Broder) with participation from Michael Siebel of Y Combinator, Shyam Rao (founder of Punchh, acquired for $500+ million by Partech), and Ian Crosby (founder of Bench and Teal, and former Head of Fintech at Shopify), among others. Dripos provides a software platform for coffee shops to operate their business. The platform offers specialized point-of-sale (POS) and mobile payments, employee management and payroll, loyalty and marketing automation, as well as comprehensive administrative functions like accounting and banking. [Link]
Sublime Security, led by Josh Kamdjou, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Index Ventures (Jahanvi Sardana, Shardul Shah) with participation from previous investors Decibel Partners and Slow Ventures. Sublime Security provides an AI-powered, programmable cloud email security platform that detects and blocks attacks like business email compromise (BEC), malware/ransomware, credential phishing, and more. The open platform enables security teams to have visibility and control over their email environment, customize and use the platform to suit their needs, and collaborate with their peers against novel attacks to reduce risk and prevent email-borne incidents. [Link]
Amplifier Security, led by Shreyas Sadalgi, has raised a $3.3 million Seed funding round. The round was led by Cota Capital (Aditya Singh) with participation from WestWave Capital (Gaurav Manglik) and Shift Left Ventures, and included angel investments from founders of Slack, MobileIron, Centrify, PeopleNet, Skyflow and Mercury. Amplifier Security utilizes AI-powered technology to enable security teams to modernize their approach. The company offers security solutions for enterprises, uniting technology and human expertise to enhance an organization's security posture. [Link]
Dropzone AI, led by Edward Wu, has raised a $16.85 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Theory Ventures (Tomasz Tunguz), adding existing investors Decibel Partners (Jon Sakoda), Pioneer Square Ventures, and In-Q-Tel (IQT). Carta CISO Garrett Held, Head of Security at Postman Joshua Scott, and Integreon President and Head of Cyber Solutions Anshu Gupta also participated. Dropzone AI delivers pre-trained autonomous AI analysts that work alongside human analysts on security operations teams. They handle the frontline work of investigating alerts (including cloud, network, identity, endpoint, and phishing alerts) 24/7, giving cybersecurity teams the ability to do vastly more work with the same team. Using LLMs, its AI analysts perform end-to-end investigations replicating the techniques of elite analysts and enable human analysts to focus on real threats and higher-value work. It does not require any playbooks, code, or chat prompts and can be deployed in 30 minutes. As a result, analyst teams can focus on real threats and amplify their output. [Link]
*Note: The companies we feature in our weekly recap are a very small subset of a much larger batch, carefully chosen based on our team's assessment of how each company aligns with our GTM search practice. It’s worth noting that most startups raise funding rounds privately, often long before the news is announced publicly!
