| May? Mais oui! (Sorry.) Sending out a slightly abbreviated issue today as we race off to a fourth grade field trip. More tomorrow.:) |
| Top News |
| Apple is scheduled to report its second-quarter results today after the market closes and expectations are . . . not high, notes Recode. Facebook is separately kicking off its F8 developers conference today in San Jose and Mark Zuckerberg has already dropped a bit of news: the company will soon launch a new privacy feature that will allow users to see and delete the data Facebook has collected from websites and apps that use its ads and analytics tool. TechCrunch has more here. |
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| New Fundings |
| Algolux, a four-year-old, Montreal, Canada-based company at work on machine-learning stacks for autonomous vision and imaging, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by General Motors Ventures, with participation from Drive Capital,Intact Ventures, and Real Ventures. More here. AMCS, a 15-year-old, Limerick, Ireland-based maker of software and vehicle technology for the waste, recycling, and material resources industries, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Insight Venture Partners and Ireland Strategic Investment Fund. More here. Attenua, a three-year-old, New York-based developer of new treatments for chronic coughing, has raised $35 million in Series A funding led by Omega Funds, with participation from Abingworth, OrbiMed and Redmile Group. EndPoints News has more here. Covee, a 1.5-year-old, Zurich, Switzerland-based network for decentralized data science collaboration, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding led by LocalGlobe, with participation from Atlantic Labs, among others. TechCrunch has more here. Hustle, a four-year-old. San Francisco-based personalized mass texting tool, just raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from GV and Salesforce Ventures. TechCrunch has more here. MasterClass, the five-year-old, San Francisco-based online education platform known for celebrity-taught classes, is working to finalize a Series D round that could raise around $70 million at a valuation north of $300 million, reports Axios, which says to expect it to be insider led. To date, the company has raised roughy $56 million, shows Crunchbase. Backers include IVP, New Enterprise Associates, Bloomberg Beta, and Javelin Venture Partners, among others. Namogoo, a four-year-old, Boston- and Israel-based ad blocking technology company, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Hanaco Venture Capital with participation from GreatPoint Ventures, Blumberg Capital and Inimiti Capital. More here. NovellusDx, a 7.5-year-old, Jerusalem-based precision medicine company at work on an early cancer detection technology, has raised $6 million in funding, including from Helsinn Group, Bio Capital Impact Fund and Windham Venture Partners. Globes has more here. Paragraf, a U.K.-based graphene technology development company, has raised roughly $4 million in seed funding led by Cambridge Enterprise, with participation from Parkwalk Advisors, Amadeus Capital Partners, and IQ Capital Partners. TechCrunch has more here. Sentenai, a three-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based data science company that organizes and stores sensor data to make it more useful, has raised $2 million in seed funding from One Way Ventures, TechNexus Venture Collaborative, and several angel investors. More here. Substack, a year-old, San Francisco-based startup that provides users with tools to publish paid-for subscription newsletters, has raised $2 million in seed funding from The Chernin Group, Fifty Years, Zhen Fund, Garage Capital, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron. More here. Suki, a year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based maker of a voice assistant for doctors (it was formerly known as Robin AI), has raised $15 million funding round led by earlier backer Venrock. Other participants in the round included First Round,Social+Capital, Nat Turner of Flatiron Health, Marc Benioff, and other individual investors. The company has now raised around $20 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here. ZeroCater, a 8.5-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that provides office catering and snacks, has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Cleveland Avenue, with participation from Romulus Capital and Struck Capital. TechCrunch has more here. |
| New Funds |
| Andra Capital, a two-year-old, Bay Area-based investment firm, has raised $500 million in funding for a new digital currency that investors can use to back a group of late-stage venture capital firms, says the firm’s managing partner, Haydar Haba. The new token is called Silicon Valley Coin (SVC) and it’s built on the Ethereum blockchain. Reuters has the story here. Goodwater Capital, co-founded in 2014 by former Kleiner Perkins partner Chi-Hua Chien and Eric Kim, formerly of Maverick Capital, is looking to raise up to $350 million for its third fund, shows a new SEC filing. It’s a pretty fast return to the market. Goodwater closed its second fund just 14 months ago with $250 million. It closed its debut fund with $130 million. More on the consumer-tech focused firm here. |
| Exits |
| Marketo, a once publicly traded software company that’s now owned by the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, has acquired Bizible, a Seattle-based marketing performance management software maker. Terms aren’t being disclosed. Bizible had raised about $19 million in equity and debt financing, including from Scale Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Square 1 Bank. GeekWire has more here. In 2012, Cisco made one of its biggest-ever acquisitions when it acquired video and security specialist NDS for $5 billion. Now, the company is selling part of that business to one of its previous owners, the private equity firm Permira, as it looks to refocus itself and boost growth in networking, multi-cloud, security, data, and collaboration services. TechCrunch has more here. |
| People |
| A U.S. jury yesterday convicted Sushovan Hussain, the former CFO of software company Autonomy, of wire fraud and other crimes related to the company’s sale to Hewlett Packard. Reuters has more here. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum is leaving Facebook’s board — and potentially up to $1 billion — as he walks away from the social media juggernaut four years after it acquired his company. Some big investors see warning signs ahead for markets but are holding their positions. Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris is taking action: He just put half of his $5.7 billion net worth into gold. Rachel Star has joined Shasta Ventures as an associate. She was previously employed by Nordstrom, where she worked in corporate strategy. More here. The U.K. parliament has issued an ultimatum to Facebook in a last-ditch attempt to get Mark Zuckerberg to take its questions: Come and give evidence voluntarily, or the next time you fly to the U.K., you’ll get a formal summons to appear. |
| Essential Reads |
| Facebook wants to prove it can earn businesses money, not just build their social media audience. Now it has an app for that, too. Apple has deleted a revealing job listing that hints at plans to cut Qualcomm and Intel chips from its future phones. More than 100 Uber drivers in the U.S. have been accused of sexual assault or abuse over the last four years, says CNN. A similar CNN review using the same methodology found 18 cases of Lyft drivers accused in the past four years. |
| Detours |
| “The Simpsons” just surpassed “Gunsmoke” as America’s longest-running scripted TV show. Can anyone catch London’s serial cat murderer? What’s inside Mars? |
| Retail Therapy |
| One of the most opulent homes in the 90210 zip code is looking for a buyer. Its marketing materials describe it as “an authentic Italian village” to give you some sense of its scale(!). |