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Bowery Valuation, a New York-based company that we told you about last year, has raised $12 million in Series A funding for its tech-enabled real estate appraisal platform. The 3.5-year-old company raised the capital from Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, Navitas Capital, Fika Ventures and Builders.

Bowery caught our attention initially because, like a lot of real estate technology companies, it’s tackling some clunky processes that you might imagine would have been solved long ago. For example, its mobile app enables appraisers to tick off items, rather than write everything down. It automatically pulls in public record data so that appraisers needn’t surf the web to find what they need. It enables passive databasing, meaning that rental and sales comps that are often lost today can be found via a map-based search. It also uses natural language generation to help its appraiser clients produce reports.

What has changed since we last talked: the company was beginning to sell a white-label version of its app to customers, and it has since shifted toward focusing its entire product and engineering team on its own internal software.

It has also expanded its footprint more slowly than it thought it might. Though the company is currently licensed and working throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, it hasn’t reached numerous farther-flung cities that continue to remain in its sights, including L.A. and Chicago.

Both are “still our first two choices for expansion,” says co-founder and CEO Noah Isaacs, adding that Bowery’s goal is now to “be in at least one of those two markets within the next nine to 12 months, with the other to follow shortly. We held off on expanding into new geographies prematurely, as we felt we had a lot more room to grow just in the tri-state area.” (Isaacs says the company has more than tripled its customer base and revenue since we last talked with the company last March.)

Though Bowery today focuses on multi-family and mixed-use assets, it also plans to expand to other commercial properties this year, says Isaacs.

Isaacs and his best childhood friend, John Meadows, founded Bowery in 2015 after working together at the same appraisal firm in New York and seeing plenty about the business on which they could improve. After bringing aboard as CTO Cesar Devars, a Princeton grad who’d studied economics and worked on several startups after graduating, the three got to work, applying and gaining acceptance shortly afterward to MetaProp NYC, a local accelerator program that focuses exclusively on real estate.

Bowery, where Meadows and Isaacs are co-CEOs, has since raised $18.8 million altogether, including from real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2AAHlnq

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Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory.

Aurora, the developer of a full-stack self-driving software system for automobile manufacturers, is raising at least $500 million in equity funding at more than a $2 billion valuation in a round expected to be led by new investor Sequoia Capital, according to a Recode report. A $500 million financing would bring Aurora’s total raised to date to $596 million and would provide a 4x increase to its most recent valuation.

The company, founded in 2016, raised a $90 million Series A last February from Hoffman’s Greylock Partners and Index Ventures . Hoffman and Index general partner Mike Volpi joined Aurora’s board as part of the deal. Greylock and Index are Aurora’s only existing investors, per PitchBook data. The young business has a lean cap table often characteristic of startup’s led by experienced entrepreneurs able to secure financing deals briskly from top VCs.

Aurora’s C-suite is chock-full of veteran AV workers. Urmson, for his part, formerly headed up the self-driving vehicles program at Google, now known as Waymo. Chief technology officer Drew Bagnell was head of perception and autonomy at Uber and Sterling Anderson, Aurora’s chief product officer, directed the autopilot program at Tesla from 2015 to 2016.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2FiYqFN

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Managed By Q, the office management platform that launched back in 2013, has today revealed that it raised an additional $25 million as a part of its Series C, led by existing investors RRE and Google Ventures, with participation from new investors DivCo West, Oxford Properties and others. The fresh capital brings the total round to $55 million.

Managed By Q launched as a all-encompassing platform for office management, offering IT support, supply inventory management, cleaning, and equipment repair. Since, the company has added a full-fledged marketplace, allowing office managers to choose vendors for various needs around the office.

But for 2019, the company is focused on tools and services.

“We want to spend 2019 putting even greater focus on the tools used by our vendors and workplace management teams, like task management tools,” said cofounder and CEO Dan Teran . “We want to build the first set of collaboration tools for the workplace team, the same way that designers use InVision and engineers use GitHub and salespeople use Salesforce. Something purposely built for the workplace team.”

Teran described tools that would allow for employee requests, work orders, task management, inventory management and budgeting to all live on the same platform.

The company hasn’t shared much by way of revenue or customer growth, but Teran told TechCrunch that the marketplace business has been doubling since it launched and is on track to continue on that trajectory. He also wrote in a company blog post that Managed by Q’s top five vendor partners have done over $1 million in business on the Managed By Q platform, and more than 30 partners will have earned over $100K on the platform in 2018.

The NY-based startup also brokered a partnership with Staples to provide office supplies to clients, and acquired Hivy and NVS to further fill out their office management suite of products.

Managed By Q has raised a total of $128.25 million, according to CrunchBase.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Fguwmd