Travel financing startup Uplift is announcing that it has raised $123 million in Series C funding.
Uplift has been relatively quiet about its business until now. Its founder and CEO is Brian Barth, who previously sold his travel startup SideStep to Kayak for $200 million
“We’ve been exceedingly low-profil,e because it’s a really good idea and we wanted to keep it a secret,” said President Robert Soderberry. “But now we’re at a size and scale where we’re ready to raise our visibility.”
Besides, he acknowledge that it would be hard to “keep a $123 million Series C financing round a secret.”
The idea is pretty straightforward: Uplift works with partners like the vacation package sites of United Airlines, Southwest and American Airlines, as well as Allegiant Travel Company and Kayak, to offer financing to travelers, allowing them to pay for their trips in monthly installments. (It has a bank partner for the loans.)
For example, Soderberry said that if a family is considering a trip to Disneyland for a price of $2,000, Uplift might be able to offer a one-year financing plan with monthly payments of $189 a month.
“We make it really easy for consumers to understand,” he said. “It’s a convenient way to book travel, it reduces the upfront cost and encourages them to book more often, which in turn drives conversion for our travel partners. It’s really a win-win.”
It’s an idea that’s spreading in other industries through companies like Affirm — and in fact, Affirm has been moving into travel. But Soderberry said Uplift is is the only company focused entirely on the travel industry.
“Planning and purchasing travel is really different buying a mattress or a gym membership,” he said. “It’s a different kind of product and different technology.”
And although Uplift launched less than two years ago, Soderberry said the company is on-track to drive nearly $1 billion in loans in 2019. He said that for some partners, Uplift represents 20 percent of their business.
The new funding should allow Uplift to bring on new partners, offer new services and otherwise grow the business. At the same time, Soderberry said the company will remain focused on travel, and on reaching consumers through its partners rather than launching a marketplace of its own
“Travel companies want to protect their customers and they don’t want us to be sourcing or acquiring their consumers,” he said. “We stand behind our partners … We don’t bring [customers] to our site to try to create a marketplace, we’re not trying to build a consumer platform, we’re building a platform for travel partners.”
Uplift previously raised $23 million in funding. The Series C was led by Madrone Capital Partners, with participation from Draper Nexus, Ridge Ventures, Highgate Ventures, Barton Asset Management and PAR Capital.
“Uplift’s focused business model of bringing flexible payments to travel is a winner,” said Madrone’s Jamie McJunkin in a statement. “Our confidence to invest was driven by an experienced management team, a very large market opportunity and the competitive advantages driven by the innovations Uplift has brought to the travel market.”
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2U5Ffn4
London-based edtech startup, pi-top, has unboxed a new flagship learn-to-code product, demoing the “go anywhere” Pi-powered computer at the Bett Show education fare in London today.
Discussing the product with TechCrunch ahead of launch, co-founder and CEO Jesse Lozano talked up the skills the company hopes students in the target 12-to-17 age range will develop and learn to apply by using sensor-based connected tech, powered by its new pi-top 4, to solve real world problems.
“When you get a pi-top 4 out of the box you’re going to start to learn how to code with it, you’re going to start to learn and understand electronic circuits, you’re going to understand sensors from our sensor library. Or components from our components library,” he told us. “So it’s not: ‘I’m going to learn how to create a robot that rolls around on wheels and doesn’t knock into things’.
“It’s more: ‘I’m going to learn how a motor works. I’m going to learn how a distance sensor works. I’m going to learn how to properly hook up power to these different sensors. I’m going to learn how to apply that knowledge… take those skills and [keep making stuff].”
The pi-top 4 is a modular computer that’s designed to be applicable, well, anywhere; up in the air, with the help of a drone attachment; powering a sensing weather balloon; acting as the brains for a rover style wheeled robot; or attached to sensors planted firmly in the ground to monitor local environmental conditions.
The startup was already dabbling in this area, via earlier products — such as a Pi-powered laptop that featured a built in rail for breadboarding electronics. But the pi-top 4 is a full step outside the usual computing box.
The device has a built-in mini OLED screen for displaying project info, along with an array of ports. It can be connected to and programmed via one of pi-top’s other Pi-powered computers, or any PC, Mac and Chromebook, with the company also saying it easily connects to existing screens, keyboards and mice. Versatility looks to be the name of the game for pi-top 4.
pi-top’s approach to computing and electronics is flexible and interoperable, meaning the pi-top 4 can be extended with standard electronics components — or even with Littlebits‘ style kits’ more manageable bits and bobs.
pi-top is also intending to sell a few accessories of its own (such as the drone add-on, pictured above) to help get kids’ creative project juices flowing — and has launched a range of accessories, cameras, motors and sensors to “allow creators of all ages to start learning by making straight out of the box”.
But Lozano emphasizes its platform play is about reaching out to a wider world, not seeking to lock teachers and kids to buying proprietary hardware. (Which would be all but impossible, in any case, given the Raspberry Pi core.)
“It’s really about giving people that breadth of ability,” says Lozano, discussing the sensor-based skills he wants the product to foster. “As you go through these different projects you’re learning these specific skills but you also start to understand how they would apply to other projects.”
He mentions various maker projects the pi-top can be used to make, like a music synth or wheeled robot, but says the point isn’t making any specific connected thing; it’s encouraging kids to come up with project ideas of their own.
“Once that sort of veil has been pierced in students and in teachers we see some of the best stuff starts to be made. People make things that we had no idea they would integrate it into,” he tells us, pointing by way of example to a solar car project from a group of U.S. schoolkids. “These fifteen year olds are building solar cars and they’re racing them from Texas to California — and they’re using pi-tops to understand how their cars are performing to make better race decisions.”
pi-top’s new device is a modular programmable computer designed for maker projects
“What you’re really learning is the base skills,” he adds, with a gentle sideswipe at the flood of STEM toys now targeting parents’ wallets. “We want to teach you real skills. And we want you to be able to create projects that are real. That it’s not block-based coding. It’s not magnetized, clipped in this into that and all of a sudden you have something. It’s about teaching you how to really make things. And how the world actually works around you.”
The pi-top 4 starts at $199 for a foundation bundle which includes a Raspberry Pi 3B+,16GB SD card, power pack, along with a selection of sensors and add-on components for starter projects.
Additional educational bundles will also launch down the line, at a higher price, including more add ons, access to premium software and a full curriculum for educators to support budding makers, according to Lozano.
The startup has certainly come a long way from its founders’ first luridly green 3D printed laptop which caught our eye back in 2015. Today it employs more than 80 people globally, with offices in the UK, US and China, while its creative learning devices are in the hands of “hundreds of thousands” of schoolkids across more than 70 countries at this stage. And Lozano says they’re gunning to pass the million mark this year.
So while the ‘learn to code’ space has erupted into a riot of noise and color over the past half decade, with all sorts of connected playthings now competing for kids’ attention, and pestering parents with quasi-educational claims, pi-top has kept its head down and focused firmly on building a serious edtech business with STEM learning as its core focus, saving it from chasing fickle consumer fads, as Lozano tells it.
“Our relentless focus on real education is something that has differentiated us,” he responds, when asked how pi-top stands out in what’s now a very crowded marketplace. “The consumer market, as we’ve seen with other startups, it can be fickle. And trying to create a hit toy all the time — I’d rather leave that to Mattel… When you’re working with schools it’s not a fickle process.”
Part of that focus includes supporting educators to acquire the necessary skills themselves to be able to teach what’s always a fast-evolving area of study. So schools signing up to pi-top’s subscription product get support materials and guides, to help them create a maker space and understand all the ins and outs of the pi-top platform. It also provides a classroom management backend system that lets teachers track students’ progress.
“If you’re a teacher that has absolutely no experience in computer science or engineering or STEM based learning or making then you’re able to bring on the pi-top platform, learn with it and with your student, and when they’re ready they can create a computer science course — or something of that ilk — in their classroom,” says Lozano.
pi-top wants kids to use tech to tackle real-world problems
“As with all good things it takes time, and you need to build up a bank of experience. One of the things we’ve really focused on is giving teachers that ability to build up that bank of experience, through an after school club, or through a special lesson plan that they might do.
“For us it’s about augmenting that teacher and helping them become a great educator with tools and with resources. There’s some edtech stuff they want to replace the teacher — they want to make the teacher obsolete. I couldn’t disagree with that viewpoint more.”
“Why aren’t teachers just buying textbooks?” he adds. “It takes 24 months to publish a textbook. So how are you supposed to teach computer science with those technology-based skills with something that’s by design two years out of date?”
Last summer pi-top took in $16M in Series B funding, led by existing founders Hambro Perks and Committed Capital. It’s been using the financing to bring pi-top 4 to market while also investing heavily in its team over the past 18 months — expanding in-house expertise in designing learning products and selling in to the education sector via a number of hires. Including the former director of learning at Apple, Dr William Rankin.
The founders’ philosophy is to combine academic expertise in education with “excellence in engineering”. “We want the learning experience to be something we’re 100% confident in,” says Lozano. “You can go into pi-top and immediately start learning with our lesson plans and the kind of framework that we provide.”
“[W]e’ve unabashedly focused on… education. It is the pedagogy,” he adds. “It is the learning outcome that you’re going to get when you use the pi-top. So one of the big changes over the last 18 months is we’ve hired a world class education team. We have over 100 years of pedagogical experience on the team now producing an enormous amount of — we call them learning experience designers.”
He reckons that focus will stand pi-top in good stead as more educators turn their attention to how to arm their pupils with the techie skills of the future.
“There’s loads of competition but now the schools are looking they’re [asking] who’s the team behind the education outcome that you’re selling me?” he suggests. “And you know what if you don’t have a really strong education team then you’re seeing schools and districts become a lot more picky — because there is so much choice. And again that’s something I’m really excited about. Everybody’s always trying to do a commercial brand partnership deal. That’s just not something that we’ve focused on and I do really think that was a smart choice on our end.”
Lozano is also excited about a video the team has produced to promote the new product — which strikes a hip, urban note as pi-top seeks to inspire the next generation of makers.
“We really enjoy working in the education sector and I really, really enjoy helping teachers and schools deliver inspirational content and learning outcomes to their students,” he adds. “It’s genuinely a great reason to wake up in the morning.”
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2FK8bO7
Epic Games announced this morning that they’ve acquired Serbia-based 3Lateral, a game studio focused on designing more realistic computer-generated human characters.
The team of 60+ will be continuing their work with existing partners and maintaining their presence in Serbia. 3Lateral founder Vladimir Mastilovic will lead Epic Games’ worldwide digital humans efforts, the company says.
No details on a price or specific deal terms were given.
Epic Games, which operates Fortnite as well as the Unreal Engine game development platform, has worked with 3Lateral in the past on projects to push the level of realism and detail that are possible with human avatars.
“Real-time 3D experiences are reshaping the entire entertainment industry, and digital human technology is at the forefront. Fortnite shows that 200,000,000 people can experience a 3D world together. Reaching the next level requires capturing, personalizing, and conveying individual human faces and emotions,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a statement.
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2WfLp66
DoorDash, a well-funded food delivery unicorn, is familiar with this method of staffing. The company announced this morning that it has poached its second Uber employee in the last year to join its growing business. Ryan Sokol, credited with leading and scaling Uber Eats, Uber’s food delivery arm, from its inception, has joined DoorDash as its vice president of engineering.
The news comes shortly after the San Francisco-based company hired Prabir Adarkar, Uber’s former head of strategic finance, as its chief financial officer. The company also recently hired chief people officer Sarah Wagener from Pandora, where she was VP of human resources.
Reporting to co-founder and chief executive officer Tony Xu, Sokol will lead the product, infrastructure and data science teams within DoorDash’s engineering department.
“Ryan comes to DoorDash at a critical inflection point in our business following a breakout year,” DoorDash wrote in an announcement. “In 2018 we 5xed our geographic footprint from 600 to 3,300 cities and tripled our valuation to more than $4 billion.”
“We doubled the engineering team to 200+ last year, working on a variety of problems from machine learning applications to logistics to personalizing consumer experiences,” they added. “This year, we plan to double our team again and continue on our trajectory as the fastest growing last-mile logistics company in the space.”
Six-year-old DoorDash has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital funding, most recently at a $4 billion valuation, from SoftBank, Sequoia, Coatue Management, DST Global, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, CRV and several others.
I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how Anchorage keeps rich institutions from being robbed of their cryptocurrency, but the off-the-record demo was damn impressive. Judging by the $17 million Series A this security startup raised last year led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, Mark McCombe of Blackrock, and AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, I’m not the only one who thinks so. In fact crypto funds like Andreessen’s a16zcrypto, Paradigm, and Electric Capital are already using it.
They’re trusting in the guys who engineered Square’s first encrypted card reader and Docker’s security protocols. “It’s less about us choosing this space and more about this space choosing us. If you look our backgrounds and you look at the problem, it’s like the universe handed us on a silver platter the venn diagram of our skillset” co-founder Diogo Monica tells me.
Today, Anchorage is coming out of stealth and launching its cryptocurrency custody service to the public. Anchorage holds and safeguards crypto assets for institutions like hedge funds and venture firms, and only allows transactions verified by an array of biometrics, behavioral analysis, and human reviewers. And since it doesn’t use “buried in the backyard” cold storage, asset holders can actually earn rewards and advantages for participating in coin-holder votes without fear of getting their Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other coins stolen.
The result is a crypto custody service that could finally lure big-time commercial banks, endowments, pensions, mutual funds, and hedgies into the blockchain world. Whether they seek short-term gains off of crypto volatility or want to HODL long-term while participating in coin governance, Anchorage promises to protect them.
Evolving Past “Pirate Security”
Anchorage’s story starts eight years ago when Monica and his co-founder Nathan McCauley met after joining Square the same week. Monica had been getting a PhD in distributed systems while McCauley designed anti-reverse engineering tech to keep the US military data from being extracted from abandoned tanks or jets. After four years of building systems that would eventually move over $80 billion per year in credit card transactions, they packaged themselves as a “pre-product acquihire” Monica tells me, and they were snapped up by Docker.
As their reputation grew from work and conference keynotes, cryptocurrency funds started reaching out for help with custody of their private keys. One had lost a passphrase and the $1 million in currency it was protecting. The pair realized there were no true standards in crypto custody, so they got to work on Anchorage.
“You look at the status quo and it was and still is cold storage. It’s the same technology used by pirates in the 1700s” Monica explains. “You bury your crypto in a treasure chest and then you make a treasure map of where those gold coins are” except with USB keys, security deposit boxes, and checklists of where they are. “We started calling it Pirate Custody.” They set out to build something better — a replacement for usernames and passwords or even phone numbers and two-factor authentication that could be misplaced or hijacked.
This led them to Andreessen Horowitz partner and a16zcrypto leader Chris Dixon, who’s now on their board. “We’ve been buying crypto assets running back to Bitcoin for years now here at A16zCrypto and its hard to do it in a way that’s secure, regulatorily complaint, and lets you access it. We felt this pain point directly.”
Andreessen Horowith partner and Anchorage board member Chris Dixon
This is when Monica and McCauley give me their off the record demo. While there’s no screenshots to share, the enterprise security suite they’ve built has the polish of a consumer app like Robinhood. What I can say is that Anchorage works with clients to whitelist employees devices. It then uses multiple types of biometric signals and behavioral analytics about the person and device trying to log in.
But even once they have access, Anchorage is built around quorum-based approvals. Withdrawls, other transactions, and even changing employee permissions requires approval from multiple users inside the client company. They could set up Anchorage so it requires five of seven executives to pull out assets. And finally, outlier detection algorithms and a human review the transaction to make sure it looks legit. A hacker or rogue employee can’t steal the funds even if they’re logged in since they need consensus of approval.
That kind of assurance means institutional investors can confidently start to invest in crypto assets. That swell of capital could help replace the retreating consumer investors who’ve fled the market this year leading to massive price drops. The liquidity provided by these asset managers could keep the whole blockchain industry moving. “Institutional investing has had centuries to build up a set of market infrastructure. Custody was something that for other asset classes was solved hundreds of years ago so it’s just now catching up” says McCauley. “We’re creating a bigger market in and of itself” Monica adds.
With Anchorage steadfastly handling custody, the risk these co-founders admit worry them lie in the smart contracts that govern the cryptocurrencies themselves. “We need to be extremely wide in our level of support and extremely deep because each blockchain has details of implementation.This is inherently a very difficult problem” McCauley explains. It doesn’t matter if the coins are safe in Anchorage’s custody if a janky smart contract can botch their transfer.
There are plenty of startups vying to offer crypto custody, ranging from Bitgo and Ledger to well-known names like Coinbase and Gemini. Yet Anchorage offers a rare combination of institutional-since-day-one security rigor with the ability to participate in votes and governance of crypto assets that’s impossible if they’re in cold storage. Down the line, Anchorage hints that it might serve clients recommendations for how to vote to maximize their yield and preserve the sanctity of their coin.
They’ll have crypto investment legend Chris Dixon on their board to guide them. “What you’ll see is in the same way that institutional investors want to buy stock in Facebook and Google and Netflix, they’ll want to buy the equivalent in the world 10 years from now and do that safely” Dixon tells me. “Anchorage will be that layer for them.”
But why do the Anchorage founders care so much about the problem? McCauley concludes that “When we look at what’s potentialy possible with crypto, there a fundamentally more accessible economy. We view ourselves as a key component of bringing that future forward.”
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2AYHhxY
Lumigo, an Israeli startup, announced a healthy $8 million seed round today, as it emerged from stealth to help companies monitor serverless architecture. Investors included Pitango Venture Capital, Grove Ventures and Meron Capital.
The company was started by a couple of ex-Checkpoint execs, Erez Berkner and Aviad Mor. They decided to head out on their own to solve a problem they were seeing around monitoring, as developers moved to serverless environments.
Serverless computing lets developers code applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. That’s because services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions provide the exact amount of infrastructure resources required to run the application at any given moment. It is incredibly convenient for developers trying to move more quickly, but it poses challenges for the operations team trying to manage and monitor the application.
To help solve this, the company uses a visual map to show operations exactly what’s happening inside the application. The map enables operations teams to see and understand every request and get to the root cause of a problem. It can trace the path not only from the serverles infrastructure, but also to adjacent services like database and storage.
For starters, the company is working with AWS, but plans to add support for other cloud platforms down the road. Moving forward, the founders’ vision is more than just serverless. They plan to expand to monitor containers and API services like Twilio and Stripe.
For now, it’s still early days, but the company has eight employees and a dozen customers using the product. The money should allow them to hire more engineers and begin building out the product further.
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CFbylL
Lumigo, an Israeli startup, announced a healthy $8 million seed round today, as it emerged from stealth to help companies monitor serverless architecture. Investors included Pitango Venture Capital, Grove Ventures and Meron Capital.
The company was started by a couple of ex-Checkpoint execs, Erez Berkner and Aviad Mor. They decided to head out on their own to solve a problem they were seeing around monitoring, as developers moved to serverless environments.
Serverless computing lets developers code applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. That’s because services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions provide the exact amount of infrastructure resources required to run the application at any given moment. It is incredibly convenient for developers trying to move more quickly, but it poses challenges for the operations team trying to manage and monitor the application.
To help solve this, the company uses a visual map to show operations exactly what’s happening inside the application. The map enables operations teams to see and understand every request and get to the root cause of a problem. It can trace the path not only from the serverles infrastructure, but also to adjacent services like database and storage.
For starters, the company is working with AWS, but plans to add support for other cloud platforms down the road. Moving forward, the founders’ vision is more than just serverless. They see that as one of three pillars for the company, and plan to expand to monitor containers and API services like Twilio and Stripe.
For now, it’s still early days, but the company has eight employees and a dozen customers using the product. The money should allow them to hire more engineers and begin building out the product further.
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CFbylL
Adobe today announced that it has acquired Allegorithmic, the French company behind the Substance tools for creating textures that are widely used by AAA game creators, as well as visual effects artists, animators and designers. Over time, Adobe will bring many of Allegorithmic’s technologies to its various Creative Cloud tools, many of which already offer complementary tools. Beyond those integrations, though, what this acquisition is really about is the fact that 3D design and creating 3D content is becoming increasingly important for the creatives who use Adobe’s tools. With Adobe Dimensions and, more recently, Project Aero for creating AR experiences, the company has started focusing on 3D, and this acquisition will bring both talent and technology to the company.
It’s worth noting that Adobe previously invested in Allegorithmic and that Dimensions already features integration with Substance, so today’s announcement has clearly been in the works for a while.
As Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky told me, it’s worth remembering that many of Adobe’s most important products today were acquisitions, including Photoshop back in 1995. “Adobe is a company that has always embraced new DNA and has grown through these critical acquisitions,” he said, and noted that Adobe always looks to these acquisitions to see how it can change through them — not how it can change the company it acquires. “For Creative Cloud, this is one of these acquisitions,” he added.
He also noted that while Substance has been around for more than 15 years, there’s a lot of tailwind in the industry now that it’s often easier to render and image than set up a photo or video shoot and then edit and retouch those images. Adobe, of course, wants to catch as much of that tailwind as possible.
Adobe’s Stefano Corazza, who is the company’s head of AR, also noted that the Allegorithmic team was among the first to focus on physics-based rendering and that tools like Substance will become increasingly important as creatives try to build realistic AR experiences that need to be as photorealistic as possible — and to do that, you need to be able to create materials that are able to reflect light properly, for example. He also stressed that new technologies like Nvidia’s RTX raytracing hardware will keep pushing the boundaries on photo realism.
The current Substance product line will remain intact, by the way. Adobe obviously knows that it is acquiring a set of tools that have been used for creating games like Assassin’s Creed, Forza and Call of Duty, but also movies like Blade Runner 2049. Those use cases aren’t going away. But while Adobe obviously has a long history in the movie industry, this is also a move that takes it deeper into the world of game development. Don’t expect to see Adobe launch a competitor to Unity or other game development tools, though. What Belsky seems to be more interested in — besides the existing use cases — is to enable a wider range of people to make objects in games, for example. He noted there’s already a flourishing number of games that allow players to use their own objects and textures, for example, and Adobe wants to offer tools for them, too.
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2COCX4T
Since launch, Brandless has looked to make shopping for everyday items simple by pricing everything at $3. Today, for the first time since the company came on the scene, Brandless will be adding new items that exceed its own $3 limit.
The e-commerce brand is adding baby and pet products to its portfolio.
Baby products include Premium Diapers with no latex, lotion fragrance or chlorine processing, organic baby food pouches and cruelty-free baby care products like baby wipes, lotion, shampoo and diaper rash cream. Pet products include protein treats, supplement chews, non-toxic toys, hemp collars and pet cleanup waste bags made with a TDPA technology material that breaks down faster in landfills.
Though some of these products won’t wear the $3 pricetag as a uniform like other Brandless goods, the company says that 90 percent of its products still fall into the $3 category. Products that are not $3 or less will be $9.
Brandless recently introduced a subscription, giving users a stickier way to interact with the brand, especially on the heels of the launch of pet and baby products.
The subscription is free, but it asks users to meet a minimum of $36 for free shipping, and it auto-fills the box with goods you’ve chosen for monthly resupplies.
The time between purchase and receipt is difficult for products like the ones Brandless sells. Toilet paper, snacks, pet food etc. all come in different amounts that last a different length of time. This means that options like Amazon Prime, which offers shipping as fast as same-day in some cases, become incredibly attractive to restock on that one thing that ran out too quick.
Edison Trends took a look at Brandless over a period between 2017 and 2018 and found that retention was the company’s most pressing issue. Only 20 percent of customers who bought something in late 2017 came back the next quarter for a purchase, and only 13 percent came back the quarter after that.
Since Brandless gives back the cost of marketing its products to consumers, word of mouth and customer loyalty are the two pillars upon which the company is built. Subscriptions and new product categories are two ways to bring on new users and build loyalty with an existing customer base.
But the seven-year-old company has plenty of work to do. With nearly $300 million in funding, investors and shareholders are expecting big things from Brandless.
from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CCPF6n
Alchemist, which began as an experiment to better promote enterprise entrepreneurs, has morphed into a well-established Silicon Valley accelerator.
To prove it, San Francisco-based Alchemist is announcing a fresh $2.5 million investment ahead of its 20th demo day on Wednesday. Jupiter Networks, a networking and cybersecurity solutions business, has led the round, with participation from Siemens’ venture capital unit Next47.
Launched in 2012 by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson investor Ravi Belani, Alchemist provides participating teams with six months of mentorship and a $36,000 investment. Alchemist admits companies whose revenue stream comes from enterprises, not consumers, with a bent toward technical founders.
According to numbers provided by the accelerator, dubbed the “Y Combinator of Enterprise,” 115 Alchemist portfolio companies have gone on to raise $556 million across several VC deals. Another 25 have been acquired, including S4 Capital’s recent $150 million acquisition of media consultancy MightyHive, Alchemist’s largest exit to date.
Other notable alums include Rigetti Computing, LaunchDarkly, which helps startups soft-launch features and drone startup Matternet.
Alchemist has previously raised venture capital funding, including a $2 million financing in 2017 led by GE and an undisclosed investment from Salesforce.
Nineteen companies will demo products onstage tomorrow. You can live stream Alchemist’s 20th demo day here.
