Category: UNCATEGORIZED

With $11 million in funding and a mission to open up the doors of regenerative therapies to dogs across the nation, the Los Angeles based startup Gallant is now opening its doors for the first time.

The company was founded by DogVacay founder and chief executive Aaron Hirschhorn after seeing his own pet’s struggle with debilitating illness and knowing firsthand that regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies could help.

“I struggled with debilitating chronic back pain for more than a decade, leaving me incapable of doing activities I loved, until regenerative medicine successfully cured my condition,” said Hirschhorn, in a statement. “At the same time, I watched my dog Rocky suffer from arthritis so painful that she couldn’t walk. I knew there had to be a better way to treat and heal our pets, which sparked the beginning of Gallant. We are on a mission to keep our pets happier and healthier through the power of regenerative medicine.”

Joining Hirschhorn at the company is Linda Black, an experienced serial entrepreneur at life sciences companies like Medicus Biosciences and SciStem, which both focused on developing regenerative therapies. Richard Jennings, the chief executive of cord blood banking company, California Cryobank, and Darryl Rawlings, the founder and chief executive of Trupanion, both sit on the company’s board of directors.

Hirschorn knows the pet business. He helped grow DogVacay to over $100 million in sales over his tenure at the company before its merger with Rover.

It’s that experience in business that likely helped investors including Maveron, Bold Capital Partners, Bling Capital, and Science Inc. come to the table and fetch $11 million in cash for the business.

Through the investment, Gallant was able to acquire the veterinary division of Cook-Regentec, including the animal medicine division’s intellectual property, existing stem cell banking operations and their pipeline of cell therapy products derived from reproductive tissue.

What’s the benefit of banking your dog’s stem cells for life for roughly $1,000?

According to Gallant, the veterinarians from its newly acquired business have treated hundreds of cats and dogs already with their own banked stem cells. Those treatments have helped dogs with illnesses including osteoarthritis, atopic dermatitis, torn ligaments and chronic dry eye. Each treatment has been demonstrated to be effective in early clinical trials and stem cell therapy is on the cutting edge of new scientific research.

With Gallant, pet owners opt in to having their animal’s stem cells collected during a routine spaying or neutering procedure. Hirschhorn says that roughly 1 million cats and dogs undergo those procedures every day, so there’s no shortage of potential customers.

During the procedure, vets deposit tissue from the operation in a special container that Gallant will collect and use to harvest an animal’s stem cells.

By collecting stem cells harvested during the operations, Gallant says it can get access to younger, healthier stem cells.

Banking and paying for therapies using Gallant’s technology isn’t cheap. The company charges $395 to collect the cells and another $595 to store them for a pet’s lifetime. If an owner wants to pay annually, there’s a $95 fee per year to store the genetic material. (Gallant says it’s waiving the initial collection fee for a limited time to coincide with its launch).

Treatments based on a pet’s genetic material cost $300.

“In my experience with clinical trials and evaluating dogs with debilitating arthritis, I’ve seen first hand how cell therapy can change lives, ” said Dr. Black, chief scientific officer at Gallant, in a statement. “I’m committed to developing therapies that dramatically improve the quality of life for dogs.”

Mobile banking app Current, which began as a teen debit card controlled by parents, expanded to offer personal checking accounts earlier this year. Now the company says it has grown to host over 500,000 accounts on its service and has closed on $20 million in Series B funding to further its growth.

The round included new investors Wellington Management Company, Galaxy Digital EOS VC Fund, and CMFG Ventures — the venture capital arm of the CUNA Mutual Group, a mutual insurance company serving credit unions and their 120 million members. Returning investors included QED Investors, Expa, and Elizabeth Street Ventures.

The first version of Current, which debuted in 2017, was focused on giving parents a more modern way to dole out allowances and reward their kids for chores. But over time, the product became more like a real bank account for teens, culminating with the addition of routing and account numbers late last year. This allowed working teens to direct their paycheck to Current, as they could with a traditional bank.

This year, Current launched personal checking using the same core technology powering its teen banking product. The product includes features like faster direct deposits, gas hold crediting, and merchant blocking without charging overdraft fees, hidden fees, or requiring minimum balances.

While the teen checking account users have an average of 15, the average age for the new personal checking account users is 27.

This puts Current in a more competitive market, where a number of banking apps are now targeting a younger, more mobile generation who begun to favor modern, feature-rich apps over brick-and-mortar banks. Among its rivals are apps like Step, Cleo, N26, Chime, Simple, Stash, and others.

Like many in this space, Current isn’t actually a bank — its banking services are provided by Choice Financial Group and Metropolitan Commercial Bank, which allows it to offer FDIC insurance up to $250,000. Instead, many of the banking apps focus instead on the feature set and user experience they can offer.

Both of Current’s products include a Visa co-branded debit card tied to the Current account. Along with the funding, Current and Visa are also announcing an expanded joint marketing partnership, which will help Current reach new customers.

“We believe everyone should have access to affordable financial services that improve the chances for a better life,” said Stuart Sopp, Current Founder and CEO. “We have made this a reality through rebuilding financial infrastructure with the Current Core. It allows us to build more products that offer new ways to interact with money. Our rapid growth to half a million accounts serves as a testament to the ways our products and cost savings are bringing better financial outcomes and we anticipate bringing those benefits to over 1,000,000 customers by mid-2020.”

To date, Current has raised $54 million in funding.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic wil find out what the public markets think of its ambitious plan to make commercial space tourism a reality on Monday. The company’s shareholders have approved a merger announced earlier this year with Chamath Palihapitiya’s special Social Capital Hedosophia holding company, and that will take effect Friday with adequate on the NYSE for the newly merged public entity on Monday.

Virgin Galactic and Palihapitiya announced the arrangement back in July, which will involve an $800 million investment in Virgin Galactic. Branson’s Galactic, one of two Virgin-branded space companies (the other is Virgin Orbit, which intends to provide orbital commercial small satellite launch capabilities), will seek to bring paying tourists to sub-orbital space using its SpaceShipTwo spacecraft and modified carrier airplane launch platform.

Virgin Galactic recently debuted the spacesuits its paying passengers will wear on the $250,000 tourist jaunts to space, which will begin in the first half of next year if the company sticks to its most recent public timeline. Its spacecraft can host up to six paying passengers, meaning each flight could earn the company up to $1.5 million in revenue. Virgin Galactic says it has over 600 people already in queue to take the trip.

Monday’s trading day should reveal what kind of confidence public market investors have in the value of that business proposition. Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic is already booking customers for research missions as well, indicating it can also look beyond just the very wealthy for revenue sources.

If you thought storming into a highly secured government facility with your electronics but without permission was a smart idea, you’d be wrong.

But that didn’t stop Rep. Matt Gaetz and close to three-dozen of his Republican colleagues on Wednesday from doing exactly that.

Gaetz, a Republican congressman from Florida, proudly announced in his since-deleted tweets: “I led over 30 of my colleagues into the SCIF where Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions.” At the time, Gaetz was interrupting a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee where chairman, Schiff, was deposing senior government official, Laura Cooper, as part of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

One of the cardinal rules of entering one of these facilities is that you don’t bring in any electronics. And those lawmakers did exactly that.

No wonder Gaetz deleted his tweets.

A SCIF — a sensitive compartmented information facility — sounds fancy but in reality are just rooms designed to be secure for sharing sensitive and secret information at the higher echelons of government secrecy. There are plenty dotted around Washington DC for lawmakers and government officials to huddle in and chit-chat. There are SCIFs in the White House, Congress and every major government department in the capital — even the president’s Florida resort.

The idea is you go in to one of these rooms and they’re safe to discuss state secrets. These rooms vary by size and shape — some are enormous and are able to sit an entire congressional committee. Some can be used on the road in the form of a large pop-up tent. But they all do the same job: they’re designed to a specification so that nobody can eavesdrop on what’s being said.

So when a gaggle of Republican lawmakers stormed one of the congressional SCIFs yesterday with their electronics in their pockets, understandably a lot of people were furious.

“No unauthorized electronic devices are allowed in the SCIF precisely because they could be used to exfiltrate decoded, highly classified data,” said Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey. “Standard operating procedure is to deposit anything like a mobile phone in some storage outside before entering,” he said.

“To force your way into a SCIF and use a mobile device inside is the height of recklessness: you must know that you are endangering material that could cause grave damage to the national interest,” he added.

The rebuke was quick.

“[The lawmakers] endangered our national security and demonstrated they care more about a political stunt than protecting intelligence information,” tweeted Mieke Eoyang, vice-president of Third Way, a national security think tank. “Foreign adversaries are constantly trying to figure out what goes on inside those rooms to figure out what the U.S. knows about them, to out U.S. high-level sources in their governments, to know what the U.S. government knows and use it against us,” she said.

“I cannot emphasize enough how serious this is,” she added.

And neither can the chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who wrote to the Sergeant-at-Arms, the official in charge of the House’s law enforcement, expressing his anger at the infraction.

“Such action is a blatant breach of security,” said Thompson in the strongly worded letter, demanding action is taken against the violating House members.

“Inadvertently bringing electronics into a SCIF is a very common security infraction, and it is taken incredibly seriously by agencies,” said Mark S. Zaid, an attorney specializing in national security cases. “It is drilled into people’s heads to never bring their cell phone into a protected area.”

The penalties for the House members could be swift, said Zaid, including pulling their future access to classified material.

“Agencies will not hesitate to revoke someone’s security clearances when multiple infractions occur,” he said. “When it comes to intentional infractions, the repercussions would be swift and severe, as it should be.”

Randori, a Boston-based start-up from a former Carbon Black executive and a former Red Team consultant, announced its first product today called Randori Recon, a service designed to act with a hacker’s mindset to surface all of your company’s external weaknesses.

Brian Hazzard, co-founder and CEO, says he had worked with his co-founder David Wolpoff when he was running a red team consulting firm. The idea behind a red team is to act as an attacker would and find a company’s weaknesses. The two decided to put Wolpoff’s lucrative consulting firm out of business and develop a tool to put this kind of service in reach of any company.

“The idea is to break out of that defender’s mindset, to stop guessing at what you need to do on the defense side, but rather to inform our strategies and the way we defend our networks from the attacker’s perspective,” Hazzard explained.

Based on just a company email address, Recon begins to build a picture of all the publicly available information about that company, and from that they can find weaknesses and vulnerabilities that a hacker would typically exploit to get inside a company’s defenses.

Wolpoff says that it’s not useful or desirable for a red team to have any knowledge of the target company’s security defenses. He wants to go in there with what he calls “a black box” and discover everything he can find on his own. “We start with basic information, and then we’ll go discover everything that’s discoverable from that and then from each of those individual nuggets that we glean, we chase every thread that we can chase from those,” he said.  They then continually monitor this information, so that if anything changes, they can find new vulnerabilities that could pop up over time.

While the company is starting with external vulnerabilities, the plan is to build out the service to provide internal scans, as well. “As we progress the product, we will be able to do internal reconnaissance inside of an organization as well, but for the Recon product we’re really focusing on an outside-in black box discovery of the publicly visible surface area of an organization,” Wolpoff said.

Wolpoff says the service agency he ran was lucrative, but the sales cycles were long, and because of the cost, it was really only within reach of relatively few organizations who were willing to pay for that kind of service. Over dinner in 2017, Hazzard and Wolpoff hatched the idea of developing his knowledge and expertise and packaging it as an online service.

They started developing the product and opened the company last year. They announced a $9.75 million seed round last October.

It’s no secret that the art of customer service in the modern era is something that banks desperately need help with.

One of the reasons why challenger banks have been able to find acceptance, new customers and — well — the ability to challenge existing banking companies is the mistreatment customers receive from their existing money holders.

That’s why tools designed to help marketing and customer engagement are a big business and why the Minneapolis-based Total Expert has been able to raise $52 million in its latest round of financing.

The new round brings the company’s total haul to $86 million thanks to capital investments from Georgian Partners, Emergence, and Rally Ventures (all veteran software as a service investors).

“We are incredibly excited about Total Expert’s approach to building trust and maximizing the long-term value of relationships between consumers and lenders,” said Simon Chong, managing partner and co-founder of Georgian Partners, in a statement. “The future of consumer finance is engaging across all product and customer needs during their financial life, and Total Expert is the category leader powering this humanized automation and compliance at scale.”

The company said it will use the money to expand on its 218 person team — especially hiring additional data scientists and designers. The company also said it would accelerate the development of new automation tools to help small banks and credit unions compete.

“The future of financial services belongs to firms that combine human interaction with technology in a way that creates higher quality and more relevant experiences throughout the entire customer journey,” said Joe Welu, Total Expert’s chief executive officer. “Every interaction a consumer has with a financial services brand either erodes trust or builds trust, and legacy technology makes it difficult to deliver on the expectations of the modern consumer. Our mission is to ensure that banks and lenders create customers for life by delivering on these expectations”

HelloOffice, a new real estate brokerage business out of San Francisco, has nabbed $6.5 million in new financing and is absconding down to Los Angeles to open its first regional office.

The company provides software to expedite the often painful (especially in San Francisco) task of finding office space (not the Mike Judge movie, which is available to stream on Google, Amazon, iTunes and other services for $3.99).

So far, HelloOffice has worked with companies like Y Combinator, Knotel, Brex, Palantir, and Patreon to help them get the space they need.

Now, chief executive officer Justin Bedecarre says the company is ready to tackle the Los Angeles market.

“We believe LA is at an inflection point, with the biggest technology and entertainment companies in the world choosing to make LA a key hub or headquarters,” says Bedecarre. “At the same time there is a startup renaissance occurring here, building the foundation for decades of growth and opportunity.”

Fueling the company’s growth is the $6.5 million the company has raised from a slew of top tier venture funds. Investors in the company include Initialized Capital, Founders Fund, Founder Collective, Peak State Ventures, SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, SaaStr, and The House Fund.

The investment is another example of investors looking to niche verticals within the broad business-to-business software category that can benefit from lightweight, flexible software offerings tailored to the specific needs of industries.

There are a lot of very large businesses that can benefit from the efficiencies software provides.

“We raised money in order to invest in our team and platform as well as to scale to new markets beyond San Francisco,” says Bedecarre. “However we have been growing so quickly while remaining profitable, we haven’t touched any of the money we raised.”

Influencer marketing and the related area of spon con have become a cornerstone of how the internet’s wheels spin: personalities attract traffic and buzz, and help shift not just sentiment but often products for brands, giving boosts both to online engagement and commerce. Now, a London startup called Verve, which plays on the influencer theme in the area of selling tickets to experiences and events, has raised a significant round of growth funding to expand its business.

The company today is announcing that it has raised $60 million in as it rebrands to a new name, Pollen, to reflect a redoubled consumer focus. To date, the company has sold 1 million experiences since being founded in 2014, with 330,000 sold this year, making tens of millions in revenue across a footprint of about 20 countries and among a demographic that is mostly in the 18-28 range.

Led by Northzone, the round also included Sienna Capital, existing investors including Draper Esprit, Backed and Kindred, and others.

Pollen has now raised $100 million, and while it is not disclosing its valuation, Callum Negus-Fancey, the CEO who co-founded the company with his brother Liam, told me that it’s about 3.7 times higher than in its previous round. Meanwhile, PitchBook notes that when it raised part of the round this summer, it had a pre-money valuation of about £70 million. If that’s accurate, this would put the valuation now at around $150 million.

The era of influencers is well and truly upon us in social media: the “billboards of new media”, as Negus-Fancey describes them, have become a major way for brands to reach certain kinds of audiences — often younger demographics that are spending a lot of time already on social platforms whose tastes are formed in part by posts from those who they follow.

Pollen is also targeting the same demographic, and it’s also playing on the idea of influencers, but it’s taking a fairly different approach to how it interacts with these. The company is based around a members-only business model, with membership being free, but only open to those who have built networks of people who look to them to make recommendations for interesting things to do. There are about 35,000 members on the platform today, which Pollen refers to as “Ambassadors.”

Pollen then works with event planners — be they music festival or concert organizers, nightclub events, or destination events such as skydiving or chartering yachts, some 500 in all including Live Nation, MGM Resorts, TAO, Hakkasan, AEG & C3; and secured partnerships with Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, Priceline, Stubhub, and SeeTickets — and negotiates a certain amount of tickets to these that will be marketed through its network of people, the members of Pollen.

These people, in turn, decide which events they want to promote to their audiences. For those who manage to shift tickets (which are not sold by Pollen but by partners like Ticketmaster or Eventbrite), they get rewards in the form of tickets to other events or other perks (but no cash). Pollen makes money by taking a cut on each sale — usually something like 10-20%, Negus-Fancey said.

Sometimes these can be very popular events, like the Reading Festival. “It’s a common misconception that most events sell out,” he told me. “In fact, there is a spectrum and you have to spend a lot of money on marketing when you are an event organizer. We are a cost effective way to market those tickets.”

Interestingly, the basic idea is that these tickets and the influencers themselves do not share their offers widely: part of the company’s terms and conditions are that its members cannot promote their offers widely on social media.

“I see us micro-influencers, more like an evolution of direct selling rather than related to what happens on Instagram,” Negus-Fancey said. “It’s not about loads of followers online. It’s much more omnichannel. Our members might connect with people in bars or pubs or schools or on WhatsApp, or even the dark web. These are about two-way conversations between close groups of friends, not one-way communication.”

At a time when we are also seeing an interesting rise in messaging-based commerce — where the focus is less scale and better connections with smaller audiences to guarantee better conversions — Pollen’s idea has had some resonance with users, as well as investors.

“We’ve known Callum and the team since early 2016 and the company has delivered on every milestone since then.” said Gareth Jefferies, Investment Manager at Northzone, an early investor in Spotify, in a statement. “The most exciting prospect for me is the potential the company has to play a pivotal role in how brands engage with an entire demographic. In a few years’ time, if the company continues to execute, Pollen can become one of the most culturally significant companies for Gen Z, and be the best way of buying not just festival tickets and holidays, but to access all sorts of products and services.”

Grafana Labs, the commercial company built to support the open source Grafana project, announced a healthy $24 million Series A investment today. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Lead Edge Capital.

Company CEO and co-founder Raj Dutt, says the startup started life as a way to offer a commercial layer on top of the open source Grafana tool, but it has expanded and now supports other projects including Loki, an open source monitoring tool, not unlike Prometheus, that the company developed last year.

All of this in the service of connecting to data sources and monitoring data. “Grafana has always been about connecting data together no matter where it lives, whether it’s in a proprietary database, on prem database or cloud database. There are over 42 data sources that Grafana connects together,” Dutt explained.

But the company has expanded far beyond that. As it describes the product set, “Our products have begun to evolve to unify into a single offering: the worlds first composable open-source observability platform for metrics, logs and traces. Centered around Grafana.” This is exactly where other monitoring and logging tools like Elastic, New Relic and Splunk have been heading this year. The term “observability” is a terms that’s been used often to describe these combined capabilities of metrics, logging and tracing.

Grafana Labs is the commercial arm of the open source projects, and offers a couple of products built on top of these tools. First of all it has Grafana Enterprise, a package that includes enterprise-focused data connectors, enhanced authentication and security and enterprise-class support over and above what the open source Grafana tool offers.

The company also offers a SaaS version of the Grafana tool stack, which is fully managed and takes away a bunch of the headaches of trying to download raw open source code, install it, manage it and deal with updates and patches. In the SaaS version, all of that is taken care of for the customer for a monthly fee.

Dutt says the startup took just $4 million in external investment over the first five years, and has been able to build a business with 100 employees and 500 customers. He is particularly proud of the fact that the company is cash flow break even at this point.

Grafana Labs decided the time was right to take this hefty investment and accelerate the startup’s growth, something they couldn’t really do without a big cash infusion. “We’ve seen this really virtuous cycle going with value creation in the community through these open source projects that builds mind share, and that can translate into building a sustainable business. So we really want to accelerate that, and that’s the main reason behind the raise.”

Data security startup Very Good Security, has raised $35 million in its latest round of funding.

Its Series B, announced Thursday, was led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz — which led its $8.5 million Series A round — and Vertex Ventures US.

Very Good Security’s offering is simple. Instead of other businesses and startups holding onto their own collected user data, Very Good Security stores it in its secured vault, and gives its business customers the tools to access, edit, and process it without any of the liability.

The company’s software-as-a-service offering replaces sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or medical information for example, with an aliased version. The data can used just like ordinary data but it’s unreadable to humans, rendering it useless to hackers in the event of a data breach or theft.

Businesses who sign up to the data security offering can say they’re “zero data,” a term Very Good Security uses to describe companies that don’t store their own data. The company says by storing data in its vaults and not their own makes it more difficult for attackers to steal user data, while relieving companies of the burden of having to maintain a secure data environment themselves.

It makes sense, given how startups especially are notoriously unfocused on security.

Mahmoud Abdelkader, co-founder and chief executive of Very Good Security, said his company helps other businesses and startups launch and grow while “offloading the risk that comes with data custodianship.”

The company said it will use the $35 million round to support its “rapid” growth as its customer base increases. To date, the company has enlisted Brex and Deliveroo as customers, indicating considerable trust in the platform.