#7: (5/27/24) Early & Growth Stage Tech Startup Funding Recap!
Check Out This Week's Venture Capital Investment Summary Spanning Early & Growth-Stage US Based Environmental Technology & Enterprise Software 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 Environmental Technology & Enterprise Software 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. Make sure you reach out to any that are interesting/relevant that you might be able to help!
Here’s this week’s startup funding recap:
Subeca, led by Patrick Keaney, has raised a $6 million Series A funding round. The round was led by SUEZ, a global leader in digital and circular solutions in waste and water services, with participation from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, and Burnt Island Ventures (Christine Boyle). Subeca has built a smart water meter register that retrofits onto a majority of existing water meters in under one minute, essentially making dumb meters smart. For water utilities, this reduces the cost of meter reading operations while vastly increasing the amount of available data and insights to the utilities and their customers. Subeca does this via their smart meter register (called PIN) devices that is instantly connected to the AWS cloud via Amazon Sidewalk. Subeca’s Blinc IoT module utilizes Amazon’s Sidewalk network, a free communications network that covers more than 90% of the US population, to help customers manage water infrastructure and detect and resolve water leaks. [Link] #Water Tech #Internet of Things #Computer Hardware Manufacturing #Sustainability #CleanTech #Environmental Technology #GreenTech
Ketos, led by Meena Sankaran, has raised a $10 million Equity Growth funding round. The round was led by Tenfore Holdings, with participation from Danu Venture Group and existing investors Broadway Angels, Plum Alley Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and Accenture, who serves as both an investor and strategic resale partner. Ketos provides real-time water analytics and intelligence to enable smarter and sustainable farms, cities, and industries. Through its machine learning and predictive technology, it enables improved efficiency, operations, yield, compliance, and treatment choices by measuring parts per billion (ppb) specificity & standardized water metrics. Its solutions include an integrated offering of an industrial-grade, patented robotics system, an IoT communication framework, and a robust AI-enabled software platform to address global water management issues, while providing mission-critical insights and 24/7 services for operators across all industries. [Link] #Water Tech #Internet of Things #Sustainability #CleanTech #Environmental Technology #GreenTech
XGS Energy, led by Josh Prueher, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Valo Ventures and VoLo Earth Ventures, and included participation from new investors B Current Impact Investment, MIH Capital, and individual inside investors, as well as additional funding from existing investor Thin Line Capital. The new financing built on the $9.7M round led by Constellation Technology Ventures earlier this year, and the $14M Series A investment led by Anzu Partners. XGS Energy provides a proprietary solid-state geothermal system that uses thermally conductive materials to deliver affordable energy anywhere there is hot rock. Its system improves geothermal energy production from its historical dependence on natural water resources and geological conditions, unlocking low-risk power project development, geographic flexibility, and deployment. [Link] #Geothermal Electric Power Generation #Energy Generation #CleanTech #ClimateTech #Sustainability #Environmental Technology
280 Earth, led by John Pimentel, has raised a $50 million Series B funding round. The round was led by a highly skilled investor team including Builders VC, Gideon Yu, and Alphabet, Inc. 280 Earth aims to scale up and commercialize innovative direct air capture technology developed at X, The Moonshot Factory (Google X). The first phase of the commercial demonstration facility is designed to capture up to 500 tonnes per year of CO2, as well as water, from ambient air. The captured CO2 will be liquified and sequestered off-site or used in various industrial processes, while the related water can be used for cooling or other end uses. The facility is extensively instrumented to validate scale up plans for its technology as it progresses to a 5,000 tonne per year module. [Link] #Environmental Engineering #Industrial Manufacturing #Sustainability #Carbon Capture #Environmental Technology #Water Tech #ClimateTech #CleanTech #GreenTech
WitnessAI, led by Rick Caccia, has raised a $27.5 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by GV and Ballistic Ventures (Barmak Meftah) – the company had previously been incubated by Ballistic Ventures, beginning in 2023. WitnessAI is deployed as an isolated, cloud-based instance for each customer, encrypted with their own keys to ensure data privacy and regulatory separation. The platform intercepts activity between users and LLMs, applies control policies, and ensures data protection and user safety – all with millisecond latency and requiring nothing to be installed on the users’ devices. Achieving this requires an integrated design that blends new techniques in machine learning, offensive and defense security for AI activity, and enterprise-scale web services deployment. [Link] #Computer and Network Security #Cyber Security #Information Security
Simr, led by Burak Yenier, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Uncorrelated Ventures, with participation from BMW i Ventures (Baris Guzel) and Earlybird Venture Capital. Simr aims to help manufacturers by advancing SimOps, the practice of automating simulation processes to improve decision-making, innovation, efficiency, and quality in product design and engineering. It enables rapid product development and delivery with a platform compatible with any compute infrastructure, which allows engineers to securely design and test product concepts using existing workflows and tools, providing complete control over their simulation workflows and data. [Link] #Digital Manufacturing #Engineering Simulations #Advanced Manufacturing
Coactive, led by Cody Coleman, has raised a $30 million Series B funding round. The round was co-led by Emerson Collective and Cherryrock Capital, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners (Elliott Robinson), Greycroft, and previous investor Andreessen Horowitz. Coactive uses AI to allow users to manage, categorize, and retrieve visual data such as images and videos for applications ranging from intelligent search to video analytics – no metadata or tags required, creating an enterprise-grade operating system for visual content. Instead of tagging/labeling, the system leverages multimodal AI in a highly scalable and secure way to pull context directly from the pixels and audio in content, easing the work of data, marketing, and product teams. Since the launch last year, tech-enabled enterprises from Fortune 500 retailers, media & entertainment companies, and community platforms have used Coactive to create intelligent applications that generate value from their massive volumes of unstructured visual content. [Link] #Artificial intelligence #Machine Learning #Computer Vision #Data Transformation #Data Conditioning #Data Analysis #DataOps Software #ML Ops #DevTools
InfinitForm, led by Dr. Michael Bogomolny, has raised an undisclosed Seed funding round. The round was led by Schematic Ventures (Julian Counihan). InfinitForm provides engineering GenAI software that streamlines the design-to-manufacturing process, integrating with various manufacturing methods to optimize cost, speed, efficiency, and performance. This software enables mechanical engineers to establish higher standards through extensive GPU-accelerated design simulation and optimization tools, collaboration features, and an intuitive user interface. The platform integrates into existing workflows, offering engineers and manufacturers capabilities from concept to production. In 2024, the company progressed from a beta version to a commercial product. [Link] #Generative AI #Digital Industrial Manufacturing #Advanced Manufacturing #Environmental Technology
Aeromine Technologies, led by David Asarnow, has raised a $9 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Veriten (Maynard Holt). Aeromine has developed a breakthrough scalable renewable energy solution that harnesses the power of wind in an efficient system. Aeromine units install on the edge of the building roof, they are motionless, vibration- and noise-less. System installations are typically 50 kW or larger. The solution is robust, long-lasting, and requires much less rooftop space than other options to generate distributed energy. Ideal for large, flat rooftop buildings – including warehouses, big box retailers, data centers, office, and apartment buildings. Aeromine leverages existing financial structures, installation resources and incentives established by the solar industry. [Link] #Renewable Energy #Energy Tech #ClimateTech #Sustainability #Environmental Technology #CleanTech #GreenTech #Wind Tech #Energy Generation
Aerodome, led by Rahul Sidhu, has raised a $21.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by CRV (Saar Gur) with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Karman Ventures, Immad Akhund, and Ford Street Ventures. Aerodome is a Drone-As-First-Responder (DFR) technology company using an integrated, automated, and remote software operating system to equip agencies with advanced, 24/7 DFR capabilities. By providing a fully automated and remote air support operating system, the company equips agencies with a 24/7 solution that reduces the need for patrol officers to respond to calls while offering faster response times. [Link] #Aerospace #Drone Data #Public Safety #Drone Management
Patronus AI, led by Anand Kannappan, has raised a $17 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Notable Capital (Glenn Solomon) with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Datadog, Gokul Rajaram, Factorial Capital, and software and AI executives. Patronus AI provides an automated evaluation and security platform that helps companies detect large language model (LLM) mistakes at scale. Using proprietary AI, it enables enterprise development teams to score model performance, generate adversarial test cases, benchmark models and more. Patronus AI automates and scales the manual model evaluation methods prevalent in the enterprise today, enabling organizations to deploy LLMs while minimizing the risk of model failures and misaligned outputs. [Link] #Network Security #Artificial Intelligence #Machine Learning #Generative AI #Developer Platform #LLMOps Platform #ML Ops #DevTools #DevOps
Verse, led by Seyed Madaeni, has raised a $20.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by GV (Andy Wheeler) with participation from Coatue, CIV, and MCJ Collective. Verse provides software that helps companies reduce their electricity costs and scope 2 emissions at the same time. Its SaaS platform, AriaTM, leverages generative AI to help companies define clean energy goals and plan, procure, and manage optimal portfolios of clean energy assets at least cost. Customers can set parameters that target specific goals (e.g., cost, emissions, or hourly matching) and optimize for annual matching, emissions matching, or hourly matched carbon-free energy (CFE). [Link] #Renewable Energy #Compliance Software #Sustainability #Energy Efficiency #Artificial Intelligence #Environmental Technology #Sustainability #ClimateTech #CleanTech #GreenTech #Generative AI
SOCRadar, led by Huzeyfe Onal, has raised a $25.2 million Series B funding round. The round was led by PeakSpan Capital (Sanket Merchant), with participation from Oxx (Richard Anton). SOCRadar is a cybersecurity company committed to delivering advanced threat intelligence solutions that enable organizations to proactively defend against cyber threats. Its flagship Extended Threat Intelligence (XTI) platform offers a comprehensive suite of tailored products. These are cyber threat intelligence, external attack surface management, brand protection, dark web monitoring, and supply chain threat intelligence. By improving artificial intelligence and machine learning, SOCRadar enhances threat detection capabilities and promptly provides proactive and actionable intelligence. [Link] #Cyber Security #Cyber Threat Intelligence #Security Operations Center #Incident Response #Artificial Intelligence #Information Security
ThinkLabs AI, led by Josh Wong, has raised a $5 million Seed funding round. The round was co-led by Powerhouse Ventures (Emily Kirsch) and Active Impact Investments (Mike Winterfield), with participation from Blackhorn Ventures, Amplify Capital, Mercuria Energy, and a national US energy company. ThinkLabs AI is a specialized AI development and deployment company which aims to empower critical industries and infrastructure with AI towards global energy sustainability. The company, launched from GE Vernova, offers ThinkLabs Copilot, a digital assistant that understands the real world with proprietary physics-informed AI digital twins that provide a foundation model for engineering systems. The ThinkLabs Copilot is being designed to support natural language interactions and augments centralized operational systems such as Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) and Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS), while enhancing edge intelligence. [Link] #Artificial Intelligence #Sustainability #Energy Tech #Environmental Technology #Sustainability #ClimateTech #Data Infrastructure #Energy Efficiency #Energy Management #Foundation Models #Edge Computing
Traction Ag, led by Dustin Sapp, has raised a $10 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Cooperative Ventures and joined by Plymouth Growth and existing investors. Traction Ag provides farmers and ranchers with the functionality and data they need to make critical decisions on the farm. Its cloud-based accounting software, coupled with data integrations, equips farmers with insights that can improve farm profitability through enhanced decision-making processes. Recently, the company acquired and integrated solutions from Granular and Conservis accelerating the build-out of premium and enterprise features within the Traction Ag platform. [Link] #AgTech #Farm Management #Agriculture #Data Integration Platform #Environmental Technology #Sustainability #ClimateTech #Smart Agriculture
*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!
