Here’s a financing round highlight reel:
Let’s kick off this hyperactive holiday wrap-up with a cheeky shout-out to two
Air Street Capital portfolio companies! AI chipmaker
Graphcore raised a
$222M Series E led by Ontario Teachers’ Pensions Plan and computer vision data platform
V7 Labs raised a
$3M Seed to scale its auto-labeling, training, inference, and lifecycle management service.
Horizon Robotics, a Chinese AI chipmaker,
raised $150M of a reported $700M target Series C, led by 5Y Capital, Hillhouse, and Capital Today. This follows their $600M Series B two years ago.
Scale, the data annotation company for AI, closed a
$155M Series D led by Tiger Global. The 4-year old company, which now counts hundreds of customers that annotate tens of millions of data points per week, at $3.5B post-money. Scale also announced its
acquisition of Helia, a small computer vision startup founded in 2019 with a focus on video understanding, to accelerate Scale’s Nucleus data lifecycle product.
Genesis Therapeutics, an AI-first drug discovery company focused on small molecules, raised a
$52M Series A led by crossover investor Rock Springs Capital. The company is particularly strong on property prediction and graph neural networks.
BioAge, a biotech company focused on finding drugs to treat age-related diseases, raised a
$90M Series C led by a16z and Elad Gil (who is also an investor in Spring Discovery, another aging focused drug disco startup). The company has human aging cohorts with blood samples collected up to 45 years ago alongside -omics data that is tied to extensive medical follow-up records including detailed future healthspan, lifespan, and disease outcomes.
TuSimple, a Chinese autonomous trucking company, closed a
$350M Series E from a range of strategic investors (logistics companies). Earlier in the year, TuSimple was
reportedly preparing for a US public listing in 2021.
WeRide, a Chinese AV startup, raised a
$200m strategic round from Chinese bus maker, Yutong, to make autonomous minibusses and city busses.
Microblink, a 7-year old Croatian computer vision startup automating data extraction, raised a
$60M round from Silversmith Capital.
Anyscale, the makers of the Ray distributed execution framework, raised a
$40M Series B led by NEA. Their managed service lets developers build distributed applications from their laptops.
Ultimate.ai, a virtual customer service agent builder, raised a
$20M Series A led by Omers Ventures.
Tecton, the managed feature store for machine learning, raised a
$35M Series B co-led by a16z and Sequoia, just 7 months after announcing their $20M Series A.
Caja Robotics, a warehouse automation company with robots for lifting and moving items, raised a
$12M Series B led by New Era Capital.
Tonic, makers of a synthetic data service, raised an
$8M Series A led by GGV.
Truera, which builds model explainability software, raised a
$12M Series A.
Arthur.ai, another model explainability startup, raised a
$15M Series A led by existing investor Index Ventures.
Reface, the app that does what it says on the tin raised a
$5.5M Seed round led by a16z.
WaveOne, a video compression/superresolution startup, raised a
$6.5M Seed round led by Khosla. In the years since Magic Pony built related technology before joining Twitter, the problem of bandwidth-efficient media communications can only have grown more significant.
Anomalo, a data quality, and validation startup raised a
$6M round led by First Round Capital and Foundation Capital.
M&A and IPOs
Innoviz, an Israeli LiDAR startup, is the
latest of its kind to agree to a SPAC with Collective Growth Corporation. The combined company will be worth $1.4B.
Ouster, a 5-year old US LiDAR maker that made $19M revenues in 2020,
agreed to go public via a SPAC called Colonnade Acquisition Corp. This values Ouster at $1.9B. LiDAR’s are a hot target of SPACs, which to date include Velodyne, Luminar, and Aeva, all reaching combined valuations of $2-4B with very little revenues today (if any).
Boston Dynamics, the markers of the quadruped Spot Mini, sold an 80% position for
$921M to South Korean automotive giant Hyundai.
In the weeks (or months?) before
Roblox finally goes public, the global online platform for game creation and playing
acquired Loom.ai, a startup specializing in real-time facial animation technology for 3D avatars.
—
Signing off,
Nathan Benaich, 17 January 2021
Air Street Capital is a venture capital firm investing in AI-first technology and life science companies. We’re an experienced team of investors and founders based in Europe and the US with a shared passion for working with entrepreneurs from the very beginning of their company building journey.