Hello and welcome back to Last Week In Venture, the weekly rundown of deals which may have flown under your radar.
There are plenty of companies operating outside the unicorn and public company spotlights, but their stories are still worth sharing. In them we can find trends and get a glimpse of what鈥檚 coming down the pike.
Without further ado, let鈥檚 dive into some of the deals from the week that was in venture-land.

Keyless
In the world of security, trust is a liability, especially when it comes to passwords. People and passwords don’t tend to play well together. It’s easier to re-use the same password for multiple services. A strong password can be easily forgotten. Storing authentication data turns web companies into targets for bad actors. It’s kind of a mess.
With offices in New York, Singapore, and London, is a cybersecurity company aiming to use biometrics and a distributed cryptographic storage and validation protocol to make passwords a thing of the past. According to , features are extracted from biometric scans, like a picture of one’s face, then are split, encrypted, and stored across several nodes in the Keyless network. Upon an authentication event, the system calls back the partial keys and reassembles them to get the stored key.
Keyless raised led by which saw participation from , , , and .
Searchable.AI
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been 95 percent sure I’ve written about or researched a topic in the past but am 100 percent unable to find that information in the moment, when I need it most. Even though I’m pretty fastidious with organizing and labeling notes and files, it’s often the case that the magical incantations I type into a search bar fail to summon anything of value. A new startup hopes to help knowledge workers find what they need to get the job done.
Founded by veteran entrepreneur, startup investor, and expert in information retrieval and automated decision systems , Searchable.ai is a rather stealthy San Francisco-based startup. According to announcing , the company is developing “a new personalized semantic search engine for your work.”
The deal was led by and saw participation from . An array of angels including co-founder , co-founder , and MIT professor , among , also contributed to the round.
Campuswire
It seems like every couple of years a startup comes along to improve higher education by creating another communication channel between students and teaching faculty.
is one of those startups. Headquartered in New York, the company is building what its founder, , described as a blend of , , and Piazza, focusing on interaction and communication. It doesn’t have all the features of a legacy learning management system like , but that’s because the company wants to do one thing well. Campuswire was founded in 2016, has 11 full-time employees, and serves 133 schools.
This week, the company $3.6 million from , , , and . Individuals participating in the deal include founder , partner , and .
Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by聽 Photo by Scott Webb, via Unsplash.
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