There are plenty of companies operating outside the unicorn and public company spotlight, but that doesn’t mean their stories aren’t worth sharing. They offer a peek around the corner at what’s coming next, and what investors today are placing bets on. 

Without further ado, let’s check out a few rounds from the week that was in venture land.

Be My Eyes

I don’t know how you’re reading this, but you are. Most of us read with our eyes, but some read with their ears or their fingers. Blind people frequently have options when it comes to reading, but there’s more to life than just reading. 

Imagine going to a grocery store and stepping up to the bakery counter. You might be able to read a label with your eyes, but if there’s no label you could still probably figure out what type bread you’re buying based on its color and shape. But what if you couldn’t see (or see well)? What are you going to do, touch all the bread to figure out its size and shape? Get real down low and smell ’em all? (Which, for the record, sounds lovely, if a little unhygienic.)

You’d probably ask someone who can see for some help. That’s the kind of interaction a service like facilitates. Headquartered in San Francisco, the startup founded in 2014 connects blind people and people with low vision to sighted volunteers over on-demand remote video calls facilitated through the company’s mobile applications for Android and iOS. The sighted person can see what’s going on, and offer real time support for the person who can’t see.

The company this week that it led by . In 2018, Be My Eyes launched a feature called “Specialized Help,” which connects blind and low-vision people to service representatives at companies. , , and are among the companies enrolled in the program. 

Be My Eyes initially launched as an all-volunteer effort. The company says it has a community of more than 3.5 million sighted volunteers helping almost 200,000 visually impaired people worldwide. According to Crunchbase data, the company has raised in combined equity and grant funding.

Wildnote

The environment is, like, super important. It’s the air we breathe and the water we drink. Regardless of your opinion on environmental regulations, most come from a good place: Ensuring the long-term sustainability of life on a planet with finite resources by putting a check on destructive activity. Where there’s regulation, there’s a need to comply with it, and compliance can be kind of a drag. There is a lot of paperwork to do.

is a company based in San Luis Obispo, California. It’s in the business of environmental data collection, management and reporting using its eponymous mobile application and web platform. Field researchers and compliance professionals can capture and record information (including photos) on-site using either standard reporting forms or their own custom workflows. The company’s data platform also features export capabilities, which produce PDFs or raw datasets in multiple formats.

The company from and , the corporate venture arm of . Wildnote was part of the 2019 cohort of The Heritage Group’s accelerator program, produced in collaboration with , which aimed to assist startups working on problems from “legacy industries” like infrastructure, materials and environmental services.

Enveil

Encryption uses math to transform information humans and machines can read and understand into information that we can’t. Encrypted data can be decrypted by those in possession of a cryptographic key. To everyone else, encrypted data is just textual gobbledegook. 

The thing is, to computers, encrypted data is also textual gobbledegook. Computer scientists and cryptographers have long been looking for a way to work with encrypted data without needing to decrypt it in the process. has been a subject of academic research and corporate research and development labs for years, but it appears a commercial homomorphic encryption product has hit the market, and the company behind it is raising money to grow. 

The company we’re talking about here is . Headquartered in Fulton, Maryland, the company makes software it calls ZeroReveal. Its ZeroReveal Search product allows customers to encrypt and store data while also enabling users to perform searches directly against ciphertext data, meaning that data stays secure. Its ZeroReveal Compute Fabric offers client- and server-side applications which let enterprises securely operate on encrypted data stored on premises, in a large commercial cloud computing platform, or obtained from third parties.

Enveil raised $10 million , which was led by . Participating investors include , , and . The company was founded in 2014 by and has raised a total of $15 million; prior investors include cybersecurity incubator and , the nonprofit venture investment arm of the .

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Daniil Kuzelev, via Unsplash.

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There are plenty of companies operating outside the unicorn and public company spotlight, but their stories are worth sharing. In them, we find current trends and get a glimpse of the future.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at some stories from the week that was in venture-land.

Not your average mini mart

If it weren’t for the fact that I had to buy cilantro and green onions for some chicken meatballs I plan to make for dinner tonight, I’d have bopped into the near the Merchandise Mart before starting work today.

Foxtrot is a convenience store company based in Chicago. But it’s not like the kind with hot dogs on greasy rollers and the only sometimes-functional blue raspberry slush machines. It’s a convenience store for the urban brunching class. It’s got taps: for cold beer, cold-brewed coffee and kombucha. It carries good if premium-priced prepared salads and snacks, an absurd array of fancy canned coffees and soft drinks, premium brands of personal care items and, at least at my local store, a small gift and knickknack section in the back corner near all the wines. All that and a couple bags of chips.

It does not, however, carry fresh herbs. Which is why I went to in River North. Chicagoans reading this will understand.

Back to the news: besides operating physical locations in Chicago and Dallas, Foxtrot serves those markets with one-hour delivery. And to grow its footprint in its home markets, as well as expand its operations to Washington, D.C., the company co-led by and . Participating investors include , , , , (which led in March 2018) and .

The company that it doubled its overall revenue from last year, and that it grew e-commerce revenue by 150 percent year on year. Foxtrot says its revenue is currently split roughly 50-50 between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar.

The company was founded in 2013 and, with the new round announced this week, has raised just under $25 million to date.

This week in fleets

Managing a fleet of vehicles can sometimes feel like herding cats. It’s difficult to imagine a time before modern tracking and telematics. Truckers and logistical workers would have to log everything themselves. By hand. On paper. A lot of folks in the business still do, but that’s changing as software companies seek to automate the monitoring and compliance work around fleet management.

We bring this up because this week saw (at least) two Series A deals raised by companies in the fleet management sector.

We’ll start internationally. Headquartered in Gurugram, India, is building a suite of tools for logistics companies to manage their fleets. These include tools for asset tracking, operations and financial monitoring, route management, and integrations with India-certified GPS and tolling systems. This week, the company closed $2.8 million in Series A funding led by Singapore venture firm . , a couple C-suite executives from Indian e-commerce company investing in an individual capacity, and participated in the round.

And then, on the U.S. side, there’s . The Pittsburgh-based company also closed a Series A round, which was led by . (Allos Ventures recently closed $52 million for its third VC fund, as Crunchbase News reported.) Participating investors from the round include , and . Similar to Fleetx.io, Maven Machines offers a couple of products, including its main fleet management solution and its own telematics platform, which helps fleet operators monitor the use and location of their assets.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Frank McKenna, via Unsplash.

It seems like for all but the most intractable problems, there’s a company out there trying to solve it. And there are many startups operating outside the big-company spotlight with stories worth sharing. It’s a chance to look around the corner at what investors are making small bets on today and, by proxy, what the future could look like years from now.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into a few rounds from the week that was in ventureland.

Podcasting pitches draw ears of investors

Hate to break it to you, but “VC Twitter” is so 2018. Everybody’s into podcasting now. Starting ’em, guesting on ’em, sharing their Very Important Insights about them on VC Twitter or in their newsletters, which seemingly everyone has these days.

After some financial success in the sector (like ‘s acquisitions of and ) venture investors aren’t just interested in making podcast content, they see a business opportunity in the sector.

This week saw a couple of deals struck with podcast-related companies.

Podsights

Based in New York, is building an advertising platform for the podcasting industry. If you’ve listened to a podcast, you’ve probably heard an ad for something like mattresses or a website builder. Those ads implore listeners to use an offer code on the sponsor’s website at checkout. For many reasons, this is an imperfect system. Podsights seems to be trying to close that loop by with a podcast via what the company calls an “analytics prefix” or “hosting provider’s Tracking URL and the brand’s site via our JavaScript SDK.”

The end result? Giving brands competitive intelligence, reporting on their ad campaigns, and purchase attribution. The company says it cares about privacy, but you have to remember they’re adding what’s tantamount to a tracking pixel into podcasts. Podsights raised from , , media investors and , and several angel investors.

Podchaser

Louisville, Kentucky-based is on the discovery side of the business.

Podcasting is (and hopefully will remain) a mostly decentralized industry riding atop an open protocol: RSS. You can think of podcasts as the web before began building its in 1994. That’s kinda what Podchaser is doing: creating what it says is the most comprehensive podcast database in the market. Its website features profiles for creators, and the podcasts they host and appear on. Users can create and share their own curated lists of podcasts.

This week, the company announced co-led by and . Participating investors included , and individual angels.

Watching where the water goes

There’s that phrase: “When it rains, it pours.” According of the (SHELDUS, which is maintained by ), $107.8 billion “in direct property damage from flooding (73 percent of the national total) was incurred in urban areas, affecting 20,141 urban counties, from 1960 to 2016.”

As climate change threatens to intensify future storms, it’s likely that urban flooding will become more common and potentially more severe in some places. Except for when the system is overloaded or fails entirely, most city dwellers take stormwater infrastructure for granted. But for city engineers, figuring out what to do with stormwater is a full-time job and a huge line item in municipal infrastructure budgets.

Headquartered in Seattle—a famously wet city— makes and deploys arrays of sensors to monitor flow through a city’s drainage infrastructure. Beyond just stormwater management, the company touts its offerings as a solution for tracking illegal dumping into city sewer and stormwater pipes, and tracking overflows. In addition to the hardware, StormSensor also developed a cloud-based system which automatically gathers data from sensors in the field and displays that information on dashboards.

StormSensor was founded by and in 2015. The company was previously backed by a number of incubator and accelerator programs, including some focused on water and green infrastructure, as well as . This week, StormSensor picked up an from , a Minneapolis-based investor focused on backing and growing technology businesses founded and led by women. A announcing the round said Stettler and Rothman have raised $2.6 million to date for their venture.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by Photo by Pan Xiaozhen, via Unsplash.

There are zillions of startups working on interesting problems, and the overwhelming majority of them do so outside the public market or unicorn company spotlight. Their stories are still worth sharing because they can provide a peek into where investors think the world is going. The small upstarts of today could be behemoths in the future.

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So, without further ado, let’s check out a sample from the week that was in venture-land.

SENS Foods

Crickets are the pleasant sound of warm summer nights and the soul-crushing silence of a joke fallen flat. Dried, fried, or eaten whole, the sound is less a chirp and more a crispy crunch. (Tasty, right?) Ground into flour, mixed with other ingredients and baked into bars, the idea of eating crickets might sound a little less gross, at least to some.

is a Czech manufacturer and distributor of cricket protein products including snack bars, powders and crackers. The company raised €1.9 million (a little under $2.1 million) in to help scale commercialization efforts. The round was co-led by and Presto Ventures (formerly known as ).

The company says it , in Thailand and that it wants to make cricket protein “cheaper than chicken.”

Nori

Left unabated, global carbon emissions and the climate change they catalyze threaten to turn life into something decidedly more solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, for all but the most privileged on our planet.

The most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is ultimately going to involve moving the industrial energy mix off of fossil fuels. But once the cat is out of the bag, or the gas is already in the atmosphere, some of it can be sequestered.

Soil is the world’s largest carbon sink. And , a Seattle-based startup, aims to continue building a marketplace which aims to help individuals and businesses offset some of their carbon footprint by incentivizing farmers to use sustainable practices which support bacteria in the top layer of soil which absorb and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This week, Nori announced . The company did not disclose who invested. Nori’s co-founder and CEO Paul Gambill that the capital will last the company through mid-2020 and that they intend to raise additional capital to further scale out its team of 10.

Mine

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you probably use the internet. And you probably use a lot of different services, many of which have collected at least some personal data about you. Traipse around online long enough and you’ll probably leave a big data footprint somewhere.

is a London-based startup aiming to help people discover where their data is located, understand how it’s being used and, if they want, ensure its removal from platforms. For those people living in a jurisdiction where is enforceable (e.g. the EU), takedown requests come with some legal teeth.

To help scale the service and its business, the company, founded in 2019, in seed backing from and .

In coverage of the round, “Mine discovered that the average users have 400 companies in their footprint, out of which, more than 80% of the services are unused and can be deleted.”

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann, via Unsplash.

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Around the country and, indeed, the world, there are countless startups toiling outside the unicorn and public company limelight, building their version of the future. In their stories, we can spot trends and get a glimpse around the corner to see what’s next.

Without further ado, let’s dive into a few of the deals from the week that was in venture-land.

Plastic From Kelp

Earlier this week, Crunchbase News published some findings about the emerging sector of sustainable packaging and plastics. Though we didn’t mention the following company in that particular article, it’s worth pointing out what is doing.

The New York-based startup is in the business of making biodegradable replacements for single-use plastics, starting with drinking straws. Its straws are not actually made of plastic, but kelp. a large species of marine algae, underwater forests of which lie just offshore 25 percent of the world’s coastlines.

The company to release a line of kelp-based cups, lids, utensils, and other forms of packaging. To help expand the scope and scale of Loliware’s operations, it raised from , , , and . , founder of , also participated in the deal.

Give Your Career A Jolt

Business school is a place where you could end up spending a lot of money to learn about how to make a lot of money. And that’s the problem. Lots of people could benefit from learning about the hows and whys of doing business, but most can’t (or don’t want to) pay tens of thousands of dollars for the (often basic) knowledge and (often priceless) network one could obtain in business school.

Based in Tel Aviv, is an education company aiming to change the model of business education. It currently operates campuses in Tel Aviv and London, but it plans to expand to New York City with the help of €12.7 million (approximately $14.1 million USD) in announced this week. led the deal, which saw participation from and , which, respectively, led prior and rounds raised by the company.

Jolt offers the bulk of its coursework in subject areas like management and leadership, personal skills and self development, and marketing, sales, and customer success. Its offerings in more technical fields like data, product, and finance are more limited. The company lists its educational offerings in on its website. According to , Jolt’s “NAMBA” (Not an MBA) program costs £175 a month (about $228 USD), or £4,500 (a bit over $5,850 USD) in total. For many, that should be an easier bill to swallow than traditional b-school.

Level Up Your Engineering Team

In the tech industry, the “tech” part is built by engineers. In the part of the tech industry Crunchbase News covers most, that typically means software engineers. Keeping an engineering team happy and productive is a prerequisite for long-term success in this industry.

is a Seattle-based startup building tools for engineering managers to measure the factors which contribute to technical employees’ morale and output.

According to coverage : “Uplevel’s technology analyzes a variety of channels including messaging platforms like Slack, collaboration tools like Jira, code repositories like GitHub and calendars to analyze how engineers spend their time. The platform spits out insights analyzing whether engineers are stuck in too many meetings, assigned too many tasks at once or don’t have enough focus time.”

Uplevel raised which saw participation from , , and .

GeekWire reported that Uplevel has 10 companies and over 4,000 engineers onboard its platform. The upstart company has 16 people on the team and is actively hiring for key roles.

And with that we’re done for the week. See you back here soon.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Marek Okon, via Unsplash.

Plenty of ventures are operating outside the unicorn and public company spotlight, but their stories are still worth sharing. In them we find the opportunity to peek around the corner, to see what’s next and to suss out what’s happening close to the economic metal.

Let’s take a look at some deals from the week in venture-land.

Bob.io

Here is a fun fact for you. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon before the first commercially successful rolling luggage was invented. Your wheeled suitcase is literally space-age technology, and it helps you schlep your stuff hither and yon. Of course, you also have to schlep your suitcase around. (Don’t worry, someone is already working on autonomous luggage.)

Imagine the following situation: you’re in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of a fabulous trip. You’ve got an outbound flight in the evening, leaving you most of the day to see the sights after you check out of the hotel. Be honest with yourself here: Do you really want to trundle your roller bag to the museum and then all the way to BCN? Heck no.

For most of us, on travel days our luggage is both our burden to bear and logistical challenge to face. If you’ve ever wished the airport baggage check-in desk could just come to you, and you so happen to be in Barcelona or Madrid, there’s BoB. (aka Bob.io), based in Madrid, picks up luggage, shuttles it to the airport and checks it in. Baggage is picked up from the luggage carousel at the destination airport, as if the travelers checked it in themselves. The service starts at €15 (about $17) for one bag, and €5 for each subsequent bag.

The company has formed partnerships with European airlines like Iberia, Lufthansa, Air France, KLM and Vueling. Bob.io also works with online travel agencies, hotels and apartment rental platforms to promote its service.

Bob.io (about $3.33 million USD) in new funding this week. , , , and invested in the deal, alongside angel investors like and . The company was founded in 2017 and has to date, according to Crunchbase data.

Sweepr

We live in the future. We’ve got computers on our desks, in our pockets, in our ears and, more and more often, in our speakers, light switches and everywhere else throughout our homes. Some people know a lot about computers, and others don’t. And that’s fine. When it comes to providing technical support, though, it’s important to meet people where they’re at.

Based in Dublin, Ireland, is a startup which aims to help companies offer better technical support for smart home products by analyzing the devices connected to someone’s home network and helping determine where the problem lies. The company swept up (roughly $8.9 million) in new funding, at least some of which comes from a new strategic investor: .

Recall that Amazon recently acquired mesh networking company Eero. Sweepr’s tech (or something like it) could be integrated into the Eero platform, letting people just ask Alexa why their smart television isn’t connecting to the internet, or whatever. This will definitely be one to watch.

Outlier.org

There’s a lot to say about college, lately. Its rising cost is among the most salient social and political issues of the day. If seemingly every decent job needs at least some college coursework these days, access to the knowledge, skills and, importantly, credentials is the issue at hand.

Started by , founder of online learning company , is a Brooklyn-based startup which produces online courses, dynamically generated problem sets, and testing tools. Students pay $400 per course and, if they pass, are given fully transferable college credits from the University of Pittsburgh.

Outlier.org raised in a round led by . , and also participated in the deal.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Markus Winkler, via Unsplash.

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Plenty of ventures are operating outside the unicorn and public company spotlight, but their stories are still worth sharing. In them we find the opportunity to peek around the corner, to see what’s next, and to suss out what’s happening close to the economic metal.

Let’s take a look at some deals from the week that was in venture-land.

Bushel

So let’s say you’re a grain farmer. You’ve got a lot of acreage, a lot of equipment, and, presuming the season ain’t a bust, a lot of grain come harvest time. How are you going to turn that grain into money to pay operating costs and, ultimately, feed your family?

Time was once when you’d harvest your crop, haul it to a grain elevator, and haggle with the buyer there based on prevailing market prices. As you can imagine, that’s a somewhat cumbersome process. A new generation of grain producers, however, are active mobile phone and desktop web users, and they’re looking for better ways to connect with the elevators buying their harvests.

Headquartered in Fargo, North Dakota, is a startup behind that integrates directly with grain elevator operator’s market data and accounting systems, creating a smoother interface between grain buyers and grain producers. Rather than centralizing the exchange on one marketplace platform, like some of its competitors, Bushel spins up branded instances of its platform software based on the particular needs of its grain elevator clientele. This decentralized approach helps Bushel touch over 15 percent of U.S. grain volume.

This week, the company $19.5 million in led by . , , and unnamed others, including prior investors, participated in the round.

Hugging Face

Some people write like robots, and others use robots to help them write. doesn’t make robots per se, but it does make Transformer, an open source framework for natural language processing and text generation, including implementations of OpenAI’s GPT and GPT-2 models. Its framework has received over 19,000 stars on Github at time of writing.

To fund continued scaling and commercialization, the company raised led by , with participation from , Kevin Durant’s , and , alongside CTO and CEO .

Humm

Your brain is a wrinkly mass of fat and protein, sparkling with electricity. Add a little more electrical stimulation to the mix, and get a better memory. Or so suggests , makers of a forehead-applied patch which it claims enhances working memory.

According to coverage , the company of 40 people and found that working memory was improved by 20 percent in specific types of memory tests, as compared to a control group. To commercialize its brain-zapping headbands, the company raised $2.6 million in seed funding led by . and participated in the deal.

And with that we’re done for the week! For those traveling for the holidays, enjoy and be safe!

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by Photo by David Clode, via Unsplash.

The world is a rapidly changing place, and entrepreneurs are identifying opportunities to launch new businesses which aim to capitalize on new trends. Investors, by turn, are eager to park their money with teams building a future that aligns with their strategic advantage and financial interests.

The thing is, though, that there are so many companies out there that it’s hard to keep track of ‘em all. Plenty of ventures are operating outside the unicorn and public company spotlight, but their stories are still worth sharing. In them we find the opportunity to peek around the corner, to see what’s next, and to suss out what’s happening close to the economic metal.

Come along for the ride, won’t you? Let’s take a look at some deals from the week that was in venture-land.

Reduce, Reuse, Renew

Stare into the yawning abyss of some of the world’s biggest industries, and you’re bound to find a lot of waste and inefficiency. Clothing and accessories manufacturing and retail results in stuff that’s sold, but also lots of stuff that’s not, or can’t be bought.

Environmental consciousness, the rising cost of living, and other factors are contributing to the growing trend of “circular commerce,” or “recommerce.”

Headquartered in Oregon, is a company which helps brands reduce waste (and economic write-downs) by reclaiming, renewing, and ultimately reselling clothing and gear that was otherwise unsellable. The that not all of its merchandise is used. Otherwise unsellable clothing “comes from a larger pool of returned items, damaged items, customer take-back programs or other production sources.”

The Renewal Workshop “renews” all clothing and gear through a cleaning, repair, and certification process prior to shipping out to the next owner of the garment. Its include outdoor and athletic brands like Nau, Osprey, and North Face Renewed, as well as workwear brands like Carhartt.

The Renewal Workshop raised led by Dutch firm , in which participated. According to announcing the round, the company used part of the capital to open its first European facility, in Amsterdam, “offering [the company’s] entire suite of services to European apparel brands, from circular business model strategy to garment and textile renewal services and recommerce management.”

A huge percentage of clothing ends up in landfills or in the incinerator. Hats off to those diverting a potentially profitable stream from what would otherwise have gone to waste.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Small and medium sized businesses typically rely on the full faith and credit of their owners to keep the company going. That’s doubly true for minority-owned businesses, which for a variety of unfortunate structural reasons haven’t had access to the same type of financial access enjoyed by other business owners privileged by race, gender, or socioeconomic background.

In disparity, there’s an opportunity to fill the gaps. LA-based is a lender specializing in servicing small businesses started and led by Latinx people. This week, the company $8 million in led by Mexico-based financial services company , which previously provided a rotating credit facility to Camino. Camino Financial says it will use the new funding to build out statistically-driven business intelligence capabilities and accelerate growth. The company has already issued more than $30 million in loans “while at the same time growing monthly loan originations at 419% year-over-year. The facility’s growth is on track to surpass all other debt funds focused on the Latinx business market within the next 12 months.”

Citing statistics from the Latino Donor Collaborative in its announcement, the company states that the “U.S. Latinx economy generated $2.3 trillion in GDP in 2019, making it the 8th largest economy and the largest Hispanic economy in the world.”

Here’s An Idea To Float

Getting people to make decisions together is really hard. And that’s just when the stakes are low. Try getting you and your friends to agree on dinner plans and you know what I mean. But when there’s money on the line, in business, collective decision-making and feedback gathering becomes an even bigger challenge. helps facilitate the process of gathering insights from business teams, letting managers ask “flights” of questions, and giving employees the ability to contribute their input anonymously into a shared pool of answers, which are then upvoted. In theory, good ideas should float to the top.

The company it raised co-led by Jason Calacanis’s and . Automattic founder , , , , and others participated in the deal. The company started as a student project; its first funding was from the Olympus Spark Grant Fund at back in 2013.

And with that we’re done for the week. See you back here real soon!

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Ian Dooley, via Unsplash.

There are lots of companies operating outside the limelight enjoyed (but sometimes despised) by public companies and big unicorns alike. However, their stories are worth sharing, because they give a glimpse around the corner, at what’s coming up next.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into some highlights from the week that was in venture-land.

Superpedestrian

If you live in or near a big city in the U.S., chances are you’ve seen scads of scooters scattered about the sidewalks of your otherwise lovely downtown. Fantastically fun for urbanites with higher risk appetites (your correspondent included), electric scooters (and other lightweight transportation options) have the potential to vanquish cars from city centers.

Billions of dollars have been invested in scooter service startups. But as the old saying goes, in a gold rush, it’s best to be the one selling pickaxes. Scooter manufacturers like Superpedestrian build the devices which the services use to mine consumer demand for point-to-point transportation.

Founded in 2012 as a bicycle company with an exclusive license from MIT for its patent, which turns ordinary bikes into electric-assisted bicycles with built-in locking and environmental sensing capabilities. With the recent micromobility craze, though, the company expanded its offerings to include network-connected electric scooters and a fleet management platform built for scooter rental service providers.

The company is preparing to launch its hardware and software offering in January 2020. In the lead-up to that, this week, the company announced it raised from , , , and .

Samasource

Yeah, machine learning is cool, but we humans are the ones that tell computers what to grok. Behind every well-tuned neural network is a mountain of training data, which is often harvested and enriched by hand.

You do this in small ways almost every day. Ever have to pick out the pictures with storefronts or stoplights to prove you’re not a robot? You’re helping to enrich a dataset used to train a neural net. You’re the one doing the labeling because it’s trivially easy for us people, but it’s computationally difficult, for now.

is one of several companies in the business of building proprietary training datasets. Its differentiator? Location. Though headquartered in San Francisco, the company employs a staff of 2,900 people worldwide. The company is the largest AI and automation employer in East Africa, according to coverage .

This week, the company announced it raised led by (formerly known as IDG Ventures USA). Samasource says that 25 percent of the Fortune 50—including major automakers and tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and IBM—use its services.

Bunch

You know what can be a lot of fun? Playing video games. You know what’s more fun than playing video games? Playing video games with your friends.

Some readers of a certain age may have packed up their tower PCs and trundled them over to a LAN party. Most of us have, at one point or another, sat on the couch with the gang, just hanging and playing round. Kids these days though, they got it easy. Realtime remote multiplayer over high speed connection is the mode du jour. While that’s worked well on PC and console platforms, mobile is where the money’s at. And its where casual and serious gamers alike are spending more time.

But you needn’t play alone. is an app which helps, well, you and a bunch of friends play mobile games together in real-time. With video chat and multiplayer capabilities, the company aims to provide a more fun, interactive experience for social gamers. The app lets you see when your friends are online and lets you start playing from within the app or via a link passed over text message. Bunch is available for iOS and Android.

This week, the company closed from League of Legends maker , Finnish mobile game studio , , , and Chinese tech giant .

And with that, we’re done for the week. The Crunchbase News crew will be back for a short week before Thanksgiving. Friendly reminder that if you’re using a frozen turkey, you should start thawing it in the fridge on Monday.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Jeremy Ricketts, via Unsplash.

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Around the country and, indeed, the world, there are countless startups toiling outside the unicorn and public company limelight, building their version of the future. In their stories, we can spot trends and get a glimpse around the corner to see what’s next.

Without further ado, let’s dive into a few of the deals from the week that was in venture-land.

BrewBike

Espresso, cold brew, regular ol’ drip—the Crunchbase News team are equal opportunity coffee consumers. Although the coffee maker in the corner of the office brews a mean cup, there’s still something special about going to a coffee shop.

But what if the coffee shop came to you? For students at Northwestern University, UT Austin, Texas State University, and the University of Miami, it does. is what it sounds like: bicycle-wheeled cart turned  pop-up shop, that dispenses cold brew coffee to thirsty, sleep-deprived students at centrally located places on campus.

Founded in 2015 by two college students at Northwestern University, the company’s slogan is “In Students We Trust.” To that end, the company employs student baristas who, according to the company, have collectively earned over $150,000 slinging that magical bean water.

To scale to more college campuses, the company raised led by , a Florida-based family office. , former managing director of the venture investment group of fast food giant McDonald’s, participated in the round.

JetPack Aviation

Imagine, for a moment, the future. What do you see? Whether your vision is bleak or bright, it might feature jetpacks. Well, the future is getting closer, at least for a deep-pocketed few.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, is building a suite of futuristic single-passenger flying machines including, yes, and what can only be described as that look like they fell out of the Tron cinematic universe. As is the case with most things, if you have to ask the price, you probably can’t afford it. The company quotes the cost of its two jetpack models only “upon private request.” Its jet-powered Recreational Speeder will cost $380,000 for the personal version. The company is also working on a model of the speeder targeted at defense and heavy industry customers, but the price of that vehicle is still to be announced.

JetPack Aviation raised this week. —a seed stage venture capital fund operated by eccentric billionaire —led the round, which saw participation from , , and technologist .

Conservation Labs

Drip. Drip. Dripppp… Each drop of water lost to leaks and careless use is a waste of money and a precious natural resource. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, is a company which develops and delivers a smart water meter which helps people track and manage their water use, and detect leaks.

The company says that there are over 3 trillion gallons of unintended water use each year in the United States alone, collectively costing Americans about $70 billion per year. To help tackle that problem, the company raised led by . Participating investors include , , , and the .

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by  Photo by Dan Carlson, via Unsplash.