Founded by entrepreneurs and , a duo of cousins who are also mothers, the startup today announced it closed its seed round of $900,000, adding to an early investment of $700,000. It has raised a total of $1.6 million to date.

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While TOP describes itself as a “social impact” startup, its lead investor in today’s financing announcement is a for-profit fund spun out of : . Per the press release, the firm led the round in support of Sullivan who is an alumnus of UMass Amherst. Angel investors also participated in the round, however TOP declined to disclose details.

In its announcement, TOP said it plans to use the seed capital to expand its presence in grocery stores and retail locations nationwide. It also plans to work with and its own e-commerce platform. It was refreshing to hear TOP mention product presence as a priority, especially with what feels like a flurry of direct-to-consumer (DTC) offerings everywhere.

When I asked TOP for more information, co-founder Sullivan nodded to growth in the company’s DTC channel, so that explains the focus on distributing into retail in 2020.

Let’s get into how TOP plans to differentiate the other store staple brands for tampons and pads.

TOP estimates that almost “20 billion pads and tampons end up in landfills each year and can take centuries to biodegrade.” Sullivan and her team want to change that by offering plant-based tampons.

The company sources its organic cotton from Turkey, India and Tanzania. Meanwhile, its factory in Barcelona sources power from running water, and TOP claims that everyone “from the farmer to the factory worker is paid a fair wage.” The applicator is plant-based, it claims. TOP also said all products have a seal made of cotton (not plastic) and organic certification from ICEA, the Ethical and Environmental Certification Institute.

TOP’s products are also solid in biodegradable boxes.

The company charges $7 to $8.50 per box for 16 tampons, or 20 pads. From a price-point perspective, traditional tampon brands like Tampax sell for around $7, and, a venture-backed startup that has , sells a box of tampons for around $10.

It’s noteworthy that Lola wants to destigmatize period products, but has other lines as well around sexual health and menstrual cramps. Like TOP, Lola started with tampons as a flagship offering and has since attracted investors like and .

Unlike Lola, however, TOP points to its focus on a younger demographic as a key differentiator.

“A key part of our purpose is giving back, with a focus on middle and high school students,” Sullivan told Crunchbase News. “When we heard one in five girls in the U.S. have missed school because they didn’t have access to period products, we decided to do something about it.” She added that the company is partnering with schools and nonprofits to make access easier.

TOP declined to share specific metrics around growth or volume of products sold thus far, beyond “ high triple-digit growth in our business.”

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To quickly recap, we talked with Accel, #Angels, BBG Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, The Engine, Floodgate, Homebrew, Lerer Hippeau, NFX, UnCork Capital and UpWest.��Here is the customized Crunchbase Pro list of organized by last equity funding amount from smallest to largest.��

Vas Natarajan: Partner, Accel

Natarajan pointed to , a site reliability engineering platform that addresses those instances when a company’s site goes down, potentially costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.

led the seed in 2018. Blameless raised a in March 2019 led by Accel and .

“What Blameless is building is a command and control for engineers, DevOps leaders, product leaders to be able to collaborate by Slack, pull in all the relevant metrics that they’re seeing from different infrastructure monitoring problems, and then push fixes as quickly as possible.”�� said Natarajan.

Secondly is , a data privacy technology company that raised a in April 2019 from Accel.

Every technology company needs to know where their users are logging in from around the globe, and the laws of that country. “That is a whole set of infrastructure solutions, and front end consumer facing tools that Transcend will build and sell for any company,” said Natarajan. “If you go to privacy.trulia.com or privacy.hoteltonight.com, I as an end user can see your privacy policy, I can log in and see what data you’ve collected on me and then I can hit delete. Transcend powers all that.”

Jana Messerschmidt and Katie Stanton: Founding Team #Angels

The #Angels founders have their eyes on , a marketplace that matches celebrities with consumers for personalized video shoutouts. Cameo raised a $50 million Series B in June 2019 led by .

“The consumer will script what they want the celebrity to say. So it could be a happy birthday message. It could be an engagement message. It could be congratulations on your job promotion. Whatever you want it to be. And then the celebrity decides whether they want to fulfill it. The celebrity also sets their price. You have everything from cameos for $25 all the way up to slots charging a few thousand dollars,” said Stanton.

Next is that helps women track their fertility at a fraction of the cost. Modern Fertility raised ain June 2019 led by of . “They’ve helped demystify fertility, and giving you more power towards understanding how fertile am I right now?” said Stanton.

Susan Lyne: Co-founder, BBG Ventures

“ is a marketplace for very large farms to sell the 30 percent of produce that gets ploughed under, because it doesn’t meet cosmetic standards for grocery,” said Lyne who invested in its seed round. Full Harvest connects large farms to food businesses. led its in August 2018.

Then there is .

“GoTenna allows you to send a text message and your location when there is no wireless coverage, no cell coverage, nothing. It was really developed initially for rock and roll concerts, and off-grid sports,” said Lyne. Since its early days it has been adapted for more critical use. “It’s just a great communications protocol that allows anyone to communicate in a disaster.”

Lyne invested in GoTenna’s seed round back in 2013. Most recently it has raised a in June 2019 led by .

Ted Wang: Partner, Cowboy Ventures

is an AI platform for accounting firms to automate routine tasks.

“What you’re really stopping humans from doing is reading and typing. This makes people more effective in their jobs. I can’t imagine anyone is going to be unhappy about not having to do that,” said Wang.

Vic.ai raised an in September 2019 led by .

“ is a company that currently has a product that looks at your job postings, and is able to analyze the text of the job postings and help you to write them in a way that they’ll be more effective,” said Wang. “You can send a posting through the Textio system, and it will send you an augmented version of the same text with suggested changes or highlights.”

Textio raised a in June 2017 led by .

Katie Rae: CEO, The Engine

“ is miniaturising a fusion plant with an invention that allows them to get to net positive energy,” said Rae of this fusion energy company built on top of decades of research. “We believe what they’ve invented will allow you to get there. If that’s true, you basically have endless clean energy. This is a team that has already proven out a bunch of the most significant milestones, and will continue to do that over the next two to three years.”

Commonwealth Fusion raised a in June 2019 led by , with , , and along with other investors.

Next up is , a company that develops technologies to engineer human primary cells and iPSC’s for both discovery and clinical manufacturing of advanced therapies. According to Rae, “They looked at the biotech industry and asked, ‘Why are there PhDs basically injecting things into cells?’ Would there be a way to speed this up in the biotech industry by ten thousand X?”

Kytopen raised a in May 2019 led by and .

Iris Choi: Partner, FloodGate

has built software for simulation testing of autonomous vehicles. Applied Intuition raised its Series B of $40 million led by in September 2019.

“Instead of physically having to run autonomous vehicles in Arizona in a quarantined off area, you can do billions of test runs, in various scenarios, using software. There is a benefit to having a mutual third party, instead of everyone building it in-house whether you are an OEM or a rideshare provider. This is only going to become increasingly necessary in the future,” said Choi.

Another company worth watching is , which offers business owners a simple procurement app for their daily supplies, reducing time spent on managing their inventory, and helping lower waste. Cheetah last raised its in October 2018 led by and .

Satya Patel and Hunter Walk: Homebrew Founders

“�� was started by two brothers, one who was a Navy Seal and the other who was an engineer at MIT. And the brother who was a Navy Seal came back for his tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he came to the realization that none of his colleagues, fellow soldiers died in battle,” said Patel.

“They died when they were doing reconnaissance into areas where there was no information about the building or the terrain that they were going into. And it seemed crazy to him that that can’t be solved in some different way. And so he got together with his brother, and they decided to build a company called Shield AI, which is developing fully autonomous drones for the public sector. These drones can by themselves navigate into buildings and caves. Collect intelligence about what’s going on inside through thermal cameras, regular cameras and then communicate that back to people who can do analysis on it,” said Patel.

“Shield AI is a company that has such a powerful mission around ensuring the safety of civilian and military lives.”

Shield AI raised a $25 million Series B in August 2019 led by .

Also on his radar is , which�� creates software infrastructure for any software company to become a payments company. Finix raised a in July 2019 led by .

“We think of it as democratizing access to a financial services infrastructure, helping a whole generation of software companies create more value for themselves and their employees and their customers,” said Patel.

Eric Hippeau: Co-founder, Lerer Hippeau

is an AI powered app for personalized health information

“They can answer pretty precisely all your health questions. If you use the app then you have the choice of very quickly getting on in a telemedicine way talking to an experienced doctor,” said Hippeau.

“It’s also a B2B business where you’ll see it appear at the front end to a number of different kinds of service providers, who would rather have something like this, as the first point of contact. It might be a hospital or it might be a clinic so that they can better direct the patient to the right service,” said Hippeau.

K Health last raised ain December 2018 led by , and .

Also up is , which automates retirement plans for small to medium sized companies. “They basically offer a very easy, low cost for SMBs. It’s really low cost,” said Hippeau. “They do all this hard work for about $8 per employee per month. And so they now originate a huge percentage of all new 401K plans in the United States.”

Guideline raised their in December 2018 led by .

James Currier: Co-founder, NFX

New York-based centers on financial products in the real estate sector.

“They allow people to buy residential houses for cash,” said Currier. “Ribbon gives the cash for two to eight weeks for the transition to take place and then the home buyer gets a mortgage. It really helps when you want to buy a home before you sell your other one.”

Ribbon raised a led by �� in October 2019.

is the largest repository of in the world, for disease detection. “They’ve created a platform play, and then they’re working with pharma and agricultural companies to develop diagnostics and therapies to edit change in a responsible way,” said Currier.

Mammoth Biosciences raised its in June 2018 led by the .

Jeff Clavier: Founder, Uncork Capital

“ is a hardware company that makes air purification technology for allergy, asthma or respiratory disease,” said Clavier. “It has a huge potential market. When you think about pollution in India and China this is a big market.”

Molekule raised their in November 2018 led by .

Another on the watchlist is , a chat inbox for teams. “Companies can aggregate a bunch of email, text accounts and any communication into one single chat inbox where teams can collaborate and have way more efficient customer support,” said Clavier.�� Front raised a led by in 2018.

Shuly Galili: Co-Founder, UpWest

is a company automating accounts payable to decrease time spent chasing invoice approval. Stampli raised a in October 2019 led by .

“They’re dealing with customers who have thousands and thousands of invoices, are inundated with paperwork, with a paper trail, with not knowing where the invoice started, and when is it going to be paid,” said Galili. Customers include retailers through to companies that have many outsourced vendors.

Also up is , a cybersecurity startup that addresses the risks in a company’s IT systems. CyCognito recently raised an funding in Nov 2019 led by .

“The attack surface has changed because it’s no longer just the technology that is on your laptop. There are many ways that servers, mobile technologies, customer lists and credit cards are being exposed today,” said Galili. CyCognito monitors these shadow risks an IT team might not be aware of to minimize exposure to attack.

Pro Tip. Crunchbase Pro subscribers can save this to their account to track changes over time, and get alerts.��

To Note: Some of the investors mentioned in this article are ��

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Current investors London-based as well as U.S.-based firms , and also participated in the funding alongside . LeafLink has now raised a total of $51 million since it was founded three years ago, according to the company.

Its first raise was a $3 million seed funding in early 2017, led by Lerer Hippeau. Today, LeafLink’s e-commerce marketplace connects more than 1,200 licensed cannabis brands to over 3,500 cannabis retailers and it has facilitated more than $1 billion in annualized orders.

Dispensaries use LeafLink to order inventory from multiple brands and the company also offers vendors services such as order management, customer relationship management (CRM), inventory tracking, and customized reporting.

The company charges a $299 minimum monthly subscription fee for that software. That makes LeafLink an SaaS startup, or looking at its cannabis focus, more precisely a vertical-SaaS startup

Growth

The New York company said it plans to use the new capital toward speeding up its expansion roadmap and toward improving its technology. It also says it’s begun “a massive recruiting effort” to hire in both its New York and Los Angeles offices. Currently, it has more than 65 employees.

LeafLink in particular is also eager to scale its LeafLink Financial unit, a payment and credit management solution it created for cannabis retailers and brands. So far, the service is live in four states in the US.

For context, many companies focused on cannabis marketing cannot access traditional banking resources. This forces many companies, operating legally in the space, to use cash more than they otherwise might. If LeakLink can provide better banking tooling to cannabis companies currently locked out from regular services, it could improve their operational efficiency.

The company launched in Colorado in 2016 with Zoots as its first brand and with $40 million in annualized orders. By August 2017, LeafLink had reached $100 million in annualized orders via its platform.

Others In The Market

LeafLink is not alone in raising capital as a cannabis-focused startup. The Crunchbase graph below has nearly 700 investments into cannabis companies recorded.

A few, for context. raised last month after . The company deals with delivering “wholesale cannabis” to individuals at a discount to market pricing. And, sticking to recent investments, raised , also in July, helps folks find the correct cannabis products for their needs.

But the most interesting among the recent cannabis-focused venture rounds that we came across was another software-focused investment. raised a Seed round earlier this week, a from . The capital was invested into a company that “gives cannabis business owners the power to manage and optimize their operations while complying with regulation standards.”

Investments in the space are going up. In April, we reported that funding for cannabis companies more than doubled from 2017 to 2018 with more than $1.3 billion directed toward startups and other private companies in the industry last year, according to Crunchbase data.

M&A activity also seems to be taking place. In March, Holden Page covered how Arizona-based , a publicly traded company with dispensaries in many legalized states, acquired , a Chicago-based operator and grower of Cannabis, for $850 million.

Clearly, there are several cannabis startups raising cash that are moving beyond the flower and into software. The fact that these startups are actually getting funding tells us that innovation, within a highly regulated industry like cannabis, is welcome.

Illustration: . Data and charting: .