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, , , and participated in the financing. With the latest round, Tempus has now raised $620 million since its September 2015 inception, according to Crunchbase Previous backers include and Denmark’s .

Tempus says it has built an operating system to deliver personalized cancer care. It’s using its new capital to expand  into other disease areas, including diabetes, depression and cardiology.

The startup is on a mission to redefine how genomic data is used in a clinical setting. It’s built out an interactive analytical and machine-learning platform so patients can benefit “from the treatment of others who came before.”

Tempus’ genomics tests analyze DNA, RNA and proteomic data to understand a patient’s tumor at the molecular level with the goal of identifying customized treatment options.

Currently, Tempus works with thousands of oncologists across hundreds of medical systems. It claims to have the “world’s largest libraries of clinical and molecular data, and an operating system to make that data accessible and useful.”

As anyone who’s had a family member battle cancer can attest to, the thought of more personalized (and better!) care is more than welcome.

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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.

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The Washington, DC-based venture firm (which we profiled in this piece in March) focuses on early-stage investing with an emphasis on companies located in “underserved” markets.

I hopped on the phone this morning with , co-founder and managing partner of Revolution, and he told me all about the company’s plans for the new fund. He also shared some details of the performance of its second fund, which in 2013.

First, let’s start with the new fund. Savage said the firm intentionally opts not to raise larger funds because it wants to focus on quality over quantity. Its target with this third fund was $200 million but Revolution “flexed up a little” at the last minute to make room for an additional LP, he said.

“It’s easier to be a big fund. But we think this is the right size for us,” he told me, noting that traveling to other geographies in search of new opportunities takes “a lot of time and energy,”

“But most importantly, our philosophy is reflected in the way we underwrite. We stick with these companies through the good times and bad. Other firms tend to invest in a lot of companies and hope to get one massive outcome. It’s like buying a lot of lottery tickets,” Savage added. “That might be a perfectly good model for them, and a handful are really good at it. But we don’t want to invest in more companies than we have time to support.”

Instead, he said, Revolution’s portfolio is very concentrated with “an extremely low loss ratio.” Of the 18 investments made out of its second fund, Revolution saw five partial or full exits (notable all were Silicon Valley-based).  Investments from its previous fund include Washington, D.C. area-based companies and , Milwaukee-based , San Diego-based , Denver-based , Detroit-based (which we covered here), and Chicago-based .

Looking ahead, the firm expects to make about 15 to 20 investments out of its new fund. According to Savage, Revolution typically invests $1 million to $12 million in initial financing, with an average of between $4 million and $8 million for an initial check.

Because the firm targets companies that are usually based outside of Silicon Valley, it’s seen “outsized” returns on its investments, according to Savage.

Why does location matter, you ask? Companies in those regions don’t often have access to a lot of early-stage funding and are often more capital efficient than their Silicon Valley counterparts, he said. Revolution is also able to invest at a more modest valuation.

“So even at moderate outcomes, because we invest thoughtfully and the companies usually don’t consume as much capital, we see quality venture returns,” Savage said.

While the fund is not sector focused, it does look for companies using technology “to attack existing billion dollar categories” as opposed to startups inventing new categories, Savage said. For example, one portfolio company, Framebridge, is challenging the traditional custom framing industry.

It’s also taking on companies that are in regulated categories.

“We consider ourselves to be Washington insiders and among our team there’s very strong government and regulatory expertise,” he said. “Plus, it’s impossible to make the argument these days that regulation isn’t important, from big companies to small. And that’s obviously true with a lot of the categories we attack as well.”

Indeed, co-founders and investment partners Tige Savage, , and have been collaborating and investing together for over a decade

Revolution has yet to invest out of its new fund.

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Being comforted by the greenery of his family’s plants during the winter months of Detroit, where Bloomscape is based, is something Mast remembers fondly.

“Living in Michigan, one could get sick of winter, but being surrounded by colorful green plants as far as the eye can see is the kind of thing you don’t forget,” he recalls.

So it’s no surprise that as an adult he wanted to share that comfort with others. He launched Bloomscape for that purpose: to help consumers more easily find, buy and care for plants.

Mast’s love for plants is now translating into impressive financial results for his business. While he wouldn’t disclose specifics, he did say Bloomscape has – in its short 16-month history – generated millions in sales and sold over 100,000 plants to 25,000 unique customers in 48 states (orders have come from as far as Russia). So far it’s seen 50 percent month-over-month growth.

Such early traction has led to a high-profile group of investors putting money into the company’s just-raised $7.5 million series A. led the round with participation from Endeavor, existing investors, and a bevy of consumer brand founders, including co-founder J, co-founder , co-founder , co-founder co-founder , and co-founders and .

Indeed for some (including myself) plant shopping can be intimidating. Questions abound. From what kind of plant grows best with a certain amount of lighting to how much water does it should get. Bloomscape is designed to help confused consumers such as myself pick the best option for their space. It currently offers more than 90 types of plants from 10 inch aloes to five-foot palm trees.

Providing people with “a really good start goes a very long way,” Mast said.

“We found that people really want to get into plants but don’t always feel confident they can pick the right one or care for them well,” he told Crunchbase News. “So the first thing we do is make sure people are getting fresh plants from a greenhouse, with healthy roots and already repotted. They are essentially living room ready.”

As a personal plant enthusiast, Mast had the convenience of asking his mother, who has 40 years of experience with growing, for advice. With Bloomscape, he’s attempting to give his customers the same kind of personalized care. Starting with his mother, Joyce, as the official “,” Mast has since built a team of support staff to help answer customer questions.

“I realized quickly if we can help people select the right plants and give them the right kind of personalized instructions and support, they could be more confident and successful,” he said. “And that’s when people really cut loose and fill out their homes with plants.”

For , partner at Revolution Ventures, Bloomscape’s premise makes sense in what she described as a “highly-fragmented, fast-growing, .”

The home and garden category has been slow to come online given the complexity of warehousing and shipping living organisms. As such, the plant business has been historically dominated by regional garden centers and big-box retailers such as Home Depot or Lowe’s, noted Sieg.

“Consumer shopping preferences and growing millennial interest in house plants have created significant pent up demand for a reliable online retailer,” she wrote via email. “Bloomscape is reinventing the category’s consumer experience.”

Revolution also saw opportunity in the space, with Sieg noting that less than three percent of plant-related transactions occur online. Plus, urbanization and millennial preferences have led to a recent surge of interest in using plants as decoration, she added.

Currently, Bloomscape has 15 employees and is hiring rapidly, according to Mast, mostly in its home base of Detroit. It also plans to use the new capital to expand its greenhouse footprint and into “all areas of the home and garden.” The company also plans to grow its network of foliage partners and implement new technology initiatives, such as enhancing its site and “leveraging data” to help people in different home conditions and geographic regions with more “tailored care.” It’s also planning to introduce two-day shipping.

Personally, I recently finally got over being intimidated by plants and our home is now filled with them. They add beauty and warmth while also cleaning the air. While I’m no expert on buying or caring for plants, I can certainly see the need for what Bloomscape has to offer. Here’s to more green in everyone’s homes.

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Photo credits: Bloomscape

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But cost and access to mental health providers is still a major issue—enter startups, several of which have emerged in recent years to provide people with alternatives. One of those, New York-based , which provides therapy via a subscription-based online platform, has just raised $50 million to help reach more users. (Talkspace describes itself as a telebehavioral healthcare company.)

led the Series D. Existing backers , , , Compound and others, also participated in the round. As part of the funding, , principal of Revolution Growth, will join Talkspace’s board of directors.

Talkspace’s model connects individual users with a network of over 5,000 licensed therapists through a web and mobile platform the company says is HIPAA-compliant, meaning it is designed to protect a client’s privacy.

Users have “dedicated therapists” to whom they can send unlimited messages using a monthly subscription service. They can choose from a range of plans, which include messaging-only options and live video sessions. The startup also provides psychiatry services, including prescription fulfillment, adolescent therapy, and couples counseling. Its platform has been used by over 1 million people across 10 countries, according to the company, which declined to provide revenue figures. (Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps has about using the platform.)

The funding brings Talkspace’s to $106.7 million since its inception in 2012 when husband and wife and founded the company after “personally” experiencing “the benefits of therapy” in their marriage.  

“We embarked on a mission to eliminate the 3 most prominent barriers to mental health services: access, stigma, and cost. We aim to provide therapy for all and thus, help create a better world of happier people in the process,” said Oren, who serves as Talkspace’s CEO.

It’s just one of a number of startups focused on mental health. Earlier this year, meditation and mindfulness app became mental health’s first unicorn after raising a $88 million Series B. Another meditation app, , has raised about $75 million .

In a press release, Talkspace said it would use the new capital “to expand access to mental health services and improve quality of care through its national network of over 5,000 licensed, credentialed providers.”

In its release, Talkspace also said the funding would  “accelerate the growth” of its commercial business, out of which it partners with employers, health plans, employee assistance programs (EAP) and educational organizations in an effort “to make therapy available and affordable.”

For example, the company has partnered with Optum’s behavioral health business. Talkspace also provides services to employees via relationships with Aetna – a CVS Health company, New Directions Behavioral Health and Magellan Health, and others. Talkspace said its commercial business “now covers over five million lives.”

“We view the addressable market for Talkspace as an enormous opportunity that is growing in both size and importance,” said Revolution’s Conroy in a press release. In a phone conversation this morning, Conroy told me that he’d been following the company for a couple of years and was impressed with its recent traction in terms of signing up with not only major insurance carriers, but a number of large employers as well. Talkspace has also established relationships with thousands of licensed professionals across the country with an average of 10 years of experience, which Conroy believes “sets it apart from the competition.”

“What Talkspace has done around building their network is very unique,” he added.

In addition to its commercial expansion, Talkspace said it plans to expand into two unidentified global markets. It also plans to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities. Currently, the company’s data science team aggregates client and therapist interactions, enabling it to better match users “with the best possible therapists,” Oren told Crunchbase News.

“By studying a large corpus of successful treatment courses, we can apply large scale regressions, and build a decision-support system based on ML (machine-learning) models that help therapists better diagnose, use the appropriate interventions, understand whether their treatment plans are effective, and apply changes in real time,” he added.

Of course, there’s been plenty of criticism of such services. In this , users of other “text therapy” services called their experiences “unhelpful and expensive.” 

Oren Frank’s response to such claims is that psychotherapy “is an incredibly helpful, but also a very traditional profession.”

“We understand and accept some of the resistance shown by the more traditional guardians of the ‘old ways,’ but those resistances are based on opinions, not data nor research,” he told Crunchbase News.

Revolution’s Conroy said the venture firm also believes that Talkspace is helping bring awareness to mental health access.

“For close to 70 percent of its people, using Talkspace was their first interaction with a therapist,” he told Crunchbase News. “We want to find companies not only attacking a big market, but are also increasing market size too. And that’s what Talkspace is doing by bringing down barriers around affordability, access and stigma.”

Without question access to mental health is a good thing, and clearly, some big-named investors agree.

Photo Credit: Lee Seidenberg

So we decided to ask someone who has actually been doing it for years what he thinks.

“We’re delighted that there’s a bandwagon forming,” Steve Case told Crunchbase News.  “We’ve been hoping for that for a number of years.”

is the founder of the trio of funds (including ) that are exclusively focused on investing outside the major hubs of Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. 1

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Since launching the  Rise of the Rest platform in 2014, Case and company have invested in 116 companies and traveled to 38 cities by bus. (When asked which of the locales is his favorite, Case joked that it was like having 38 children. He couldn’t pick just one.)

The fund is an extension of personal seed investments Case was making individually in startups in “emerging communities” that he discovered while working on the under former President Barack Obama. All three Revolution funds are based in Washington, D.C.

Case, who also co-founded internet provider AOL in the mid-1980s, decided in 2017 to launch a formal investment vehicle to further his mission. His team now travels to various cities with the goal of investing $100,000 in a local startup at the end of the day. The $150 million Rise of the Rest Seed Fund is backed by an illustrious group of investors and executives, including Amazon founder , former NY Mayor and former CEO . They have all ”publicly committed to the idea that great companies can be scaled in cities outside of Silicon Valley.”

For clarity: Going forward when we refer to “Revolution” we are talking about the trio of funds unless we specify otherwise.

Over time, Case has followed through on his intentions. Across all three funds (including the Seed Fund, Ventures and Growth), 98.5 percent of total invested capital has gone to companies outside of Silicon Valley.

In 2018, Revolution made 135 investments, including follow-on rounds. Of the 103 companies in which the funds invested in 2018, 102 were based outside of Silicon Valley. The markets that saw the most investments in 2018 included Austin, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.

“From an investment standpoint, we think certain places like Silicon Valley have tons of great people doing tons of interesting things,” he told Crunchbase News. “It also has tons of VCs. So the valuations are sometimes high. In markets with a different supply-demand dynamic, the valuations tend to be more moderate.”

While Rise of the Rest (ROTR) is too early-stage to have seen any exits, one company Case invested in prior to its being formed did get in late 2016: , the pitch competition winner during a stop in Atlanta. (Sidenote: Since the Atlanta stop was before the ROTR Seed Fund’s formation, this was a personal investment from Case not from the fund itself.)

However, the Revolution funds as a whole did see four exits in their portfolio in 2018 with , , , and Other successes included portfolio companies and reaching unicorn status. Last year, Revolution also hosted two conferences for startup founders and leaders. Additionally, it launched a new video series.

Looking Forward

For years Case has been vocal about his belief that with “the next wave of entrepreneurship,” the center of gravity will shift from Silicon Valley to other parts of the country. To Case, the current “capital imbalance” that exists is both “a problem to solve and opportunity.”

“A majority of venture capital goes to three states,” he said. “We think that’s crazy…There’s a lot of people and places feeling left out and behind.”

As a result, he continues to target underserved markets, with the goal of attracting national attention to the startups in those regions while also raising their profiles locally. At the end of April, the Rise of the Rest tour is headed to Florida and Puerto Rico, its first foray out of the mainland U.S.

Its next stop is Orlando, which has traditionally been known as a hospitality hub with Walt Disney World. Then, the tour will hit the Space Coast, where for the first time, Rise of the Rest is branching out.

“We’re not just inviting people from the area (to the pitch competition),” he said. “We’re inviting anyone with a space-related startup to apply, and are flying the best ones there.”

Case is also eager to visit Miami, which he described as “quite a global city,” and hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.

“There’s a lot of excitement around rebuilding the economy there and creating a more sustainable, self-sufficient future for the island,” he told Crunchbase News.

From The Startup POV

, co-founder and CEO of San Diego-based ll, said he was introduced to Rise of the Rest through , the director of the program. Barbo’s company went through that program in 2018.

Kuder was on the bus with Rise of the Rest in Birmingham, Ala. around the same time Trust & Will was gearing up for its seed raise.

“I saw him tweeting about it and asked for an introduction,” Barbo said. Trust & Will helps individuals and couples set up a trust-based estate plan, document their wills, and designate guardians for children or dependents.

Ultimately, Rise of the Rest invested in Trust & Will’s $1.5 million seed round, an experience Barbo said has been transformative in several ways.

“They have this emotional IQ you don’t always get from other VCs, as they’re investing in people more than anything, especially at the early/seed stage,” he said. “The amount of support they pour into founders is amazing.”

The firm’s personal approach has made Barbo and his team feel nurtured.

“One of the things about the Revolution team is that all of them connected with me on LinkedIn and have shown their support through that channel and other social media such as Twitter,” he said. “That sharing and retweeting is nice validation. It feels like they really care.”

Another example of the fund’s personal approach is a book club which provides materials to all startup founders.

“To have a little bit of a mentorship through a book club is not as common among traditional VCs,” Barbo added. “It seems very unique…We just have these little boosts of support in the smallest of interactions.”

Whether it’s through a program as simple as a book club or direct financial investment, Case’s initiatives aren’t just about providing support outside Silicon Valley, according to Case, they are about providing support to the individuals behind the companies and that is a revolution worth getting behind.

Photos Courtesy of Revolution