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Hello and welcome to Last Week In Venture, the weekly roundup of venture deals inked with interesting companies you may have missed.

Investors continued to funnel staggering amounts of capital into companies like Compass, Opendoor, and Stripe, among others which raised this week.

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It鈥檚 easy to overlook what companies outside the spotlight are contributing to startup ecosystems around the world. But that doesn鈥檛 mean their stories aren鈥檛 worth sharing.

Let’s dive in!

Market Hot Spot: Digital Media

A cluster of digital media deals bubbled up this week, which might come as a surprise to some. Venture-backed upstart news sites like and are off while platforms like Facebook and Apple News put the squeeze on ad revenue for even the biggest publishers.

Nevertheless, investors committed capital to a number of digital media deals announced this week:

• side project between two musicians who just wanted a better way to , grew big enough to in March. from , a tech and media holding company founded by former Disney and DreamWorks Animation chief executive .
• Los Angeles-based produces snack-sized video infotainment targeted at younger audiences. Interestingly, ATTN’s main distribution channels are Facebook-owned platforms, including Instagram TV and the Facebook Watch streaming service. (Contrast this against all the content publishers focused on Youtube, a platform .) ATTN’s flagship shows include a current events broadcast hosted by former Vice President Joe Biden and a food documentary series featuring Zooey Deschanel. ATTN raised led by , a media investment group co-founded by .
• , formerly known as Keli Network, is another video production company. According , the company “makes hit videos […] by digging through comments, reviews, and tweets to find out what trends people are talking about and then turns them into series.” The company’s videos generate 2.5 billion views per month across 170 million monthly users of Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. (That’s .) Jellysmack led by . , , and participated in the deal. Alongside the funding, the company announced that it hired media executives from Mashable and Red Bull to help with original content production, according to .
• Last but not least, although it is not a venture funding round, we wanted to mention given to , a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom which, according to its , is “a new publication illuminating the societal harms of emerging technologies.” Craigslist founder , the , the , and the all contributed to the upstart publication, which is also taking donations from the public through its website. Given the biggest tech companies鈥攑ublic and private鈥攁re increasingly drawing criticism for privacy violations, misuse of personal information, raising rents, intensifying traffic, and making us sad and lonely, there’s gonna be a lot of muck to rake through.

Other Deals In Interesting Sectors

• , a Bend, OR-based ordering platform for cannabis pickup and delivery rolled up $3 million in green to take root in Canada and other federally legal international markets. The round was led by , a cannabis-focused venture fund co-founded by Calvin Broadus Jr., better known as . No word yet on whether Dutchie includes snack options for satiating future munchies.
• Quantum accelerator company raised led by . , , , and participated. Unlike quantum computing concerns like , , and IBM, Bleximo is instead focused on building quantum co-processors that can operate alongside classical computers to accelerate progress in quantitatively-intense problem spaces, like molecular dynamics modeling in drug discovery.
• Austin, TX-based (which is in the middle of re-branding from Krew) raised a modest $223,100 in seed funding to build a business around a ride-sharing marketplace for inter-city travel. Hitch hopes to eventually connect budget-conscious travelers who needs to hop between cities to someone who’s driving their own car there. The Krew says rides from Austin to Houston are $35, and that the company has facilitated over 1,000 rides to date. To be sure, Hitch faces the challenging of building up two sides of a marketplace business: the inter-city drivers on one side, and the riders on the other. This proved difficult for a little company called Zimride, which was founded back in 2007 as a way to connect college kids with rides back home. Zimride eventually gave up on inter-city travel, pivoted to local ride-hailing, and rebranded to . The rest is history.

And for those of you who made it to the end, a lagniappe: . Have a ducking great weekend! ?

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