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Hello and welcome back to Last Week In Venture. It鈥檚 the weekly rundown of rounds announced by neat companies that may have flown under your radar this week.

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This week, the Crunchbase News team covered a number of emerging trends. We looked at where seed and early stage funding is growing (or not), new evidence of a possible slowdown in China鈥檚 startup market, and we began tracking all VC rounds over $250 million. Beyond that, we covered the ignominious demise of Munchery, explored venture-backed companies in the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, and profiled a number of Latina VCs.

Also, huzzah! and is funded for at least the next three weeks. What happens after that is unknown, but in the meantime we鈥檙e excited to cover the IPO and other regulatory filings that will no doubt shake out of the backlog.

Let’s dive into the week that was in venture-land.

Dancing To The Bank

Most of the rounds we cover here for Last Week In Venture are smaller sums raised by early stage-companies. Breaking the mold a bit, let’s take a quick look at Austin, Texas-based legal tech company announced this week. The late-stage deal was led by SaaS investor and saw participation from .

Founded in 2012 the company provides a suite of tools for professionals in the field of “ediscovery.” In the legal field, “electronic discovery” describes the process whereby data is sought and analyzed for the purposes of using it as evidence in a proceeding civil or criminal case. It is a multibillion-dollar market.

Now, with , DISCO says it’s raised “more than any other enterprise legaltech company.” DISCO recently relocated to Austin from Houston.

Founder and CEO said in a statement provided to Crunchbase News that 鈥淒ISCO鈥檚 mission is to create technology to modernize the practice of law.鈥� DISCO’s software offerings let law firms and corporations analyze incoming information using AI, manage complex legal workflows, and search databases using a visual interface.

Camara that the company plans to grow the team by 200 people in 2019.

Other Interesting Rounds

• The reaper has spared no soul and will inevitably find you one way or the other. You’re going to die. I’m going to die. Them’s the breaks. Hopefully we’ll leave something behind to benefit a future generation, and to ensure that transfer goes smoothly, you’re going to need a will. is a U.K.-based company that helps individuals and couples from England and Wales set up wills online for later on-paper signing and storage. For individuals, the service costs 拢90 up front, and for 拢10 per year wills can be updated as needed. (Talk about lifetime customer value, amirite?!) The company announced led by ; in the deal.
• Many of us will host at least one big event in our lives. But finding inspiration (and, my gosh, all the help) needed to bring a party together is hard. aims to help on both fronts. PartySlate raised led by . Other Chicago-based groups that invested in the round include , , and , which all participated alongside from Nebraska and California. The site lets event professionals share photos (which are tagged and searchable by categories like “lighting at fundraisers”) from an event and, also, creates a list of which providers did what, like credits at the end of a movie. It’s functionality is a remix of a certain photo-pinning website, a professional services marketplace, and, for the event professionals themselves, a portfolio site for their work.
• According cited on , one in eight people in the U.S. has some hearing loss in both ears. The problem is that good quality hearing aids are expensive and visits to an audiologist can be inconvenient. New York-based raised to scale up its business of delivering comparatively inexpensive ($2,350, according to ) hearing aids that can be tuned remotely during an online appointment with a licensed audiologist, which is facilitated through Lively’s mobile app. (the family office of co-founder ) and invested in the deal.
• Market indexing firm that the “professionally managed global real estate investment market” grew to $8.5 trillion in 2017, the most recent year for which reliable data was available. Some might think that pricing an asset鈥攊n this case a building or piece of land鈥攊s more of an art. For years, an abundance of data has made real estate investing into a science, leaving ample opportunity for entrepreneurs. Dutch real estate tech upstart developed a supervised machine learning model that produces valuations that dynamically adjust as new data becomes available. The company says it’s “twice as accurate as traditional appraisals.” GeoPhy raised led by . Prior Series A investors and followed on in this round.

And with that, we鈥檙e done for the week! Have a fantastic and restorative weekend.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by聽聽Cover image by Ray Hennessy, via Unsplash.