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Sano Genetics, a startup with a broad mission to support personalised medicine research by increasing participation in clinical trials, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding.
The round is led by Episode1 Ventures, alongside Seedcamp, Cambridge Enterprise, January Ventures, and several Europe and U S.-based angel investors. It adds to £500,000 in pre-seed funding in 2018.
Sano Genetics says part of the new capital will be to fund free at-home DNA testing kits for 3,000 people affected by Long Covid. It will also further invest in the development of its tech platform and grow the team
Founded in 2017 by Charlotte Guzzo, Patrick Short and William Jones after they met at Cambridge University while studying genomics as postgrads, Sano Genetics has built what it describes as a “private-by-design” tech platform to help patients take part in medical research and clinical trials. This includes at-home genetic testing capabilities, and is seeing the company support research into multiple sclerosis, ankylosing spondylitis, NAFLD, and ulcerative colitis2, with a research programme for Parkinson’s disease on the agenda for later in 2021.
“For participants in medical research, the process is not user friendly,” says Sano Genetics CEO Patrick Short. “There is usually little to no benefit for participants beyond altruism, taking part is difficult and time consuming, and people are also concerned about the privacy of their sensitive genetic and medical information.
“[Therefore], for researchers in biotech, pharma, and academia, it is very difficult to attract and retain research participants, which adds substantial costs and time to their research. In particular for research involving genetics and precision therapies, it is doubly challenging to find the ‘right’ patients because genetic testing is not routine in the healthcare system”.
To help solve this, Sano Genetics matches relevant participants to research via its platform. It then makes participation easier by enabling at-home genetic testing and by guiding participants through the process.
“The system is designed so users know exactly what will happen with their data, and we give them straightforward ways to control their data,” explains Short. “We keep our users engaged and involved in the research process by giving them updates on the research they have been a part of, and with free personalised content including genetic reports, and stories from other people like them on our blog”.
A typical end user is someone who has a chronic or rare disease and is using the platform to take part in research that helps them personally (e.g. access to a new therapy via a clinical trial) or to help others like them.
Meanwhile, Sano Genetics generates revenue by charging biotech and pharma companies fees to find the right patients for their studies. “The typical study for us consists of a set-up fee, a per-test fee for our at-home genetic testing and analysis, and a fee for each referral we make of an interested and eligible participant to their research study,” adds the Sano Genetics CEO.
French startup Alma is raising a $59.4 million Series B funding round (€49 million). The company has been building a new payment option for expensive good. You can choose to pay over three or four installments. This product sounds familiar if you’ve used Klarna in the past. But Klarna isn’t available in France.
Cathay Innovation, Idinvest, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Seaya Ventures and Picus Capital are participating in today’s funding round. In addition to today’s equity round, Alma is raising a credit line of $25.5 million (€21 million) to finance merchant payments.
What makes Alma attractive to merchants is that the startup is handling 100% of the risk involved with a payment over multiple installments. When a customer buys a bike over four installments, they’ll get charged over several months. But the merchant gets paid on day one.
Since I first covered Alma, the startup has launched the ability to pay later. You enter your card information right now but you get charged 15 days or a month later. It can be particularly useful if you’re unsure about something you’re buying and if you think there’s a chance you’ll send it back.
And it’s an attractive option in France where debit cards are the norm — not credit cards. Alma also plans to offer longer plans, such as the ability to buy now and pay over 6, 10 or 12 installments.
Thanks to the new influx of cash, the startup plans to triple the size of its team and reach €1 billion in annual payment volume within two years. It’s also going to expand to other countries, but with a specific focus on helping French merchants reach European customers living in other European countries.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/25/alma-raises-59-4-million-for-its-klarna-like-payment-option/
Dubai-based cybersecurity startup SpiderSilk has raised $2.25 million in a pre-Series A round, led by venture firms Global Ventures and STV.
In the past two years, SpiderSilk has discovered some of the biggest data breaches: Blind, the allegedly anonymous social network that exposed private complaints by Silicon Valley employees; a lab leaked highly sensitive Samsung source code; an inadvertently public code repository revealed apps, code, and apartment building camera footage belonging to controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI; and a massive spill of unencrypted customer card numbers at now-defunct MoviePass may have been the final nail in the already-beleaguered subscription service’s casket.
Much of those discoveries were found from the company’s proprietary internet scanner, SpiderSilk co-founder and chief security officer Mossab Hussein told TechCrunch.
Any company would want their data locked down, but mistakes happen and misconfigurations can leave sensitive internal corporate data accessible from the internet. SpiderSilk helps its customers understand their attack surface by looking for things that are exposed but shouldn’t be.
The cybersecurity startup uses its scanner to map out a company’s assets and attack surfaces to detect vulnerabilities and data exposures, and it also simulates cyberattacks to help customers understand where vulnerabilities are in their defenses.
“The attack surface management and threat detection platform we built scans the open internet on a continuous basis in order to attribute all publicly accessible assets back to organizations that could be affected by them, either directly or indirectly,” SpiderSilk’s co-founder and chief executive Rami El Malak told TechCrunch. “As a result, the platform regularly uncovers exploits and highlights how no organization is immune from infrastructure visibility blind-spots.”
El Malak said the funding will help to build out its security, engineering and data science teams, as well as its marketing and sales. He said the company is expanding its presence to North America with sales and engineering teams.
It’s the company’s second round of funding, after a seed round of $500,000 in November 2019, also led by Global Ventures and several angel investors.
“The SpiderSilk team are outstanding partners, solving a critical problem in the ever-complex world of cybersecurity, and protecting companies online from the increasing threats of malicious activity,” said Basil Moftah, general partner at Global Ventures.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/24/spidersilk-pre-series-a/
There is no lack of state funding for China’s smart driving startups nowadays as the country advances its goal to become a global leader in artificial intelligence in a decade’s time. The latest to get a financial boost is Uisee, a Beijing-based company founded by a group of tech veterans including the former head of Intel Labs China, Wu Gansha.
Uisee said Monday it has closed a funding round north of 1 billion yuan ($150 million) from investors including the National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrade Fund, a $21 billion state-backed fund set up in 2019 to promote and upgrade the manufacturing value chain in China, with the Ministry of Finance as the biggest shareholder.
Five-year-old Uisee is the first autonomous driving company the Fund has ever backed, according to the announcement, and the firm is expected to help propel forward the public transit and logistics sectors and become a “benchmark” autonomous driving enterprise in China, said a manager from the Fund in a statement.
Unlike Mobileye or China’s Momenta, which sell advanced driver-assistance systems as they invest in the development of more advanced Level 4 driving, Uisee leapfrogs ADAS and focuses on unmanned driving, co-founder and CEO Wu Gansha said in a previous interview.
Uisee enables autonomous driving for cases ranging from robotaxis and city buses to airports and logistics hubs. It’s secured a handful of major customers, including the Hong Kong International Airport, which is using Uisee’s tech to automate its baggage tractors, alongside state-backed automakers FAW Group, Dongfeng Motor, and more.
The new funding round, which also counts a number of undisclosed “industrial investors,” will allow Uisee to ramp up research and development and promote the industry’s at-scale monetization.
More to come…
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/24/uisee-150-million-round/
German drone technology startup Wingcopter has raised a $22 million Series A – its first significant venture capital raise after mostly bootstrapping. The company, which focuses on drone delivery, has come a long way since its founding in 2017, having developed, built and flown its Wingcopter 178 heavy-lift cargo delivery drone using its proprietary and patented tilt-rotor propellant mechanism, which combines all the benefits of vertical take-off and landing with the advantages of fixed-wing aircraft for longer distance horizontal flight.
This new Series A round was led by Silicon Valley VC Xplorer Capital, as well as German growth fund Futury Regio Growth. Wingcopter CEO and founder Tom Plümmer explained to the in an interview that the addition of an SV-based investor is particularly important to the startup, since it’s in the process of preparing its entry into the U.S., with plans for an American facility, both for flight testing to satisfy FAA requirements for operational certification, as well as eventually for U.S.-based drone production.
Wingcopter has already been operating commercially in a few different markets globally, including in Vanuatu in partnership with Unicef for vaccine delivery to remote areas, in Tanzania for two-way medical supply delivery working with Tanzania, and in Ireland where it completed the world’s first delivery of insulin by drone beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS, the industry’s technical term for when a drone flies beyond the visual range of a human operator who has the ability to take control in case of emergencies).
Wingcopter CEO and co-founder Tom Plümmer
While Wingcopter has so far pursued a business as an OEM manufacturer of drones, and has had paying customers eager to purchase its hardware effectively since day one (Plümmer told me that they had at least one customer wiring them money before they even had a bank account set up for the business), but it’s also now getting into the business of offering drone delivery-as-a-service. After doing the hard work of building its technology from the ground up, and seeking out the necessary regulatory approvals to operate in multiple markets around the world, Plümmer says that he and his co-founders realized that operating a service business not only meant a new source of revenue, but also better-served the needs of many of its potential customers.
“We learned during this process, through applying for permission, receiving these permissions and working now in five continents in multiple countries, flying BVLOS, that actually operating drones is something we are now very good at,” he said. This was actually becoming a really good source of income, and ended up actually making up more than half of our revenue at some point. Also looking at scalability of the business model of being an OEM, it’s kind of […] linear.”
Linear growth with solid revenue and steady demand was fine for Wingcopter as a bootstrapped startup founded by university students supported by a small initial investment from family and friends. But Plümmer says the company say so much potential in the technology it had developed, and the emerging drone delivery market, that the exponential growth curve of its drone delivery-as-a-service model helped make traditional VC backing make sense. In the early days, Plümmer says Wingcopter had been approached by VCs, but at the time it didn’t make sense for what they were trying to do; that’s changed.
“We were really lucky to bootstrap over the last four years,” Plümmer said. “Basically, just by selling drones and creating revenue, we could employ our first 30 employees. But at some point, you realize you want to really plan with that revenue, so you want to have monthly revenues, which generally repeat like a software business – like software as a service.”
Wingcopter 178 cargo drone performing a delivery for Merck.
Wingcopter has also established a useful hedge regarding its service business, not only by being its own hardware supplier, but also by having worked closely with many global flight regulators on their regulatory process through the early days of commercial drone flights. They’re working with the FAA on its certification process now, for instance, with Plümmer saying that they participate in weekly calls with the regulator on its upcoming certification process for BVLOS drone operators. Understanding the regulatory environment, and even helping architect it, is a major selling point for partners who don’t want to have to build out that kind of expertise and regulatory team in-house.
Meanwhile, the company will continue to act as an OEM as well, selling not only its Wingcopter 178 heavy-lift model, which can fly up to 75 miles, at speeds of up to 100 mph, and that can carry payloads up to around 13 lbs. Because of its unique tilt-rotor mechanism, it’s not only more efficient in flight, but it can also fly in much windier conditions – and take-off and land in harsher conditions than most drones, too.
Plümmer tells me that Wingcopter doesn’t intend to rest on its laurels in the hardware department, either; it’s going to be introducing a new model of drone soon, with different capabilities that expand the company’s addressable market, both as an OEM and in its drones-as-a-service business.
With its U.S. expansion, Wingcopter will still look to focus specifically on the delivery market, but Plümmer points out that there’s no reason its unique technology couldn’t also work well to serve markets including observation and inspection, or to address needs in the communication space as well. The one market that Wingcopter doesn’t intend to pursue, however, is military and defense. While these are popular customers in the aerospace and drone industries, Plümmer says that Wingcopter has a mission “to create sustainable and efficient drone solutions for improving and saving lives,” and says the startup looks at every potential customer and ensures that it aligns with its vision – which defense customers do not.
While the company has just announced the close of its Series A round, Plümmer says they’re already in talks with some potential investors to join a Series B. It’s also going to be looking for U.S. based talent in embedded systems software and flight operations testing, to help with the testing process required its certification by the FAA.
Plümmer sees a long tail of value to be built from Wingcopter’s patented tilt-rotor design, with potential applications in a range of industries, and he says that Wingcopter won’t be looking around for any potential via M&A until it has fully realized that value. Meanwhile, the company is also starting to sow the seeds of its own potential future customers, with training programs in drone flights and operations it’s putting on in partnership with UNICEF’s African Drone and Data Academy. Wingcopter clearly envisions a bright future for drone delivery, and its work in focusing its efforts on building differentiating hardware, plus the role it’s playing in setting the regulatory agenda globally, could help position it at the center of that future.
