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Warehouse automation company Nimble Robotics today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series A. Led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures and featuring Accel and Reinvent Capital, the round will go toward helping the company essentially double its headcount this year.

Founded by former Stanford PhD student Simon Kalouche, the system utilizes deep imitation learning – a popular concept in robotics research that helps systems map and improve through imitation.

“Instead of letting it sit in a lab for five years and creating this robotic application before it’s finally ready to deploy to the real world, we deployed it today,” says Kalouche. “It’s not fully autonomous – it’s autonomous maybe 90, 95% of the time. The other 5-10% is assisted by remote human operators, but it’s reliable on day one, and it’s reliable on day 10,000.”

Nimble is one in a long list of robotics companies to get a boast from Covid-19. The pandemic has driven both explosive growth in ecommerce and interest in automation, contributing to a significant excitement around the warehouse fulfillment tech. Nimble has also benefited from the rapid deployment of its systems.

“We’re not the first robotic pick, place and pack company that’s out there. We’ve grown really fast and have a lot of robots deployed in production,” Kalouche tells TechCrunch. “A lot of people have robots in the corner of a warehouse. Right now, we have heaps of robots deployed, and we’re growing really quickly. These are robots that are in production and picking tens of thousands of real orders every single day for each of our customers.”

In addition to the large funding round, the company is also adding two impressive names to its Board of Directors: Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Fei-Fei Li and Kitty Hawk/Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun.

“Nimble addresses both reliability and integration concerns,” Li, who’s also a seed investor, said in a release tied to the news. “Their robots have been picking reliably in production, at scale for over a year for some of the world’s largest retailers. They’ve developed an AI-powered product that makes integration fast and frictionless for their retail customers.”

Primary care startup Forward Health is looking to expand its tech-powered, personalized healthcare model across the U.S., and will use a new $225 million Series D raise to help make it happen. The new capital comes from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Mark Benioff – and recording artist The Weeknd – among others. I spoke to Forward Health co-founder and CEO Adrian Aoun about his company’s plans for this fresh capital, and we also chatted briefly about how The Weeknd got involved.

Forward, which currently operates clinics in select U.S. markets including LA, New York, Chicago, SF and Washington, D.C., has a number of distinguishing features, but most notable are likely its tech-first approach that includes a full biometric assessment upon first visit, and its business model, which eschews insurance providers altogether and instead works based on a single flat membership fee.

Aoun and his co-founders created Forward Health with the idea of building a healthcare business that’s aligned with its customers in terms of incentives, which is why they sidestepped insurance altogether. That’s led to a focus on customer service and long-term patient relationships and outcomes, which Aoun says are stronger because they’re not bound by an individual’s relationship with their employer, for instance, which is often the case when an employer foots the bill for healthcare via company-provided insurance.

“The average person in the Bay Area is with their employer for about two and a quarter years,” Aoun told me. “So your employer is kind of sitting there thinking, if you get the flu, you’re missing three days of work – I’m out some money.” That means they’ll do things like institute programs to remind employees constantly to get their annual flu vaccine, and do other things to make that happen like provide on-premise shots. But Aoun says they’re optimizing for short-term outcomes, not long-term health – because that’s where their incentives tell them to optimize.

Image Credits: Forward Health

But when long-term healthcare programs, like lifestyle shifts that can lessen the potential of truly dangerous outcomes like heart disease and cancer, come into play, an employer who expects you to stick around for a few years at most is far less incentivized to want to fund that. Forward Health, which aims to attract subscribers and, for lack of a better term, minimize churn, actually is incentivized to make those long-term outcomes positive for everyone who comes through the door.

That’s part of why one focus with this new funding is to debut new doctor-led programs tailored to treating conditions that individual patients might be predisposed to – like heart health, if heart disease runs in your family, or specific types of cancer, if there’s a history of that, for instance.

“We’ve got our [in-clinic] body scanners, our blood tests, our gene sequencing – we basically collect on the order of about 500 biometric data points,” Aoun said. “The idea is you and your doctor then figure out which which kind of programs make sense for you based upon those.”

For example, Aoun says he’s actually at fairly high risk for developing heart disease, so there’s a Forward program that includes doing a heart risk analysis, blood tests, and regular at-home monitoring of key risk factors like blood pressure and weight. Another program for cancer prevention includes measures designed to help lessen the risk of contracting the top five cancers in terms of prevalence — so Forward created a dermatoscope for that, which is essentially a skin scanner to map out an individual’s moles and skin features and alert them of any changes.

This builds on work that Forward began at the outset of COVID-19 — its ‘Forward at Home’ program, which includes sending patients home with specialized sensors for remote care. Another specialized program tailored to COVID-19 actually offers monitoring specific to the disease in order to track a patient’s progress safely.

“We’re now launching programs for all the top diseases to help you get ahead of them,” Aoun said. “And whatever kind of programs you’re using, you walk away with plans that are tailored to you, again, to counsel you not only on the potential risks for the things like the cancer and heart disease, but also to be proactive, with guidance from diet, to exercise, to stress, and to sleep, etc.”

The programs are supported by Forward’s 24/7 worldwide care support team, which subscribers can access via their mobile app. It’s also complemented by the check-ins with your physician via the ‘Forward at Home’ in-home virtual visits.

Image Credits: Forward Health

While Forward is already rolling these out, it has plans to continue to develop new ones, and it’s also monitoring results in order to understand how they’re working for users, and will be sharing that data once it has collected a significant sample. I asked Aoun how Forward can scale this kind of personalized care – especially now that the startup plans to open additional locations in other parts of the country.

Basically, Aoun said that Forward approached it as an engineering problem. He argues that most solutions in healthcare see the fundamental issue as a labor problem — but trying to scale that, with the salaries that medical professionals command, and the limited availability of skilled talent, makes no sense. Especially because consumers are naturally looking for improvements in their standard of care over time, in the same way they expect improvements in the products they buy or services they use.

Rather than relying on a chain of increasingly specific medical professionals to address individual health risks and needs, Aoun said Forward identified that there’s a massive amount of overlap in preventative care courses of action. The Forward team focused on breaking the fundamental elements down into what equate roughly to reusable Lego blocks, which can be recombined with relative speed and repeatability to produce a program that’s nonetheless tailored to an individual’s needs.

Combined with Forward Health’s longitudinal approach to care, these programs and their recombinant nature should prove a good dataset from which to assess how a direct, client-focused primary care model affects overall health.

And, because I promised, I’ll leave you with how Aoun says The Weeknd got involved in the Series D.

“He literally just walked by one of our locations, and walked in and was like, ‘This is awesome,’ and then asked a friend, who asked a friend, who asked a friend to get connected,” he told me.

Taavet Hinrikus, the first employee of Skype and co-founder of fintech giant Wise (formerly TransferWise), is teaming up with Teleport co-founder and current Topia CPO Sten Tamkivi to create a new investment vehicle.

Both are already seasoned investors — Hinrikus is one of Europe’s bona fide super angels, with over 100 investments to his name — and have already done a number of tickets together. The new as yet unnamed venture will see the pair’s investment activities formalised as an equal partnership and be supported by a team of six people based in Estonia, including an investment analyst.

Just don’t call it a VC fund.

“I’m still not setting up a fund, but am partnering to help do more of the same on the investing side,” Hinrikus told me last week in a text message.

For the last few years — perhaps prompted by swapping the role of CEO of Wise for chairperson — there’s been speculation within London’s increasingly chatty venture capital scene that he might raise a fund of his own or join an A-list VC firm as a partner. The Wise founder actually spent about a year as a venture partner at Mosaic Ventures, which ended last summer and went unreported.

“When you say fund, this means other people’s money and a specific mandate (i.e. invest in seed or late, in biotech or fintech, promise to return the money in a certain time, etc.),” Hinrikus said in an email earlier this week. He also explained that the new firm will not be seeking outside LPs and will be “evergreen”, enabling it to make considerably longer-term bets than many VC funds. Instead, Hinrikus and Tamkivi are happy to hold investments for 10-20 years.

“This structure is both liberating and differentiating, because without strict external mandates we can go after the missions we feel passionate about and be really patient about how long we stay involved in our companies,” said Tamkivi in an email.

“[We] will not be the one pushing a founder to sell,” underlines Hinrikus. “Will always stay on the founder’s side as we’ve been in that position ourselves”.

The pair’s combined portfolios focus mostly on Europe but also further afield, including the U.S., Japan and Singapore. Mutual investments (or shareholdings) include Wise, Bolt, Veriff, LHV, Xolo, Oyster HR, Pactum, Starship, Curve, Sunrise and Acapela.

Hinrikus and Tamkivi have also jointly contributed to several “mission driven” nonprofit endeavours such as Jõhvi School of Technology, Good Deed Education Fund or Vabamu Museum of Freedom and Occupations, which they, and the new firm’s back office, will continue to support. Most recently, Hinrikus co-founded Certific, which is building the rails for home health testing.

Hinrikus and Tamkivi say their new investment firm will back tech companies with a €250,000 to €1 million seed investment, but also has the freedom to follow on right up to an IPO. In most instances, it doesn’t expect to lead rounds but hopes to be seen as more collaborative than competitive.

“In short, we will be doing more of the same: give founder-backing to more upcoming founders,” said Hinrikus. “What excites us most is the future ahead and finding positive missions that improve our future. So far it’s been lots of future of work, future of finance, but in the future we’d love to think more about future of health and climate as well”.

“It will take a bit more conscious effort to figure out what our theses and strategy will be for completely new areas,” adds Tamkivi. “As humans, we both care about longevity, health, education, democracy — if we find ways how to move these huge problem spaces along with capital, we are very eager to learn”.

The pair are also willing to take positions in crypto tokens, real assets or any alternative financial instruments.

“On a high level you can think of DeFi as just a natural extension of our broader ‘future of money’ financial freedom thesis,” said Tamkivi. “When it comes to technical execution, we’ve benefited a lot from the freedom to invest not just in equity of established companies, but to also take token positions, use on-chain yield strategies or work with specialized venture funds. Whatever helps our founders”.

To that end, the new investment fund is breaking cover with very little fanfare — and, as mentioned, it doesn’t even have a name yet. “’Have you talked to Taavet and Sten yet?’ should work fine for now,” quipped Hinrikus, in his own deadpan style of humour I’ve become accustomed to over the years.

“More seriously, we are just getting started together,” clarified Tamkivi. “[We’re] still figuring out what kind of structure, processes, new talent and other things, such as additional branding, we’ll need as we scale up the activities from our lives as individual angels to date”.

mPharma, a Ghanaian health tech startup that manages prescription drug inventory for pharmacies and their suppliers, today announced its expansion to Ethiopia.

The company was founded by Daniel Shoukimas, Gregory Rockson and James Finucane in 2013. It specializes in vendor-managed inventory, retail pharmacy operations and market intelligence serving hospitals, pharmacies and patients.

In Africa, the pharmaceutical market worth $50 billion faces challenges such as sprawling supply chains, low order volumes, and exorbitant prices. Many Africans still suffer preventable or easily treated diseases because they cannot afford to buy their medications.

With a presence in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zambia, as well as two unnamed countries, mPharma wants to increase access to these medications at a reduced cost while assuring and preserving quality. The company claims to serve over 100,000 patients monthly and has distributed over a million drugs to Africans from 300 partner pharmacies across the continent.

CEO Rockson says that when mPharma started eight years ago, he wanted to own a pan-African brand with operations in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria from the get-go.

By 2018, mPharma went live in the West African country. In 2019, the health tech acquired Haltons, the second-largest pharmacy chain in Kenya, subsequently entering the market and gaining 85% ownership in the company. However, it seemed like a stretch to the Ghanaian-based company to expand to the East African country as it met several pushbacks. Rockson attributes this to the harsh nature of doing business with foreign companies.

“Ethiopia is one of the most closed economies on the continent. This has made it a bit hard for other startups to launch there just because the government rarely allows foreign investments in the retail sector.”

According to Rockson, most foreign brands operate in the country through franchising, a method mPharma has employed for its expansion into Africa’s second most populous nation.

The company signed a franchise agreement with Belayab Pharmaceuticals through its subsidiary, Haltons Limited. Belayab Pharmaceuticals is a part of the Belayab Group — a conglomerate that is also an official franchisee of companies like Pizza Hut and Kia Motors in Ethiopia.

Rockson says we should expect the partnership to open two pharmacies in Addis Ababa this year. Each pharmacy will offer the company’s consumer loyalty membership program called Mutti, where they’ll get discounts and financing options to access medication. 

Image Credits: mPharma

This franchising is a part of mPharma’s growth plans of enabling companies looking to enter the pharmacy retail sector. The plan is to provide access to a “pharmacy-in-a-box” solution where mPharma handles every infrastructure involved, and the pharmacy is just concerned about the consumer. 

“What we’ve done is that we enable these pharmacies with our software, and we have the backend physical infrastructure and warehousing,” he said. ‘They can rely on mPharma to do all the background work from getting the products into your pharmacy and also providing the software infrastructure to be able to run delivery services while they focus on clinical care.”

mPharma is one of the well-funded healthtech startups in Africa and has raised over $50 million. Last year when it secured a Series C round of $17 million, Helena Foulkes, former president of CVS, the largest pharmacy retail chain in the U.S., was appointed to its board. She joined Daniel Vasella, ex-CEO and Chairman of Novartis as members who have decades of experience in the pharmaceutical industry.

This sort of backing, both in expertise and investment, has proven vital to how mPharma runs operations. Rockson doesn’t mince words when saying the company wants to dominate African healthcare with Ethiopia, its toughest market to enter, already secured.

“There are issues of fragmentation in pharmacy retailing, poor standards and high prices that haven’t been fixed. The African opportunity is still huge, and we are still at the beginning stages of privatisation of healthcare on the continent,” he said.

Snyk, a developer of application security technology, is now worth $4.7 billion after a new fundraising and secondary sale that totaled $300 million.

In all, investors have poured $470 million into the company after this new investment, which was led by Accel and Tiger Global, with participation from a host of existing investors including Addition, Boldstart Ventures, Canaan Partners, Coatue, GV, Salesforce Ventures, and funds managed by Blackrock.

New investors joining Accel and Tiger on the cap table included Alkeon, Atlassian Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Geodesic Capital, Sands Capital Ventures and Temasek.

Withe big valuation and very very late stage investors on the cap table, it’s likely that this will be Snyk’s last round before a public offering. And the markets for enterprise software companies have been white hot recently, so the reception for Snyk should be positive.

Snyk’s value and sky high valuation comes from its ability to offer an application security platform that the company said is designed to provide security visibility and remediation for every component of modern applications — including their code, open source libraries, container infrastructure and infrastructure as code.

Investors seem to believe the company’s claims and so do a clutch of key new hires including Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Jeff Yoshimura, a former executive at Elastic; CIO Erica Geil, who previously worked at Groupon; and Vice President, Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) Sales, Shaun McLagan, who previously worked for EMC.

After the funding, Michael Scarpelli, the Chief Financial Officer of the enterprise software darling and last year’s blockbuster public offering, Snowflake, and Ping Li, a longtime enterprise software investor and a Partner at Accel.

“We first met the Snyk team at the start of their journey, as early investors,” said Li, in a statement. “Throughout our partnership, we’ve witnessed first-hand Snyk’s unshakeable dedication to developer and security teams and their original vision become a reality. We’re looking forward to supporting the successes of Snyk in 2021 and beyond.”

Snyk’s financing comes as application vulnerabilities are becoming an increasingly popular attack vector for hackers. Roughly 43% of data breaches have been linked back to flaws in applications, according to the company.

Meanwhile, a dearth of developers focused on security means that automation has to do more heavy lifting. Snyk says it provides that through automated remediation and the integration of security features directly into developer workflows. The company also offers real-time answers to coders’ security questions.

So far, that suite of services has meant more than 27 million developers around the world are using Snyk tools and the company also provides a marketplace for security coders to pitch their own tools on the Snyk platform.

“We believe Snyk’s developer-first approach to security is a fantastic tool for developers and organizations today,” said Chris Hecht, Head of Corporate Development, Atlassian. “Snyk has already showcased some amazing integrations with our tools, and we’re now thrilled to extend our partnership with them through an Atlassian Ventures investment.”