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3D model provider CGTrader, has raised $9.5M in a Series B funding led by Finnish VC fund Evli Growth Partners, alongside previous investors Karma Ventures and LVV Group. Ex-Rovio CEO Mikael Hed also invested and joins as Board Chairman. We first covered the Vilnius-based company when it raised 200,000 euro from Practica Capital.
Founded in 2011 by 3D designer Marius Kalytis (now COO), CGTrader has become a signifiant 3D content provider – it even claims to be the world’s largest. In its marketplace are 1.1M 3D models and 3.5M 3D designers, service 370,000 businesses including Nike, Microsoft, Made.com, Crate & Barrel, and Staples.
Unlike photos, 3D models can also be used to create both static images as well as AR experiences, so that users can see how a product might fit in their home. The company is also looking to invest in automating 3D modeling, QA, and asset management processes with AI.
Dalia Lasaite, CEO and co-founder of CGTrader said in a statement: “3D models are not only widely used in professional 3D industries, but have become a more convenient and cost-effective way of generating amazing product visuals for e-commerce as well. With our ARsenal enterprise platform, it is up to ten times cheaper to produce photorealistic 3D visuals that are indistinguishable from photographs.”
CGTrader now plans to consolidate its position and further develop its platform.
The company competes with TurboSquid (which was recently acquired for $75 million by Shutterstock) and Threekit.
As money floods into the electric vehicle market a number of small companies are trying to stake their claim as the go-to provider of charging infrastructure. These companies are developing proprietary ecosystems that work for their own equipment but don’t interoperate.
ChargeLab, which has raised $4.3 million in seed financing led by Construct Capital and Root Ventures, is looking to be the software provider providing the chargers built by everyone else.
“You’ll find everyone in every niche and corner,” says ChargeLab chief executive Zachary Lefevre. Lefevre likens Tesla to Apple with its closed ecosystem and compares Chargepoint and Blink, two other electric vehicle charging companies to Blackberry — the once dominant smartphone maker. “What we’re trying to do is be android,” Lefevre said.
That means being the software provider for manufacturers like ABB, Schneider Electric and Siemens. “These guys are hardware makers up and down the value stack,” Lefevre said.
ChargeLab already has an agreement with ABB to be their default software provider as they go to market. The big industrial manufacturer is getting ready to launch their next charging product in North America.
As companies like REEF and Metropolis revamp garages and parking lots to service the next generation of vehicles, ChargeLab’s chief executive thinks that his software can power their EV charging services as they begin to roll that functionality out across the lots they own.
Lefevre got to know the electric vehicle charging market first as a reseller of everyone else’s equipment, he said. The company had raised a pre-seed round of $1.1 million from investors including Urban.us and Notation Capital and has now added to that bank account with another capital infusion from Construct Capital, the new fund led by Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt, and Root Ventures, Lefevre said.
Eventually the company wants to integrate with the back end of companies like Chargepoint and Electrify America to make the charging process as efficient for everyone, according to ChargeLab’s chief executive.
As more service providers get into the market, Lefevre sees the opportunity set for his business expanding exponentially. “Super open platforms are not going to be building an EV charging system any more than they would be building their own hardware,” he said.
While usage of telehealth services have surged during the COVID-19 epidemic, there are some times when health professionals need to be around in person to conduct diagnostics tests. To help those telehealth companies bridge that gap is Axle Health, a company currently enrolled in the latest cohort from the Y Combinator accelerator.
“In terms of the professionals that we send in home, they’re phlebotomists, NAs, RVNs, and RNs as well,” said Axle co-founder Connor Hailey.
In a sad reflection of the times, most of the calls the company’s getting are COVID-19 related, Hailey said.
And while the company currently doesn’t accept insurance, many of the companies on the platform choose a price they want to charge their patients and then seek reimbursement from insurers from those costs, according to Hailey.
“There are very few patients that are paying cash. Our services in the home are what would come out of pocket,” Hailey said. Those fees vary by the licensure level of the visiting health care worker. An in-home COVID-19 test could be $40 and a phlebotomist providing a blood draw would cost about the same amount, said Hailey.
The company launched its service at the end of January and is seeking to expand its treatment options to more than just COVID-19 testing, but for now, it’s simply responding to market demand.
Hailey launched the business after spending a few years working at ZocDoc and then spending some time at Uber. What motivates Hailey and company co-founder Adam Stansell is providing similar concierge services at lower costs for a broader base of patients, Hailey said.
“The rich have access to in-home care can we make it economical enough so that we can bring it to everyone,” he said.
The last year of life under a global health pandemic has seen a massive surge of people working from home — a shift that has thrown a stark light on the iffy quality of our broadband networks. Today a startup called Plume — which has built a mesh-WiFi platform that helps optimize broadband connectivity and then uses it to deliver a range of smarter home services to some 22 million homes globally — is announcing a major funding round of $270 million that underscores the opportunity to fix that, and more.
“We’re the best at optimizing WiFi connectivity in the home, but that is not what we’re about,” said Fahri Diner, Plume’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We see it as the foundation. We cut our teeth on it but have gone way beyond that to services like advanced parental controls, secure access controls, which devices can access networks and what passwords they use. We focus on sophisticated security, which we believe will be the next big area that consumers will start paying attention to.
“The ultimate product for Plume is a comprehensive, cloud-driven platform that enables consumers to curate, manage and deliver these services. That’s what the company is about.”
The investment, a Series E, is coming from a single investor, Insight Partners, and values the company at $1.35 billion. This is a significant step up for the company, which almost exactly a year ago raised $85 million in a combination of equity and debt at a valuation of $510 million.
Unless you have been following the business of home broadband networking, you may not be familiar with the name Plume. But if you are not already be using it, chances are that you may be getting pitched a service using its technology, or will be soon.
The company, based out of Palo Alto, has deals in place with some 170 carriers around the globe that provide residential broadband services, reselling Plume’s mesh technology as a way to improve home WiFi connectivity — especially critical in older or bigger homes, and dwellings where you have many people connecting to and straining your broadband network — providing Plume-powered services like network security, parental access controls and motion awareness on top of that.
Plume brands those added services as HomePass, and on top of this it also provides a cloud-based operations tools to carriers, Haystack and Harvest, which help them with customer support, to manage their networks, glean better performance analytics and provide insights on customer usage and churn.
Plume also works with a number of big and less well-known hardware makers who design the routing devices and the processors and related software that power them.
Some of its customers, like Comcast, Charter, Qualcomm, Belkin, Cablevision, Liberty Global and Shaw Communications have become strategic investors in the company over the years, which speaks to its traction with the big players in the market. (It has raised $397 million to date.)
There have been a number of efforts over the years to improve WiFi in the home, from faster networks through to better routers and WiFi extenders.
Plume’s technology is based on one of those alternatives, mesh architecture — also used by others like Google in its Nest WiFi system — which uses a single router and then a series of nodes that operate as if they are a single device on the network (extenders by contrast use different SSIDs and passwords).
On top of the mesh architecture, Plume then runs a software-defined network to identify and better measure the traffic, using automation to, for example, then detect and fix when a device is on the network, may need more power to work properly, and so on.
In all, it appears that Plume has some 170 patents and patent applications in play to underpin what it has built.
It’s interesting to note that at one time Plume was compared to Eero, the mesh-based wifi router startup that was eventually acquired by Amazon, which now resells its routers as part of its own mesh WiFi solution.
But the two have some critical differences, based mainly on the business premise behind the two. As Diner points out, Plume’s service stack is based not around a router (as Eero’s primarily was) but on mesh technology that plus an open source silicon-to-cloud framework platform for building services to run on the mesh network that it calls OpenSync. This essentially allows service providers to build their own services on top of Plume’s mesh architecture.
(Diner, I should point out, has a pretty long-standing and deep understanding of what carriers need, what they actually use and also how they think. He himself trained as an engineer and worked in increasingly senior roles at a number of vendors at the cusp of when carriers were making their switch from legacy copper to fiber and optic networks. In the heyday of telecoms capital expenditures, he sold a previous company that he founded, Qtera, a pioneer in long-haul photonic networking solutions, to now-defunct Nortel for $3.2 billion. He’s also a long-standing investor and board member at a range of major next-generation communications vendors.)
In a telecoms world that has long fretted over the idea of being cannibalized and relegated to the role of a “dumb pipe”, it provides a way for those carriers to build services — apps, as it were — on top of that WiFi connectivity.
That existential crisis has been even more compounded as the promise of “triple play” — carriers selling voice, broadband and video services to their customers — has failed to deliver not least because no one is particularly interested in using or keeping their fixed landlines, and carriers have been completely outplayed on content by the giant rush of tech and media companies building their own, more attractive alternatives for consumers.
That has left carriers with a focus on broadband, which itself then gets commoditized on price, with everyone more or less offering the same speeds and reliability.
“How to differentiate?” is the question they all ask now, said Diner. Plume’s answer: “We differentiate inside the home, with a new bundle of services.”
Realistically, however, Diner points out that only the very biggest carriers (and not even all of them) might have the resources and appetite to do so. Of the 170 customers it has today, only five are building their own customized services on top of the platform, he said.
This is why Plume builds services that it white-labels and resells to carriers to sell on to consumers, and why those services have seen a lot of traction among those service providers. OpenSync, Plume says, now covers some 26 million access points and is seeing a sharp rise as more people fill out their homes with more equipment that they use throughout the day.
You might argue that those home services will also start to look too similar to each other as well, and so frankly the hope is that the open platform will eventually lead to more companies and services innovating around it.
In the meantime, it’s a win-win for Plume.
“Growth in the smart home category is exploding, but the quality of consumer experience has fallen short,” said Insight Partners Managing Director Ryan Hinkle, in a statement. “We are convinced that Plume, with its scalable cloud data platform approach, highly efficient go-to-market strategy, strong momentum, top-quartile financial performance across all SaaS KPIs – including revenue, growth rates, gross margin, efficiency and retention metrics – and world class team is transforming this category. We’re delighted to join and support this exciting journey.” Hinkle is joining Plume’s board with this round.
Anuvia Plant Nutrients has raised $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer technology.
The company, backed by investors like TPG ART, Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, Generate Capital andPiva Capital, is now ready to roll out its tech, which is already used on roughly 1200 farms and is projected to be on 20 million acres of farmland by 2025.
Now led by longtime agriculture executive Amy Yoder, who represents the sixth generation of a Michigan farm family, Anuvia pitches its tech as a supplement for crops that can boost productivity by taking excrement, food waste and agricultural processing waste and converting that into useful fertilizer using a proprietary catalytic process.
By treating the waste with a specific blend of chemicals Yoder said Anuvia’s technology can control the release of nutrients as plants grow to make more productive crops and reduce leaching into soil, protecting groundwater and restoring carbon to the soil.
Anuvia is one of a growing number of agriculture technology companies trying to juice crop productivity and capture carbon to provide additional revenues from more abundant crops and carbon capture and storage. Other startups, including Pivot Bio, Indigo Agriculture, AgBiome, and Agrinos, are all developing other crop treatments that can purportedly boost agricultural production.
“Most of what I see would be very complimentary to us,” said Yoder. “Because we put the carbon back into the soil, because the nutrients are held in different way. You could utilize the pivot technology and the Anuvia technology. Those things when they could piggyback together could make really nice solutions in the longterm.”
The Winter Garden, Fla.-based company has a 1.2 million ton facility for production, but the company wants to build out additional capacity and continue developing new fertilizers to take to market, Yoder said.
Farmers using the product see increased yields of around five times their previous production levels and the product can be used on all the main row crops, according to Yoder.
That claim has been verified by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), a leading global environmental consulting firm, versus traditional fertilizer on corn, rice, and cotton.
Anuvia’s treatment can also reduce greenhouse gases on production by up to 32% compared to commercial fertilizers. Anuvia estimates that its products could provide emissions reductions equivalent to removing 30,000 cars from roads. If the company can get farmers to apply its treatment to the 90 million acres of corn in the U.s. that would reduce the equivalent emissions of 1.8 million cars, according to a statement.
“With the world’s population expected to hit 10 billion by 2050, we need technology-enabled, large-scale agriculture to meet this growing demand,” says Dr. Geoff Duyk, Founder and Managing Partner of Circularis and Anuvia Board Member. “Anuvia’s technology will help farms continue to feed the world, while also advancing the circular economy, increasing sustainability, and enhancing resource efficiency.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/anuvia-raises-103-million-to-commercialize-its-novel-fertilizer/
