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Discovery and research of new molecular compounds is an expensive business, with development costs exceeding $10 billion per substance in some cases. Part of that comes from the need to closely examine every relevant molecule, studying its chemical composition and interactions as well as its physical structure at the atomic level. Despite advances in software to help model these compounds and molecules, there are still challenges in fully understanding their shapes through a two-dimensional computer screen.
San Diego-based startup Nanome uses virtual reality to solve that problem. The idea for Nanome came out of CEO and Founder Steve McCloskey’s time in the nanoengineering program at UC San Diego, where he saw a need for a better understanding of three-dimensional molecular structures.
“Understanding structure empowers our users to understand how their designs function,” he wrote in an email. “Yet, the R&D process for drug discovery relies on 2D monitors, keyboard, and mouse, which limits the understanding of complex 3D structures or interactions and contributes to massive R&D costs averaging $2.5B per drug.”
Nanome recently closed a funding round led by Bullpen Capital for $3 million to establish new business partnerships, build up the company’s brand, and expand their science and engineering team. “Nanome is reimagining the way we interact with science at a time when innovation in collaboration is more important than ever before,” said Bullpen Capital General Partner Ann Lai in a press release. Formic Ventures, led by Oculus co-founder Michael Antonov, also took part in the round.
McCloskey thinks that Nanome’s platform has become even more relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, as researchers might be forced to work remotely on occasion, limiting their access to in-lab technology and software.
“Nanome helps scientists get on the same page quicker,” he wrote in an email. “Traditionally scientists working with molecules use screenshots or screen sharing, and rely on the mouse cursor and Zoom to communicate their insights and ask for feedback from other team members.” Nanome streamlines this process by bringing researchers to the same virtual reality space to work on molecule development together.
So far, Nanome has worked largely on projects with companies in the food and beverage industry, as well as another to develop more sustainable batteries. But they have plans to use this new funding to expand into pharmaceutical chemistry, synthetic biology, and even education. Their next product update will feature what McCloskey calls ‘Spatial Recording,’ that will allow users to record their work for later review – basically a screen recording but with a VR experience. “This is not only an amazing feature for asynchronous collaboration among researchers, it is also useful for producing lectures and lessons,” he wrote in an email.
Emergency response services have been one of the unsung heroes of the last chaotic year, providing essential and urgent medical and other assistance during a period that has faced not just the usual run of natural and man-made disasters, but a global health pandemic to boot.
Today, a startup that is building tools to make it easier for emergency response teams to do their jobs by providing them with more immediate data about callers and their circumstances, is announcing a big round of funding as it continues to grow.
RapidSOS, which has built a data platform for emergency response services, has closed a Series C of $85 million, money that it will be using to build in more integrations to provide its customers with better and bigger data sets, and to continue expanding its operations after providing data to assist in addressing some 150 million emergencies in 2020 — which works out to some 400,000 emergencies per day.
These included not just responses to sudden downturns for Covid-19-stricken people, but also natural disasters and helping in related situations when other problems arose. For example, RapidSOS stepped in to provide data when the Nashville bombing took out a portion of 911 infrastructure on Christmas Day, affecting 300 agencies.
The round is being led by Insight, with other unnamed investors participating. Valuation is not being disclosed, CEO and co-founder Michael Martin said, but it has now raised $200 million.
The round comes also on the heels of the company raising $21 million just in June of last year.
Founded in New York, RapidSOS has expanded in the last year to operations in Mexico, where it now covers some 70% of consumers working alongside first responders and partnerships with Google and Uber (which provide location and ride sharing data).
To add to that, today it is formally opening for business in the U.K., in partnership with MedicAlert, which has been working with the company quietly in the past year.
The opportunity it’s tackling in the U.K. is similar to what RapidSOS identified and built on in the U.S.
As in RapidSOS’s home country, the average U.K. home has 9 connected devices — from smartphones, smart watches and smart speakers, through to smart locks, alarm systems and more — and the idea will be to bring more of the data that these amass about a user’s location, medical statistics, and other data to provide a basic level of data so that when people call 999 (the U.K.’s equivalent of 911) for an urgent service, the conversation can quickly progress to finer details in what is a very fragmented market for emergency information.
“Generally, you are going from a world where 911 didn’t even know your name, so giving responders a name or location can shave critical seconds off response times,” said Martin.
In the U.S., RapidSOS now works with over 4,800 emergency communications centers, which together cover some 92% of the population, integrating with whatever software those centers happen to use to manage their services. (Case in point: we covered one of RapidSOS’s partners recently, Carbyne, which itself raised $25 million last month.)
On the other end of its ingestion engine, the startup’s platform currently brings in and consolidates data from some 350 million connected devices.
Martin likes to compare the challenge that RapidSOS is setting out to tackle to that of an hour glass.
“There are now close to 20 billion devices out there with critical information, and at the bottom is advanced software systems to work with that, but between is the 1960s voice infrastructure,” he said, holding up a giant blue sand hourglass in our video call. “So the challenge is to get between one and the other, but also to be able to get on the phone with someone in need and have a coherent conversation.”
His startup sits where the sand normally gets squeezed, and essentially provides an avenue not just to expand that opening but theoretically organise the sand to run through it in a more orderly way.
Indeed, the company is doing more than just connecting providers with data: it’s also trying to build a platform to make it easier for more of the companies holding data to contribute it in a more effective and useful way — a need that arose, Martin said, in the last year as companies approached RapidSOS asking how they could help.
That led to the startup working with the American Heart Association, the American Red Cross and Direct Relief, to launch the Emergency Health Profile, which will allow people (starting in the U.S.) to opt into sharing more background health information to first responders by creating a profile associated with a person’s mobile number.
This complement’s RapidSOS’s existing business model and sources of real-time diagnostic data, with the aim to provide a more complete picture of a person and his or her problems. As we have said before, this is something of a Holy Grail in the medical world: it provides obvious benefits but also many challenges in terms of data protection and privacy longer term, one of the reasons why it has remained so elusive — and may indeed pose a challenge to RapidSOS and its partners in the longer term.
That, however, is the kind of problem that precisely can be attacked (if not necessarily completely vanquished) by technology, one reason why VCs have been knocking.
“Insight has a history of backing category-defining companies, and RapidSOS has all the makings of one in the emergency response space,” said Nikitas Koutoupes, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “We are excited to have our team of software ScaleUp and platform experts help drive RapidSOS’ mission.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/rapidsos-raises-85m-for-its-emergency-response-data-platform/
French startup Homa Games has raised a $15 million seed round led by e.ventures and Idinvest Partners. The company has built several in-house technologies that can take a game from a prototype to an App Store success. It partners with third-party game studios and has a few in-house game studios as well.
OneRagtime, Jean-Marie Messier, Vladimir Lasocki, John Cheng and Alexis Bonillo are also participating in today’s funding round. This is quite a big funding round, but Homa Games already has some impressive metrics.
For instance, the startup’s games have been downloaded 250 million times overall since the creation of the company in 2018. It has signed an IP partnership with Hasbro to launch a Nerf-themed game that has been working quite well. Other games include Sky Roller, Idle World and Tower Color.
Home Games has developed three products in particular to optimize mobile game creation. Homa Lab helps you learn more about the competitive landscape with market intelligence and testing tools. Homa Belly is an SDK that helps you iterate and manage your game. And Homa Data optimizes monetization using data for both in-app purchases and ads.
Third-party developers can submit their games and choose Homa Games as their publisher. Both companies agree on a revenue-sharing model.
In addition to third-party games, Homa Games has also acquired IRL Team in Toulouse and has in-house game development teams in Skopje, Lisbon and Paris. Overall, there are 80 people working for Homa Games.
Benoist Grossmann from Idinvest Partners and Jonathan Userovici from e.ventures are both joining the board of the company.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/hyper-casual-game-publisher-homa-games-raises-15-million/
Soon, your cloud photo backups could reside on beams of light transmitted between satellites instead of in huge, power-hungry server farms here on Earth. Startup LyteLoop has spent the past five years doing tackling the physics challenges that can make that possible, and now it’s raised $40 million to help it leapfrog the remaining engineering hurdles to make its bold vision a reality.
LyteLoop’s new funding will provide it with enough runway to achieve its next major milestone: putting three prototype satellites equipped with its novel data storage technology into orbit within the next three years. The company intends to build and launch six of these, which will demonstrate how its laser-based storage medium operates on orbit.
I spoke to LyteLoop CEO Ohad Harlev about the company’s progress, technology and plans. Harlev said five years into its founding, the company is very confident in the science that underlies its data storage methods – and thrilled about the advantages it could offer over traditional data warehousing technology used today. Security, for instance, gets a big boost from LyteLoop’s storage paradigm.
“Everybody on every single data center has the same same possible maximum level of data security,” he said. “We can provide an extra four layers of cyber security, and they’re all physics-based. Anything that can be applied on Earth, we can apply in our data center, but for example, the fact that we’re storing data on photons, we could put in quantum encryption, which others can’t. Plus, there are big security benefits because the data is in motion, in space, and moving at the speed of light.”
On top of security, LyteLoop’s model also offers benefits when it comes to privacy, because the data it’s storing is technically always in transit between satellites, which means it’ll be subject to an entirely different set of regulations vs. those that come into play when you’re talking about data which is warehoused on drives in storage facilities. LyteLoop also claims advantages in terms of access, because the storage and the network are one in the same, with the satellites able to provide their information to ground stations anywhere on Earth. Finally, Harlev points out that it’s incredibly power efficient, and also ecologically sound in terms of not requiring million of gallons of water for cooling, both significant downsides of our current data center storage practices.
On top of all of that, Harlev says that LyteLoop’s storage will not only be cost-competitive with current cloud-based storage solutions, but will in fact be more affordable – even without factoring in likely decreases to come in launch costs as SpaceX iterates on its own technology and more small satellite launch providers, including Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab, come online and expand their capacity.
“Although it’s more expensive to build and launch the satellite, it is still a lot cheaper to maintain them in the space,” he said. “So when we do a total cost of ownership calculation, we are cheaper, considerably cheaper, on a total cost of ownership basis. However […] when we compare what the actual users can do, you know, we can definitely go to completely different pricing model.”
Harlev is referring to the possibility of bundled pricing for combining storage and delivery – other providers would require that you supply the network, for instance, in order to move the data you’re storing. LyteLoop’s technology could also offset existing spend on reducing a company’s carbon footprint, because of its much-reduced ecological impact.
The company is focused squarely on getting its satellites to market, with a plan to take its proof of concept and expand that to a full production satellite roughly five years form now, with an initial service offering made available at that time. But LyteLoop’s tech could have equally exciting applications here on Earth. Harlev says that if you created a LyteLoop data center roughly the size of a football field, it would be roughly 500 times as efficient at storing data vs. traditional data warehousing.
The startup’s technology, which essentially stores data on photons instead of physical media, just requires far less matter than do our current ways of doing things, which not only helps its environmental impact, but which also makes it a much more sensible course for in-space storage when compared to physical media. The launch business is all about optimizing mass to orbit in order to reduce costs, and as Harlev notes, photons are massless.
SplashLearn, a 10-year-old U.S.-headquartered edtech startup that teaches children through a game-based curriculum, has raised $18 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more markets.
San Francisco-based Owl Ventures led the Series C funding round in SplashLearn, and Accel, which had earlier invested $7 million in the startup’s Series B, also participated in the new round.
In an interview with TechCrunch, SplashLearn co-founder and chief executive Arpit Jain said one of the biggest hurdles the education system faces today is that kids do not wish to learn, so you have to broach the subject in a way they find engaging.
His startup offers math and reading courses to students in pre-kindergarten to grade five. It has developed, with guidance from teachers and other experts, over 4,000 games and other interactive activities to explain various concepts to the children.
In a demo, Jain showed an adventure game that was riddled with hurdles. A kid needed to visually apply the concept of addition to progress forward in the game. “When the kids are engaged, there is improvement in their learning outcome,” said Jain.
SplashLearn platform additionally provides 15 minutes to 20 minutes of personalized learning experience to each student every day, he said.
The startup charges $12 a month to parents for its service. Alternatively, the service is free for schools. Currently, one in every three schools in the United States use SplashLearn, Jain said.
“One of our goals has been to make quality education available to students for free. Our business model has enabled us to work on this,” he said. SplashLearn doesn’t reach out to schools, he said. Teachers use our platform, and if they like the offering, they make the case for wider adoption at the school, said Jain, who like the other three co-founders, is an alumni of IIT Kharagpur.
Image: SplashLearn
The team first created an edtech platform that was similar to what Coursera has evolved into over the past decade. But their previous venture failed to gain traction as the Indian market, which had fewer than 50 million internet users then, wasn’t ready for it, said Jain.
SplashLearn today caters to more than 40 million registered students on its platform, 10 million of whom joined last year as the coronavirus shut schools worldwide. More than 750,000 teachers have also joined the platform.
The startup is currently largely serving students in the United States, which accounts for 80% of its revenue. But students from over 150 other markets, including the UK, Australia, Canada and India use the platform today.
“SplashLearn is well poised to bring about a distinct change in the digital learning space with its unique blend of scientifically designed curriculum and its pedagogical methods with global appeal. SplashLearn fits into our objective of supporting innovative companies in the edtech space, helping drive a paradigm shift in the way education is imparted, bringing it to scale,” said Amit A. Patel Managing Director, Owl Ventures, in a statement. Patel is joining the SplashLearn’s board along with Abhinav Chaturvedi, a partner at Accel.
Last year, SplashLearn also started a tutoring service for kids, where teachers teach a group of three to five students. This service costs $10 to $25 an hour. “Even at this cost, we are offering the service at a fraction of what it would cost students in a private tuition,” he said.
The tutoring service is currently available in the U.S., and Jain said the startup plans to grow it within the country this year.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/splashlearn-raises-18-million-for-its-game-based-edtech-platform/
