Microbes are essential to all life on earth and, in fact, the most dominant form of life on Earth. The study of microbes has historically advanced society in numerous ways such as the creation of the first smallpox vaccine, identifying the causes of cholera, tuberculosis, and anthrax, and the discovery of penicillin. Today, microbes in controlled settings can improve healthcare, food production, and agricultural output. Kingdom Supercultures is a designer and supplier of microbial strains that are naturally found in food. By using experimental and computational approaches for formulation, the company is able to provide the raw ingredients for use in manufacturing plant-based food, fermented beverages, and personal care products. There are over 6000 food additives – flavoring, glazing agents, bleaching agents, improvers, etc. – that are used to process foods that we’re told are harmless but, in reality, are anything but and never found in natural food. Kingdom Supercultures offers a viable substitute, at scale, to these ingredients to ensure that the future of food production and consumer goods is with real, natural ingredients, free of manipulation and processing aids. AlleyWatch caught up with Kingdom Supercultures CEO and Cofounder Kendall Dabaghi to learn more about the company’s ambition mission to reframe the way we think about food production, strategic plans, latest found of funding from investors that include Shine Capital. In addition to Shine Capital, this funding round was supported by Valor, Tao, Lux, SALT, Reference, and Digitalis
Alley Showdown
Correlated Raises $8.3M to Power Software Sales Teams with Customer Interaction Data
Knowing your customer is one of the core tenets of any business. For digital businesses, knowing your customer interactions with your software is critical. In a SaaS-dominated world, sales strategy largely focuses on providing free trials with the hopes that a certain percentage converts to paid customers without considering any feedback from the customer or customer behavior. Correlated calls itself a “Product Led Revenue Platform” that lets software companies track and understand exactly how their customers are interacting with their product, providing them with contextual insight on when and how best to convert trial users into paying customers based on the customer’s specific circumstances. Previously, sales teams have relied on using sets of disparate and rudimentary tools to monitor a customer’s behavior but Correlated is one of the first platforms to centralize and formalize this sales enablement function in real-time. The platform integrates with sales technology stacks with a few clicks, supporting Hubspot, Salesforce, Snowflake, Segment, Slack, Outreach, and others. Similar to Zapier, Correlated can trigger corresponding actions in these platforms based on when pre-established conditions are met based on user behavior. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO Tim Geinsenheimer to learn more about how the founding team’s experience at a number of high-growth New York startups inspired the idea for Correlated, the company’s launch out of beta, future plans, recent funding round from investors that include Harrison Metal, NextView Ventures, Apollo Projects, Brian Long, Andrew Jones, Ben Darnell, and Pete Kazanjy.
Diggs Raises $13M for its Design-Centric Pet Products Business
Pet adoption soared during the pandemic, increasing 34% year over year. As the world returns to semi-normalcy, many of these new pet owners will be spending less time at home. As a result, the 63.4M households that have dogs in the US will need to sequester their furry loved ones. Diggs is a pet products company that offers a signature, modern dog crate, Revol, with dog comfort in mind. Revol, which starts at $245, is a collapsible dog crate that making it easy to store and travel with. The designed-focused company also offers crate training accessories and memory foam crate beds. Diggs grew revenue 400% in 2020. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Zel Crampton to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans for new products, and recent round of funding from investors that include Venn Growth Partners and Strand Equity.
Conducto Raises $3M for its CI/CD Toolkit to Power Workflow Automation
Conducto is one of the newest tools that’s being used by engineers to automate workflows and simplify complex CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) and data pipelines. Conducto’s pipeline toolkit allows engineers to define their pipeline in Python instead of a configuration language, is easy to visualize as a pipeline scale with more tasks with the use of a tree structure, and is also easy to debug. For companies, adopting CI/CD enables them to reduce costs, innovate faster, experiment more, and improve the quality, security, and deployment of their software. The company’s technology is battle-tested as it was used by hundreds of traders at the cofounders’ previous company. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Jonathan Marcus to learn about the technology, the company’s launch, and recent funding round.
Pepper Raises $2M for Bras Designed for Small Chest Sizes
“We didn’t match the same patterns as many of the direct to consumer startups you see today that raised a lot of money early on and had high burn rates. We have been serendipitously building the business in a way that would help us weather the current storm: our team has always been lean with just 3 full-time employees, geographically distributed and remote (which investors initially questioned our ability to build a fast-growing DTC startup this day), and have burned very little over the last few years.”
Women in NYC Tech: Sophie Kahn of AUrate
Are you a woman in NYC Tech and interested in participating in this series? Make sure to read the whole article… Much has been said and written about the lack of women in the tech sector, be it as investors (or associates), founders, or in management positions at major companies. Is the problem the old […]
How This NYC Startup Raised $18.6M to Revitalize The Fragrance Industry
Perfume shopping is all about exploring new products and scents, but when people go fragrance shopping, playing with new scents is far from encouraged. People feel pressured to purchase an entire costly bottle of perfume or cologne, which causes them to stick to the scents they know and trust, leaving little room for discovering something […]
No One Likes Workplace Drama and This NYC Startup is Getting Rid of It
The workplace has its disputes — some uglier than others. When tensions are high and you need a way to address a sticky situation, you need Bravely at your side. It’s an on-demand conflict coaching and communication guidance platform tailored to the workplace. Billing itself as Urgent Care for HR, Bravely provides advice to manage uncomfortable […]
Women in NYC Tech: Amy Inlow of Albert
Today we speak with the award winning marketer and CMO at Albert, Amy Inlow. Formerly the CMO at Tracx, Amy has successfully brought AI marketing to…
Women in NYC Tech: Michelle Bacharach of FINDMINE
Are you a woman in NYC Tech and interested in participating in this series? Make sure to read the whole article… Much has been said and written about the lack of women in the tech sector, be it as investors (or associates), founders, or in management positions at major companies. Is the problem the old […]
Women in NYC Tech: Erika Mozes of Hyr
Today we hear from entrepreneur Erika Mozes and her journey to cofounding Hyr, the hiring and staffing platform. Beginning a career as a lobbyist Erika found herself working for large corporations like Coca-Cola an McDonalds before eventually moving to NYC to start Hyr.