Demographic information of an area and the health of the economy are two of the four main determinants of the real estate market. Interest rates and government policy are the other two. Markerr is a real estate analytics and intelligence platform that layers both public and private data to provide insights into any real estate market. The company looks at factors like income levels, job growths, spending, and demographic profiles to empower commercial property owners, investors, and lenders to understand present and future rental rates. Markerr offers a dashboard that can analyze, in real-time, at the property level in addition to offering reports and data feeds. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO, Founder, and repeat entrepreneur Brian Lichtenberger to learn more about how data is used in strategic decision-making in the real estate industry, the company’s future plans, recent round of funding from investors that include RET Ventures, Continental Realty Corp, Matt Levin of Twin Shores Capital, Edward Norton, and Joe Lettween of Osso Capital.
Funded in New York
RIND Raises $6.1M for its Skin-On Dried Snack Fruit Brand
A large portion of the nutrients that are found in fruits and vegetables are found in the skin. The skin is a rich source of antioxidants, fiber, minerals, and vitamins. Yet many of us prefer to consume fruits without the peels. RIND is a skin-on dried fruit snack brand that offers chewy snacks. The company currently offers six flavors, all made from California-grown organic fruit, that are vegan, non-GMO, kosher, and gluten-free. RIND can be found direct-to-consumer through its website as well as distributed online through Amazon, HungryRoot, FreshDirect, Good Eggs, Hive Brands, and Imperfect Foods and in-person at ~100 locations like select Whole Foods and Juice Press throughout the city. Through the pandemic, the company was able to grow revenue 5x and now plans to launch its first dried fruit snack chip. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Matt Weiss to learn more about the benefits of skin-on dried fruit snacks, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding from investors that include Valor Siren Ventures and Melitas Ventures.
Gloat Raises $57M for its Talent Marketplace Platform That Allows Companies to Tap into Their Talent Pools More Effectively
The pandemic has tested the workforce resilience, agility, and capabilities to reshape our approach to the future of work. Organizations, now split across remote locations, need to understand the composition of their workforce, their skillset, and availability more so than ever before. Gloat is a talent marketplace platform for companies to manage, deploy, and grow their internal talent pools. By mapping a workforce’s talents, skills, and availability, managers now have access to a broader talent pool, diversifying teams, and allowing projects, initiatives, launches, open roles, mentorship programs, etc. to get staffed faster while keeping employees engaged. As the pandemic led to an acceleration in workforce management, Gloat was able to 5x its ARR and triple its headcount. Companies like Unilever, Schneider Electric, Novartis, and HDBC are users of the platform. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Ben Reuveni to learn more about the need for talent marketplaces, the company’s strategic plans, the latest round of funding from investors that include Accel, Eight Roads Ventures, Intel Capital, Magma Venture Partners, and PICO Partners.
UtilizeCore Raises $5.3M for its Building Service Management Platform and Marketplace
Service management has long been a staple of the IT industry, continuously pushing the industry forward to deliver better experiences and manage crises more efficiently. The real estate industry has also been using a service management model to respond to the needs of commercial/residential property owners and tenants but has been slower to adopt innovation. Addressing a $680B+ outsourced facilities management market, UtilizeCore is a building service management platform and marketplace for the real estate industry to automate many of the functions of service management. Similar to sites like Angie’s List, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor for residential homeowners, service management companies and building owners can use the SaaS platform free of cost to discover, hire, manage, and pay contractors to deliver services to buildings. The pandemic exposed the importance of being able to manage buildings virtually, leading to increased interest for UtilizeCore; the company now has 50K+ users that have completed more than 2M work orders. AlleyWatch caught up with the cofounders Jason Kwait (President), Ryan Gottfried (CEO), and Johnny Zhu (COO) to learn more about the company, its strategic plans, and recent found of funding from investors that include boldstart ventures, MANTIS Venture Capital (in partnership with The Chainsmokers), S12F, and key strategics.
Nate Raises Another $38M to Make Any Mobile Checkout Seamless
Despite the majority of web traffic coming from mobile devices, the cart abandonment rate on mobile devices is significantly higher than that of desktop; an astonishing 85.6% is the average mobile e-commerce cart abandonment rate. One of the most common causes cited by mobile shoppers is a frustrating checkout experience that’s cumbersome on mobile. Nate is a mobile checkout app that allows consumers to complete their purchase of items from any website with a few clicks. All you have to do is share any item on the Nate app and click buy to complete purchases in seconds. On the back end, Nate’s AI-powered technology completes the purchase process, leading to increased customer satisfaction as well as increased conversion for retailers. The company charges $1 per transaction and that includes the issuance of a virtual card used in the transaction, which ensures that the shopper’s data is protected. Nate also recently introduced its own buy it now, pay later option along with some other ancillary features like gifting, sharing, and social wish lists. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Albert Sangier to learn more about how Nate powers mobile commerce, the company’s strategic plans, and latest round of funding led by Renegade Partners with participation from Forerunner Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Coatue.
Ten Little Adds $5M For its Predictive E-Commerce Platform that Ensures Kids are Properly Sized When it Comes to Shoes and Accessories
Early childhood is one of the stages of life where growth is rapid and this makes it difficult for parents to keep up with what size their child should currently be wearing, especially when it comes to shoes. Two out of three kids are wearing the wrong shoe size. Ten Little is an e-commerce platform that lets parents buy the perfect shoes for their kids from a curated assortment of tested brands and the company’s own direct-to-consumer line of shoes. The company has built a predictive data platform that tracks children’s growth and alerts parents when to consider replacing shoes based on age-specific development patterns. Initially focused on footwear, the company has expanded its product line to include socks and accessories including hats and sunglasses. The physician-recommended shoes start a very reasonable $39/pair. Through the pandemic, the company has been able to maintain a 50% MoM growth rate, serving more than 100,000 families. AlleyWatch caught up with Cofounder and CEO Fatma Collins to learn more about the company, the challenges of managing a global supply chain through the pandemic, future plans, and latest round of funding from investors that include Kindred Ventures and NextView Ventures.
Thirty Madison Raises $140M to Make the Treatment of Chronic Conditions Accessible
45% of Americans have at least one chronic condition with a total cost of $3.7T per year. The most common form of treatment is medication. Thirty Madison is a healthcare company that helps people with chronic conditions access high-quality virtual treatment options provided by specialists. The company operates a growing family of brands that address a number of common treatable conditions. Among them are Keeps (hair loss), Cove (migraines), Even (gastrointestinal conditions), and Picnic (allergies). In 2020, the company tripled its revenue, serving hundreds of thousands of patients across its various lines, fulfilling the accelerated demand for telehealth solutions in the wake of the pandemic. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Steven Gutentag to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plan, the latest round of funding from investors that include HealthQuest Capital, Mousse Partners, Bracket Capital, Polaris Partners, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Northzone, Greycroft, and others.
ChartHop Raises $35M to Help a Company Better Understand Its Most Important Resource: Its People
The evolution of a successful company involves a typical storyline that goes from the founding team focusing on product and growth at the earliest stages to the founders’ roles transitioning to storytelling and finding, engaging, and retaining the right talent after product-market-fit is established. Initially, with a small team, it’s more manageable for management to understand employee capabilities, motivation, and how these align with the company’s goals long-term and short. ChartHop is an organizational management platform that provides unprecedented and automated insight into a company’s talent pool at a holistic level, enabling companies to effectively manage, understand, and visualize the organizational structure as they scale. The platform integrates with a growing number of HR data providers to seamlessly enable organizational decision-making for things like tying compensation directly to performance data or tracking the effectiveness of DE&I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) efforts. The company now has 130+ corporate customers and has grown revenue 500% over the last year, attracting its third round of funding in the last 18 months.AlleyWatch caught up with CEO, Founder, and serial entrepreneur Ian White to learn more about how ChartHop has built the ultimate people analytics platform, the company’s strategic plans, and latest round of funding from investors that include ChartHop raised a $35M Series B round. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Elad Gil, and previous investors Cowboy Ventures and SemperVirens.
Nomad Data Raises $1.6M to Help Businesses Navigate the Data Market to Ensure They are Using the Right Data Sets
Businesses spent $187B on big data and analytics in 2019. The amount of data subject to data analysis will grow to 5.2 zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes) by 2025. Data-driven businesses are expected to take $1.8T annually from organizations that are less reliant on data. Organizations need to integrate data into their operations to remain competitive and drive intelligent decision-making. But how do you figure out what second and third-party data to use? Nomad Data, a search engine for data sets, makes answering this very query a seamless process through automation. Prior to Nomad Data, seeking out data providers to fulfill your data requirements was inefficient and extremely time-consuming with the possibility that there may be questions about the data’s quality. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Brad Schneider to learn more about how Nomad flips the data market to the end-user from the data provider, the company’s strategic plans, and recent round of funding from investors that include Bloomberg Beta, Alumni Ventures, Great Oaks Ventures, Correlation Ventures, DataFrame Ventures, and a number of data-industry expert angel investors.
Verbit Raises $157M for its Transcription and Captioning Platform Powered by AI
Transcription is one of the many areas where technology has impacted the future of work. First, global outsourcing sent transcription work to countries with language proficiency and low-cost wages. Now, deep-learning technologies such as AI and natural language processing are bringing automation to the industry. Verbit is an AI-powered transcription and captioning platform that leverages natural language processing and machine learning to deliver transcription that’s faster, more accurate, and less costly than previously possible. However, the platform isn’t completely dependent on technology as it operates a hybrid model with 30,000+ professional transcribers to review the accuracy of the transcriptions and captions as AI still can’t always correctly discern the reality of human dialogues in terms of context and common sense. Verbit is able to filter out background noises and detect domain-specific terminology, which is useful for compliance with industry-specific regulations. The depth of the technical stack also allows for captioning live audio and video in real-time. The company is just shy of a $100M ARR with ~70% margins. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Tom Livne to learn more about how his experience as an attorney working with transcription led him to found Verbit, the company’s path towards IPO, latest round of funding from investors that include Sapphire Ventures, Third Point, More Capital, Omer Cygler, Azura, and ICON fund, Stripes, Vertex Ventures and Vertex Growth, HV Capital, Oryzn Capital, Viola Ventures, and ClalTech.
LetsGetChecked Raises Another $150M to Expand its Virtual Healthcare Services
The pandemic has reshaped the future of remote healthcare as accessibility to healthcare became paramount, leading to accelerated digital adoption. In fact, 23.6% of all healthcare interactions were via telehealth during the first four months of the pandemic, up from just .3% for the same period in 2019. LetsGetChecked is a virtual healthcare company that initially started by providing at-home diagnostic testing for the treatment and diagnoses of several ailments like sexual health, cholesterol, diabetes, and even COVID. Building on the 100+ at-home tests, the company has now expanded into telemedicine consultations and pharmaceutical fulfillment for these conditions. Through the pandemic, LetsGetChecked managed to grow revenue by more than 1500% as a result of increased interest in virtual care. AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Peter Foley to learn more about how his own experience as a patient inspired the business, the impressive traction that led to the company reaching unicorn status, latest funding round from investors that include Casdin Capital, CommonFund Capital, Illumina Ventures, Optum Ventures, Transformation Capital, HLM Venture Partners, and Qiming Venture Partners USA, and Rory Mcllroy through Symphony Ventures.