Salman Sarfraz

Eight Sleep – Healthy Sleep Technology Raises $40M

Starting as a smart bed cover under the name of Luna and now evolving into a sleep fitness company offering smart beds and accessories for healthy sleep, Eight Sleep (formerly known as Eight and one of our portfolio startups) has also went through a Series C round and raised $40M of funding. Eight Sleep raised $5M and $14M in Series A & B respectively and collectively with recent Series C, Eight Sleep’s total funding amount has reached $70.1M.

The funding round was led by Founders Fund in participation with old investors: Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, 8VC, Y Combinator and Kevin Hartz. Moreover, Ryan Petersen has also joined as a new investor in this round.

With the additional $40 million, the company plans to invest heavily in scientific research and development as well as workforce and retail growth. They plan to launch a scientific trial with Stanford University focused on the effects of temperature regulation on sleep using Eight Sleep products, and are currently conducting studies with Mount Sinai and UCSF. They aim to double their team of 50—bringing their New York-based workforce to 100—as soon as possible. Though the company operates largely direct-to-consumer, they’re bringing the slumber party to a showroom at San Fransisco’s B8ta, building on the success of their exhibition space at New York’s Showfields and foreshadowing their larger retail strategy.

The company currently sells tech-enabled mattresses, pillows, blue-light filtering glasses and bed frames. Their signature product “the Pod” starts at $2,295, a competitive price for a premium mattress, features a heating and cooling system, and is compatible with the Eight Sleep app, which workshops sleep success through analytical reporting, exercises and more. Zatarain says that 84% of Eight Sleep’s customers who sleep cool on the Pod report improved sleep. And Pod fans apparently include some of the top names in performance: 12-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte, Cleveland Browns wide receiver Jarvis Landry and supermodel Coco Rocha.

For lead investor Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, the reason to invest in Eight Sleep (and join the board of directors), was the major improvement in his sleep with an Eight Sleep Pod. “Rather than fixing economics of mattress industry, Eight Sleep is actually thinking of sleep as a fitness category–something that can be enhanced with the use of technology,” says Stephens who strayed from his govtech investment vertical for Eight Sleep due to personal satisfaction with the product.

Please read the full story at Forbes.

Salman Sarfraz

Algolia – Search-as-a-Service for Websites and Apps Raises $110M

Algolia, one of our fastest growing portfolio startups has bagged a whooping $110M funding in a Series C round led by Accel in participation with Salesforce Ventures. With 8000 customers and 70 billion queries served per month, Algolia is massively growing to become one of the biggest hosted search APIs in the market.

Since its seed funding in 2014, Algolia went through its Series A and B rounds which summed up to a funding of $74.22M but after this recent Series C, Algolia’s total funding amount has increased to $184.2M.

There you go Algolia! Keep up the good work.

Having Salesforce as a strategic backer in this round is notable, as the CRM giant has only made smaller steps into search: a tool launched last month to search better on Salesforce services, and some discovery and search features in its Commerce Cloud. But there is no native search product equivalent to what Algolia does, with Salesforce instead opting for endorsed integrations with third parties, such as Algolia competitor Coveo. The plan will be for Algolia to integrate with Salesforce to continue expanding what it’s doing in Commerce Cloud with search, although there are no products to speak of as of yet

“Algolia has been a great search innovator and delivers unique experiences for customers across Commerce,” said Mike Micucci, CEO, Salesforce Commerce Cloud. “Algolia’s integration into the Commerce Cloud platform will continue to drive momentum and mutual success with our developer, partner and customer community.”

“We have no plans to build a consumer service,” CEO Nicolas Dessaigne said. “There are a lot of companies like Amazon and Google doing a great job. We like to think of them as partners in a way, educating the whole world about search.”

“Behind a world-class team of search experts and a passionate customer base, Algolia has become the market leader in Search-as-a-Service,” said Nate Niparko, partner at Accel. “Algolia is accelerating innovation in personalized and intelligent search, enabling companies to deliver a great user experience that drives improved business results. We are excited to double down on Algolia and support their mission to lead the search and discovery market.”

Please read the full story at TechCrunch.

Mathew Vandervoort

Pesto – Career Accelerator for Software Engineers

Pesto

Pesto is an intensive training program to help software engineers in India break into international tech careers via full-time remote jobs.

Co-founders Ayush Jaiswal and Andrew Linfoot originally met in a co-working space and realised the disparity between software engineer remuneration in India and the US.

Now they are on a mission to give everyone equal access to opportunity, regardless of where they were born.

Today we are focusing on upskilling India’s 5 million software engineers and pairing them with the worlds top tech companies.

Pesto works by providing training with zero upfront cost to students. Once the students complete the training and get hired, they pay a portion of their income to Pesto under an Income Share Agreement.

After gaining initial traction and focusing on the quality of business, the team is now focused on increasing the frequency of batches to help more students.

Zillionize was lucky to get the opportunity to invest in Pesto and we look forward to helping them on their mission. For more details, check out https://www.pesto.tech/.

Salman Sarfraz

ReadMe – an Interactive API Documentation Platform Raises $9M

ReadMe, a company allowing its customers to build custom API documentation and provide personalized support to users by tracking API usage has raised $9M in a Series A round led by Accel in partiticpation with Y Combinator. After this round, ReadMe’s total funding amount has reached $10.1M.

Prior to today’s funding announcement, the company had taken just a $1.2 million seed round in 2014. Today, it reports 3,000 paying customers and that it has been profitable for the last several years, an unusual position for a startup. In spite of this success, co-founder and CEO Gregory Koberger said as the company has taken on larger customers, they have more sophisticated requirements, and that prompted them to take this round of funding.

In addition, it has expanded the platform to use a company’s API logs to help create more dynamic documentation and improve customer support kinds of scenarios. But by taking on data from other companies, it needs to make sure the data is secure, and today’s funding will help in that regard.

“We’re going to still build the company traditionally by hiring more engineers, more support people, more designers, the obvious stuff, but the main impetus for doing this was that we started working with bigger companies with more secure data. So a lot of the money is going to help make sure that we handle that right,” Koberger explained.

Please read full story at TechCrunch.

Mathew Vandervoort

Vitau – Your Intelligent Pharmacy

Vitau

Vitau are an intelligent pharmacy that takes care of patients suffering from chronic illnesses by sending their medications monthly. They also help with insurance reimbursements so that customers do not need to waste time at the pharmacy or doing paperwork.

Zillionize recently invested in the startup after they launched in Mexico and recently participated in YCombinator S19.

Co-founder and CEO, Tuto Assad, knows the pain and requirements of receiving regular medication after being diagnosed with diabetes from a long age. Vitau’s easy to use subscription service helps simplify the process.

For more information and to check out the fast growing online pharmacy visit https://vitau.mx/.

Mathew Vandervoort

Blair – Better Student Financing

Blair

Blair allows students to finance their tuition or costs of living. After they graduate, they pay back a percentage of their income for a fixed period of time.

Zillionize has recently invested in Blair and looks forward to seeing the team provide flexibility to college students through their Income Share Agreements.

Blair was founded by a strong team with personal experience with Income Share Agreements and well aware of the rising student debt crisis.

The team compared the options available in the US to the options available in Germany, where Income Share Agreements are common, and could see a gap in the market.

They launched out of YCombinator S19 and since the launch have been featured on TechCrunch, Forbes and many other media sites.

In addition to providing finance for college students, Blair provides an investment opportunity for accredited investors seeking to combine social impact and financial returns:

Blair offers an opportunity to invest in selected university students on basis of a fair, proven and frequently requested business model.

For more information check out https://joinblair.com/.

Mathew Vandervoort

spotLESS Materials – Keep your glass clean

Spotless Materials

Founded by PhDs Birgitt Boschitsch Stogin and Tak-Sing Wong in May 2018 spotLESS Materials provides easy to use surface coating products.

Our coatings stand out in their ease of application and in sludge repellency, but are also highly effective at repelling water and other substances as well.

Zillionize is a proud investor of this startup aiming to leverage their mechanical and materials expertise to address sticky problems.

Currently they are doing this by commercialising their super slippery, liquid-,sludge-, and bacteria-repellent bio-inspired self-healing surface coating.

The team initially targeted sanitation and have expanded beyond that to a product suitable for outdoor studios, the automotive industry and at home.  They have received a number of grants, awards and also completed YC S19.

We are looking forward to seeing spotLESS Materials address sticky problems with their slippery solutions. For more details check out https://www.spotlessmaterials.com/.

Mathew Vandervoort

Zippi.com.br – Loans for Gig Workers in Brazil

Zippi.com.br

Zippi is an online lending startup revolutionising financial services for gig workers.

After recently graduating from YC S19 the fully compliant neobank has started providing finance to drivers in Brazil.

Unlike traditional loans, repayments are flexible and based on the recipients income with affordable interest.

The strong team hope to help Latin America’s 30M+ gig workers.

Zillionize is delighted to have invested in Zippi and looks forward to see them disrupt traditional lending with tailored solutions for an under-served market.

For more details check out https://www.zippi.com.br/

Mathew Vandervoort

Brave Care – Excellent Urgent Care for Kids

BraveCare

Zillionize is thrilled to be supporting health care for children through its recent investment in Brave Care.

Brave Care is a pediatric focused urgent care clinic which provides a service in between a child’s regular doctor and emergency situations.

The YC backed startup’s first flagship clinic is on Sandy Blvd NE Portland and is open 7 days a week. It is capable of treating a wide range of common and no so common illnesses. They offer onsite x-ray, fracture care, mild nasal sedation for uncomfortable procedures, stitches, and tissue glue for minor wounds.

Brave Care was founded by a strong team of Corey Fish (CMO) , Darius Monsef (CEO), Maryam Taheri (COO) and Asa Miller (CTO) after a personal experience of pediatric urgent care brought them together:

BraveCare have recently closed a $5 million seed round of funding and Zillionize was proud to be apart of this round.

The funding will allow Brave Care to open new lightweight facilities in the Portland area that can help provide support to the main facility. It will also allow improvements to their electronic health records system.

For more details on Brave Care, head to https://www.bravecare.com/.

 

Mathew Vandervoort

Taskade – The Unified Workspace

Taskade

Taskade is a next generation team productivity and workflow management tool. It provides a unified workspace and allows team members to chat, write and get work done.

Founders John Xie, Dionis Liore and Stan Chang recently announced that they have raised $5m on the back of graduating from YC S19.

Zillionize is thrilled to have invested in Taskade’s raise and look forward to being apart of their journey to revolutionize team productivity.

Taskade helps teams stay competitive in this modern environment by cutting down the friction in planning, decision making, so teams can focus on doing.

https://www.taskade.com/about

Taskade allows you to keep track of tasks within each project and switch task list views between list, board, action and mindmap to find the perfect view for your project. It also includes built in real time communication including chat and video conferencing. The team calendar and road map allows teams to keep track of tasks, plan, manage and visualise projects.

Currently offering a free and paid tier for users, we recommend you give it a try. Check out https://www.taskade.com to learn more.