Key Deals of the Week 01.01-14.01.21

Medium deals (from $ 15 million to $ 75 million)

Robotics

January 4, 2021. AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup that builds robotic systems for sorting garbage, has announced the closure of its $ 55 million B round with XN as the lead investor.

The funds will be used to scale the business and develop applications based on artificial intelligence technology.

AMP Cortex, the company's robotics control system, uses a combination of artificial intelligence algorithms and physical robots to control sorting.

Analysts predict that by 2024 the market for robotic garbage sorting equipment should reach $ 12.26 billion, increasing by an average of 16.52% per year.

Mobility

January 5, 2021. COxbotica, a UK-based autonomous vehicle software company, has announced a $ 47 million raise in its Series B round led by BP Ventures.

The startup says the funding will be used to accelerate the commercial rollout of its software platform in key industries and markets.

Some experts predict the pandemic will accelerate the adoption of autonomous delivery vehicles.

Self-driving cars, vans and trucks promise to minimize the risk of spreading disease by limiting contact with drivers.

Oxbotica was founded in 2014 by Oxford University professors Paul Newman and Ingmar Posner, who aimed to create software that drives autonomous vehicles, independent of expensive third-party infrastructure.

Large deals ($ 75 + million)

FinTech

January 5, 2021. Divvy, a corporate expense management service, raised $ 165 million. Investors were PayPal Ventures, Hanaco, Insight Venture Partners, Whale Rock, Schonfeld, NEA, Acrew and Pelion.

The company previously raised a little over $ 250 million.

In 2020, Divvy was included in the list of 50 most interesting companies, future "unicorns", according to the analytical company Fast Company.

Divvy was founded in 2016 and focuses on the greatest possible automation with its own cloud platform. The service combines a smart credit card for employees with expense management software.

logistics

January 5, 2021. ILobby, a provider of visitor management (inbound and outbound tracking and identification) software, has raised $ 100 million from Insight Partners.

Founded in 2013 in Toronto, Canada, iLobby offers a range of computer vision-based automated tools to optimize inbound and outbound emails, deliveries and visitors. Among the clients of the service are such companies as: Boeing, FedEx, Hershey, Pepsi, Nikon, Pearson International Airport, Scotia Bank and LG.

SaaS

January 6, 2021. Pax8, a provider of a SaaS platform that makes it easier to centralize provisioning, subscription management, and billing through the cloud, announced a $ 96 million raise.

The round was led by Catalyst Investors and Sageview Capital, joined by current investors: Blue Cloud Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures.

Pax8 recently announced the acquisition of Wirehive, a British consulting company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloud Technology

January 6, 2021. Dremio, a startup that offers tools to simplify data storage (cloud storage), has announced raising $ 135 million in Series D. Post-money valuation - $ 1 billion.

Sapphire Ventures led the round, with existing investors Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Cisco Investments also participating.

The total volume of external financing of the company was $ 250 million

The company was founded in 2015 in California (USA).

According to a recent report by Allied Market Research, the global data warehouse market was estimated at $ 18.61 billion in 2017, with an average annual growth of 8.2% from 2018 to 2025.

Entertainment

January 7, 2021. Hopin, an 18-month-old virtual event startup, acquired streaming video studio StreamYard for $ 250 million. This is Hopin's second acquisition in the past month. Last month, Hopin bought event management company Topi.

The London-based company Hopin (a platform for online events) was able to attract two investment rounds in a year: $ 40 million in June and $ 125 million in November 2020. Interestingly, the startup was launched 1.5 years ago, and its assessment in November 2020 is already amounted to $ 2.125 billion.

CyberSecurity

January 8, 2021. Equifax (American credit bureau) announced the purchase of Kount for a $ 640 million deal.

The Kount service uses artificial intelligence technology to prevent fraudulent transactions and conduct digital identity verification. Kount uses AI to analyze 32 billion transactions across 17 billion devices. As the system grows in intelligence, it shifts from simple analysis to predictive modes to help companies prevent digital fraud.

Kount's products will eventually become part of Equifax's proprietary anti-fraud platform, Luminate.

January 8, 2021. Lacework (California, USA), a developer of solutions for cloud storage protection, workload assessment, cyberattack detection and compliance, announced the completion of a funding round of $ 525 million (post-money more than $ 1 billion).

The round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Altimeter Capital, as well as Snowflake Ventures. The total amount of funds raised by the company to date has exceeded $ 600 million.

According to a 2020 survey conducted by LogicMonitor, approximately 83% of enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud, but the cloud remains vulnerable to cyber attacks. Last year, IBM found that the average time to detect a violation was 206 days. Gartner predicts that 50% of companies will inadvertently open up components of their cloud applications and infrastructure online in 2021, up from 25% in 2018.

Analytics Tools

January 8, 2021. Quantum Metric, a platform that helps companies improve websites and apps based on collected feedback from end users in real time on an ongoing basis, has received $ 200 million in funding from current investors Insight Partners and Uncorrelated Ventures (post-money valuation of the company over $ 1 billion ).

Quantum Metric, founded in 2015, USA.

Quantum Metric can also track customer behavioral metrics to automatically identify design issues.

January 8, 2021. Starburst Data (a database analytics platform) raised $ 100 million from Andreessen Horowitz (lead investor), Index Partners, Coatue, and the venture capital arm of Salesforce.

The previous funding of $ 42 million was received just six months ago.

The company's post-transaction valuation was about $ 1.2 billion.