Series A companies, December 22
Surgery, Metal Scrap, Organ Preservation
Ant Money, a California-based micro-income stock investments startup raised $20 million in a Series A round to help people invest rewards and rebates from brands in stocks. Ant Money is cofounded by the founder of Acorns that helps people invest the change into mutual funds. Ant Money is a holding company of three brands: ATM, Blast, and, Learn and Earn which is fantastic. Learn and Earn teaches people finance and then helps them invest in stocks. They have these super simple short gamified classes that teach investing and industry basics. For example, ARK funds have a class called “Looking Forward to AI”. There is also a class called “Easy Ways to Reduce Waste”. Although these classes are used primarily for financial literacy, I think the bigger value here is teaching people the fundamentals of industries before they invest in them. For example, you first learn how recycling works, and then you invest in companies that you believe are going to do well. Ant Money has several products with a mission to educate and engage people to invest. So it’s Robinhood for Gen Z, but you know, better.
Apella, an SF-based surgery data startup raised $21 million in a Series A round to build iOS for the surgery room. Lyft shows us the real-time location of the driver but we don’t have such data for surgery. Apella puts sensors in the surgery room to collect and analyze data to improve the performance of the surgical team for better outcomes. They call it the third wave of surgery innovation, surgery robots being the second.
X-Therma, a California-based organ preservation startup raised $13 million in a Series A round to improve the transport and storage of Regenerative Medicine. Transplantable organs need the right temperature or they will experience “freeze burn”. Although low temperature extends life, “the ice is the enemy”. The idea and science came from the arctic fish that has antifreeze protein defense against the ice formation that humans don’t. X-Therma has designed an ice prevention material for better organ delivery and safer cryoprotectants for IVF.
GreenSpark, a NY-based software startup raised $5 million in a Series A round led by Tiger Global to help scrap yards streamline operations, save time, money, and scale the business. GreenSpark “follows the metal in a scrap yard, from point of purchase all the way to the ultimate sale, with everything that those processes entail, all under one roof”. I don’t hear much about software being used in the metal industry so it is refreshing to read news about its modernization. “Scrap commodities recycled annually save the equivalent energy use of 48 million homes for one year, or nearly 400 million tons of carbon dioxide”, i.e. recycling commodities are important to our environment.
Mperativ, an SF-based revenue marketing startup raised $5 million in a Series A round to align marketing and sales teams on the success metrics. In modern business, marketing and sales are two different teams with different metrics and lingo, except one - revenue. Mperativ has built a platform for sales and marketing executives to finally align on revenue.