School is nearly out and summer’s almost here. A lot is going on in most people’s lives, so let’s take a look at a few intriguing startups that raised cash this month that may have escaped your notice.

This month the rounds included everything from added support for cancer survivors to leveraging your car for credit. Let’s take a look.

AI parenting

Depending on who you talk to, AI can solve everything. But can it solve the problem of making sure your kids are watching what they should on the internet?

Well maybe — at least that’s what one Nashville, Tennessee-based startup is promising. Angel AI Co., which has created an AI platform that it says provides an “age-appropriate” internet experience for children between 5 and 12 years old, raised a $4.75 million seed round led by Cortical Ventures this month.

Angel AI says it uses large language models, natural language processing, speech recognition and other tech to generate age-appropriate answers to children’s questions and deliver what the company calls compelling but safe content and entertainment.

The platform has the ability to learn and understand the child over time, and will provide video and audio options at their comprehension level to help them learn.

Angel’s content is also free from advertisements and includes a parent insight portal — which can inform parents about their children’s interests.

Making it rain

One of the things humankind still has not figured out is how to control Mother Nature.

Nevertheless, an El Segundo, California-based startup is giving it a try when it comes to rain.

Rainmaker Technology raised a $6.3 million seed round from a large group of investors that included Long Journey Ventures, Champion Hill Ventures and Garry Tan. The startup aims to develop cloud seeding techniques — a weather modification tool discovered last century that seeks to introduce ice nuclei to clouds and cause, well, rain.

Cloud seeding can work, but the question has usually been how well it works. It also has been in the news recently.

Rainmaker hired its first engineers this year and now seems poised to get out into the field later in 2024 — and make it rain.

Fighting obesity

More than 2 in 5 adults — 42.4% — have obesity in the U.S., so clearly it’s a problem.

However, it also can be complicated due to the many reasons for it. Startup Phenomix Sciences is trying to bring some clarity to the problem. The Menlo Park, California-based biotech firm locked up a $5.5 million Series A this month from investors including DexCom, LabCorp and Health2047 as it tries to bring data intelligence to the treatment of obesity.

The startup, born out of the Mayo Clinic, says it has developed a phenotyping test that gives insights into genetics to determine an individual’s cause of obesity. The test is already in use by obesity treatment providers in the U.S. and identifies obesity subtypes of the disease caused by the interaction of genes and the environment.

These different phenotypes can include things like emotional hunger or hungry gut — defined as when someone eats a full meal but feels hungry soon after. Knowing the phenotype can allow for a better treatment.

Along with its Series A, the company also secured a $1.8 million National Institutes of Health research grant.

Obesity is serious and can be caused by many things. Knowing the root of a specific patient’s problem can lead to a better outcome.

Care for cancer survivors

Beating cancer is hard. However, sometimes dealing with beating cancer can be hard too.

OncoveryCare, formerly VivorCare, locked up a $4.5 million seed round this month led by .406 Ventures to launch its cancer survivorship care model.

The Boston-based startup’s virtual care model for cancer survivorship equips patients with a care team of survivorship-trained clinicians, and initial areas will be toxicity management, mental health support, navigation and care planning, and preventative care. The first regional rollout will serve Tennessee to start, in partnership with Tennessee Oncology, also an investor.

The population of cancer survivors is growing rapidly in the country, expecting to double between 2008 and 2030 to 22 million, according to the company. It’s critical to offer those survivors help as they fight fatigue and anxiety, and deal with complex screenings and monitoring — especially coming off the toughest battle of their lives.

A credit car?

While many people take getting a credit card for granted, it can be difficult for many people who have low credit scores or have struggled to build a credit history.

Dallas-based Yendo closed a $150 million debt financing led by i80 Group to try to help those people — using something many already have.

While some folks may not have a strong credit history, they have a car. Yendo provides a vehicle-secured credit card, allowing consumers to tap into the equity of their cars to get up to $10,000 of revolving credit. A person’s credit line increases proportionally as they pay down their auto loans each month.

The card also is available to customers who do not yet own their vehicle but choose to refinance their auto loan through Yendo.

The company’s card currently is available in 40 states across the U.S. and hopes to expand with the fresh funding.

For many, their car is their most valuable asset. Being able to access credit by leveraging it makes sense.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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NFX, Obvious Ventures, GingerBread Capital, Precursor Ventures, and others also participated in the round. The two-year-old company raised a $2 million seed led by Obvious Ventures in 2017. NFX and Precursor Ventures put money in its seed round as well as the most recent funding event.

Dr. Iman Abuzeid came up with the idea for Incredible Health after hearing repeated complaints from friends and family members who were doctors and surgeons about understaffing, “and not having enough health care workers, especially nurses, to take care of patients.”

The trained physician and co-founder Rome Portlock (an MIT alum who comes from a family of nurses) set about creating a marketplace for hospitals and health systems to connect to qualified nurses looking for work. Abuzeid cites statistics indicating that by 2024, the U.S. is poised to have a shortage of one million nurses.

The marketplace launched about 18 months ago in California, where the company says it’s already profitable. It uses “proprietary algorithm-based tech” to match hospitals with nurses for permanent jobs.

“By automating the screening and custom matching process, hospitals and health systems can hire permanent nurses in less than 30 days,” she told Crunchbase News. “This is a process that normally takes 90 days or more with the inefficiencies of traditional hospital hiring practices.”

Today, over 150 hospitals in the state are using Incredible Health, including Stanford Health Care, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, CommonSpirit Health, Tenet and HCA, among others. The startup currently has 34 employees compared to about five a year ago, according to Abuzeid, and will use the new capital to expand nationally and to add other health care workers to its platform.

David Jones, Stanford Health Care’s chief human resources officer, says using Incredible Health has led to the institution “consistently” hiring for permanent roles in under three weeks.

Other investors in the latest round include Matt Mickiewicz, founder of Hired, a software engineer career marketplace; Steve Goodman, co-founder of Bright.com (acquired by LinkedIn); and Pete Kazanjy, founder of TalentBin (acquired by Monster).

Photo courtesy of Incredible Health

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One Hoboken, New Jersey-based startup wants to step into that process and has just raised $10 million from an investor who believes the company’s product has merit.

The startup, Health Recovery Solutions, has developed software to help reduce readmissions via remote patient monitoring and video visits. The company has just raised that $10 million in a “growth round” from Edison Partners out of Princeton, N.J. The financing brings the company’s total venture and equity raised to $17.5 million, according to its Crunchbase profile.

CEO Jarrett Bauer developed the idea for the company in 2011 as a 24-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins University when his grandmother was readmitted to the hospital for heart failure.

“So I convinced two friends to start the company and write all the software,” Bauer said. Not only is the company’s goal to help improve patient outcomes, but also to help hospitals protect themselves from being penalized for having a patient readmitted.

Health Recovery Solutions claims its platform, which includes software, predictive analytics and hardware/bluetooth devices, is cutting down on 30-day readmissions to healthcare facilities, especially those related to chronic illness, by as much as 80 percent.

Today, 140 medical centers including Penn Medicine, John Hopkins Medicine, WellCare and Henry Ford Health System use Health Recovery Solutions, and the company has monitored about 100,000 patients to date, according to Bauer.

“We’re using this $10 million for further product growth and also to help us reach our 1 million patient goal,” he told Crunchbase News. “We’ll be investing heavily in product development and in account managers so we can meet demand.”

Bauer expects the company to nearly double its revenue this year to $11 million compared to $6.3 million at the end of last year. Health Recovery Solutions, which has landed on the Inc 5000 list multiple times, currently employs 85 people with plans to double that over the next two years.

I asked Bauer how his startup does remote patient monitoring better than the slew of other companies in the space. To him, it lies in the fact that it’s cloud-based.

“A lot of remote monitoring companies tend to be more hardware-centric and then move into telemonitoring,” he said. “We were software-focused in the beginning and I believe that makes us more nimble. We have software and tablets to engage patients, many of whom are elderly, and apps for family members.”

While Edison has invested in a number of healthtech companies, including Lincor, Purple Lab and TrialScope, among others, its backing of Health Recovery Solutions marks its first telehealth investment.

Gregg Michaelson, operating partner at Edison Partners, said his firm believes the company’s patient monitoring platform “solves a critical problem in healthcare.”

“Hospital readmission rates are significantly higher than they could be because many recently discharged patients are not provided with the proper education to improve their condition or tools for clinicians to keep track of their progress,” he wrote via email. “The company provides a clear ROI to its customers healthcare systems and home health agencies—as well as to patients.”

Health Recovery Solutions is one of many telemedicine companies ranging in category from urgent care to fertility to cannabis that have landed significant capital over the past few years, as Savannah Dowling reported in March.

Take a look at some notable companies that have raised since the beginning of 2017:

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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In a phone interview, Paulo Braga – the company’s head of corporate venture – told me that the fund will allocate up to Brazilian Real(R) $45 million (about US $12 million) “for technology projects with the potential to transform the healthcare sector.”

To give you an idea of its size, Sao Paulo-based Eurofarma recorded R $4.3 billion (about US $1.14 billion ) in “gross income” and had nearly 6,800 employees in 2018. It has 287 products, serves 30 medical specialties and covers 101 therapeutic classes across Brazil. Eurofarma has operations in 20 countries, with an industrial site in Brazil and plants in six other Latin American countries. Last year, it invested more than R$250 million (US $66.5 million) in R&D, according to Braga.

Eurofarma’s first investment out of the new fund, which launched in June, was in a Belo Horizonte-based content marketing startup called Rock Content. Overall, Braga projects the portfolio will include 8-12 companies with investments ranging from R $500,000 (US $133,000) to R $4 million (US $1.06 million) with Eurofarma joining a company’s board as part of the funding.

The new fund is focused on Brazilian startups but is open to investing in other countries, particularly the United States and Israel. But in those cases, it expects to partner with other VCs on deals, Braga said.

“In general, we are agnostic as to sector,” Braga told Crunchbase News. “We want to look at companies that are changing the healthcare ecosystem through technology over the next 10-15 years.”

In particular, Braga noted that patient management and integration systems are “fragmented.” As part of its corporate venture efforts, Eurofarma also plans to target scientific or academic initiatives “still in the embryonic phase” and help turn them into businesses. It also offers a mentoring program.

I was also curious as to why, after 47 years in existence, Eurofarma was ready to jump into the venture world. Braga’s answer was unsurprising.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve been seeing a lot of healthcare startups start to emerge here in Brazil,” he said. “About five to six years ago, health tech was almost nonexistent. And now we know of at least 300 Brazilian startups focused on the space. We know there’s a lot of mechanics in the healthcare system here as a whole that need to change, and are hopefully going to change. We want to be a part of that.”

Indeed, Brazil’s startup ecosystem seems to be gaining traction as of late. As we reported in May, venture funding in Brazil exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year, according to LAVCA, the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America. That’s 52 percent more than the $859 million invested in 2017, and a staggering 369 percent increase from the $279 million raised in 2016, as you can see in the chart below.

Illustration: Image Credit: iStock/fotopoly.

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The amount is significantly higher than the $132 million and $139 million raised in the firm’s first two funds, which closed in 2007 and 2011, respectively.

Kevin Lalande, co-founder and managing director of Santé Ventures, said the firm plans to make 20-25 new early-stage investments out of the new fund. It’s already made three deals so far (equal to about 6.5 percent of its capital), putting money into San Jose-based Cryosa, which is developing treatment of sleep apnea; DyaMX, a Minnesota company focused on a treatment of Type II diabetes, and Geneos Therapeutics, a neoantigen-based personalized cancer therapy with headquarters in Pennsylvania.

The new fund was about 25 percent oversubscribed, according to Santé, and included more than 30 limited partners. Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System committed $75 million to Fund III, and another $75 million to a planned Fund IV. It also contributed to Santé’s first two funds.

Founded in 2006, Santé has invested in a total of 33 companies, including the three startups referenced above. It’s had nearly a dozen exits, according to its Crunchbase profile, including Boston Scientific scooping up Claret Medical (for $270 million) and Millipede Medical (for $540 million); Becton Dickinson acquiring TVA Medical and IBM purchasing Explorys.

About 40 percent of the firm’s portfolio is made up of Texas companies. But Lalande points out that some companies’ technologies originated in other locales but were moved to the area so that the investors could be physically closer to help them scale.

“With many of our portfolio companies, we either created them or were the first investor,” Lalande told Crunchbase News. “We usually write the first check and support a company all the way to the end.”

Santé says that it is looking for “compelling opportunities”  in the medtech, biotech, digital health, and health care services sectors. It has an office in Houston’s Texas Medical Center (for obvious reasons) and is the only VC firm focused on the space in the Austin area.

Previously, Lalande spent seven years at the now-defunct Austin Ventures.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias