Co-founders Hunter Morris and Mitch Orkis met while working together on another brand. Orkis was at digital marketing firm Frank Collective and worked there with Morris on rebranding one of his other companies. 

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The two got to talking about what they saw as an unaddressed market in the sexual wellness products space and the two went on to found Los Angeles-based Hello Cake and its Cake brand of products.

“Walking down most aisles is one option, but the products available have confusing ingredients and it’s hard to understand what to do with them,” CEO Morris told Crunchbase News. “On the other end is a sex shop, which is a place not everyone is comfortable being in. There is no middle ground when it comes to what to do and what to try. That exists in other categories, but in this one, no brand combines approachability or guides you down a path to understand the products better.”

Lerer Hippeau led the new investment and was joined by Sugar Capital, Brand Foundry Ventures, Selva Ventures, Silas Capital, Gabby Slome, Brian Bordainick and Kate Wallman. In total, the company has raised $5.7 million since it was founded in 2018, according to Orkis, who serves as Cake’s chief marketing officer.

Caitlin Strandberg, partner at Lerer Hippeau, said she met the Cake founders when they were raising money for a different product, and tracked them for more than a year. When they came to her with Cake, she wanted to invest.

She liked that Morris was a repeat founder and that Morris and Orkis had complementary skill sets. She also was interested in investing in a company that was going after sleepy incumbent areas where millennials and Gen Z consumers weren’t being served.

“This is a big space that investors have not traditionally invested in because they often trigger a vice clause,” Strandberg said in an interview. “Sex should be fun, inclusive, positive and safe. Cake has great content on its site on how to have sex and be safe. They also have entertainment, which is a whole other area. This brand is about everyone being included with all lifestyles not only accepted, but encouraged, and that is important.”

Cake is targeting the sexual wellness market, which in the United States was valued at $9.1 billion in 2019, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 5.2 percent through 2027, according to market research firm Grand View Research.

“We wanted to pair the name of the product with clarity on what the product is for,” Orkis said. “On the side of the box are instructions, and we also have education on our website. The first step is sexual education to get to know what you like and don’t like, and then how to communicate that with someone else. Then we go into the step of trying new things. We say our products are for the ‘bedroom curious’ a lot, and our content reads like skincare routines.” 

Morris and Orkis plan to deploy the new funding into product development, marketing, scaling its inventory and manufacturing, as well as on its brick-and-mortar retail launch. According to Orkis, Cake has a big opportunity to reinvent the sexual wellness aisle of the story.

The company launched its products online in June 2020, and has experienced 470 percent quarter-over-quarter growth. It brought in just under $500,000 in revenue in the past month.

“Our products are meant to help people have fun, either by themselves or with a partner,” Morris said. “There are great spaces within sexual health, lubricants and toys that will be expanding for us.”

Courtesy photo: Cake co-founders Hunter Morris, left, and Mitch Orkin

American schoolchildren are in the midst of what for many is their most highly-anticipated summer break yet — after more than a year of social distancing and Zoom school, they’re finally going to Fourth of July barbecues again, spending time with friends, and traveling with family. 

But amid all that joy and excitement, it’s easy to lose sight of another health crisis that the pandemic brought to the surface: Mental health. 

For Daybreak Health co-founder and CEO Alex Alvarado, teenage mental health is always top-of-mind. His San Francisco-based startup provides personalized online mental health counseling to teens — a topic that’s close to his own heart after one of his younger brothers suffered through mental health crises while they were growing up.

The issue Daybreak seeks to tackle is large. Globally, depression is the fourth leading cause of illness and disability among adolescents aged 15-19 years, according to the World Health Organization. Half of all mental health conditions start by 14 years of age but most cases are undetected and untreated, according to the organization.

When we last spoke with Alvarado in May, Daybreak had gone through Y Combinator’s accelerator program, closed a $1.8 million seed round led by Maven Ventures, and was growing revenue at 20-30 percent a month.

Alvarado spoke with Crunchbase News again in mid-June to update us on the company’s progress and what he’s focused on now. “It always ties back to our mission: universal access to mental health for teens,” he said.

What follows are excerpts from that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

On recent highs: We’ve more than doubled our pediatric (business). Ten new groups signed up, including UCSF Benioff. We’re more deeply embedded in school systems and districts. 

There’s lots of social anxiety funneling into deeper issues. Schools are understanding the impact that mental health can have on academics. The need is growing, but because of COVID, new funding was made available to schools and they can put this into programs. We hope to be part of that movement. 

We’ve brought on great new team members to allow us to pursue new initiatives, built deep school partnerships and had conversations with insurance companies to get our services covered. We’ve hired five new team members in the last month.

We’re thinking about the next six months as a lead-up time for Series A, so we want to make progress on these initiatives.

And recent lows: This is our first time around the block. We were so small last summer we didn’t understand the seasonal dynamics. It seems obvious, but when school’s out and it’s busy during summer, the amount of new patients slows. That seasonal slowdown in terms of growth is a low, but it’s also a learning experience and I look at it as an opportunity. 

Instead of just investing in the relationship with schools, we’re doubling down on our pediatric partnerships, which doubled, and we’ve found new ways to grow.

What’s next: We have a good amount of runway left: a year and a half. It’s not an urgent thing, but we’ve cultivated relationships and are starting to think about who could be a good candidate to lead our Series A.

Read Part 3: For Daybreak Health, A Back-To-School Season Like No Other

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Today, the city’s blockchain presence is flourishing and not only attracting companies, but venture investors as well.

Rosa Shores and Gabe Higgins, co-founders of BlockSpaces, a blockchain integration platform, are leading the movement.

“Gabe and I have been in blockchain technology since 2012,” Shores told Crunchbase News. “It started out as a fascination, when blockchain was only Bitcoin.”

Blockchain technology is essentially digital information that is stored in a public database and often used to send a transaction, such as digital currency, from one place to another in a democratized way — without any identifying information, leading to improved security.

Shores and Higgins started setting up regular meetings for the blockchain community across Tampa to discuss blockchain development and cryptocurrency. It grew to include businesspeople, and then into building companies and finding investors, she said.

In 2017, they opened their physical BlockSpaces space as a place for all of those people to come together and work on projects. BlockSpaces, the technology, connects existing business applications to blockchain networks through an API-based B2B integration platform.

Businesses began using the BlockSpaces space as a place to work on blockchain projects and to understand the technology, said Shores, who is also vice president of the Florida Blockchain Business Association, which focuses on regulation around cryptocurrency and blockchain in Tallahassee.

One of the newest transplants into Tampa Bay’s blockchain scene was reported in May: Nuke Goldstein, co-founder and CTO of London-based cryptocurrency platform Celsius Network, moved to Tampa Bay and plans to open a local office.

Investment potential

In Tampa, companies outside financial services, including insurance, agriculture, real estate and e-commerce, are also seeing the benefits of adopting the technology. BlockSpaces itself raised $1.3 million in seed funding, led by Leadout Capital, in March 2020.

Leadout Capital Managing Partner Ali Rosenthal and General Partner Steve Brownlie saw Shores’ proposal for funding come through — its nonobvious look at blockchain and how crypto went crazy — and how people in blockchain found BlockSpaces to be a place to exist and find support, Rosenthal said in an interview. Leadout is an early-stage software investor looking for founders building companies in underlooked and underserved industries.

“BlockSpace is developing among a very large and rapidly growing market in the blockchain space,” Rosenthal added. “As we learned more about the Florida technology ecosystem, we saw that Rosa was truly steeped in building that blockchain community.”

Over the past five years, Tampa has earned its title as a blockchain capital and destination as more companies come in, according to Saxon Baum, vice president of investor relations at venture capital fund Florida Funders, who moved to Tampa from Pittsburgh 10 years ago.

He believes the wave of attention started with Michael O’Rourke, who in 2018 founded Pocket Network, a platform for developers to connect any app, on any blockchain, to any device, with a single line of code. The company raised under $1 million in venture capital, but in April 2021 announced on Twitter that it earned $9.3 million in revenue — six months after its launch — by selling its token to developers and node operators.

Blockchain will be successful, but from a venture capital perspective it is hard for some investors to wrap their heads around it, Baum said.

Crunchbase data shows investment into blockchain-focused companies took off in 2021, both globally and in the U.S., with $5.8 billion going into all companies so far, up from $1.8 billion for the whole of 2020, while $3.1 billion was carved out for domestic companies, an increase from $1 billion handed out the year prior.

Overall, nearly $15.6 billion was pumped into global blockchain companies — and that’s just those categorized as blockchain within the dataset — it doesn’t include those in other industries using blockchain technology.

“When we looked at Pocket Network, we knew it was probably going to be successful but we ended up passing on the deal,” he said. “Fast-forward to today, and it is one of the most successful companies, and Michael has been the go-to person for attracting companies here.”

Since then, Florida Funders found its stride in investing in companies leveraging blockchain technology. The firm made an investment into Stratos Technologies’ fund, which is working in the decentralized finance blockchain space, according to Baum.

A lot of traditional venture capital firms are looking at how to get into blockchain, and Baum said some are set up like Florida Funders to get into deals, but still have experts on hand to assist.

“We know that we want to be in this space, but will continue to reach out to others for guidance,” Baum said. “We have a city taking off with blockchain. We have Pocket Network going to be a unicorn, which will lead to people making money and then going out and starting their own companies, which will grow the ecosystem. Tampa is perfectly set up for continued growth for blockchain.”

Coming together as a community

Embarc Collective CEO Lakshmi Shenoy was recruited to Tampa Bay three years ago to start the organization, which helps Tampa Bay entrepreneurs build companies.

As an ambassador for the city, Embarc is focused on increasing the number of startups in Tampa and Florida as a whole, providing intensive coaching and programming and leveraging Embarc’s network so that businesses can have better accessibility to talent and customers, she said in an interview.

Shenoy started with 25 companies in 2019, and today works with more than 100 technology companies. As such, Embarc recently opened a new facility in the downtown area, she said.

“Tampa is a much smaller startup market, so it needed deliberate support to start to make the flywheel happen,” Shenoy said. “In a lot of ways, the pandemic put eyes on Florida and helped us accelerate.”

When she moved there, Shenoy began meeting with individuals in the blockchain space, and one of the first things she observed was everyone’s desire to learn more about blockchain. She knew from the start that it was going to be a critical piece of the puzzle around what the startup community would look like, she said.

What she found, too, was that blockchain was embedded into businesses other than cryptocurrency applications, which she said she found exciting.

“It is the less sexy stuff, but areas like health care, insurance and the vitamin supplement tracking, are emerging,” Shenoy said. “The technology will grow to be so pervasive that we won’t have to talk about blockchain. It will just be there.”

John Fohr, co-founder and CEO of TrustLayer, recently relocated the company to Tampa Bay from San Francisco just as it was closing on its $6.6 million seed round at the end of last year. TrustLayer is an insurtech company using distributed ledger technology to automate insurance verification.

The motivation for the move was seeing a lot of customer service centers and companies having success building out customer success teams with talent from the area, which is ripe with industry experts, Fohr said in an interview.

At the time, he didn’t realize how big of a community the blockchain folks had, but found the ecosystem to be helpful for collaboration and meeting company champions.

“We are super happy we ended up coming here,” Fohr said. “Tampa hits way above its weight class. It’s a big city with a small-town feel where everyone works together. Entities like Embarc have turbocharged the tech scene. Tampa also now has this funding world that has opened up, which was traditionally limited to San Francisco.”

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Sweat Equity Ventures Partner Anthony Kline brings a unique offering to the venture capital world: Working with companies at their time of founding to build their dream team.

Before joining the San Francisco accelerator and venture firm, Kline was honing his skills at venture-backed companies, which include Stripe, as well as AppDirect, where he was the company’s first recruiter and head of talent.

Sweat Equity was founded in 2018 by Dan Portillo and is backed by Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. In the past three years, Sweat Equity has added 20 companies to its portfolio, most recently The Public Health Co. and Bespoke Financial.

Kline said startups need product and engineering talent so they can land their first series of customers to drive revenue — anything to scale faster than competitors and be in high demand.

“Rather than charge enormous consulting fees we ask for an ownership stake, so we are literally putting money where our mouth is,” he added. “We offer not just advice, but we are doing the job of a senior-level executive that you would have to recruit and probably wouldn’t get them at that stage.”

He spoke with me about his approach to recruiting, and finding the right people for traditionally hard-to-hire positions.

The following was lightly edited for clarity and length.

What led you to a career in venture capital?

Kline: I was recruiting for early- to mid-stage for 12 years, and I was working with the founders. I joined Stripe, and my job was building out engineering teams and scaling any new product organization. I helped figure out what new teams would look like. I began looking at a couple of companies a month, and some couldn’t figure out how to go to market without having to hire over and over again. When Stripe grew from 200 to 2,000 employees in three years, I was faced with a choice and wanted to do it all. Dan Portillo reached out to tell me that he was starting a new VC firm. I had always wanted to be an owner of something, but not a recruiting firm. I was attracted to VC, but wanted to be involved in selecting companies and the path to do that. This married all of those things together and was a natural fit for me.

How do you like to work with founders?

Kline: Closely. Building your core team is one of the most vital things you can do. The first 10 to 20 people are your culture and they carry that for years. There is a lot of risk involved. Most people can do the job that is in the description, but it’s harder to have the right vibe, know how they operate together, and match personalities and energy types. If you don’t spend a lot of time with them, you will miss it. I start out working with founders and gain a “sixth sense” for what is important, and what stands out beyond the job description, to be able to find that same thing on the candidate’s side so you can have the right person for the right company.

What is your sweet spot with regard to recruiting for a startup?

Kline: Leadership and executive recruiting. Mostly in engineering and product, but I’ve done legal, finance, marketing; the wonderful thing about being head of recruit and leading it. You meet some of the best people, get to know what “great” looks like across the board and take that framework to any type of role.

What would be considered the “hardest-to-hire” positions for startups?

Kline: Definitely engineering, but what is harder to hire is a great head of recruiting. The pandemic shifted people’s priorities, and the larger companies, even before the pandemic, were making it difficult to leave. We’ve seen massive wealth accumulation and golden handcuffs. It’s not 20-somethings running around Silicon Valley anymore — they have families and mortgages, and a reduced risk is important. The startup landscape has changed. There is more capital and competitive salaries. There is more capital going into the market, and with not many other great places to put capital, VC is creating more startups than before and more tools to developers to build companies. It is so much easier to start a company than it was before. You need fewer people to build a product because of the infrastructure that can be plugged into. The barrier to entry is less, creating a need for more developers. However, the rate of training programs and getting education in computer science and engineering has not kept up with demand. We are going to be forever in this world.

What is one or two of the biggest mistakes startups make for their first employees?

Kline: Sometimes you hire or over-promote or -title people. You bring in the first employee as a vice president when what you really needed was an individual contributor who knows what they are doing: 90 percent building a product, not managing people. Most startups just hire their friends and stay within their networks instead of building a sustainable recruiting network. That eventually will dry up, and friends won’t always want to work on what you are working on. I understand why a person is seeking a VP role, but it’s not always good for the long-term. The best thing is to set up and invest in a talent acquisition strategy and recruiting.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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JT Garwood and Jack Miller started the Seattle-based company in March after seeing health care companies struggle during the global pandemic to pay fair prices for supplies as they competed with other entities due to shortages.

“As we talked to health care companies, we learned how hard it was to purchase supplies at a fair price. After conversations with vendors, hospitals and clinics, we saw an opportunity to change the medical supply industry,” said Garwood, who previously worked in sales at Microsoft and for another company in the health care supply space.

Bttn. is targeting the U.S. wholesale medical supply market, which is predicted to be valued at $243.3 billion this year according to IBISWorld. The startup developed a platform aimed at cutting out middlemen, offering direct-from-manufacturer pricing and providing a better ordering experience.

Its marketplace eliminates the need for exclusive and restrictive contracts and enables providers to save between 20 percent and 40 percent on their medical supply bills, while also taking advantage of improved shipping and delivery speeds, Garwood said.

“We are taking a process that traditionally involved fax machines or a sales rep, and putting it on a web application for order automation,” he added. “You can build a cart with gowns and syringes and then subscribe on a 30-, 60- or 90-day basis.”

In its first three months of operation, bttn. secured more than 300 customers and did more than $500,000 in sales, he added. In addition, the company formed partnerships with 11 health care associations and have 20 more being finalized.

The company will use the funds to expand its technical, sales and operations teams.

Deshpande, co-founder and CEO of Farmers Business Network, said in an interview that when he met Garwood, he admired his mission-driven approach to lowering costs for health care businesses.

“bttn. is bringing transparency to small businesses,” he added. “JT and Jack understand where small hospital systems are coming from when buying goods, and have easier options for how to do it. I liked the gritty way they launched and got initial traction. They have a big potential to make an impact and be a big company.”

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The crypto and blockchain sector has attracted nearly $12.4 billion in venture investment into U.S.-based companies since 2017 and $19.4 billion globally, Crunchbase numbers show. In fact, data so far for 2021 shows dollars were nearly 3x from 2020 for both global and U.S. investments. But the sector also faces continued opportunities and challenges going forward, including more widespread adoption and new regulatory pressures from governments around the world.

Case in point: Earlier this month, El Salvador became the world’s first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. At the same time, Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission ordered its exchanges to delist meme coins, such as Dogecoin, as well as NFTs, exchange tokens and fan tokens, saying those tokens have “no clear objective or substance or underlying [value].”

Stepped-up efforts by China’s government to rein in the crypto space had the largest impact on valuations. On Friday, authorities in China’s Sichuan province, one of the country’s largest mining centers, reportedly ordered cryptocurrency miners to shut down their operations,

Cryptocurrency experts say these kinds of polarizing events put a spotlight on the space.

“Blockchain was accelerated five years in the pandemic,” according to Alon Goren, founding partner at blockchain fintech venture studio Draper Goren Holm.

Here’s a closer look at four factors that are likely to drive big changes in the cryptocurrency space in years to come.

1) Mainstream adoption

Cryptocurrency startups are working to make the process of using, buying, trading and finding digital currencies easier, driving greater consumer awareness and adoption.

Increasingly, mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies is “crazy important” to the growth of the sector, according to Goren. Still, some of that adoption has come from less serious applications of digital currencies, including “meme coins” — assets based on jokes but with no real value other than those given to them by social indicators — a phenomenon that also concerns Goren because they reinforce the notion that cryptocurrency isn’t legitimate.

“Publicly traded companies can show quarterly earnings, you can follow the CEO on Twitter and you know their opinions on things,” Goren added. “In crypto, you don’t have those kinds of things to show legitimacy.”

Meanwhile, Hsuan Lee, CEO of Portto/Blocto, said the adoption of NFTs — non-fungible tokens — is one of the biggest factors that has changed the industry in the past year. Portto is a Taiwan-based company that aims to make blockchain simple for users and developers.

Although NFTs have been around since 2017, they were initially not appealing for typical use, but that all changed when they became approachable by retail investors, including when sports organizations got involved in selling digital clips and cards, he said.

“The National Basketball Association doesn’t market itself as a blockchain, but offering collectibles on it appeals to fans,” Lee said in an interview. “With those kinds of applications, even introducing a music NFT would potentially attract existing music fans. With that kind of people joining the party, it will make crypto more mainstream.”

Muneeb Jan, a cryptocurrency and fintech expert operating out of Hong Kong, said the investor base for cryptocurrency is still largely retail investors, while major financial institutions are in the discovery phase.

Still, new companies are announcing on a daily basis that they will accept bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and banks are facing crypto investor demand to get more involved in the space, Jan said.

“Crypto funds are increasingly viewed as an asset class,” he said in an interview. “There is not much of a use case currently, but they want to jump onto the bandwagon. If more large institutional investors come in, there will be price stability, and it will improve the legitimacy.”

2) Price volatility

Jan believes two of the biggest headwinds slowing more mainstream cryptocurrency adoption are price volatility and the fact that bitcoin as a mode of payment is not yet completely viable due the current inability to quickly process transactions.

Bitcoin has been particularly volatile in recent days. After surging above $40,000 about a week ago, the currency fell below $30,000 this week, recovering to around $32,400 as of Tuesday afternoon. Over the past year, the price grew to a peak of more than $60,000 before falling back to half that at the end of May.

Just processing transactions is not a sustainable use long-term due to the expensive transaction fees associated with it, even though people want bitcoin to be able to do that, he added.

“Other cryptocurrencies are not volatile because the community investing in them have come to a consensus on the price,” Jan said.

Lee said price volatility will be aided by regulations, especially as cryptocurrency is adopted more broadly. Price volatility will only be fixed with time, he said.

“This is a very young market and it has attracted attention, which makes prices volatile,” he added. “It can be dangerous to get into a space without established regulations. Being at an early stage, there is a lot of imagination that can be had for these cryptocurrencies. At the same time, when bad news comes out, it can easily dump harder on crypto than other companies.”

3) Regulatory pressure

Regulations proposed for cryptocurrency have gained steam since the beginning of 2021.

Among them: The U.S. Department of the Treasury announced in May that it will require any transfer worth $10,000 or more to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service as part of an effort to curb tax evasion.

“I’m happy to see regulations come into place because it will be good for the industry overall,” Lee said. “It will minimize possible scams or malicious use cases and make it better for everyone to get on board.”

The government is also examining possible regulations of cryptocurrency exchanges with a focus on protecting investors and preventing market manipulation, as well as financial account reporting as it relates to cryptoasset exchange accounts and payment service accounts that accept cryptocurrencies.

Goren called a focus on Bitcoin, Etherium and the public markets “a double-edged sword.” Any real value is eroded when inflation occurs, but Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, so its value holds up well against inflation.

And the more institutions that participate, the more legitimacy it creates so regulators are less likely to fight it, he said.

“Most lawmakers know crypto is not used by criminals, but the people who put them in office are large financial institutions that are cheering when they say that happens,” Goren said.

While he understands why there have to be IRS reporting requirements for tax purposes, he disagrees when government regulations don’t consider Bitcoin a currency, but then treats it like cash.

By instead treating cryptocurrency as a capital asset, the IRS is taxing capital gains, which could also have implications on the venture capital world, he added.

Goren said other countries have a bit more clarity, but there is still misunderstanding in the U.S. when it comes to how cryptocurrencies should be reported financially, and it won’t change until there is clear categorization of cryptocurrencies.

4) Beyond Bitcoin

Rocketfuel Blockchain founder Peter Jensen said it will take time for the public to understand and be comfortable with cryptocurrency, much as people had to acclimate to the idea of online banking and ATM cards before that.

Jensen’s company, based in San Francisco, processes crypto payments. He believes people are distracted by the price volatility of Bitcoin, although it is just one out of some 200 cryptocurrencies.

“We need to move people’s minds away from Bitcoin because who knows if cryptocurrency will survive,” Jensen said in an interview. “There are many cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar, which means they have zero volatility. If you take those and use them for payment, then you get the benefits of that.”

Global developments — such as El Salvador adopting cryptocurrency and both Sweden and Dubai issuing their own digital currencies — bring promise for the future of the industry, and Jensen predicts the U.S. will eventually issue a digital version of the dollar.

He sees a world where when you get a job, you will have the choice of receiving your paycheck in dollars or cryptocurrency, and there will be no volatility because those funds will be guaranteed by the U.S. government.

“We feel that the U.S. has an opportunity to be ahead, even though China is adopting cryptocurrency faster, as well as those with less-efficient banking systems,” Jensen added. “If we don’t stay in front, we are going to be last.”

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Phoenix Insurance Co. led the round, and was joined by Fortissimo Capital, BASF Venture Capital, Trendlines Group and Maverick. The new cash infusion brings the company’s total funding to $36 million, according to Gil Shalev, founder and CEO of Equinom.

With a background in plant breeding, Shalev said he founded the company in 2012 to develop technology for breeding new varieties of seeds that will yield new ingredients for better nutrition.

“We want to take genes and use a technology, that is non-GMO and non-gene edited, to develop ingredients with multiple traits that are already available in the market,” he told Crunchbase News.

This comes as more consumers are concerned about the kinds of food they eat and how they are made. The market for alternative meat, eggs, dairy and seafood products is predicted to reach at least $290 billion by 2035, according to research by Boston Consulting Group and Blue Horizon Corp. Food companies are responding to those concerns, with non-GMO seeds being one of the options, Shalev said.

The new funding will enable Equinom to expand its operations in sales, marketing, and research and development across the globe. In October, the company will introduce a new pea protein that will cost 4x lower than similar proteins and be more nutritious, Shalev said.

“This will disrupt the plant protein industry,” he added. “The new funding will help us scale up as we have completed the R&D process.”

Over the past year, the company was executing R&D on sesame plants and breeding alternative legumes. Currently, Equinom has more than 100,000 acres grown across five continents and has secured millions of dollars in contracts with market-leading food brands.

Elad Givoni, head of private equity at Phoenix, said in a written statement that Equinom “is uniquely positioned in the agtech space as a major player who can impact the future of food.

“Through its proprietary technology, distinct methodology and unique genomic database, Equinom is able to create a wide range of products for a broad spectrum of commercial food applications, while ensuring that the products can be quickly adapted to rapidly changing market needs,” he added.

The Equinom team, with founder and CEO Gil Shalev in the middle, as well as inset photo, courtesy of Equinom.
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Ryan O’Neil and his wife founded the St. Louis-based company in 2013 after previously owning a wedding and event floral business together. A year in, and their event company was losing customers because it was taking too long for O’Neil’s wife to get proposals back due to the time she put into researching all of the event components and their costs.

“Sitting at the kitchen table, we realized that all of these spreadsheets and lists should be talking to each other,” he said. “We started building a tool for ours and other florist businesses, but then started having catering companies ask us for software.”

Curate’s platform enables businesses to create proposals, process payments, manage supply chains, and maintain communication with customers and suppliers so owners can spend more time on their business. It also has workflow integrations with popular tools such as Square, QuickBooks and Stripe.

The seed round was led by OCA Ventures, which was joined by Jim McKelvey, Cultivation Capital and Stout Street Capital. Prior to this investment, Curate was largely bootstrapped with a small seed round, O’Neil said.

“Coming out of COVID, there were some important opportunities we knew we had to jump on, and we knew if we were going to raise a Series A, we needed all of the pieces in order,” he added. “We ended up finding great partners, like OCA.”

O’Neil intends to use the new funding on technology development, to grow and provide new features and functionalities, especially for catering companies, as well as for a more robust customer relationship management platform for florists.

Tamim Abdul Majid, general partner at OCA Ventures, said he was introduced to O’Neil by another entrepreneur in St. Louis. The firm was looking for solid vertical SaaS solutions and was impressed with how well O’Neil had coordinated Curate’s growth.

“Ryan is the kind of customer-driven CEO that we like,” Abdul Majid said in an interview. “His numbers are really good, he has good economics and churn rates — the right kind of thing you want to see in a SaaS play. In addition, Ryan’s customers are some of the best we have had in terms of fans, who are saying ‘you can’t take this service away from me.’”

Meanwhile, O’Neil said Curate experienced “explosive demand” over the past year, with April 2021 revenue up 700 percent over the year prior. As such, he also expects to double his employee headcount to 32 people and is hiring in infrastructure and product development.

During the global pandemic, the company was working with customers to cancel events and solve supply chain issues. Within six weeks, Curate had also built a brand-new product for customers to see what their workflow would look like for one product versus another. It even hired a full-time employee to answer Paycheck Protection Program questions and help companies apply, O’Neil said.

Next up, the company will round out key roles within the leadership team and work on product development.

“As we look forward, we will be restructuring the application so it is faster and stronger,” O’Neil added. “One of the key things that showed up this year was that we can jump verticals. We are seeing dynamic growth with caterers, but also have landscapers, interior designers and creative small businesses, and we want to be the sales and operations center for all businesses.”

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Leading the seed round was 10D, with participation from SleepScore Ventures, Maniv Mobility and Vasuki.

Adi Berenson and Ran Margolin co-founded the Israel-based company in 2018 after meeting at Apple, where they were part of its product incubation group.

They got the idea for Clair Labs after seeing the aging population and push of hospitals to send low-acuity patients home, which resulted in more high-acuity patients in the hospitals. While at home, patients were generally given medical devices, and the pair thought they could combine their knowledge of consumer technology from Apple with health care to make those devices easier to use and something patients are willing to use at home.

What resulted is contact-free biomarker sensing for continuous monitoring of vital signs including heart rate, respiration, air flow and body temperature. Clair Labs is using that information to build medical devices and systems.

“One of the challenges of this space is that it is wide, and there are many companies taking a horizontal approach,” Berenson told Crunchbase News. “We think the best approach is to find existing workflows and deploy our technology. It is a bit trickier because you have to fall into existing clinical, regulatory and reimbursement practices, but it works well when all of those pieces fall into place.”

The company is initially targeting sleep medicine, especially around sleep apnea, as well as acute and post-acute care facilities.

According to Berenson, biomarker sensing is a more cost-effective way to digitally monitor around the clock. The system also monitors behavioral markers, including sleep patterns and distress, as well as tracks changes in the patient’s position, such as an intent to rise. All of that data is analyzed by machine-learning algorithms to provide evaluations and alerts to health care staff.

The technology is currently in clinical trials in Israel, and the company has plans to begin pilots with sleep centers and hospitals in the United States.

Clair Labs is pre-revenue and running on a lean team of 10 employees. The new funding will enable the company to hire for its R&D center in Tel Aviv, as well as get it in position to open a U.S. office next year, which will be focused mainly on providing customer support in North America and leading marketing and sales.

“It took us a bit of time to incubate, but with this round, we are now moving from incubation to prototyping and the clinical trials phase,” Berenson said. “The trials are going well and the system is performing. Our goals for the next two years include completing our trials in Israel before going to the United States for trials, getting FDA clearance, and beginning to sell before we go after our next funding round.”

Meanwhile, Rotem Eldar, managing partner at 10D, said his firm’s focus is on digital health, and there is a strong interest in Clair Labs due to an experienced team that is bringing technology and know-how into a space with a large market opportunity.

In the past few months, several remote patient monitoring companies have attracted venture capital, including:

• Cardiac digital health provider Vector Remote Care, which closed a $12.5 million Series A investment, led by Updata Partners.
• Launchpad Digital Health led a $10 million Series A round of funding into Harmonize for its AI-based remote health tool for high-risk patient populations.
• Norbert Health landed $5 million in Seed II funding, led by Serena Capital and HCVC, to continue developing its contactless vital sign scanning technology.

Eldar said Clair Labs differentiates itself with its computer-vision expertise, and in the way that it did not have to develop a new sensor — a large burden for companies — as the contactless application in different clinical applications.

“Sleep tests, though a niche market, is an entry into the market that is quick and needed,” he added. “With this type of sensor, they can enter the market quickly and easily expand usage to other applications.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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The Sunnyvale, California-based company announced plans to go public in February through a merger with VG Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, sponsored by Virgin Group.

Shares, now trading under the ticker symbol ME, opened at $11.13 and quickly rose throughout the day to close at $13.32 per share.

The business combination values at an enterprise value of approximately $3.5 billion, according to the company. The transaction was expected to deliver up to $759 million of gross proceeds through the contribution of up to $509 million of cash from VG Acquisition Corp. and a concurrent $250 million private placement of common stock.

In its regulatory filing, 23andMe reported revenue of $305.5 million during the fiscal year ended March 31, 2020, down from the $440.9 million for the same period in 2019. Net losses for fiscal year 2020 were $250.9 million, widening the gap of losses reported in 2019 of $183.5 million.

The company reported 10.7 million customers as of Dec. 31, 2020. As of Jan. 31, there were 83,400 subscribers to 23andMe+, a service launched in October 2020 to provide members with enhanced genetic testing reports.

In addition, the company said it “expects to continue to incur significant expenses and operating losses for the foreseeable future” as it continues to expand its R&D and develop drugs itself or with collaborators.

The company is the latest to ride the SPAC heatwave that became popular last year. Numbers for 2021 are already setting a new record so far this year with 344 deals raising $107.5 billion, according to SPAC Research data.

Illustration: Dom Guzman