App maker Flyp is the among the local companies that raised funding this week.
Get a daily dose of Boston startup funding news in The Beat. Sign up here. New Money is BostInno's report on all the tech funding deals this week. Check back for updates.
Carbon Black (Waltham)
- Amount: ~$14 million, according to an SEC filing
- Investors: Not disclosed
- Details: The funding is added on to the company's ~$54 million round from this past fall. Carbon Black, which until this week was known as Bit9+Carbon Black, specializes in several areas of cybersecurity: protecting computer systems by only allowing trustworthy software to run, detecting malicious activity and helping organizations respond. The new funding brings Carbon Black to about $188 million in total funding to date.
General Catalyst Partners (Cambridge)
- Amount: $845 million for its eighth fund and a supplemental fund.
- Details: The eighth fund consists of $660 million and the supplemental fund is for $165 million, according to SEC filings. The firm—based in Cambridge with offices in Palo Alto and New York—focuses on investing in tech, with past bets including Airbnb, Snapchat, Kayak and HubSpot. The new funds top the size of GC's previous fund, a $675 million, seventh fund that was announced in late 2013.
- Medium post.
Notarize (Boston & Virginia)
- Amount: $2.4 million seed round
- Investors: Polaris Partners, Ludlow Ventures, Crashlytics co-founders Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert, Streetwise Media co-founder Chase Garbarino
- Details: Notarize offers a digital notary service that has just launched in the Apple App Store. The service takes advantage of a law passed by the state of Virginia, allowing notaries to handle transactions online, verifying signature and identification over video chat. Each notary transaction costs $25, a price set by law in Virginia. The company's founder is Pat Kinsel, who previously co-founded Spindle, a location-based social news filter acquired by Twitter.
- Full story.
BeON Home (Boston)
- Amount: $2.9 million
- Investors: Jopeko LLC (led the round) and existing investors (not named).
- Details: The company is the maker of a Bluetooth Smart-enabled home protection system that provides security and emergency lighting. BeON Home has now raised $5 million in total. Past investors in the company have included former New England Patriots defensive tackle Vince Wilfork and former Boston Bruins defenseman Ray Bourque, who in 2014 did a bizarre ad for the company.
Silk Therapeutics (Medford HQ & manufacturing)
- Amount: $6 million
- Investors: The Kraft Group led the latest round. Other investors include: Sheri and Roy P. Disney, Dr. Richard Sackler of Summer Road LLC, Erin Donahue and Ron Bresler, Altman Health Investments, BML Group, Lear Corporation and Highland Consumer Partners.
- Details: The Kraft Group led the company's $2 million Series 1A round back in March 20125 as well. Silk skincare products are geared toward those with super-sensitive skin, and include lines for anti-aging, hydrating, renewal, lifting and more. The company has raised $10.25 million in funding to date.
Elemental Machines (Boston & San Francisco)
- Amount: $2.5 million
- Investors: Founders Fund’s FF Angel, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Project 11 Ventures, 2M Companies (family office of Morton H. Meyerson), Rock Health.
- Details: The startup is aiming to change the way the world does science, providing the infrastructure that will ensure experiment reproducibility for researchers. The founding team includes Sridhar Iyengar and Sonny Vu, previously the founder of wearables maker Misfit and medical device firm AgaMatrix. The goal is for scientists to gain intelligence into any variability in the physical world that may be impacting their experiments, research or reproducibility. The intended result is for scientists to bring new medicines to market more quickly.
Lexumo (Cambridge)
- Amount: $4.89 million seed round
- Investors: Accomplice, .406 Ventures and Draper.
- Details: Lexumo's "Big Code" analytics technology was originally developed at Draper Laboratory with DARPA funding. The startup said it will use the new funding to continue developing and commercializing its platform while adding more people to its sales and marketing teams. Lexumo calls its platform the "world's first automated cloud-based service for continuously monitoring software for vulnerable open source components." The platform is also used to protect software in Internet-of-Things devices. "Security for the Internet of Things has been largely overlooked and, given the pace of IoT deployments, it presents a massive risk to technology developers, businesses and consumers," Maria Cirino, managing partner at .406, said in a statement. "Recent research cites that security solutions for IoT are at least two years away, but Lexumo has the right technology and business model to tackle this problem today."
Flyp (Boston)
- Amount: $5.8 million
- Investors: Aspect Ventures, Acorn Ventures, Structure Capital, MAG Ventures, Morningside Technology Ventures, Russell Simmons, Jeffrey Parker
- Details: In spring 2015 the the company introduced their app for easily setting up multiple phone lines on a smartphone (the first additional line is free and the second additional line is $2.99/month). In November, Flyp debuted a new service that lets its app users make calls and texts for free between the U.S. and 15 countries in Europe, by transforming all Flyp communications into local calls. Flyp reports that its app has gotten more than 1 million downloads over the past nine months, worldwide. The funding will be used for development and expanding the number of countries where Flyp is available; right now the app is offered in 17 countries (in North America and Europe), and the plan is to add another 30 countries this year. The company raised the round in several closes over the course of a year, with the latest close in the fourth quarter of 2015, a spokesman said.
- News release.
