Bird, which went public last year, recently laid off 23% of its staff.
Bird
E-scooter company Bird Global Inc. has named Shane Torchiana its new president, who takes over the role for founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden.
VanderZanden will remain as Bird's chief executive and chair of the board of directors, per an SEC filing.
Torchiana has been Bird’s chief operating officer since January. Before that, he worked in various roles at the Santa Monica, California-based company, most recently as senior vice president of corporate development and strategy from January 2019 to January 2022.
The move comes shortly after Bird (NYSE: BRDS) received a warning from the New York Stock Exchange for its low stock price. The company, which went public last year, recently laid off 23% of its staff, according to tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, after struggling to make a profit.
In other L.A.-area tech and startup news:
MaC Venture Capital was co-founded by Marlon Nichols, Michael Palank, Charles D. King and Adrian Fenty.
MaC Venture Capital
- MaC Venture Capital has announced a $203 million Fund II, building on the $110 million seed-stage fund secured in March. MaC Venture Capital, a majority Black-owned firm, said it will use its Fund II capital to double down on its cultural investment framework, which has supported technology startups that are "shaping culture, increasing access and resources to underserved communities, and meeting consumer and industry needs," the company said. The four founding general partners include venture capitalist Marlon Nichols; former Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty; former William Morris Agency talent agent Michael Palank; and Macro founder and CEO Charles King, former agent/partner at William Morris Endeavor. MaC Venture Capital is the result of a 2019 merger between Cross Culture Ventures, co-founded by Nichols, and M Ventures, co-founded by Fenty, King and Palank. As of the launch of the seed-stage fund, MaC Venture Capital had invested in 50 companies.
- Los Angeles software company Regard (formerly known as HealthTensor) has raised $15.3 million in Series A funding led by Calibrate Ventures and Foundry Group. Also participating were existing investors TenOneTen Ventures and Susa Ventures, as well as new investors Brook Byers of Byers Capital and Drew Houston. The company, which is developing an AI co-pilot for physicians to help diagnose medical conditions, said it will use the funds to grow its staff, support more clients, reduce integration time, and expedite reach to new physicians and hospitals.
- Global Premier Fertility, an Irvine-based company that builds, acquires and manages fertility clinics and adjacent businesses, has closed an $11 million Series C led by Triangle Capital Corp. The private investment firm also committed to an additional $50 million investment to be deployed over the next 12 months. The round will support Global Premier Fertility's acquisitions efforts, build new clinics with current and prospective physician partners, and help recruit top fertility talent.
- Manhattan Beach cybersecurity company Inspectiv has secured an $8.6 million Series A led by StepStone Group with Fika Ventures, Freestyle and Mucker Capital. The financing brings Inspectiv's total funding to more than $16 million. In addition, Ryan Disraeli, co-founder of TeleSign, has been named CEO. Disraeli will work closely with founder and Executive Chairman Joseph Melika, who continues to spearhead product strategy. The company said its platform combines artificial intelligence from crowdsourced security testing and proprietary vulnerability scanning to help companies continuously identify, remediate and protect against security threats.
Binarly is a cybersecurity company building technology to address repeatable security failures in the firmware supply chain.
Binarly
- Binarly Inc., a Pasadena cybersecurity company building technology to address repeatable security failures in the firmware supply chain, has raised $3.6 million in seed funding from WestWave Capital and Acrobator Ventures. Prominent cybersecurity leaders Michael Sutton, Thomas "Halvar Flake" Dullien, Jamie Butler, Ryan Permeh, Bryson Bort, Pedram Amini, Chris Ueland and David Mandel from Emerging Ventures also joined as investors. Binarly is co-founded by security pioneers Alex Matrosov and Claudiu Teodorescu, who previously worked on hardware and software security at NVIDIA, Intel Corp., ESET, BlackBerry, Cylance and FireEye.
- Pasadena-based Miso Robotics, which makes restaurant robots, is working with Amazon Web Services to begin testing the software powering its Flippy 2 and Flippy Lite using AWS RoboMaker. Miso said the move to AWS RoboMaker will enable it to run up to 50 simulations at once and help the company turn future prototypes into functional products at a much quicker rate.
