September revved up in terms of term sheets for Richmond-area startups and tech companies.
At least seven funding deals, led by ZielBio's eight-digit haul, collected a combined $21 million from investors last month. The total comes in lower than August's $70 million haul, but mostly due to Landos Biopharma's massive $60 million round. Not including that deal, both volume of deals and average deal size ticked up in September.
Here are the biggest startup funding and M&A deals from last month.
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Charlottesville-based ZielBio has raised $11 million in equity funding from three investors, according to SEC filings. The company, formerly called iTi Health and licensed out of UVA, makes a tech platform for finding high-value targets for drugmakers and is developing a handful of cancer treatments.
Property rental platform Outdoor Access closed a $2.8 million Series A funding round as it looks to scale to more states. The capital infusion was led by VentureSouth, a South Carolina-based angel network that invests funds from high-net-worth individuals in early-stage startups across the Southeast. Two-year-old Richmond venture group Trolley Ventures, a previous investor, also participated. The company has mainly built up its network in Virginia and North Carolina so far, with the funds earmarked for a push into South Carolina, Texas and Pennsylvania.
Richmond-based GlobalWorx has raised $2.6 million in an equity and debt raise, according to SEC filings, with a cap of $4.8 million. The company makes software for consumer goods companies that tracks inventory, with a focus on replacing out-of-stock items for retailers and merchandisers. It recently added a business line with an expansion into drug stores.
Richmond-based insurance tech startup Fenris Digital raised $1.7 million in a seed funding round that included an investment from former FICO CEO Larry Rosenberger. Fintech fund SixThirty and three Virginia investment shops – the Center for Innovative Technology, Tyson's Angels Group and 757 Angels Group – also participated in the round. The 3-year-old company will use the funds to hire employees in several departments and build out its product suite.
Six months after launching, Meru Biotechnologies raised $1 million in a debt funding round of up to $2 million. The startup is commercializing technology licensed from Vanderbilt University that analyzes how molecules bind together, looking to accelerate drug research. Co-founder and CEO Dan Rodenhaver was a managing director at Richmond consulting firm The Fahrenheit Group before launching the new venture.
Richmond-based startup Trilogy Mentors has closed a pre-seed funding round of $835,000, led by Rosetta Stone co-founder Michael Silverman and the Maclaurin Group. Maclaurin founding partner Alan Williamson – former CTO of Royall & Co. – will serve as interim CTO, adding to the recent on-boarding of Nathaniel Casey as chief revenue officer.
Nonprofit entrepreneurial support organization Activation Capital invested a total of $500,000 to Startup Virginia, a local startup incubator, and $225,000 to programming and regulatory support for the newly created Health Innovation Consortium. The grants are supported through Activation’s Ecosystem Direct Investment Fund, which was created in December 2017 and has awarded a combined $2 million to ecosystem support organizations.
Honorable Mentions
The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute nabbed a pair of U.S. Department of Transportation grants totaling $15 million to advance research on the safe integration of automation into U.S. roadways. Virginia Tech says the funding will drive initiatives to develop safety-first, data-based solutions to national transportation challenges. They were two of seven proposals selected for a grant through the Automated Driving System Demonstration Grants program.
Tyler McQuade, a professor at the VCU College of Engineering, is leading a multi-university AI project that became one of the first to land nearly $1 million in funding through a new National Science Foundation initiative called the Convergence Accelerator. McQuade and his collaborators will pitch their prototype in March in a bid for additional funding of up to $5 million.
