Several companies raked in new money in March.
Tat'âna Maramygina / EyeEm
For D.C.-area ventures seeking capital — and investors ready to deploy that capital — March didn’t disappoint.
Money flowed across industries, from biotech and health care to food and hospitality, and everything in between, including D.C.’s Altoida Inc. with $14 million; Bethesda’s Eat the Change, from Honest Tea’s Seth Goldman and celebrity chef Spike Mendelsohn, with $4.5 million; the District’s SparkMeter Inc. with $10 million; Rockville’s Autosled Inc. with $5 million; and D.C.’s Placemakr, formerly WhyHotel, with $90 million.
Also in March, the Maryland Tech Council received $2.45 million from the federal government’s omnibus bill to accelerate innovation for the state’s life sciences companies. D.C. social impact nonprofit Halcyon raised its first fund at $5 million. And Rockville proptech investor Camber Creek closed its fourth fund at $325 million.
Those were some of the highlights. But as always, the region saw more investments than we could count throughout the month. Here’s the rundown:
- Fonbnk Inc.: The District-based crypto company opened the month with an oversubscribed $3.5 million seed round led by New York’s New Form Capital. San Francisco’s Kraken Ventures, New York’s North Island Ventures and others also participated, as did big names such as Pharrell Williams via Black Ambition of Los Angeles. Fonbnk offers financial services to people with limited banking access, allowing them to use digital money for prepaid airtime minutes, or cellphone minutes paid for ahead of time. The goal, according to the company, is to provide access to decentralized financial services for underserved populations. It focuses on emerging markets in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
- Legends of Learning: The D.C. ed-tech startup said March 2 it nabbed $5 million in funding from Denver’s Konvoy Ventures and a handful of angel investors including James Park of Fitbit, Holly Liu of Kabam, Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Kun Gao of Crunchyroll. The company, which offers a collection of computer-based educational games to help teachers keep students engaged, launched in 2017 and comes from serial entrepreneur Vadim Polikov. Legends of Learning, which classified the latest capital infusion as a seed round, has raised more than $18 million to date, according to PitchBook, including $3.5M in 2019.
- Salubris Biotherapeutics Inc.: The Gaithersburg biotech announced March 7 it received $32 million from China’s Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd., of which the local firm is a wholly owned subsidiary. The financing, which closed in late 2021, positions the company to advance its pipeline, which includes therapeutics for cardiovascular diseases, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. The clinical-stage company, founded in 2016, is led by CEO Sam Murphy.
- Cambium Carbon PBC: The District climate-tech startup made public March 15 a fresh $3.2 million in a seed funding round led by Los Angeles-based MaC Venture Capital, also with investment from San Francisco’s Soma Capital; Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai; Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and Blue Ivy Ventures, among others. The company’s software-as-a-service platform connects local sawyers and millers with trees that fall in forests across the country — so they can turn them into durable products for real estate developers, tech companies and furniture manufacturers. “This funding will allow us to grow a two-sided marketplace for locally sourced and salvaged material that reinvests in urban tree restoration and creates local jobs,” Cambium Carbon co-founder and Chief Financial Officer Marisa Repka said in a statement.
- ThreatBlockr Inc.: The Tysons cybersecurity firm, which rebranded from Bandura Cyber, said March 22 it raised $5 million in new funding. Columbia, Maryland-based Gula Tech Adventures, New York’s Tenfore Holdings, Bethesda’s Saul Holdings and Lord Baltimore Capital Partners led the round, alongside other new and existing investors. The company plans to use the money to expand its threat defense platform and continue growing the team. That’s in addition to adding two new executives: Oracle alum George Just as chief revenue officer and Distil Networks alum Courtney Brady as vice president of marketing.
- Theia Analytics Group Inc.: The D.C. company disclosed March 23 the close of a $1 million angel round. The company did not disclose names of the investors, but founder and CEO Jeff Hood said in a statement the individuals are associated with firms such as Goldman Sachs, T. Rowe Price and Wells Fargo. TAG, which aims to help organizations navigate regulatory changes, said in its announcement the capital positions it to continue developing its analytics products and move toward “owning the governance suite.”
- Jeenie: The D.C. startup, which aims to break down language barriers in health care, announced March 31 $9.3 million in Series A investment. Boston digital health growth equity firm Transformation Capital led the round. Jeenie’s mobile and web-based platforms, now live in hundreds of health care facilities throughout the U.S., connect patients and caregivers to live interpreters to foster equity and eliminate disparities due to language barriers. “Jeenie was created to make language assistance ubiquitous, so anyone in the world can effectively communicate without language barriers," Jeenie co-founder and CEO Kirsten Brecht said in a statement. “In health care in particular, this means being a voice for the most vulnerable, by ensuring clear, trusted and accurate communication between caregivers and all their patients.”
Who did we miss? Send us an email and let us know.
Related:
