The funding frenzy continues.
D.C.-area companies sustained fundraising momentum in April, following a strong first few months of 2022 for venture capital locally; Greater Washington counted 94 venture deals totaling $1.78 billion in the first quarter alone, per recent data from venture analytics firm PitchBook Inc.
Those raises included D.C.’s Upside with $165 million; Arlington’s Federated Wireless Inc. with another $14 million, bringing its Series D total to $72 million; Rockville’s Compost Crew with $5.5 million; Gaithersburg’s Adaptive Phage Therapeutics Inc. with $20 million; and London’s Wagestream with $175 million, which it will use to fund a Greater Washington headquarters.
The Maryland Tech Council raised another $2.5 million, on top of $2.45 million in March, for life sciences workforce development. And new funds emerged, including Bethesda’s Hull Street Energy with $1.1 billion, D.C.’s Construct Capital with $300 million, Bethesda’s Excelsa Holding with $154 million and the District’s Updata Partners with nearly $600 million.
We’ll also be keeping an eye on JLabs accelerator company Acclinate raising a seed round, Bode Technology investing $2 million into its Fairfax headquarters, Eat the Change’s philanthropic engine preparing to award its next batch of grants, Amazon Web Services beginning to invest $30 million into early-stage startups built by underrepresented founders and the D.C. government seeking $92 million in federal funds for projects focused on life sciences innovation.
But over the past several weeks, more local companies raised new money. Here’s a snapshot of that activity:
- Corsha Inc.: The District software security company made public April 5 that it raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Reston’s Razor’s Edge Ventures and Eleven Ventures of Southeast Europe, also with participation from Greenwich, Connecticut’s 1843 Capital. Corsha’s platform secures cloud and computer communications for organizations, important following the pandemic-era transition to digital — and as APIs, which allow web applications to talk to one another, face increasing risk of cyberattacks. “The greater we automate our application development and deployment processes, the more the risk shifts from human to machine,” Corsha co-founder Chris Simkins said in a statement. “It’s more important than ever to have clear visibility into the machines that are accessing APIs and be able to seamlessly control access.”
- Zeno Power: The D.C. company wrapped up April with $20 million in a Series A round led by San Francisco’s Tribe Capital. The business plans to use that capital to produce small-scale nuclear batteries for space missions and sea explorations. The raise, first reported by Axios, comes as the company brings on Timothy Frazier as senior mission director and Lindsey Boles as vice president of engineering.
- Ryse Health: The diabetes care startup announced in early April the close of $3.4 million in seed capital, including $2 million from Pittsburgh’s W Health Ventures. That financing will help the business hire more people and kick off a geographic expansion. Ryse, which has locations in Arlington and Baltimore, is now looking to break into at least a couple more markets over the next two years, and intends to start raising a Series A round later this year, co-founder and CEO Richard Gurley told Maryland Inno.
- Zephyr AI Inc.: The Tysons health-tech startup charged into April with $18.5 million in seed funding. Lerner Group Investments LLC and M-Cor Holdings led the round, and a flurry of others participated, including Columbia, Maryland’s MedStar Health; Watson Pharmaceuticals founder Allen Y. Chao; Palo Alto, California’s AME Cloud Ventures and New York’s BoxGroup. The 1-year-old company, founded by D.C. incubation firm Red Cell Partners, uses machine learning and data to inform new approaches to precision medicine and drug development. The capital will help the business expand its scope, with a goal of improving outcomes for patient care, CEO David Morgan said in a statement.
- Jia Finance Inc.: The D.C. residential mortgage platform closed March with a fresh $5 million in seed funding. Atlanta’s TTV Capital led the round, and Palo Alto, California’s Stanford Angels participated alongside others. The company, which gives global investors access to U.S. residential real estate investments, said it plans to use the capital for national growth.
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