The company is building infrastructure for social knowledge aggregation

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, June 15, 2023 — Decentralized infrastructure provider Intuition has raised $4 million in a seed round fundraise led by Superscrypt. The raise comes as Intuition approaches the public launch of its protocol and first applications later this year.

Intuition lets users create attestations about any subject, storing the information in such a way that it’s easily navigable, queryable, and leveraged by other applications. Intuition’s founder, Ethereum veteran Billy Luedtke, explains that the protocol was created to capture the wisdom of crowds about everything, while making that wisdom available and open to everyone.

“Today, determining truth to make informed decisions is a complex and difficult task,” says Jacob Ko, Partner at Superscrypt. According to Ko, “Information is largely concentrated in big tech platforms, search and curation algorithms are opaque, and identity and reputation standards are too fragmented to provide strong signals. Intuition’s approach of incentivizing crowdsourced knowledge and opinions from users in a globally inclusive and decentralized way will fuel better understanding of any person, ID or topic. It has the potential to change the way we disseminate, consume and understand information and we’re excited to back a team with deep experience working on data interoperability and digital identity.”

Other participants in the round include Shima Capital, Avon Ventures, WW Ventures, Matrixport Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and ConsenSys, along with several other VC, DAO, and angel investors. This round follows a fundraise last November co-led by Andrew Keys, founder of DARMA Capital, and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys.

Whereas decentralized identity has largely focused on high sensitivity credentials, like KYC and the identities of people, Intuition facilitates robust decentralized identity that pertains to all things. “Nearly everything can and should have decentralized identifiers (DIDs),” Luedtke explains. “Whether that’s a person, pseudonym, web3 product, organization, or even a news article.”

According to Luedtke, “We presently rely on a fundamentally flawed system of siloed, centralized platforms such as Yelp, LinkedIn, and Twitter to inform our intuition about the world around us. These platforms shape our perception with fragmented, incomplete, and occasionally misleading information.”

As a protocol, Intuition doesn’t take a view on whether something is true or false, but instead captures and shows what people are saying about a thing. By allowing people to freely share their opinions about any subject, and verifiably attaching that data to DIDs in an open knowledge graph, Luedtke hopes to improve the reputation and identity data that we societally have access to regarding the things we’re interacting with every day.

“Our digital identities form the bedrock of a flourishing data-driven economy and society. However, the vast reservoir of digital knowledge on the internet still exists in a disparate and incomplete state. For a future free from these fractured conditions, we require purpose-built infrastructure that fosters the creation and seamless access to consolidated, trustworthy, and permissionless information. Anchored by an exceptional team, Intuition harnesses web3 primitives to align ownership and incentives, driving forward this transformative vision. I am thrilled to support their journey towards this exciting future,” said Alex Lin, Head of Research and Investor at Shima Capital.

Intuition’s protocol and middleware allow developers to easily integrate the company’s attestations and knowledge graph into their own applications. Intuition will initially launch with a knowledge graph explorer built atop the protocol, and will directly display human-readable data regarding wallet addresses inside popular web wallets.

For more on Intuition visit intuition.systems.

About Intuition
Intuition provides decentralized infrastructure, developer tools, and applications enabling the creation of an open, flexible knowledge graph enhancing the quality and availability of social knowledge. Intuition was founded in 2022 by Ethereum veteran Billy Luedtke and is backed by Superscrypt, Shima Capital, Polygon Ventures, ConsenSys, Andrew Keys, and Joseph Lubin along with several other VC, DAO, and angel investors. https://intuition.systems/

About Superscrypt
Superscrypt is an early stage crypto-native VC whose mission is to onboard the next wave of builders and users into the web3 space. We invest in category-defining web3 teams, and partner with them to scale their business. Our focus is on infrastructure and emerging use cases; including wallets, identity and credentials, developer tools, data indexing and search, scaling and privacy. Superscrypt is made up of founders who have decades of building and scaling technology businesses, and we leverage this experience to help our teams with GTM, product, technology, tokenomics, strategy and community building. https://www.superscrypt.xyz/

About Shima Capital
Shima Capital is a leading early stage VC firm, founded by Yida Gao in 2021, investing in disruptive blockchain companies. The fund is deeply focused on taking a hands-on approach and working closely with its portfolio companies to provide the most sweat equity per dollar invested. As teams in web3 push the frontier of innovation, Shima helps hire talent, build community, amplify narratives, and foster the acceleration of technical research and development. Shima is composed of seasoned investors, accomplished operators, and former founders who align on a mission to support all-star teams with building and scaling generational companies. For more https://shima.capital/

SOURCE Intuition Systems

SAN FRANCISCO, June 15, 2023 — Octave, an innovator in outcomes-focused behavioral health care, today announced that it has secured $52 million in Series C funding to drive national expansion of evidence-based, in-network therapy services. The round was led by Cigna Ventures, Novo Holdings, and Avidity Partners, and joined by all existing institutional investors, Health Velocity Capital, Greycroft Partners, Felicis Ventures, Company Ventures, and Obvious Ventures.

Since launching in 2018, Octave has grown rapidly and today serves 18 million covered lives across seven states: California, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Washington, D.C. The company’s innovative value-based care model has led to first-of-its-kind partnerships with major national payers.

The new funding will accelerate Octave’s expansion to more regions later this year and all 50 states in 2024, as well as the release of new technology products to serve payer and provider partners. This latest round of investment brings the company’s total funding to $86 million.

“The demand for mental health services is higher than ever, but our mission is not just to ensure that care is accessible, but actually effective for the patient and sustainable for the mental health provider. With this raise, we’re aiming to move beyond directly facilitating care, to trying to influence how the whole system functions — how care is paid for, how it is found, and the tools we use to support it,” said Sandeep Acharya, Co-Founder and CEO of Octave.

“I’m grateful to our new investors, all of whom bring a wealth of experience from scaling healthcare companies across the private and public markets, for recognizing the unique value we bring,” Acharya said. “Our team is excited to partner with them to transform mental health care.”

Increased Investment Focus on Sustainable Growth

Behavioral health investments decreased 56% from a high of $4.8 billion in 2021 down to $2.1 billion in 2022, with the downward trend continuing in the first quarter of 2023, according to Rock Health. In the current economic climate, investors are looking for strong financial models and sustainable growth strategies to dictate success.

“Cigna Ventures collaborates with innovative, forward-thinking companies who have the ability to solve healthcare’s biggest challenges and improve health outcomes for many,” said Craig Cimini, Head of Cigna Ventures. “We’ve collaborated with Octave since 2021 and believe in what the company is doing to set a new standard for behavioral care delivery.”

“Octave’s patient-centric model, which increases access to mental health while balancing provider objectives, aligns with our strategy to invest in the health and sustainability of our communities,” said Eric Snyder, PhD, Partner in the Venture Investments group at Novo Holdings. “We are impressed by Octave’s rapid expansion, strong clinical focus, and highly experienced team.”

“We are excited to invest in Octave and support their innovative approach to delivering quality mental health care. We look forward to supporting Octave as they expand their reach, enhance their technology offering, and make a lasting impact on patient’s lives,” said Avidity Partners’ Jacob Garfield.

About Octave

Octave is a modern behavioral health practice creating a new standard for care delivery that’s both high-quality and accessible to more people. With in-person and virtual clinics, the company offers personalized care plans that can include individual, couples, and family therapy, while pioneering relationships with payers to make care more affordable through insurance. Grounded in science, Octave enables clients to experience profound change that is as measurable as it is meaningful. Learn more at www.findoctave.com

SOURCE Octave Health Group

AMSTERDAM, June 15, 2023 — 

• Stellantis Ventures to support Dare Forward 2030 strategic plan
• Stellantis Ventures invests in 10 startups, one mobility venture fund to power innovation
• Three Stellantis Ventures-based projects are launching in 2023
• Investments accelerate adoption of cutting-edge technologies in compressed timeframes
• All projects focus on innovations to improve mobility and customer experience

Stellantis Ventures, the corporate venture fund of Stellantis N.V., has been formed to support and amplify the execution of the Dare Forward 2030 strategic plan.

Ten startup companies and one mobility venture fund have been considered so far as its first key investments. Three of the projects backed by Stellantis Ventures are launching this year, validating the fund’s mission to accelerate deployment of innovative, customer-centric mobility technologies and supporting Stellantis’ Dare Forward 2030 efforts in leading the change to a more sustainable mobility and better in-vehicle experience for all customers.

“Transforming Stellantis into a mobility tech company means we need to have the mindset of a startup, focused on our customers and working with a dash of impatience,” said Ned Curic, Stellantis chief technology officer. “We are using the strength of Stellantis Ventures to connect with companies that are developing cutting-edge technology that we believe can transform the in-cabin experience and improve the mobility sector, for our customers and for society as a whole.”

Investments support the Dare Forward 2030 strategy and are aligned to the three core pillars:  care, tech and value.

CARE

• 6K enables advanced sustainable manufacturing to ensure clean, low-carbon emission material production. 6K’s UniMelt plasma process is a cutting-edge platform for producing domestic sustainable critical materials for EV batteries, 3D printing and endless other applications. 6K delivers true sustainable manufacturing – faster, cleaner, and at a lower cost
   
• Beweelsociety, a startup with roots inside Stellantis, is a developer of connected e-bikes and provider of a wide range of services from purchasing to cycling through one unique digital app, including financing, insurance, facilitation and care services (maintenance, anti-theft). Expanding the vision beyond traditional auto, beweelsociety helps Stellantis accelerate the growth of sustainable and soft mobility. The first e-bikes will be available to purchase from specialized cycling networks and technology-focused retailers in Europe, starting the last quarter of 2023
   
• NetZero is a climate venture specializing in long-term carbon removal from the atmosphere by turning agriculture residues into biochar, a very stable form of carbon. Biochar can be mixed with agricultural soils, improving yields and reducing the need for fertilizers. NetZero’s mission is to bring biochar at scale in the tropics – for climate and people

TECH 

• Nauto deployed artificial intelligence and computer vision technology, combined with advanced risk data science, to more than 800 commercial fleets to help save money and lives through safer driving. Nauto’s safety system assesses both driver behavior risk and external road risk, warning and coaching drivers to reduce distracted driving and prevent collisions in real time while respecting driver privacy. Nauto Cloud and mobile applications help fleet safety and risk managers operate fleets more efficiently, identify and coach at-risk drivers, and accelerate claims processing. The Nauto solution will be available this summer in the United States on Stellantis commercial fleet vehicles
   
• Trails Offroad, staffed by off-road experts and enthusiasts, offers a digital library of more than 3,000 detailed offroad trail guides throughout the United States and Canada that can be loaded in the Jeep® Uconnect system. Each trail guide provides detailed information, including route description, key waypoints, difficulty ratings, points of interest, videos and reviews. Beginning this summer, select new Jeep vehicles will have access to more than 200 notable trail guides, including the 62 Jeep Badge of Honor trails. The full catalog will be offered as a subscription service
   
• Viaduct is an artificial intelligence platform designed to improve vehicle analytics for quality and maintenance. The platform deploys its machine learning algorithms to identify anomalies in fault and sensor data, predict vehicle health and enhance preventative maintenance routines, making vehicles safer, more reliable and personalized
   
• Geoflex is a worldwide operator of satellite positioning augmentation technology designed to augment accuracy, integrity and continuity of operation of all global navigation satellite systems receivers, whatever the brand is. Its hypergeolocation services provide accurate, safe and resilient positioning down to four centimeters accuracy everywhere in the world, on land, at sea and in the air
   
• Envisics is a globally renowned pioneer of dynamic holographic technologies with an application for augmented reality head-up displays (AR-HUDs) and automotive sensor systems. The advancement of Envisics technology has the opportunity to transform automotive displays and revolutionize the in-car experience
   

VALUE 

• Electra Vehicles, a leading provider of battery software solutions for electric mobility, provides active and adaptive controls for battery management systems, predictive battery analytics and battery pack design software. With embedded and cloud-based artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) battery enhancement features, Electra aims to maximize the full potential of battery power to enable electric mobility to take us further
• Lyten created Lyten 3D Graphene, a unique decarbonization materials platform tunable for a wide range of advanced applications: lightweight composites for reduced vehicle weight, advanced sensors to improve driver experience, and a breakthrough highly sustainable lithium-sulfur battery that uses zero nickel, cobalt or manganese, has higher energy density, lower carbon footprint and enables supply chain independence

Stellantis Ventures will be present at MOVE 2023 on June 21-22 as an exhibitor in booth #36 and a main speaker, delivering the opening keynote on June 22 titled “Start Me Up! The central role of incubators in driving mobility forward” and joining a panel discussion on “The start-up ecosystem and the unicorn journey.”

Stellantis Ventures is not disclosing the name of the mobility venture fund investment.

Stellantis Ventures was announced in March 2022 as a key component of the Stellantis Dare Forward 2030 strategic plan. Dare Forward 2030 sets out a series of important targets, led by deep emission cuts to slash CO2 in half by 2030, benchmarking the 2021 metrics, to achieve carbon net zero by 2038 with single-digit percentage compensation of the remaining emissions. Core targets for Dare Forward 2030 also include 100% of passenger car sales in Europe and 50% of passenger car and light-duty truck sales in the United States to be BEVs by the end of the decade; the ambition of doubling net revenues by 2030 (versus 2021) and sustaining double-digit adjusted operating income margins throughout the decade; and the aim to become number one in customer satisfaction for its products and services in every market by 2030.

Stellantis Ventures
Established with an initial investment of €300 million, Stellantis Ventures is the first Stellantis corporate venture fund. It targets early and later-stage startup companies that are developing cutting-edge technologies for the automotive and mobility sectors and are focused on improving outcomes for individual customers and society as a whole. The fund has a unique dual mandate that requires portfolio companies to have strong, sustainable growth prospects as well as a high potential for technological adoption within Stellantis’ products and operations. Backed by one of the world’s leading automakers and mobility provider, Stellantis Ventures is uniquely positioned to drive value quickly and effectively for portfolio members. Entrepreneurs and startups seeking funding can visit https://stellantis.ventures. 

Stellantis
Stellantis N.V. (NYSE / MTA / Euronext Paris: STLA) is one of the world’s leading automakers and a mobility provider. Its storied and iconic brands embody the passion of their visionary founders and today’s customers in their innovative products and services, including Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Citroën, Dodge, DS Automobiles, Fiat, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, Vauxhall, Free2Move and Leasys. Powered by our diversity, we lead the way the world moves – aspiring to become the greatest sustainable mobility tech company, not the biggest, while creating added value for all stakeholders as well as the communities in which it operates. For more information, visit www.stellantis.com. 

SOURCE Stellantis

$1.6 billion RIA founded by the CEO’s grandfather in 1963 is one of the original fee-only firms

CHICAGO, June 15, 2023 — Hightower today announced it has made a strategic investment in Meyer Capital Group, a $1.6 billion firm with offices in Marlton, N.J. and Naples, Fla. With 17 employees, including 10 advisors, Meyer Capital Group serves more than 800 clients.

Under the leadership of Thomas C. Meyer, CEO of Meyer Capital Group, the fee-only fiduciary wealth management firm’s mission is its motto: Commoda Tua Ante Nostra – Your Interest Before Ours. Meyer Capital Group has been helping families achieve their financial goals since 1963, when Meyer’s grandfather started the business as one of the original fee-only firms. Since 1982, when Tom took the helm, the firm has grown from $2 million to $1.6 billion assets under management (AUM). Today it serves an impressive group of clients, including business owners, non-profits, and high-net-worth individuals.

“We were looking for a partner that would support our growth while also understanding our deep roots that stem back to when my grandfather founded the business nearly six decades ago,” said CEO Tom Meyer. “Hightower is the right fit for us. Having access to their value-added services, operational resources and large community of other like-minded firms will serve as a catalyst for our accelerated growth. And most importantly, this will give us more time to focus on our clients.”

“I have personally known Tom and Meyer Capital Group for almost 20 years, and they have a long history of helping clients to achieve their financial goals, which makes them a perfect fit for our community. They’ve already aligned with our mission on spreading well-th,” said Hightower Chairman and CEO Bob Oros. “Our valued-added service offering as well as back and middle-office platform support will enable them to enhance their client value proposition while giving them time to build even stronger client relationships.”

Gladstone Associates, LLC served as advisor to Meyer Capital Group.

In addition to inorganic support, Hightower offers its 133 advisory businesses in 34 states and the District of Columbia a range of services designed to catalyze and accelerate organic growth, including business development consulting, leadership and team development, talent acquisition, marketing support, technology, investment management resources, compliance, accounting, payroll and human resources. Advisors benefit from streamlined access to the Hightower National Trust Company, estate & financial planning, and business management services such as personal CFO, bookkeeping, bill pay and tax preparation for their clients.

As of March 31, 2023, Hightower’s assets under administration were approximately $148.2 billion, and assets under management (AUM) were $119.9 billion, an increase from $113.7 billion as of December 31, 2022.

About Hightower

Hightower is a wealth management firm that provides investment, financial and retirement planning services to individuals, foundations, and family offices, as well as 401(k) consulting and cash management services to corporations. Hightower’s capital solutions, operational support services, size and scale empower its vibrant community of independent-minded wealth advisors to grow their businesses and help their clients achieve their vision of “well-th. rebalanced.” Based in Chicago with advisors across the U.S., the firm operates as a registered investment advisor (RIA). Learn more about Hightower’s collaborative business model at www.hightoweradvisors.com.

Securities offered through Hightower Securities, LLC member FINRA/SIPC. Hightower Advisors, LLC is a SEC registered investment advisor.

Media Contact:
Siobhan Nolan
JConnelly
(862) 217-9585
[email protected]

SOURCE Hightower

FREDERICK, Md., June 15, 2023 — Today, Theradaptive, a biopharmaceutical company breaking new ground in targeted regenerative therapeutics, announces that it has closed a $26 million Series A funding round to advance development of its targeted regenerative therapeutics.

The funds will enable the company to continue its work to meet regulatory requirements and scale up Good Manufacturing Practices in preparation for first-in-human clinical trials later this year. Investment will also support the expansion of the Theradaptive platform beyond orthopedics to additional indications such as oncology and dental. The round brings Theradaptive’s total funding to over $50 million. The company has previously been awarded non-dilutive grant funding from the Department of Defense, as well as the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund.

Theradaptive’s founder conceived of the technology after witnessing extremity injuries that resulted in delayed amputations among servicemembers. His subsequent research into bone and tissue regeneration at MIT focused on addressing the limitations associated with existing regenerative medicine approaches such as achieving anatomically precise outcomes and ultra-persistent local delivery of therapeutics. Theradaptive was subsequently spun out from that work. The company’s proprietary protein-engineering platform produces targeted therapeutics that can be used to coat implants, devices, and injectable carriers to achieve hyper-local delivery over long time periods exceeding weeks to months.

With this technology, the FDA has granted an unprecedented three breakthrough medical device designations to Theradaptive for its various spinal indications, allowing it to work on an accelerated review schedule to get its breakthrough treatments to patients as quickly as possible and showing the FDA’s recognition of the need for more precise and targeted therapeutics.

Dr. David Stewart, VP of Operations at Theradaptive, said, ‘We’re delighted that our investors recognize the potential of the Theradaptive platform across indications, from cancer to orthopedics. Support from our partners is essential to continue our work to make existing biologics more precise, persistent, and localized, and thus safer and more effective. Our mission is to offer new treatment possibilities to patients who currently have few options, and this funding will help us achieve this.’

‘Theradaptive’s platform is exciting because it has the potential to improve therapeutics in a wide variety of indications’ said John Greenbaum, SVP of Regulatory & Clinical Affairs at Theradaptive. He continued, ‘With the world’s population aging, the company’s spinal repair product will be more important than ever, and new programs at the company based on the same protein engineering platform will also address the $300 billion oncology market. We’re looking forward to taking our operations to the next level, scaling up manufacturing, preparing for clinical trials in the US, and continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible in regenerative medicine and targeted therapeutics more broadly.’

About Theradaptive

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Maryland, U.S., Theradaptive is a venture-backed biopharmaceutical and medical device company with the goal of leveraging its therapeutic delivery platform to deliver biologics where they are needed in the body with high local precision and high persistence to address unmet medical needs. Theradaptive’s innovative platform is enabling the development of new therapeutics in spine, orthopedics, and soft tissue repair as well as targeted immuno-oncology.

Media Contact: 
Serena Lertora
[email protected]

SOURCE Theradaptive

NEW YORK and LONDON, June 15, 2023 — Reask, the risk data company applying artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret and forecast global extreme weather conditions, today announced it has raised a total of $6.55M in investment funding. Its most recent $4.6M seed round was co-led by Mastry Ventures and Collaborative Fund, with participation from Macdoch Ventures and existing pre-seed investor Tencent, alongside pre-seed investors SV Angel and Hawktail.

Reask provides high-resolution weather risk analytics and forecasting to calculate the severity and frequency of extreme weather events on earth, anywhere, anytime. By applying AI across multiple sources of climate data, Reask delivers proprietary weather modeling algorithms that learn climate physics to offer dynamic forward-looking representations of atmospheric risk. This approach provides critical insights and intelligence to insurers and asset managers, which need more accurate weather catastrophe forecasting but are limited to unreliable and inadequate methods based on static historical statistics.

A key focus for Reask and its technology is tropical cyclones, which have caused in excess of USD $1 trillion in total economic damage globally over the last ten years. Less than 50% of those economic damages were insured. The severity of damage from tropical cyclones are projected to worsen with climate change, posing an alarming and growing threat to organizations worldwide.

“The ability to accurately forecast and measure the behavior of tropical cyclones has always been extremely challenging, especially given their complex interaction with the climate and propensity to damage land-based observational equipment,” says Jamie Rodney, CEO of Reask. “Organizations need a clearer view on how extreme weather is changing, so they can adequately prepare for any impact to their physical assets, infrastructure, business models, and customers. Our goal is to bring this information more quickly and efficiently to people and industries so we can help those who need it most and before there is an urgent need for help.”

“Ballooning industry loss rates, most recently underscored by State Farm & Allstate’s complete withdrawal from new policy issuance across home and commercial lines in California, illustrate why new approaches to extreme weather risk management must be adopted,” says Co-Founder and General Partner Sam Landman at Mastry Ventures. “Reask’s team has spent years investing in their technology platform, which has now been validated by many of the world’s most sophisticated leaders in risk analysis. We’re excited to see the continued adoption of their product across the insurance and financial services industries and believe the company is well positioned to become the new standard.”

The global insurance industry directly requires more dynamic extreme weather forecasting to price risk. Other industries including financial services, logistics, real estate, and natural resources also need better climate models to analyze hazards. With its latest funding, Reask will add more hazard coverage and grow its team internationally to better service customers in these growing markets.

“Our mission at Collab has always been to support businesses and technology that are pushing the world forward,” says Guy Vidra, Partner at Collaborative Fund. “Reask’s ground-up, physics based approach to climate analytics technology makes it possible to predict the outcomes and risks of extreme weather, allowing insurers to prepare themselves and others for the worst. We’re thrilled to support the Reask team as they continue to build out their capabilities.”

“I’m excited to continue working with Reask to develop innovative methods for better understanding and quantifying the risks of natural hazards like tropical cyclones [and wildfires],” says Daniel Swain, climate scientist at UCLA. “Using approaches deeply rooted in physical science are critical in producing reliable estimates that can keep up with a warming climate, so the Reask approach is one that’s designed for today’s challenges.”

About Reask

Reask is a science and technology company applying cutting-edge data science to natural hazard modeling. By applying AI to better capture global drivers of extreme weather frequency and severity, Reask can efficiently simulate probabilistic views of ground level risk at extremely high resolution. Early adopters include (re)insurance giants AXA and Swiss Re as well as a Big 4 accounting firm. To learn more, please visit https://reask.earth/.

Contact:
Kathy Osborne
[email protected]
607-434-2065

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2100430/Hurricane_speed.jpg

SOURCE Reask

Telmai‘s Revolutionary Architecture Delivers A Leap Forward in Data Observability 

SAN FRANCISCO, June 15, 2023 — Telmai, the data observability platform company built for hybrid data environments, today announced it has raised $5.5 million in oversubscribed seed funding. The round is co-led by Glasswing Ventures and .406 Ventures, with participation from current investors, including Zetta Venture Partners. Telmai will use the new funding to expand its team and meet increased demand for its AI-driven data observability platform.

New Funding Builds on Company‘s Momentum
Telmai’s seed round comes on the heels of several significant milestones for the company, including:

• Partnership with Google Cloud to bring ML-driven anomaly detection and data quality monitoring to BigQuery.
• Partnership with Snowflake to empower trusted data applications and products.
• Partnership with Databricks to ensure continuous reliability of data lake houses.
• Industry Recognition in G2 Data Quality Grid Report with 5-star customer ratings.
• Recent competitive customer wins with DataStax, Clearbit, and Merkle.
• New product capabilities, including Telmai data health dashboard, custom rules, end-to-end lineage, and private cloud.
• SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.

Addressing Today’s Data Challenges
Enterprises face significant challenges in understanding, monitoring, and maintaining their data ecosystems’ quality, reliability, and accuracy. Addressing these market pain points is crucial for enterprises to fully leverage their data assets, drive informed decision-making, and maintain a competitive edge in the data-driven economy.

Today, most businesses run on a hybrid data architecture, using a combination of legacy and modern data systems spread across structured, semi-structured, and event-streaming data sources, delta lakes, and cloud data warehouses. This complex environment requires a scalable data observability platform that can detect data issues across large volumes of diverse data at marginal cost. This requirement is even more critical as the industry adopts generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs).

A Future Proof Data Observability Platform
To solve these issues, Telmai delivers the first and only data observability platform to identify record value level data quality issues and anomalies at their source before data is ingested into data warehouses and AI models. Telmai uses ML to enable a low-code, no-code interface that automatically identifies issues for structured, semi-structured, and streaming sources and predicts future outcomes. This accelerates time to value for data teams for discovering data reliability issues across any source, supporting the data ecosystem’s current and future state – a revolutionary approach compared to existing solutions available in the market.

For example, Telmai helps Clearbit deliver accurate data to its customers, managing the data quality and freshness of 50M company records, 389M contact records, and 4.5B IP addresses from over 250 sources. Harlow Ward, CTO at Clearbit, says, “Our customers deserve the best possible data to grow their business. Telmai’s data observability enables us to show the quality of the data we deliver to our customers. We use Telmai to monitor and quality check the data that flows through our proprietary algorithms and the data we package for our customers. We chose Telmai because of its ML anomaly detection and scalable architecture. Telmai will remain essential as our data landscape changes.”

Telmai is led by co-founders Mona Rakibe, an entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience launching cloud products at Oracle, Dell EMC, and Reltio, and Max Lukichev, an experienced tech and data science leader and the former head of SignalFx Platform engineering at Splunk. These enterprise data veterans’ work at Reltio and SignalFX/Splunk laid the groundwork for their understanding of the industry’s data pain points and how to architect the Telmai platform for scale.

“We built Telmai using a high-scale Spark architecture allowing it to handle the growing volume, velocity, and variety of data in modern enterprises – what our customers call future-proof,” said Mona Rakibe, CEO and Co-Founder of Telmai. “Today, by partnering with Glasswing Ventures and .406 Ventures, along with the continued support from our existing investors, we are excited to take the next crucial steps in our company’s growth.”

“Since first partnering with Mona and Max at the pre-seed stage, we have been struck by the team’s vision in creating a new market around making data observability both simple and accessible to data teams,” said Graham Brooks, Partner at .406. “Telmai has proven to win against market leaders because of its superior architecture, allowing the platform to observe any data in an ever-growing data ecosystem – and so making it future-proof.”

“We invested in Telmai because they bring the best vision and highly differentiated and defensible product features to the data observability market,” said Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner at Glasswing Ventures. “Telmai is building the first, best, and only scalable data observability solution that enables data owners to monitor, detect, and remediate data issues in real-time. We are thrilled to work with Telmai’s executive leadership as they execute their mission and continue to innovate and expand their footprint.”

To learn more about Telmai, please visit https://www.telm.ai/ or request a product demo.
Join Telmai at Big Data London, where Mona Rakibe, Telmai CoFounder, will present on Data Observability Use Cases: A Look Beyond Data Quality and Incident Management at Noon on September 20, 2023, in the Modern Data Stack theater.

About Telmai
Telmai is a data observability platform company enabling enterprise data owners to monitor and detect data issues in real-time. The platform leverages AI to monitor all data passing through the data pipeline before entering the data warehouse, protecting downstream systems and analytics used for decision-making. Telmai’s real-time architecture supports anomaly detection closest to data sources and works over complex data types with native support for nested and multi-valued attributes. For more information, please visit Telmai.

Contact:
Farnaz Erfan
Head of Growth @Telmai
[email protected]

SOURCE Telmai

Ten Eleven Ventures Led the Round as Information Threats Continue to Drive Risk Across Organization

NEW YORK, June 15, 2023   — Today, Blackbird.AI, the leader in AI-driven Narrative and Risk Intelligence, announced the close of a $20M Series B round led by cybersecurity investor Ten Eleven Ventures, with follow-on support from existing investors Dorilton Capital, Generation Ventures StartFast Ventures and Trousdale Ventures. Other investors include Paul Kurtz, chief cybersecurity advisor to Splunk and Richard Clarke, the first “cyber czar” for the U.S. Government. The fresh funding brings total dollars raised to $32 million.

A 2019 estimate put the cost of disinformation at $78 billion per year globally, with publicly traded companies losing approximately $39 billion annually due to disinformation-related stock market losses. Generative AI, for all its positive attributes, provides unprecedented scalability for disinformation efforts potentially dwarfing these numbers and putting chief communication officers (CCO), chief information security officers (CISO) and the intelligence community on high alert.

“Human perception has become the latest frontier in cyberattacks, manifesting as misinformation and narrative manipulation. This emerging threat is impacting a broad range of sectors and professionals, from strategic communicators and risk managers to information security teams,” stated Wasim Khaled, CEO and co-founder of Blackbird.AI. “We aim to help organizations understand and address the potential threats posed by perception manipulation, which often fly under the radar, fostering an environment of trust, safety and integrity, while simultaneously providing them with significant strategic and competitive leverage.”

With roots in the defense community since 2019, Blackbird’s platform brings together security and communications teams to uncover and track the deliberate manipulation of digital narratives, and the explosion of events in which information threats transmute into physical and cyber threats, financial losses and potentially company-killing events to businesses across brand reputation, ESG and supply chain.

Current technologies have been unable to detect and mitigate harmful content online, often because they have not been able to identify the nuanced indicators in the content and the mechanisms by which it spreads across information networks. Blackbird’s Constellation Platform detects narratives, the risks they contain and the way in which these narratives propagate in more than 25 languages to analyze text, images and memes across the dark web, social, news and more, enabling organizations to react faster to a range of attacks with rapid access to AI-powered insights.

To date, Blackbird.AI’s growth has been mostly organic and has deployed mission critical technology with government organizations helping with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as communications firm Weber Shandwick where the platform is a critical tool in the company’s crisis services. The new funds will help the team scale the sales and marketing efforts to bring its solutions to more customers, drive awareness in key industries and accelerate innovation in enhancing the Constellation Platform and its recently launched RAV3N Co-Pilot, a state of the art Generative AI reporting module to accelerate insights and recommendations. It will also continue to expand its ecosystem through the Blackbird Global Alliance Program.

“Global organizations must act on deliberate and accidental disinformation and malicious messaging from humans or automated bots – or a hybrid of both,” said Dave Palmer, General Partner of Ten Eleven Ventures and former co-founder and chief product officer at Darktrace, who has joined Blackbird’s board of directors. “Online security measures like firewalls and cloud defenses may not be enough to ensure a safe internet. Blackbird offers superior security that goes beyond infrastructure and application security technologies. We are on a mission to serve and protect the  global information ecosystem.”

For additional information, please visit www.blackbird.ai. 

About Blackbird.AI
Blackbird.AI helps organizations detect and respond to threats that cause reputational and financial harm. Powered by their AI-Driven Narrative & Risk Intelligence Constellation Platform, organizations can proactively understand risks and threats to their reputation in real-time. Blackbird was founded by a team of experts from artificial intelligence, and national security, with a mission to defend authenticity and fight narrative manipulation. Recognized by Forrester as a “Top Threat Intelligence Company,” the Blackbird’s technology is used by many of the world’s largest organizations for strategic decision making.

About Ten Eleven Ventures
Ten Eleven Ventures is the original cybersecurity-focused, global, stage agnostic investment firm. The firm finds, invests, and helps grow top cybersecurity companies addressing critical digital security needs, tapping its team, network, and experience to help build successful businesses. Since its founding, Ten Eleven Ventures has raised over $US 1 billion and made over 40 cybersecurity investments across stages worldwide, including KnowBe4, Darktrace, Axis Security, Twistlock, Verodin, Cylance, and Ping Identity. For more information, please visit www.1011vc.com or follow us on Twitter @1011vc.

SOURCE Blackbird.AI

ARLINGTON, Va., June 15, 2023 — Lovelytics (or the “Company”), a leading data engineering and business intelligence consultancy, announced today a strategic investment from Databricks Ventures and Interlock Equity (“Interlock”), a Los Angeles-based private equity firm. This investment will accelerate the growth of Lovelytics’ team and expand its technical offerings related to enterprise data environment creation, AI and LLMs, business intelligence, data science, and cloud infrastructure.

Founded in 2017, Lovelytics provides strategy, data engineering and technology implementation services that enable global enterprises to optimize the management, governance and utilization of organizational data. Through partnerships with technology solution providers Databricks, Tableau and Alteryx, among others, Lovelytics helps businesses better manage and use structured and unstructured datasets to develop data-based intelligence.

“This investment marks a significant milestone in our journey. I am proud to have both Interlock Equity and Databricks Ventures believing and investing in our team, mission, and vision. It’s an affirmation of our hard work and dedication, helping us fuel continued growth, and reaffirming our commitment to our team, customers, services, and partners,” said Scott Love, founder and CEO of Lovelytics.

The investment from Databricks Ventures in Lovelytics marks their first investment in a consulting implementation partner. Lovelytics, an official partner of Databricks since 2021, has made significant investments in hiring, solution development, and marketing in the ecosystem.

Kori O’Brien, SVP of Partnerships at Databricks shared, “Partners play an essential role in enabling our customers to derive value from data and AI and we are thrilled to build on our partnership with Lovelytics through this investment. The Lovelytics team is best-in-class and has been a driving force in helping organizations adopt the Databricks Lakehouse. We look forward to continued collaboration across all areas of our business.”

Lovelytics will continue investing in initiatives to build its team, bolster diversity, equity, and inclusion, and strengthen training programs. Additionally, the firm will deepen its expertise across key sectors and broaden its client-tailored services offerings and solutions.

“Lovelytics is well positioned to capitalize on growing demand for data management solutions and consulting services. They play a critical role in enabling organizations to optimize the use of exponentially growing datasets to drive actionable intelligence that results in measurable improvements in performance. And they do that with an employee-driven culture that attracts top industry talent,” said Stefan Jensen, Managing Director of Interlock.

Neil Huse, former president and CEO of Clarity Insights and an Interlock Operating Partner, added, “Lovelytics has established itself as a thought leader in data and analytics consulting. The numerous recognitions by their technology partners and reputation among clients and employees alike are a testament to the talented team and strong culture that Lovelytics represents. We look forward to building on this foundation while adding more capabilities like AI and machine learning.”

Scott Love concluded, “We are eager to celebrate this milestone. The last six years were the trail leading to the mountain base. Now, with the right team, supportive investment partners, and our customers, we’re ready to ascend further. We look forward to reaching new heights with companies around the globe.”

Scott Love and Lovelytics’ leadership team retained significant ownership and will continue to lead the business. Canaccord Genuity advised Lovelytics in the transaction.

About Lovelytics 

Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Lovelytics is a leading data, analytics, and AI consulting firm, providing data advisory, enterprise data environment design and implementations, data science and machine learning, generative AI, data visualization, and training services to organizations across the world. For more information visit https://lovelytics.com/.

About Databricks Ventures

Databricks Ventures is the strategic investment arm of Databricks, Inc. Databricks Ventures invests in innovative companies that align with our view of the future for data, analytics and AI; and are committed to extending the lakehouse ecosystem or using the lakehouse architecture to create the next generation of data and AI-powered companies.

About Interlock Equity

Interlock Equity is a private equity firm focused on partnering with leadership teams of knowledge-based businesses. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Los Angeles, Interlock invests in North America-based companies in the lower middle market. The firm is focused exclusively on partnering with founders of people-based businesses providing mission-critical B2B and healthcare services.

For more information visit www.interlockequity.com.

SOURCE Lovelytics