• New Financing brings total capital raised to $56 million since starting in 2021
• Participation from strategic investors, including Uber Technologies, Inc. (“Uber”) and NVIDIA, will support deployment of up to 2,000 new AI-powered sidewalk delivery robots

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10, 2023 — Serve Robotics, Inc. (“the Company” or “Serve”), the leading autonomous sidewalk delivery company, today announced raising an aggregate of $30 million in financing, bringing the Company’s total funds raised to over $56 million. Concurrent with the raise of new capital and conversion of existing convertible notes (the “Financing”), Serve also completed a reverse merger with Patricia Acquisition Corp. (“Patricia”), a public Delaware corporation, whereby Serve became a wholly owned subsidiary of Patricia. Following the transaction, Patricia changed its name to Serve Robotics, Inc. and will continue the historic business of Serve.

The Financing was led by existing investors, including Uber, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Wavemaker Partners, with participation from new investors Mark Tompkins and Republic Deal Room. The transaction was sponsored by Montrose Capital Partners. Network 1 Financial Securities (as consulted by Intuitive Venture Partners) and Aegis Capital Corp served as co-placement agents.

Uber Vice President of Delivery and Head of Americas, Sarfraz Maredia has joined the Company’s board, effective July 31, 2023.

This Financing enables Serve to enter new markets across the United States and further advance its industry-leading, AI-powered mobility platform. The company will also begin scaling up its robotic fleet to meet massive and rapidly-increasing customer demand for last mile automation, including fulfilling its commercial agreement to deploy up to 2,000 robots with Uber Eats.

“We’re thrilled that our core strategic partners Uber and NVIDIA continue to back Serve as we work to bring sustainable, autonomous delivery to every doorstep in the next five years,” said Dr. Ali Kashani, Co-founder and CEO of Serve. “Serve’s delivery volume has grown over 30% month-over-month on average for the past 18 months. Becoming a public company provides broader access to capital, supporting our continued growth as we ramp up our partnership with the world’s largest food delivery platform and expand other enterprise partnerships.”

The securities issued in the acquisition and sold in the private placement have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Act”), and may not be resold absent registration under, or exemption from registration under, such Act.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.

To learn more about Serve, visit serverobotics.com.

About Serve Robotics, Inc.

Serve is shaping the future of sustainable, self-driving delivery. The Company designs, develops and operates zero-emissions robots that serve people in public spaces, starting with food delivery. Founded in 2017 as the robotics division of Postmates, Serve set out to build a robotic delivery experience that delights customers, improves reliability for merchants, and reduces vehicle emissions to zero. Six years later, the company’s self-driving robots have successfully completed tens of thousands of contactless deliveries in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Spun off from Postmates as an independent company in February 2021, Serve is backed by Uber and other world-class investors. Serve has several established commercial partnerships and continues to expand its partner platform. Find out more at www.serverobotics.com, follow us on social media via Twitter and Instagram, or apply to join our team on LinkedIn.

Forward Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Serve intends such forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements contained in Section 21E of the Exchange Act. These forward-looking statements can be about future events, including statements regarding Serve’s intentions, objectives, plans, expectations, assumptions and beliefs about future events, including Serve’s expectations with respect to the financial and operating performance of its business, its capital position, and future growth. The words “anticipate”, “believe”, “expect”, “project”, “predict”, “will”, “forecast”, “estimate”, “likely”, “intend”, “outlook”, “should”, “could”, “may”, “target”, “plan” and other similar expressions can generally be used to identify forward-looking statements. Indications of, and guidance or outlook on, future earnings or financial position or performance are also forward-looking statements. Investors and prospective investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as they involve inherent risk and uncertainty (both general and specific) and should note that they are provided as a general guide only. There is a risk that such predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved. Subject to any continuing obligations under applicable law, Serve does not undertake any obligation to publicly release the result of any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this announcement, to reflect any change in expectations in relation to any forward-looking statements or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statements are based. While due care has been used in the preparation of forecast information, actual results may vary in a materially positive or negative manner. Forward-looking statements are provided as a general guide only and should not be relied on as an indication or guarantee of future performance. They are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainty, assumptions and contingencies, many of which are outside Serve’s control, and are based on estimates and assumptions that are subject to change and may cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. To the maximum extent permitted by law, responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise is disclaimed. This announcement should not be relied upon as a recommendation or forecast by Serve. Past performance information given in this document is given for illustrative purposes only and is not necessarily a guide to future performance and no representation or warranty is made by any person as to the likelihood of achievement or reasonableness of any forward-looking statements, forecast financial information, future share price performance or any underlying assumptions. Nothing contained in this document nor any information made available to you is, or shall be relied upon as, a promise, representation, warranty or guarantee as to the past, present or the future performance of Serve.

Contact

Aduke Thelwell
Head of Communications
Serve Robotics, Inc.
[email protected]
347-464-8510

SOURCE Serve Robotics Inc.

NEW YORK, Aug. 10, 2023 — WindRose Health Investors, LLC (“WindRose”), a leading healthcare-focused private equity firm, announced that its portfolio company, Healthmap Solutions, Inc. (“Healthmap”), has raised $100 million to support the ongoing expansion of its business. Healthmap is a national population health management company focused on kidney disease. The company has grown rapidly and is currently contracted with its health plan customers to serve over 160,000 individuals.

The funding will provide the company with the resources to implement newly awarded business and the balance sheet strength to support the growing portion of HealthMap’s covered lives that are contracted under capitated arrangements. Today, Healthmap is contracted to manage over $3 billion in healthcare spend through risk-based arrangements with a number of the country’s leading health plans and at-risk providers. WindRose financed the transaction, which included commitments from WindRose’s sixth fund as well as a new WindRose vehicle capitalized and led by StepStone Group (“StepStone”) and joined by other new and existing investors.

“We are thrilled to build on our partnership with Healthmap as they expand their business and fulfill their mission of improving care and lowering costs for polychronic patients,” said Oliver T. Moses, WindRose Managing Partner.

Adam Johnston, Partner at StepStone said, “We are excited to support a high-quality asset in Healthmap that can make a material positive impact on patient outcomes. We believe WindRose is the ideal partner to continue generating value for all stakeholders involved.”

Eric Reimer, Healthmap’s Chief Executive Officer said, “We are grateful for the ongoing support of our investor group and excited to have ample resources to maintain our rapid growth. We believe that Healthmap has built a differentiated approach to managing chronic kidney disease. It is rewarding to see the market’s enthusiasm for our program and the positive impact we are having on patients’ lives.”

Evercore served as financial advisor on the transaction and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP served as legal advisor.

About Healthmap Solutions

Healthmap Solutions is an NCQA-accredited kidney population health management company serving health plans, health systems, accountable care organizations, and provider groups seeking a value-based solution to improve the lives of Americans living with chronic kidney disease. Using its advanced predictive analytics technology and clinical expertise, Healthmap provides early kidney disease identification and recommends clinically proven interventions to delay or slow disease progression. Healthmap Care Navigation teams work with patients and the full spectrum of a health plan’s providers to maintain access, minimize disruption and deliver personalized whole-person care from trusted providers. Healthmap’s approach is to proactively plan care transitions and optimize renal replacement therapy, with a focus on in-home dialysis treatment and transplant. This approach improves care, outcomes, and patient experience while lowering total medical costs for health plans and provider groups. 

About WindRose Health Investors

WindRose makes equity investments in companies that operate within the services sectors of the healthcare industry. The firm focuses on companies with a demonstrated ability to deliver cost-effective solutions. WindRose manages approximately $3 billion in investments. WindRose is based in New York, NY and invests in companies primarily based in North America. For more information, please email us at [email protected].

About StepStone Group 

StepStone Group Inc. (Nasdaq: STEP) is a global private markets investment firm focused on providing customized investment solutions and advisory, data and administrative services to its clients. As of June 30, 2023, StepStone was responsible for approximately $640 billion of total capital, including $143 billion of assets under management. StepStone’s clients include some of the world’s largest public and private defined benefit and defined contribution pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies, as well as prominent endowments, foundations, family offices and private wealth clients, which include high-net-worth and mass affluent individuals. StepStone partners with its clients to develop and build private markets portfolios designed to meet their specific objectives across the private equity, infrastructure, private debt and real estate asset classes.

Contact

Caroline Luz
Lambert
[email protected]
203-570-6462

SOURCE WindRose Health Investors

New funding unlocks new solutions for sustainable laundry and the removal of microplastics from wastewater, and demonstrates continued investment in climate tech

BRISTOL, England, Aug. 9, 2023 — Matter, a microplastic technology and innovation company pioneering solutions for capturing, harvesting and recycling microplastics, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A. This funding round will enable the company to scale its microplastic filtration technology and accelerate its roadmap of solutions for commercial and industrial applications.

The round was led by S2G Ventures, the direct investment team for Builders Vision, and SOUNDWaves, the sustainability-focused investment vehicle backed by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary. Kate Danaher of S2G Ventures and Katherine Keating of SOUNDWaves will both join Matter’s expanded Board of Directors. Additional investment came from Leonardo Dicaprio backed Consumer ClimateTech fund Regeneration.VC, and Katapult Ocean, which has made a significant follow-on investment via its new Deep Blue Fund since co-leading the Seed investment round, along with a small number of strategic investors.

Microplastics are tiny plastic particles less than five millimeters in size and are produced through the production and use of our clothing and textiles. For each laundry cycle, up to 700,000 microplastic fibers are released from washing machines and into waterways. An estimated 171 trillion microplastic particles currently float within our oceans, and growing research suggests that microplastics are harmful to the environment, as well as human and animal health.

“Matter’s vision is to live in a world without micropollutants. We are dedicated to building the necessary tools, techniques, and scalable solutions to drive this transformation,” said Adam Root, founder and CEO of Matter. “We knew from the start that as a small company intent on tackling this global problem, we’d need to work with partners who have the scale, vision and resources to help us deliver our technology as quickly and effectively as possible. The combined support and expertise of our investors enables us to accelerate our work, moving beyond laundry into industrial-scale applications of our technology, and drive globally meaningful reductions in micropollutant emissions with confidence and speed.”

Matter is working with domestic and commercial laundry appliance manufacturers to integrate its technology into their products ahead of incoming French legislation requiring new domestic and commercial washing machines to be fitted with microfibre filters by January 2025. Matter is also partnering with textile brands and manufacturers to help them better understand and prevent pollution from microfibre fragmentation in the textile manufacturing process.

“As established partners of Matter, we’ve been impressed by the relentless determination and speed at which they’ve been able to develop innovative solutions and demonstrate an instant impact on the industry,” said Kate Danaher, Managing Director at S2G Ventures. “Continued investment in solutions like the ones Matter provides are critical, if not essential, to ensuring the long-term health of our oceans, and subsequently, the overall health of our planet.”

With this funding, Matter will leverage their core technology to further develop scalable solutions capable of stopping microplastic and other micropollutant emissions from domestic, industrial and municipal water systems. The solution will capture the microplastics that would otherwise end in sewage sludge to be used as fertilizer or incinerated, enabling a fully circular solution.

“Matter’s micro-filtration technology is class-leading and represents a crucial defence against the continuous flow of microplastic pollution from our homes, workplaces and built environments” added Katherine Keating, Managing Partner at SOUNDwaves. “Legislation is inevitable given the ecological and health impacts of microplastic pollution that are becoming better understood every day, and we are already working with Matter to realise the commercial relationships required to bring this impact to industrial scales, mitigating thousands of tonnes of plastic materials entering our environment every year from textile production and industrial wastewater processes.”

About Matter:
Matter is an innovation company pioneering technology solutions for capturing, harvesting, and recycling microplastics. Founded in 2018, the company is now a leader in microfiltration with circularity and sustainability at the heart of the business. Their mission is to stop microplastic pollution at source. Matter’s development and growth is focused on the creation of solutions to address the major sources of microplastic pollution in wastewater, including the entire textile lifecycle, and supporting education and legislation to drive global impact. For more information about Matter, visit https://matter.industries/, or connect with us on LinkedIn.

About S2G Ventures:
S2G Ventures, the direct investment team of Builders Vision, partners with entrepreneurs who are working on solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges across the food, agriculture, oceans, and clean energy markets. We provide capital, mentorship, and value-added resources to companies pursuing innovative market-based solutions that generate positive social, environmental, and financial returns. We provide our partners with flexible capital solutions that can range from seed and venture funding through growth equity to debt and infrastructure financing. For more information about S2G, visit s2gventures.com, tune-in to our podcast, or connect with us on LinkedIn.

About SOUNDWaves: 
SOUNDWaves is a climate-focused investment vehicle that partners with leading brands and corporations to pilot and invest in early-stage solutions greening supply chains. SOUNDWaves is dedicated to supporting the next generation of clean, circular, and sustainable businesses and works closely with founders to scale for enterprise contracts. SOUNDWaves is an extension of SOUND Ventures and is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

About Regeneration.VC:
Regeneration.VC is an early-stage venture fund Supercharging Consumer-Powered Climate Innovation driven by circular and regenerative principles. We invest in Consumer ClimateTech companies that generate outsized economic and environmental outcomes across three strategies: Design (AgTech & Aquaculture and Next-Gen Materials), Use (Apparel & Lifestyle and Food & Beverage brands), and Reuse (Recommerce and Reverse Logistics system technologies).

About Katapult Ocean:
Established in 2018, Katapult Ocean is an ocean impact venture fund manager headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Since inception Katapult Ocean has invested in over 50 ocean impact tech companies spanning blue foods, ocean energy and circular resource domains. Katapult Ocean drives toward a world where a thriving ocean exists in harmony with economic development. In 2022, Katapult was recognized as an Uplink Top Innovative fund by the World Economic Forum and Katapult Ocean’s Accelerator Program was awarded ‘Best Nordic Program’. Katapult Ocean’s Accelerator Program is a Global Finalist for World’s Best Accelerator Program. Katapult Ocean is actively deploying capital from its recently first-closed Deep Blue fund.

Media Contact:
Ally Dunne, Zeno Group
[email protected] 

SOURCE Matter

The round is led by Montage Ventures and Trucks with participation from Fortune 500 giants, CarMax and Assurant Ventures

DETROIT, Aug. 9, 2023 — Treehouse, an electrification company that delivers turnkey installations for home EV charging, today announced $10M in funding. The round is led by Montage Ventures and Trucks Venture Capital, with participation from CarMax, Assurant Ventures, Acrew Capital, Gutter Capital, Detroit Venture Partners, Holman, and Automotive Ventures. The funds will be used to expand Treehouse’s Installation-as-a-Service offering to more than 30 states in the next 12 months, while investing in software that can expand the offering to other electrification products.

The Edison Electric Institute projects that 26.4 million electric vehicles will be on U.S. roads in 2030, meaning that EVs will make up nearly 10% of the 259 million cars and light trucks on the road in less than 8 years. Treehouse is addressing this by providing a home charging solution that allows EV owners to get an estimate in under two minutes and bundle home charging installation with the purchase of the best charger for each individual’s budget and needs.

“Home charging is an essential part of the EV ownership experience and Treehouse is transforming the customer experience with a novel approach,” said Todd Kimmel, Founder and Managing Partner of Montage Ventures. “We believe the installation-as-a-service model has disruptive potential in electrification far beyond EVs.”

Treehouse’s unique pricing technology allows EV buyers to receive an instant, guaranteed quote for home charging installation at the point of sale in auto retail locations or via API while applying for vehicle financing. Instant pricing allows home charging to be integrated directly into the vehicle loan, reducing barriers to affordability for home charging. Treehouse also automates permit documentation and has a proprietary network of electricians, enabling the company to deliver an elevated experience by managing the customer journey from end to end.

“The power of transparent charger installation pricing is going to change how consumers shop for and buy EVs,” said Reilly Brennan, Partner at Trucks Venture Capital. “Treehouse is removing a barrier to EV ownership and making it easier for millions of consumers across the country to switch to EVs.”

“We understand the challenges consumers typically face when it comes to installing at-home EV chargers and realize it can often feel overwhelming,” said John Trieu, Managing Director, Growth Ventures, Holman. “The Treehouse team has developed an innovative strategy to streamline this complex process and, similar to Holman, their dedication to delivering an exceptional customer experience is truly remarkable. We’re excited to support the company’s continued growth through this strategic investment and look forward to offering customers a turnkey solution for EV charging.”

Beyond charger installation, Treehouse is helping EV owners maximize incentives and rate plans by compiling every federal, state, and local incentive for home EV charging. This ensures that Treehouse’s customers are able to claim available rebates and select the best utility plans for their needs.

“‘Decarbonizing homes is an urgent task, with over 1 billion machines needing to be replaced or upgraded on the path to decarbonizing US homes in the next 15 years,” said Eric Owski, CEO and Co-Founder of Treehouse. “This funding round will allow us to rapidly expand our geographic footprint and solve core technical problems that have been barriers to scale in this industry until now.”

Treehouse is partnered with leading brands in auto retail delivering turnkey EV charging solutions. To partner with Treehouse visit https://www.treehouse.pro/partner and to learn more about Treehouse visit https://treehouse.pro.

About Treehouse
Treehouse is an electrification company that delivers turnkey installations for home EV charging. The company’s mission is to simplify electrification through software-enabled Installation-as-a-Service, empowering people to live more sustainable lives and accelerating the decarbonization of the places we live and work. Treehouse has raised more than $10.4M in financing to date. Investors include Montage Ventures, Trucks, CarMax, Assurant Ventures, Acrew Capital, Gutter Capital, Detroit Venture Partners, and Automotive Ventures and more.

Press contact:
BAM for Treehouse
[email protected]

SOURCE Gutter Capital

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 9, 2023 — SkyCool Systems Inc., a leading innovator of sustainable cooling technologies raises $5.0 million to scale deployments of its unique technology that can cool objects with no input energy, using the cool temperatures of earth’s upper atmosphere. The seed financing round was led by Nadel and Gussman Ventures, with support from D3 Jubilee Partners and several prominent private and institutional investors.

Along with its fundraise, SkyCool announces Arjun Saroya as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Arjun has 20 years of experience leading engineering, product, business, and corporate development, within the clean energy sector. As Executive Vice President of Innovation at Lime Energy, he helped build a $140 million a year industry leader in energy efficiency solutions for commercial businesses and utility programs.

The $5.0 million seed financing round marks a significant milestone for SkyCool as it transitions from commercial pilots to scaled deployments of its patented radiative cooling technology. The financing will accelerate the development and commercialization of SkyCool’s groundbreaking panel and film products.

SkyCool’s panel-based cooling product improves the efficiency of refrigeration and air conditioning systems, 24 hours a day. The company is currently focused on deploying panels with grocery stores, refrigerated warehouses, data centers, and other buildings with persistent cooling loads.

SkyCool’s direct film products passively cool buildings, shade structures, and transportation systems. The film is especially impactful in applications where heat stress is threatening lives –  including low income communities and emerging economies. Both product lines utilize radiative cooling technology, which sends heat to the cold sky and reduces the temperature of any surface to which it’s applied.

In addition to equity financing, the company has received generous grant support from ARPA-E’s SCALEUP program, the California Energy Commission and New Energy Nexus. With assistance from these agencies, and the new funding round, the company will continue to add to its installed base of projects with some of the world’s largest grocery chains, manufacturing and logistics companies, and government facilities.

“It’s rare to come across a practical, scalable technology and team that is ready for mass adoption – one that can not only make an impact on major energy use sectors of our economy, but also save lives in regions under extreme heat stress. I’m thrilled and honored to be able to lend my experience and time to furthering SkyCool’s mission,” said Arjun Saroya, on joining the team.

Eli Goldstein, the co-founder of SkyCool, will assume the role of CTO, leveraging his extensive technical expertise to drive innovation and maintain the company’s technology leadership. Co-founder Aaswath Raman, now Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA, will continue to lead SkyCool’s Technical Advisory Board.

Johannes Douma of Nadel and Gussman, who will join the company’s Board of Directors, also commented on the investment, saying: “rising global temperatures and growing populations are leading to larger energy demand used for cooling. SkyCool’s scalable, and most importantly, passive cooling technology can make a significant impact to reduce global energy demand. SkyCool has demonstrated a clear value proposition across multiple applications from refrigeration in grocery stores and data centers to direct film applications. We look forward to working closely with SkyCool’s talented management team and leveraging our operational and energy sector experience to help the company grow while addressing the thermal stresses from climate change.”

About SkyCool Systems Inc.
SkyCool Systems Inc is a cooling technology company focused on reducing energy use and improving comfort. SkyCool has two product lines: a thin film which can be applied to outdoor sky-facing surfaces and a panel product used to passively cool fluids. The thin film product, when applied to a roof, can keep it cooler than the ambient temperature, even under direct sunlight. The panel product can significantly improve the energy efficiency of commercial AC and refrigeration equipment 24/7. For additional information about SkyCool, please visit www.skycoolsystems.com.

About Nadel and Gussman Ventures
Nadel and Gussman was formed in 1940 by Isadore Nadel and his son-in-law, Herb Gussman.   Headquartered in Tulsa Oklahoma, the company has focused on oil and gas exploration and production for over 8 decades and is currently managed by Steve Heyman and Jim Adelson representing the third and fourth generations of the family.  Nadel and Gussman Ventures was formed in 2021 to focus on investing in companies that are creating sustainable energy technology to reduce the fossil fuel impact on our planet.

About D3 Jubilee Partners
Established in 2011, D3 Jubilee Partners (“D3”) is an impact venture capital firm based in Seoul Korea and Silicon Valley. The company invests in innovative solutions and tech ventures for mitigating climate change and other big world problems. D3 also convenes impact investor conferences such as “Asia Impact Nights”, to uncover the enormous potential of Asia connecting with the global impact investing community. D3 made its first investment into SkyCool in 2019 and is participating in this round through a fund backed by Korea’s Ministry of Environment and SK EcoPlant.

SOURCE SkyCool Systems

RALEIGH, N.C., Aug. 9, 2023 — Dentognostics, a research-driven technology company, has secured significant investments from Dental Innovation Alliance (DIA) and Dental365, further propelling its growth and innovation in the U.S. dental market. With their patented products for oral health and wellness, Dentognostics has gained the trust and support of industry leaders; notably, Pacific Dental Services^® made a major investment in 2021, partnering with Dentognostics to actively explore innovative technologies, including the tool to screen patients by taking a simple mouth rinse sample, within their supported practices.

Dentognostics seeks to empower patients with knowledge about what is happening in their mouth and with the understanding of the importance of proper dental hygiene, periodontal care, and maintenance. This is done with a patented product that analyzes saliva to determine the collagen breakdown activity in the mouth. By providing patients with a quantitative Oral Fitness Score, the technology keeps the patients accountable for their daily home care behavior and allows the clinician to truly personalize the patients’ care needs based on the data generated, ultimately developing trust between patients and their dental care provider.

DIA is a first-of-its-kind venture firm that funds, advises, and propels the success of early-stage dental technology companies through its leadership and investor team, which has a combined 200+ years of dental industry experience. Beyond capital, DIA provides mentorship and connectivity that can enhance sales activity for portfolio companies.

“Supporting Dentognostics aligns perfectly with our mission at DIA, which is to foster innovation and collaboration in the dental and health sectors,” says Thomas Sharpe, DIA Managing Partner. “We firmly believe in the transformative power of Dentognostics’ technology and see it as a game-changer in improving patient outcomes.”

Joining PDS and DIA as an investor is Scott Asnis, DDS, CEO of Dental365, a full-service dental group with locations throughout New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. This addition further underscores the widespread adoption potential of this technology within the U.S. dental market.

“Investing in and providing other DIA resources to Dentognostics is a natural fit. We believe in their technology and see potential in their testing to greatly improve outcomes in patients. We are excited about its potential to revolutionize patient care and elevate oral health globally,” adds Doug Brown, DIA Managing Partner. 

“We sincerely thank Pacific Dental Services for their unwavering partnership and support over the past two years. Their belief in our vision has been instrumental in our growth,” said Dirk-Rolf Gieselmann, Dentognostics founder and CEO. “We are equally thrilled to welcome DIA and Dental365, whose investments further strengthen our position in the industry and affirm our dedication to 14 years of research and development. Together, we are poised to revolutionize the oral health landscape and reach new heights.”

About Dental Innovation Alliance
www.dialliance.com
Dental Innovation Alliance (DIA) is a close group of dental industry executives that funds, advises and propels the success of early-stage companies building the future of dentistry through technology. Its investor base includes executives and experts from some of the largest and most innovative dental support organizations and other dental businesses. DIA has offices in New York, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham.

SOURCE Dental Innovation Alliance (DIA)

Founded by the IDF’s Former CISO, Sweet introduces an all-in-one cloud runtime security suite

TEL AVIV, Israel, Aug. 9, 2023 — Sweet Security today announced $12 million in seed funding and the launch of its Cloud Runtime Security Suite. The round was led by Glilot Capital Partners with participation from CyberArk Ventures and angel investors including Gerhard Eschelbeck, former CISO at Google and Travis McPeak, who led product security at Databricks. Sweet was founded by retired Brigadier General, Dror Kashti, former CISO of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), retired Colonel, Eyal Fisher, former head of the Cyber Department at Unit 8200 and Orel Ben-Ishay, former Head of the Cybersecurity R&D center at Unit 81. With a clear vision on how to best raise the bar for cloud defense, they built a cloud-native runtime security suite that enables security teams to stop cloud workload attacks, quickly and with surgical precision.

While leading the IDF’s digital transformation effort, Sweet CEO and co-founder Dror Kashti found that even though securing development environments is essential, current cloud runtime security solutions are insufficient for preparing a company for a breach. As critical as it is for companies to shift their cloud security left, attacks only unfold in runtime. Companies require technological “boots on the ground” to detect them. Existing detection tools either provide very limited functionality or aren’t optimized for the cloud. Defenders need cloud-native runtime protections that provide a full narrative for understanding and stopping attacks as they unfold.

Introducing Sweet – The Cloud Runtime Security Suite

Sweet’s Cloud Runtime Security Suite enables CISOs and security teams to level up their cloud security from partial to complete defense. Providing robust defenses across all stages of an attack, its feature set includes Detection & Response, Discovery and Prevention – all in runtime. Sweet’s runtime sensor takes under five minutes to deploy, immediately providing cloud-native cluster visibility. It streams key application data and business logic to its servers, using an innovative framework to profile workload behavior anomalies and contextualize them with traditional TTPs.

Sweet’s modern attack detection model and patent-pending auto learning technology enable immediate delivery of critical, comprehensive attack findings that allow mitigation before, during and after attacks occur. As a result, Sweet provides CISOs with the technical underpinnings needed to be accountable for cloud security. It also enables them to refresh corporate SOC and IR processes for cloud native environments, enabling the organization to ease into cloud adoption and digital transformation.

For security teams, Sweet provides a powerhouse set of runtime “must-haves”, providing a fully contextualized, at-a-glance attack narrative, backed up with extensive response capabilities, a detailed runtime topology and the ability to prioritize DevSecOps remediation efforts.

“As a large, cloud-first company, our business relies on our ability to protect our customers’ digital assets. We needed a runtime security suite that matched our scale, speed, and technology,” said Michael Shaulov, co-founder and CEO, Fireblocks. “Sweet’s technology provides real-time security detection & prevention capabilities to our cloud workloads and, importantly, with minimal business interruption. Its insights on connectivity, visibility to our cloud’s topology, and automatic classification of real-time threats is a force multiplier to our Security Operation Center and our DevSecOps teams.”

“Sweet’s vision for cloud runtime security is spot on, with a  deep understanding of how cloud attacks unfold, and critically, enables defenders to be much more effective at containing them,” said Srinath Kuruvadi, Managing Director, Head of Cloud Security, JPMorgan Chase & Co. “Attacks against cloud workloads are only going to increase in frequency and sophistication. The industry needs comprehensive security solutions to face them and Sweet is driving this shift with its extraordinary vision and expertise.”

“Investing in Sweet Security was a no-brainer,” said Kobi Samboursly, Founding Partner, Glilot Capital Partners. “First, it’s addressing an increasingly problematic cloud security gap – cloud runtime defense. Second, Dror, Eyal and Orel bring superpowers to the table: the depth and breadth of their cloud security expertise and their ability to build and mentor talented, high performing teams. Sweet is off to a great start and we look forward to supporting its success.”

“‘Cybersecurity’ and ‘delightful’ are not words that normally go hand in hand, but we want our customers to use them in the same sentence when talking about our solution,” said Dror Kashti, co-founder and CEO, Sweet Security. “We feel our timing is right to make that happen. If SOC and IR teams don’t have to constantly tune their security products or sift through mountains of alerts, they’ll execute at a higher level, and they’ll be happier. Cloud detection and response may be complex, but it doesn’t have to be painful.”

About Sweet Security

Sweet’s Cloud Runtime Security Suite delivers first-to-market capabilities for defending cloud workloads, shifting cloud security right. Founded by retired, elite IDF commanders with prodigious expertise in offensive and defensive cloud security, Sweet’s approach elevates the ability of security teams to shut down cloud attacks when they occur, where they occur, with maximum precision and minimal business disruption. Sweet Security is backed by Glilot Capital Partners, CyberArk Ventures and an elite group of angel investors. For more information, please visit http://sweet.security

Media Contact:
Liz Safran
Looking Glass Public Relations
[email protected]
408-348-1214

SOURCE Sweet Security

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 9, 2023 — Weights & Biases, the leading end-to-end MLOps platform, today announced both the close of a strategic investment of $50 million at a $1.25 billion valuation and the launch of W&B Prompts. The round was led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, with additional participation from Sapphire Ventures. The round also includes participation from existing investors, including Coatue, Insight Partners, Felicis, BOND and BloombergBeta.

As the adoption of large language models (LLMs) grows, Weights & Biases has continued building out their best-in-class MLOps platform to meet the needs of the most advanced machine learning research in the world. The team will use this new influx of capital to continue to build out these tools, including the launch of Weights & Biases Prompts.

W&B Prompts allows LLM builders to better understand every step of their LLM programs so they can fine-tune, prompt engineer, and debug the latest foundational models. This is a critical step, enabling faster time to production on LLM models and the apps they power. Like many of their features, W&B Prompts was co-designed with partners and customers, ensuring it meets the needs of a rapidly changing community of practitioners.

“Weights & Biases found their footing by helping developers supervise model training, where they are the popular choice for practically everyone we know — from Meta to OpenAI to Microsoft,” said Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. “Now that the industry is maturing, they’re expanding from training to prompting – helping enterprises around the world use LLM platforms in a safe & reliable way. It is rare to find a team and company so well positioned to capture share of the ever-growing AI market – all while maintaining terrific SaaS margins.”

“We’re big Weights & Biases fans here at OpenAI and have been using their product for a long time. In fact, we were their first customer,” said Peter Welinder, VP of Product at OpenAI. “You simply can’t do ambitious, expansive projects without best-in-class tools. We use W&B to train our models at OpenAI and I’m thrilled to see Lukas and the whole team at Weights & Biases continuing to grow and build the tools practitioners need to innovate.”

Weights & Biases is quickly becoming the default tooling for LLM and MLOps. The team has seen significant user growth since it raised its Series C in 2021, growing from 100,000 users to over 700,000. It is used by virtually all the major GenAI model builders like Meta, OpenAI, MosiacML, Aleph Alpha, HuggingFace, and more. In total, their MLOps platform has tracked nearly 300 million hours of machine learning experiments for customers from industry leaders like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Toyota Research Institute, Volkswagen and Square to emerging players like Cohere.

“Our goal at Weights & Biases has never changed: to build the best tools for machine learning practitioners,” said CEO and Co-Founder Lukas Biewald. “We’re really excited about where the field is moving, specifically the success and adoption of foundational generative AI models. Honestly, I’m thrilled to raise an institutional round from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross—who have both trained quite a lot of their own models—and have been significant users of Weights & Biases for quite a long time.”

W&B is integrated in 20,000 repos, including the LLM repos practitioners rely on like Langchain, LlamaIndex, GPT4All, and specialized infrastructure providers like Coreweave, Lambda and Graphcore. In addition to their deep, long-standing partnership with NVIDIA, Weights & Biases has partnered with other leaders in the space like Microsoft, AWS, GCP, Anyscale, and Snowflake. Cited in hundreds of state-of-the-art research papers, Weights & Biases is also a vital tool for academics pushing the boundaries of what AI can accomplish.

“Machine learning development has skyrocketed and the rate at which we are seeing new tools and experiences being built is breathtaking. To help support this tremendous wave of innovation, Weights & Biases has emerged as a leading developer-first MLOps platform,” said Casber Wang, Partner at Sapphire Ventures. “Sitting at the center of the ML workflow, Weights & Biases has become the popular choice for ML practitioners. Sapphire couldn’t be more excited to partner with Co-Founder and CEO Lukas Biewald, and the entire Weights & Biases team.”

Few industries change at the pace machine learning does. Weights & Biases remains not only committed to building the best end-to-end MLOps platform in the world but also to evolving with the machine learning ecosystem as it moves to the broad adoption of large language models and the solutions those LLMs will power.

About Weights & Biases

Weights & Biases is the leading developer-first MLOps platform that provides enterprise-grade, end-to-end MLOps workflow to accelerate ML activities. Used by over 700,000 ML practitioners including teams at OpenAI, Toyota, Microsoft, and hundreds more, Weights & Biases is part of the new standard of best practices for machine learning.

SOURCE Weights & Biases

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 9, 2023 — Symmetry Systems, a next generation AI-powered data-centric security company, today announced an $17.7 million inside round of funding with repeat participation from ForgePoint Capital and Prefix Capital and new participants W11 Capital Management and TSG (The Syndicate Group), a channel-focused strategic investor.

Symmetry Systems’ mission is to protect the world’s data, ensuring resilience and enabling modern data-centric companies to grow, innovate and lead with confidence. The world today has two massive tailwinds. First, organizations are doing incredibly sophisticated things with data, from datalakes to generative AI. Second, in the cloud, data and identity become the main points of security controls versus infrastructure and applications. This means data-centric organizations will have to build security around data and the identities that use it. And that’s Symmetry’s focus.

“It’s extremely gratifying to see that after 15 years of research, data flows have a central place in enterprise cloud security. Spectacular data applications need a new kind of security — as long as we provide great visibility into every data object, who has access to it and what they’re doing with it, we can enable safe and agile innovation within modern companies where everyone can collaborate confidently,” said Mohit Tiwari, Co-Founder and CEO of Symmetry Systems.

Organizations must unlock their data to be agile and resilient, and even to survive, in a remote-first, generative AI era. Yet organizations do not even know what data they have, who can access it, or how it is used. As a result, data is either locked away in regulated vaults or exposed to unmanaged risk in cloud and data lakes. Symmetry enables that data to flow – across business units and into the cloud and data lakes – faster and safer than ever before. Partners, including managed security service providers, incident response teams, and GSIs such as Accenture, turn to Symmetry to proactively harden their customers’ data against risks and respond with data-object level precision within minutes when an incident does occur.

Data – what to keep around, who to share it with, and how to use it – is everyone’s business in an organization. As a result, an effective data security solution must evolve beyond a security experts-only product to become a collaborative tool for both security and business (including developer and data) teams. Symmetry is building an LLM-based natural language interface, where even a business user without deep cloud expertise can understand what data and what actions create a security or compliance risk, as well as what options can iteratively improve data risk, through a sequence of plain language prompts.

Byron Alsberg, Co-Founder of Prefix Capital, stated, “Symmetry is one of those rare companies that knows how to build deeply technical products to solve very difficult and complex problems for its customers. When you see an opportunity like this, you double-down.”

“In the data access governance space, Symmetry DataGuard differentiates itself with its ability to analyze data objects and identities previously missed by traditional solutions so security teams can accurately contextualize the risk of the data in their environment,” said Katherine Walther, VP, Innovation at Trace3. “We look forward to bringing this innovative approach to our clients and organizations who still find themselves grappling to find efficient and effective ways to meet data security policies and compliance regulations.”

Further details on the funding round are available at https://www.symmetry-systems.com/blog/symmetry-systems-closes-17-7-million-to-scale-its-ai-powered-data-security-platform/. For more information about Symmetry Systems or the DataGuard solution, please visit https://www.symmetry-systems.com/.

About Symmetry Systems 
Symmetry Systems is the industry’s first hybrid cloud data security platform that safeguards data at scale in AWS, GCP, Azure services, and on-premise databases while supporting a data-centric zero trust model. With Symmetry, security and compliance teams can address threats quickly through AI-driven data security posture management (DSPM). Symmetry provides visibility into data risks from excessive permissions and anomalous data flows while giving organizations the evidence required to demonstrate compliance best practices.

Born from the award-winning Spark Research Lab at UT Austin, Symmetry is backed by leading security investors ForgePoint Capital and Prefix Capital with participation from Accenture Ventures. Symmetry provides solutions for the most demanding security teams. For more information about Symmetry Systems, please visit www.symmetry-systems.com or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Media Contact 
Caitlin Kruell
Lumina Communications for Symmetry Systems
[email protected]

SOURCE Symmetry Systems