CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Sept. 15, 2023 — Quad-C Management, Inc. (“Quad-C”), a leading middle market private equity firm, today announced it has closed on an investment in the Vortex Companies (“Vortex” or the “Company”), a global provider of trenchless infrastructure rehabilitation products and services.

Vortex is split into two divisions, offering both trenchless infrastructure rehabilitation contracting services and products. Vortex Services operates in 12 strategic locations throughout the U.S. and Europe. Vortex Products maintains two U.S. facilities. Its Sandy, Utah facility formulates, manufactures, and distributes geopolymers, hybrid mortars, polymerics, and resins; while the other, located in Greenville, South Carolina fabricates, trains, and sells sewer robotics, monitoring technology, and installation equipment.

Formed in 2015, Vortex is currently led by its co-founder and CEO, Mike Vellano, who will continue in that capacity. “We are excited to partner with Quad-C to accelerate our growth at Vortex,” said Vellano. “We have been seeking a partner with a similar mindset and history of working with companies on an ambitious expansion path.”  

“Quad-C is very excited to add Vortex to its portfolio. Mike and his management team have done an incredible job of building a profitable company in an extremely competitive environment, with a sustainable growth model,” said Tom Hickey, a Quad-C Partner. “We believe Vortex will be a great fit for Quad-C, as we are very focused on the specialty products and services sectors and we have a long history of successfully partnering with privately held, entrepreneurial minded businesses.” 

Houlihan Lokey advised Vortex on the Transaction. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

ABOUT VORTEX COMPANIES
The Vortex Companies is a leading provider of advanced trenchless water and sewer technologies. Through its products and services divisions, Vortex delivers a comprehensive suite of rehabilitation products, equipment, services, and field support to the municipal, industrial, and commercial marketplaces. This includes pipe and manhole lining systems; sewer robotics; mortars; epoxies and resin materials; installation equipment; contracting services, training, and field support. Operating globally, Vortex is focused on providing customers a broad range of industry leading, cost-effective trenchless solutions and technical expertise, best suited for their project needs. For more information, go to vortexcompanies.com.  

ABOUT QUAD-C
Founded in 1989 and headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, Quad-C is a middle market private equity firm focused on investing in established specialty distribution, industrials, transportation / logistics, business and consumer services, healthcare, food & beverage, and consumer products companies. In its three-decade history, Quad-C has invested $4.3 billion of capital in 82 platform companies. The Quad-C team is committed to partnering with entrepreneurs and management teams to accelerate growth and create long-term value. Learn more about Quad-C at www.quadcmanagement.com.

SOURCE Vortex Companies

SAN FRANCISCO  , Sept. 15, 2023 — Pixis, a leading codeless AI infrastructure company focused on enabling brands to enhance performance marketing, has raised $85 million in its series C1 funding round. The round was led by Touring Capital and brings the company’s capital raised to $209 million. The new and existing investors who participated in the funding round include Grupo Carso, General Atlantic, Celesta Capital and Chiratae Ventures. The funding will be used to deepen Pixis’ AI capabilities, accelerate global expansion, invest in R&D to refine and launch a generative AI-powered creative studio, and build strategic product and business partnerships.

Pixis develops accessible AI technology for growth marketing and has a rich product suite that includes targeting, in-flight performance optimization and generative AI capabilities. Since launch, Pixis has demonstrated a tremendous growth trajectory, with its platform leveraged by more than 200 global brands including names like DHL, Carsome, JOE & THE JUICE, Kavak, HDFC Bank, to name a few.

Nagraj Kashyap, co-founder and General Partner at Touring Capital said, “We passionately believe in the power of generative AI to transform enterprise software use cases. We see Pixis as a pioneer in this category and have been thoroughly impressed by the platform’s powerful technical capabilities translating into rapid customer adoption. We are excited to partner with Pixis, having had a years-long relationship with the team.”

Creative Studio

Pixis recently launched its creative studio, with breakthrough AI capabilities that enable brands to instantly generate photorealistic creative assets – both 3D images and videos – through simple text prompts. The creative studio is deeply integrated into Pixis’ marketing campaign optimization capabilities, embedding contextual campaign data into the creative asset generation process.

Expansion and Roadmap

“This is shaping up to be an exciting year for Pixis as we welcome Touring Capital as investors; the Touring team have been important thought partners over the years and we are delighted to announce our new partnership. With this capital raised, we will continue to concentrate on strategic channel partnerships with renewed vigour, and invest heavily in our R&D efforts,” said Shubham A. Mishra, co-founder and CEO, Pixis.

This year also saw a significant expansion of Pixis’ AI infrastructure with the company having achieved its goal of building 200 AI models. Along with having successfully beta-tested their generative AI-powered creative studio, they have also released products for cross-platform growth marketing that are proving to be game-changers in the market. Additionally, the company has also begun live deployments of its AI-powered solutions for B2B companies.

About Pixis

Pixis is a no-code AI platform helping brands scale all aspects of their marketing and augment their decision-making in a world of infinitely complex consumer behaviour. The company’s codeless AI infrastructure delivers over 200+ proprietary AI models that provide marketers with robust plug-and-play AI products – from campaign optimization to creative asset generation – without having to write a single line of code.

About Touring Capital

Founded in 2023, Touring Capital is a VC firm focused on investing in the next generation of early growth stage, AI-driven SaaS companies around the world. Its founders, Nagraj Kashyap, Priya Saiprasad, and Samir Kumar, have over a decade of experience working together at leading investment firms and a proven track record of venture capital investing across the global technology startup ecosystem. The Touring Capital team is committed to investing in companies that are leveraging AI to fuel major productivity gains for workers across all lines of business and sectors. Visit https://touringcapital.com  to learn more.

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2211403/Pixis_co_founders.jpg
Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2211404/4275385/Pixis_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Pixis

NEW YORK, Sept. 14, 2023 — Superorganism announced its launch as the first venture capital firm dedicated to the global biodiversity crisis. Founded by a seasoned venture capitalist and a conservation technologist, Superorganism aims to support early-stage technology startups working to prevent biodiversity loss.

Superorganism’s mission is to back visionary startup founders who are determined to create a more abundant future for humans and nature alike. In a world that has seen a staggering 69 percent decline in wildlife populations since 1970, Superorganism supports entrepreneurs building ambitious businesses to combat the primary drivers of biodiversity loss: land and sea use change, overexploitation, invasive species, pollution, and climate change.

“Because so many industries are linked to biodiversity loss, there are endless opportunities for startups to help incumbents transition, or to compete directly against them,” said Kevin Webb, co-founder of the firm. “Every day we meet founders using cutting-edge technologies to build nature-positive businesses, where their impacts grow with scale.”

The firm has backed tech-driven startups across categories including AI, fintech, forestry, fintech, and materials, and is actively expanding its portfolio. It also invests in frontier technologies, enabling powerful new tools for conservationists such as advanced genomic techniques or next-generation remote sensing.

“Hands down, Superorganism has been our most valuable investor,” says Aarav Chavda, founder of INVERSA Leathers, an organization that uses invasive species like lionfish to produce luxury leather products, disrupting the exotic leather market while funding invasives removal at scale. “Superorganism’s network is completely unique, and they’ve supported us in so many ways.”

Other Superorganism investments include Funga, which is leveraging the soil microbiome of healthy forests to improve forestry outcomes and address the climate crisis, and AI startup Amini, which delivers insights for corporate customers by creating environmental data infrastructure for Africa.

The co-founders of Superorganism have a unique blend of expertise. Kevin Webb has over a decade of experience in venture capital, with a track record that includes investments in billion-dollar companies such as Ginkgo Bioworks, Turo, and Ironclad. Tom Quigley, a coral reef conservationist turned startup operator, brings a deep understanding of the intersection of technology and nature.

Superorganism has also pledged to allocate 10% of its profits to support ongoing conservation efforts. This commitment underscores its support for closing the biodiversity financing gap of $711 billion per year, and helps to bring new partners and stakeholders into the conversation around how tech can be used to protect nature.

SOURCE Superorganism

The BFM Fund Selected As An SSBCI Funder Through State of Oregon, Joins Recast’s Accelerate Fellowship Program and Provides Snapshot of What’s Ahead Through Q4 2023

PORTLAND, Ore., Sept. 14, 2023 — Amidst market volatility and legacy fundraising challenges, emerging fund managers continue to make a splash as they disrupt the venture ecosystem. “The BFM Fund team has had an eventful summer and we’re gearing up for an incredible Fall conference season,” says Himalaya Rao-Potlapally, Managing Director of The BFM Fund. “It has been a great honor to be selected as an SSBCI funder, a fellow with Recast Capital and VC Include, to lead healing sessions for women of color leaders across the country, and to be recognized for the continuous work we are doing to expand the accessibility of entrepreneurship to BIPOC and rural communities as a pathway for economic development and generational wealth building.”

Over the last few months, The BFM Fund has had several milestone announcements:

Business Oregon BOV Fund Program – Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, announced its intent to award $3M to The BFM Fund. The Business Oregon Venture Fund Program (BOV Fund Program) is awarding a total of $5M to three Oregon-based fund managers to increase access to venture capital for as many as 50 early-stage startups. The BFM Fund is looking forward to deploying the capital to support the robust innovation ecosystem that has been building in Oregon over the last 10 years and has already obtained $1.5mm of the $3mm required private match funds.

Recast Cohort Accelerate Program – Recast Capital, a platform dedicated to investing in and supporting emerging managers in venture, announced the first cohort of Recast Accelerate, a catalytic program designed to drive the success of women and nonbinary-led, early stage US funds in venture capital—Himalaya Rao was selected as one of the 36 fall 2023 inaugural cohort members. Of the 36 selected funds, 25% include at least one GP that is Black, 17% Latinx, 39% Asian, 8% from the LGBTQIA+ community, and 36% are first-generation U.S. citizens. The funds are headquartered all across the US, covering 13 states and over 83% of the funds involved are raising Fund I and 53% are a solo GP. Some of the top sectors of focus include health and wellness, consumer technology and climate technology.

Boston Impact Initiative (BII), 2023 Emerging Fund Manager Cohort – Himalaya Rao and Marquita Jamarillo were selected to participate in BII’s third emerging fund manager cohort program in summer 2023. The program provides education and training to diverse, emerging fund managers who are interested in designing and launching integrated capital funds dedicated to closing the racial wealth divide. Himalaya and Marquita both successfully completed the program alongside 12 other participants representing 8 place-based funds in six cities where they learned about integrated capital, stakeholder development, investment criteria, governance structures, fund design and modeling, impact measurement and management, and raising capital.

Black Venture Summit, Build in Tulsa – Himalaya Rao and The BFM Fund have been selected to participate in the The Black Venture Summit which brings together the top Black talent in venture capital from across America to Tulsa, Oklahoma from October 4-6, 2023. Himalaya will have the opportunity to connect one-on-one with those at the forefront of equity and inclusion in the venture capital ecosystem. The summit’s goal is to bring together leading GPs and seasoned LPs committed to investing in diverse fund managers.

Recent Award Wins – The BFM Fund was recently awarded 2023 Afrotech’s Future 50 Investor, recognizing those who are advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and innovation through their career endeavors. Furthermore, Himalya Rao also received the Recent Alumni Leadership, Innovative Achievement Award from Willamette University.

These recent wins join the Managing Director’s already impressive roster of wins including:

Black Friday Film Premiere – September 1 marked “Black Friday”, a community event hosted by Devin Boss and Zoe Piliafas, at Hollywood Theatre which served as the debut for the first two episodes of a Portland-produced docuseries about Black Oregon entrepreneurs. The night also included a panel of business leaders in which Marquita Jaramillo, Principal at The BFM Fund shared the stage alongside Fund friend and community partner, All Raise CEO- Paige Hendrix Buckner, who is a fierce advocate for the inclusion of women in business. The panel was moderated by Microenterprise Services of Oregon Director, Cobi Lewis to celebrate and pay homage to the trailblazers and Black entrepreneurs of Oregon.

If you’re looking to connect with Himalaya Rao or The BFM Fund team, they will be hosting and speaking at several events this upcoming conference season:

Upcoming Calendar of Events featuring or hosted by The BFM Fund

The BFM Fund will also be supporting the following organizations at their community-centered events this Fall:

The BFM Fund
The BFM Fund is a seed-stage venture investment fund, routinely investing in Black and innovative founders who create startups based in the United States. The fund is returns-focused and seeks scalable ventures across multiple industries between the Series Seed and Series A life-stage. Beyond capital, The BFM Fund partners with industry-specific lead firms in the Series A to Series C stage to help its portfolio companies scale efficiently. The fund strategy is to be a “feeder fund” to larger industry-specific funds who lack diversity in their portfolio and connect innovative founders with a pathway to liquidity, creating intentionality in demographic-based investing. To learn more about The BFM Fund, please visit www.bfm.fund or connect with them on Linkedin (@bfmfund). Any inquiries can be sent to hello@bfm.fund. 

SOURCE The BFM Fund (Black Founders Matter Fund)

LLS’s Investment in Leading-Edge Research Aims to Accelerate Treatment Innovation and Expand Equitable Access to Treatments to Increase the Quality of Life and Survival Rates for All Blood Cancer Patients

RYE BROOK, N.Y., Sept. 14, 2023 — The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), the largest nonprofit dedicated to creating a world without blood cancers, is proud to be recognized by the White House Cancer Moonshot for its investment and efforts to promote health equity in the latest Cancer Moonshot Fact Sheet released yesterday by the White House.

From the White House Fact Sheet:

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) will invest more than $17 million to bring clinical trials and treatment innovation to diverse and underrepresented communities across the country. For example, LLS is expanding its Influential Medicine Providing Access to Clinical Trials (IMPACT) Research Grant Program to include seven major, geographically diverse cancer centers and surrounding local cancer care delivery settings, to bring blood cancer treatment studies into more communities. As part of the investment, LLS’s Equity in Access Research Program will spend $2.5 million in the next year to initiate multi-year studies addressing systemic, institutional, clinician, and patient-related barriers to trial participation. In the next five years, LLS aims to improve the speed of innovation and expand equitable access to treatments that have the potential to increase blood cancer patients’ quality of life and survival. 

The ideal timing of this information from the White House during Blood Cancer Awareness Month is amplifying LLS’s dedication to ensuring that all blood cancer patients and survivors have access to the care they need, when they need it. But for too many patients, this does not happen. As demonstrated in the latest Cancer Moonshot Fact Sheet, LLS is making major investments in solutions to advance equitable access to care.

The programs highlighted are just two examples of many ways in which LLS is working to make a difference in the lives of those affected by blood cancer. In addition to investing in research, LLS also provides free, personalized support and advocates for policies at the state and federal levels that eliminate barriers to cancer care.

To learn more, please visit lls.org.

About The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society  

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society® (LLS) is the global leader in the fight against blood cancer. The LLS mission: Cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease, and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families. LLS funds lifesaving blood cancer research around the world, provides free information and support services, and is the voice for all blood cancer patients seeking access to quality, affordable, coordinated care. 

Founded in 1949 and headquartered in Rye Brook, NY, LLS has regions throughout the United States and Canada. To learn more, visit www.LLS.org. Patients should contact the Information Resource Center at (800) 955-4572, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET.  

LLS is the only organization featured in the nonprofit category on both Fast Company’s 2022 Brands That Matter list and the 2023 Best Workplaces for Innovators list. LLS stands out among brands around the world for its relevancy, cultural impact, ingenuity, and mission impact.  

For additional information, visit lls.org/lls-newsnetwork. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Media Contact: Melissa Valentino [email protected]

SOURCE The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS)

New funding allows company to grow its California
homeowners’ insurance business providing further relief to wildfire-stressed market

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 14, 2023 — Delos Insurance Solutions, which uses wildfire science and satellite imagery expertise to solve homeowners’ wildfire insurance availability issues, today announced a $7.3 million seed extension round.  The funding enables the company’s expansion in the California homeowners’ insurance market. The seed extension round was led by IA Capital Group with participation from Blue Bear Capital; Gallatin Point Capital; Generation Space through Seraphim Space Investment Trust PLC; Avanta Ventures, the corporate venture arm of CSAA Insurance Group; Red Dog Capital; DNX Ventures; Robert Glanville; and Jonathan Crystal.

As large national carriers are reducing their California homeowners’ exposure, Delos is doubling down on its commitment to the market by working with its committed carrier partners to dramatically expand insurance options for homeowners struggling to find coverage.

The Delos approach vertically integrates its wildfire science expertise and data from its full suite of wildfire models.  This empowers the company to pinpoint properties in “stressed” areas – ones the traditional market is avoiding due to potential wildfire concerns – that do not pose a high risk of loss and offer those homeowners full insurance coverage.  To date, not a single home insured by Delos has suffered a wildfire loss and they have never non-renewed a home for wildfire exposure.

Delos’ platform aggregates and analyzes exposure and concentration data to quantify a home’s actual wildfire risk.  It’s enabled by a proprietary geospatial AI algorithm and more than two hundred data layer inputs, such as detailed weather and wind data, drought and precipitation history, and multi-level overlays of amount, type, and health of vegetation.

“This new funding round underscores Delos’ commitment to the California homeowners’ insurance marketplace and substantiates the success of our vertically integrated strategy,” said Delos CEO and Co-Founder Kevin Stein. “The significant growth of our homeowners’ insurance product over the past 12 months, combined with the confidence of our investors, helped us secure funding in a difficult environment.  It enables us to write even more homeowners insurance policies through our independent agent network and partner carriers, who offer our policy in regions where they don’t write.”

“We are impressed by Delos’ success and growth trajectory in this incredibly challenging California wildfire insurance market,” said Matt Perlman, Partner at IA Capital. “Delos provides homeowners with a creative and viable solution to the persistent problem of insuring homes in areas under threat of wildfire. We are pleased to provide further support to help fuel their expansion in California and beyond.”

“The home insurance market in California is broken and while wildfire risk isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, neither are Californians,” said Vaughn Blake, Partner at Blue Bear Capital. “Delos leverages a depth of understanding in data-modeling, machine learning, and wildfire behavior that traditional markets currently don’t possess, all in the service of writing coverage.  Blue Bear is excited to partner with Kevin, Shanna, and the rest of the Delos team as they face the wildfire problem head-on, with a data-driven, solutions-oriented approach.”

As a specialist MGA, Delos can continuously update their data set with new information within six weeks, allowing the team to adapt and react to new evolutions in wildfire peril and remain profitable as climate continues to affect this catastrophe.

About Delos Insurance Solutions

Delos Insurance Solutions uses cutting-edge technology to offer insurance protection to homeowners in communities abandoned by other insurers because of wildfire risk. Founded in San Francisco in 2017 by aerospace engineers, Delos uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to identify insurable homes within territories deemed too risky by the rest of the insurance market. Delos is a Managing General Agent (MGA) offering policies on behalf of insurers rated “A” (Excellent) by AM Best.

SOURCE Delos Insurance Solutions

Industry-first automated evaluation and security platform to detect unexpected LLM failures at scale

NEW YORK, Sept. 14, 2023 — Patronus AI today officially launched the first automated evaluation and security platform that helps companies use large language models (LLMs) safely. Using proprietary AI, the new platform enables enterprise development teams to score model performance, generate adversarial test cases, benchmark models and more. Patronus AI automates and scales the manual and costly model evaluation methods prevalent in the enterprise today, enabling organizations to confidently deploy LLMs while minimizing the risk of model failures and misaligned outputs.

Patronus AI was founded by machine learning experts Anand Kannappan and Rebecca Qian. Prior to Patronus AI, Rebecca led responsible NLP research at Meta AI, and Anand pioneered explainable ML frameworks at Meta Reality Labs. They founded the company after experiencing firsthand the difficulties of evaluating AI outputs, and recognized early on that LLM evaluation would become a massive challenge for enterprises.

“Every company is looking for ways to use LLMs today, yet they are concerned that unexpected model behavior, incorrect outputs and hallucinations will put their business and customers at risk,” said Anand Kannappan, CEO and co-founder, Patronus AI. “Whether off-the-shelf, open-source or custom, models today remain inadequately vetted and tested in real-world scenarios. And until now, the process of evaluating LLMs has been extremely inefficient and unscalable, producing unreliable results.”

Patronus AI leverages state-of-the-art machine learning technology to test and score any language model in order to identify potential failures. The platform automates:

• Scoring: Scores model performance in real world scenarios and key criteria like hallucinations and safety.
• Test generation: Automatically generates adversarial test suites at scale.
• Benchmarking: Compares models to help customers identify the best model for specific use cases.

Fueling the company’s launch is a $3 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Factorial Capital, the CEO of Replit Amjad Masad, Gokul Rajaram and a number of other Fortune 500 executives and board members.

“AI has become a must-have for businesses, as they seek to realize its full potential and not be left behind in the LLM revolution,” said Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “But no responsible company is going to put their reputation on the line by leveraging risky models. Patronus AI not only has the technology to tackle this problem head-on, they have a world-class team from Meta, Airbnb and Samsung, with the expertise to help organizations safely navigate LLMs. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with them and look forward to playing a role in their continued growth.”

Early platform partners include leading AI companies, including Cohere, Nomic AI, and Naologic. Additionally, several high profile companies in traditional industries like financial services will be piloting Patronus AI in the coming months.

About Patronus AI
Patronus AI is the first automated evaluation and security platform that helps companies use large language models (LLMs) safely. For more information, visit https://www.patronus.ai/ or reach out to [email protected].

SOURCE Patronus AI

Round led by T. Rowe Price, joined by new investors Capital One Ventures, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and strategic investor NVIDIA

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 14, 2023 — Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced its Series I funding, raising over $500 million. This funding values the company at $43 billion and establishes the price per share at $73.50. The series is led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., which is joined by other existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments, funds and accounts managed by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), Fidelity Management & Research Company, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Octahedron Capital and Tiger Global along with new investors Capital One Ventures, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and NVIDIA.

“The commitment from long-term focused strategic and financial partners reflects Databricks’ continued momentum, the rapid customer adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse, and the success customers are seeing from moving to a unified data and AI platform,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks. “Databricks and NVIDIA are building transformative AI technology, and we’re excited about the business value and innovation we can bring to our customers.”

The Databricks Lakehouse unifies data, analytics and AI on a single platform so that customers can govern, manage and derive insights from enterprise data and build their own generative AI solutions faster.

“Enterprise data is a goldmine for generative AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Databricks is doing incredible work with NVIDIA technology to accelerate data processing and generative AI models.”

“Data and AI have rapidly become the centerpiece of many business strategies. Databricks has not only pioneered the Lakehouse category with a world-class team and product, but it is now also at the forefront of Generative AI for the enterprise. We’re proud to extend our investment at such a pivotal time for the company, its customers, and the data and AI industry.” – Alan Tu, Lead Private Equity Analyst, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.

“Teachers’ Venture Growth is excited to invest in Databricks and sees tremendous growth potential for the business as enterprises increasingly deploy AI across their operations. As investors focused on long-term value creation, we look forward to working with Ali and Databricks’ strong management team on the next phase of their growth journey.” – Olivia Steedman, Executive Managing Director, Teachers’ Venture Growth at Ontario Teachers’  

The support from Databricks’ financial and strategic partners comes on the heels of its Q2 momentum (ended July 31, 2023), which includes:

• Crossed $1.5B revenue run rate at over 50% revenue year-over-year growth with the second quarter representing the strongest quarterly incremental revenue growth in Databricks’ history
• Ended the quarter with more than 10,000 global customers, including >300 customers consuming at $1M+ annual revenue run-rate
• Achieved record Non-GAAP subscription gross margins of 85%
• Closed acquisition of MosaicML, a leading generative AI platform
• Delivered 20 product and feature releases at the sold-out Data and AI Summit in June with over 30,000 global attendees

About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Founded by the original creators of Delta Lake, Apache Spark™, and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Contact: [email protected] 

SOURCE Databricks

Sailebots are a first-of-their-kind, full stack prospecting technology for automating all of sales prospecting, giving enterprise sales teams space for more meaningful human activities

KANSAS CITY, Mo. and NEW YORK, Sept. 14, 2023 — Sailes, the AI startup that developed its patent-pending Sailebots to automate all points in the prospecting lifecycle, today announced the close of a $5.1 million Series A funding round led by Lewis & Clark Ventures. The round was supported with investments from Acronym Venture Capital and Tenzing Capital, plus follow-on investment from existing investors KCRise Fund and Valor Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to $6.6 million.

Globally compliant and deployed in multiple languages, Sailes’ proprietary AI technology eliminates repetitive, manual tasks in favor of high-value, high-return sales activities. The first and only known company to automate all prospecting for enterprises, Sailes built and trained its own sales-focused AI model to replace up to a dozen different prospecting point solutions—including for research, discovery, data validation, content generation, marketing automation, follow-up prompts, and sales/revenue intelligence. Beyond “enablement,” Sailebots use proprietary standalone infrastructure to multiply enterprise sales reps with their own personalized AI as a single product to complete all activities. Reflecting the unique personality of the user, Sailebots give saleshumans the time to focus on the most meaningful activities they’ve prepared for their whole career: closing deals.

“Everyone is focused on getting AI in the hands of salespeople—and we’ve been doing our part to make that happen since 2019. However, our larger vision is a world where technology creates the space for us all to be more human,” said Nick Smith, CEO and Founder of Sailes. “We’ll give salespeople their own AI, that they control, and that prospects the same way they do, to deliver them unlimited labor, revenue opportunities, and possibilities. We’ve created a fork in the road between solutions that ‘enable,’ and Sailebots that do your work for you, as you, so you can spend more time selling, and more time living.”

Sailes has set the blueprint for a new era of capital-efficient startups, combining the efficacy of its own Sailebot^® technology with the fuel of significant Fortune 500 adoption across commercial sectors including real estate, heavy equipment, financial services, environmental, social, and corporate governance, and manufacturing, to drive yearly triple-digit revenue growth since its inception. The company deliberately pursued a strategic cash investment to help it more quickly scale its AI and machine learning talent, as well as to grow the company’s footprint in New York City.

The company’s latest innovation, Starboard™, provides an immersive user experience where enterprise sales teams can manage and deploy a “fleet” of Sailebots. This offering allows reps to onboard, instruct, deploy, and train their own AI, giving companies the control they need and the power of four sales development representatives in every Sailebot^®. As new data and insights are uncovered, they’re shared with sales teams to help them become even more effective.

“From the early stages of our diligence process, it was apparent that Sailes was the first mover in using AI to fully automate the lead gen and prospecting activities for enterprise sales teams,” said Michael Rockhold, Principal at Lewis & Clark Ventures. “With so much buzz around AI, it was incredibly validating to hear customers rave about the actual value, in terms of both sales pipeline creation and labor efficiency, the platform provides. As evidenced by their tremendous growth and marquee customer logos, Sailes is experiencing a strong pull from the market. Additionally, Nick and team embody all of the characteristics we look for when backing early-stage founders. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with the business.”

For more information, visit www.sailes.com.

About Sailes
Headquartered in Kansas City, MO and New York City, Sailes is sales with AI for enterprises. Founded in 2018 by enterprise sales leaders, Sailes deploys its patent-pending, globally compliant Sailebots to automate all prospecting for global enterprise sales teams.

Contact
5WPR for Sailes
[email protected] 

SOURCE Sailes