Le troisième fonds de capital-investissement sursouscrit est clôturé à 2,8 milliards de dollars, avec des véhicules de co-investissement dédiés aux associés commanditaires

Le fonds privilégie les investissements de rachat et de croissance dans le secteur de la décarbonisation de l’industrie

HOUSTON et BOSTON et DUBLIN, 13 décembre 2023 — Ara Partners (« Ara » ou la « société »), une société de capital-investissement et d’investissement en infrastructure de premier plan spécialisée dans la décarbonisation industrielle, a annoncé aujourd’hui avoir conclu de nouveaux engagements de capitaux pour un montant de plus de 3 milliards de dollars. La société a conclu une levée de fonds réussie pour Ara Fund III (le « Fonds III” ou le « Fonds »), avec 2,8 milliards de dollars d’engagements de la part des commanditaires, ainsi que des véhicules de co-investissement dédiés aux associés commanditaires.

Le Fonds a été largement sursouscrit à un plafond élevé, dépassant son objectif initial de 2 milliards de dollars, et a reçu le soutien de la base d’investisseurs existante d’Ara et d’un ensemble diversifié de nouveaux investisseurs institutionnels comprenant des fonds de pension, des compagnies d’assurance, des fonds souverains, des fonds de dotation et des fondations d’Amérique du Nord, d’Europe et de la région Asie-Pacifique.

Le Fonds III poursuivra la stratégie d’Ara consistant à investir dans la décarbonisation de l’économie industrielle, la plus grande source d’émissions de carbone au niveau mondial. En s’appuyant sur une expertise technique et opérationnelle importante, le fonds réalisera des investissements de rachat et de croissance dans des entreprises industrielles ayant principalement leur siège aux États-Unis, au Canada et en Europe, qui sont en mesure de réduire les émissions de carbone dans différents secteurs, notamment l’industrie et la fabrication, les produits chimiques et les matériaux, l’efficacité énergétique et les carburants verts, ainsi que l’alimentation et l’agriculture. Le précédent fonds d’Ara, Ara Fund II, a été clôturé en septembre 2021 à environ 1,1 milliard de dollars, dépassant ainsi son objectif de 650 millions de dollars. Ara gère un total d’actifs d’environ 5,6 milliards de dollars.

« Nous sommes reconnaissants de l’intérêt extraordinaire pour le Fonds III manifesté par la base d’investisseurs de premier ordre de plus en plus internationale d’Ara, a déclaré Charles Cherington, associé directeur d’Ara. Le fort soutien des investisseurs nouveaux et existants témoigne de leur confiance dans notre équipe talentueuse, dans notre stratégie d’investissement et dans les opportunités remarquables qu’offre le secteur de la décarbonisation industrielle. Nous sommes impatients de collaborer avec les équipes de gestion de nos sociétés de portefeuille de classe mondiale afin de générer des rendements élevés pour nos investisseurs dans les années à venir. »

Le Fonds III a déjà réalisé quatre investissements : Vacuumschmelze, un producteur mondial de premier plan de matériaux magnétiques avancés et le plus grand producteur d’aimants permanents en terres rares de l’hémisphère occidental ; Genera, un producteur de pâte à papier et d’emballages durables ; CFP Energy, qui fournit des solutions axées sur le marché en matière de produits environnementaux et d’énergie durable à des clients industriels dans toute l’Europe ; et CycleØ, un développeur entièrement intégré d’installations de biométhane distribué.

« La présence croissante et mondiale de la plateforme et du portefeuille d’Ara reflète directement la demande continue de l’économie industrielle pour l’innovation technologique et l’infrastructure nécessaires à la décarbonisation, a indiqué Troy Thacker, associé directeur d’Ara. Le soutien que nous avons reçu pour le Fonds III permettra à l’équipe d’Ara de continuer à investir dans des entreprises à forte croissance à l’échelle mondiale qui sont en mesure de créer de la valeur tout en ayant un impact positif sur l’environnement. »

MM. Cherington et Thacker ont fondé Ara en 2017. L’équipe d’investissement expérimentée d’Ara comprend également les associés Chris Picotte, Cory Steffek et Tuan Tran, ainsi que Teresa O’Flynn et Churchill George Yong, coresponsables de la stratégie d’infrastructure de la firme. L’équipe d’investissement travaille à partir de bureaux situés à Houston, Boston et Dublin, et bénéficie du soutien d’une équipe de professionnels expérimentés dans tous les secteurs d’activité.

Rede Partners a agi en tant qu’agent de placement et Debevoise & Plimpton LLP en tant que conseiller juridique dans le cadre de la constitution du Fonds III.

À propos d’Ara Partners

Ara Partners est une société de capital-investissement et d’infrastructures consacrée aux investissements de décarbonisation industrielle. Ara Partners investit dans les secteurs de l’industrie et de la fabrication, des produits chimiques et des matériaux, de l’efficacité énergétique et des carburants verts de l’infrastructure, ainsi que de l’alimentation et de l’agriculture, en cherchant à créer des entreprises ayant un impact significatif sur la décarbonisation. Elle opère depuis ses bureaux de Houston, Boston et Dublin, Irlande. Au 30 septembre 2023, Ara Partners possédait environ 5,6 milliards de dollars d’actifs sous gestion. Pour plus d’informations sur Ara Partners, veuillez consulter le site Web www.arapartners.com.

Contacts 
Mark Semer / Alex Jeffrey             
Gasthalter & Co.                
arapartners@gasthalter.com             
(212) 257-4170

U.S. Venture Partners leads the round, CrowdStrike co-founder participating

ORLANDO, Fla. and TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 13, 2023 — Israeli cybersecurity startup Zero Networks, a leading provider of zero trust identity and network security solutions, raised $20 million in Series B funding following a five-fold increase in its revenue, bringing its total raised capital to $45 million.

U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) led the round, with notable strategic investor Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of CrowdStrike, also participating. Existing investors Venrock, F2 Venture Capital, and Pico Venture Partners, also joined the round. The funds will be utilized to recruit development, marketing, and sales personnel, supporting Zero Networks’ hypergrowth.

Zero Networks was founded in 2019, and is led by Benny Lakunishok, the CEO, and Amir Frankel, the CTO. The company is tackling one of the most complex problems in cybersecurity – how to prevent attackers from moving laterally within the organizational network to exfiltrate data or launch ransomware attacks.

Existing segmentation solutions that address this problem are notoriously complex, labor intensive, and often do not provide comprehensive protection. In contrast, Zero Networks developed a fully automated SaaS platform that learns all network traffic and creates granular security policies that restrict user and machine access to only strictly necessary assets. Accessing sensitive protocols that are often used by attackers to move laterally is enabled only after users undergo multi-factor authentication.

In addition, Zero Networks enables organizations to securely connect remote employees and third parties to their network with zero trust principles and maximum network performance.

Zero Networks has a diverse roster of prominent customers in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including global commercial and investment banks, major US retailers, large manufacturing corporations, a global container shipping company, hospitals, law offices, construction, telecom, and public sector institutions.

Benny Lakunishok, CEO of Zero Networks, commented on the funding round, stating, “We have significantly exceeded our own growth expectations, and are thrilled to have received this investment from USVP that will allow us to scale our team earlier. It is a testament to our team’s hard work and exceptional commitment to our customers and partners. We are honored to have such a distinguished list of security leaders join our journey.”

“There are only two really huge markets in cybersecurity,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, who participated in the funding round. “As co-founder of CrowdStrike, I am privileged to have played a part in disrupting one of them – Endpoint Security. Now, I’m excited to help Zero Networks revolutionize the other huge market that is ripe for disruption – Network Security.” 

“USVP has a proven track record of investing in the most successful cybersecurity startups in Israel, and we are thrilled that Zero Networks is the latest addition to our portfolio,” said Dafina Toncheva, General Partner at USVP. “We see immense potential in the company’s approach to network security – their impressive growth this year and the satisfaction of their customers underscore the impact they are making in the cybersecurity landscape.”

www.zeronetworks.com

SOURCE Zero Networks

U.S. Venture Partners leads the round, CrowdStrike co-founder participating

ORLANDO, Fla. and TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 13, 2023 — Israeli cybersecurity startup Zero Networks, a leading provider of zero trust identity and network security solutions, raised $20 million in Series B funding following a five-fold increase in its revenue, bringing its total raised capital to $45 million.

U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) led the round, with notable strategic investor Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of CrowdStrike, also participating. Existing investors Venrock, F2 Venture Capital, and Pico Venture Partners, also joined the round. The funds will be utilized to recruit development, marketing, and sales personnel, supporting Zero Networks’ hypergrowth.

Zero Networks was founded in 2019, and is led by Benny Lakunishok, the CEO, and Amir Frankel, the CTO. The company is tackling one of the most complex problems in cybersecurity – how to prevent attackers from moving laterally within the organizational network to exfiltrate data or launch ransomware attacks.

Existing segmentation solutions that address this problem are notoriously complex, labor intensive, and often do not provide comprehensive protection. In contrast, Zero Networks developed a fully automated SaaS platform that learns all network traffic and creates granular security policies that restrict user and machine access to only strictly necessary assets. Accessing sensitive protocols that are often used by attackers to move laterally is enabled only after users undergo multi-factor authentication.

In addition, Zero Networks enables organizations to securely connect remote employees and third parties to their network with zero trust principles and maximum network performance.

Zero Networks has a diverse roster of prominent customers in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including global commercial and investment banks, major US retailers, large manufacturing corporations, a global container shipping company, hospitals, law offices, construction, telecom, and public sector institutions.

Benny Lakunishok, CEO of Zero Networks, commented on the funding round, stating, “We have significantly exceeded our own growth expectations, and are thrilled to have received this investment from USVP that will allow us to scale our team earlier. It is a testament to our team’s hard work and exceptional commitment to our customers and partners. We are honored to have such a distinguished list of security leaders join our journey.”

“There are only two really huge markets in cybersecurity,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, who participated in the funding round. “As co-founder of CrowdStrike, I am privileged to have played a part in disrupting one of them – Endpoint Security. Now, I’m excited to help Zero Networks revolutionize the other huge market that is ripe for disruption – Network Security.” 

“USVP has a proven track record of investing in the most successful cybersecurity startups in Israel, and we are thrilled that Zero Networks is the latest addition to our portfolio,” said Dafina Toncheva, General Partner at USVP. “We see immense potential in the company’s approach to network security – their impressive growth this year and the satisfaction of their customers underscore the impact they are making in the cybersecurity landscape.”

www.zeronetworks.com

SOURCE Zero Networks

NodeKit’s SEQ is a shared sequencer L1 designed to give a wide range of rollups more robustness, performance, uptime, and interoperability.

AMES, Iowa, Dec. 13, 2023 — NodeKit, the team developing SEQ, a shared sequencer L1, has raised $1.2M in a pre-seed round. The round was led by Borderless Capital with participation from Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, Polygon Ventures, Wormhole Cross-Chain Ecosystem Fund, and many angels (including key angel investors such as Avail’s Anurag Arjun and BENQI’s @hn_avax). The team is using the funding to help decentralize the next generation of rollups powered by SEQ.

“Rollups desire a cost-effective, lightning-fast, decentralized sequencer to improve the quality of their users’ experience. NodeKit fulfills this need.” – Noah Pravecek, Co-Founder & CEO

SEQ is designed to help decentralize rollup transaction sequencing, directly addressing the main issue overshadowing rollups: centralization. SEQ aims to help rollups capitalize on their advantages with fewer tradeoffs, bringing them greater robustness, performance, and interoperability.

“NodeKit is addressing some of the deepest challenges across the modular Web3 ecosystem. Alongside the tremendous adoption of L2 solutions (“rollups”), centralization remains prevalent despite the obvious drawbacks it brings, including critical censorship and performance issues. Through SEQ, NodeKit introduces atomic composability and shared sequencing to the leading protocols bringing economic efficiency and true decentralization for cross-chain modularity.” – Alpen Sheth, PhD, Senior Partner, Borderless Capital

Rollups integrating with SEQ will gain new cross-chain interoperability. This interoperability is possible because SEQ orders blocks for multiple rollups, allowing for atomic inclusion using atomic bundles within the same block.

In a time of L2 proliferation, NodeKit’s raise and first product is timely. Most L2s remain highly centralized, with single points of failure endangering whole networks. NodeKit aims to solve the centralization problem by incorporating a decentralized network of validators, making rollups more robust. NodeKit will actively work with each rollup, guiding them on their path toward greater decentralization.

NodeKit’s team consists of three co-founders aged 21, 21, and 20. Pravecek is CEO, Nick Preszler is CTO, and Ricardo Tavarez is the third co-founder and founding software engineer. All three have dropped out of universities in the American Midwest to fully pursue NodeKit and Web3.

To learn more about NodeKit, please see NodeKit’s X (@nodekitorg) or visit the newly redesigned website at nodekit.xyz.

CONTACT:
Noah Pravecek
[email protected]

SOURCE NodeKit

Opportunity Finance Network’s climate financing invests in six member CDFIs working to build climate resiliency, curb emissions, and boost local climate economies in underserved communities 

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13, 2023 — Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), the leading national financial intermediary and membership network of community development finance institutions (CDFIs) and mission-driven community lenders, has committed $8.5 million in loans and grants from its Finance Justice Fund to six member CDFIs to support products and services that build climate resiliency, curb emissions, and bring underinvested communities into the climate economy.

Launched in 2020, OFN’s Finance Justice Fund has deployed more than $210 million through loans and grants to 101 CDFIs serving rural, urban, and Native communities. The Finance Justice Fund was launched with the goal of advancing OFN’s mission to align capital with racial, economic, and climate justice by leveraging corporate and philanthropic partners for catalytic investments into CDFIs across the country.

“OFN is deeply committed to strengthening the capacity of its broad network of community lenders to lead the deployment of climate-focused financing and capital in underinvested communities across the country,” said OFN President and CEO Harold Pettigrew, who recently shared OFN’s climate justice message at COP28. “Our growing membership of 410 CDFIs and mission-driven community lenders are at the forefront of leading community investment and the fight for racial, economic, and climate justice. The Finance Justice Fund was launched for this purpose, and our initial round of climate-focused capital will advance the community investment efforts of these six extraordinary pioneers in climate lending.”

The CDFIs in this round of funding have footprints across several states and Tribal communities: Coastal Enterprises Inc. based in Maine, Craft3 based in Washington state, California-based Pacific Community Ventures, West Virginia-based Partner Community Capital, Self-Help Ventures Fund headquartered in North Carolina, and Solar and Energy Loan Fund (SELF) of Florida.

OFN’s Finance Justice Fund climate investments will support various products and services, from low-interest rate loans for electric vehicles, solar panel installation, and energy efficiency retrofits that empower communities of color and low-income communities to participate in the climate economy.

OFN will work with the recipients and other member mission-driven community lenders nationwide to answer its call to action that 100% of CDFIs become climate lenders by 2028 by offering climate-focused consumer, small business, housing, and community facility capital products.

OFN is helping CDFIs reach this goal by providing support, capital, and leadership to transform the community development finance industry into a leader in climate finance.

In addition to climate lending to its national network of CDFIs and mission-driven community lenders, OFN offers tools and training to help its members build and strengthen their climate lending portfolios. In 2023, OFN trained people across 130 community lenders and other organizations.

The organization also recently submitted a historic bid to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to scale these activities and accelerate the clean energy transition in underinvested communities.

About OFN

Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) is the leading national network of community development financial institutions. Its membership of more than 400 mission lenders specializes in providing affordable, responsible financial products and services in low-income rural, urban, and Native communities nationwide. As a trusted intermediary between CDFIs and the public and private sectors, OFN works with its partners – banks, philanthropies, corporations, government agencies, and others – to create economic opportunity for all by strengthening and investing in CDFIs. Learn more at ofn.org.

SOURCE Opportunity Finance Network

The CPA firm joins The Alliance’s esteemed group of sponsors to mentor and advise founders on tax and accounting issues and prepare them to receive capital.

Connecting GreatSoCal entrepreneurs to Venture Capital 

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13, 2023 — The Alliance for SoCal Innovation (“The Alliance”) is pleased to announce that they have formally entered into a multi-year agreement with HCVT to be a new supporting sponsor of the SoCal Venture Pipeline program (SVP) which connects the most promising early stage startups with venture capital in order to improve access to institutional capital across the SoCal region. Entering its third year, the SVP program is completely free for the startups and investors who participate. The Alliance does not collect any fees or take equity thanks to lead underwriting from Pacific Western Bank as well as support from Wilson Sonsini and KPPB LLP. Increasing capital access for the most promising startups across the expansive SoCal region is core to the Alliance’s mission and this particular program is foundational to that effort.

Andy Wilson, Executive Director of the Alliance, said “We are so fortunate in SoCal to have so many amazing founders building great startups across this massive and diverse region. However, access to critical early stage capital is not equally available to all. We rely on great partners like HCVT who share our commitment to support the most promising entrepreneurs in their effort to build high-growth startups.”

“We are very excited to partner with the Alliance on the important mission of the SoCal Venture Pipeline program,” said Vicken Haleblian, CEO and Managing Partner at HCVT. “We are committed to supporting the venture community and entrepreneurs. The Alliance, with its deep SoCal network, has a proven track record of connecting venture-ready founders to relevant investors. As a firm, we are committed to community impact and cannot think of a better way to support a thriving economy than improving capital access for the region’s most talented entrepreneurs.”

Kei Morita, an HCVT Audit Partner and co-leader of the firm’s Technology Industry group, will serve as the firm’s representative in the Alliance.

Startups based in the SoCal region who apply to be in the SVP program undergo a rigorous screening process by a team of investment professionals before being accepted into the program. Once accepted, they are further vetted before receiving highly targeted personal introductions to appropriate investors in the Alliance’s extensive and growing network of 215 active venture capital partners.

Since its formal launch in June 2021, the SoCal Venture Pipeline, which serves both Seed and Series A-ready companies, has attracted 540 total applicants with 67 accepted companies of which 15 startups were funded for a total of $63.18M raised, plus 3 additional companies that were acquired.

For SoCal-based tech startups that are raising $1M+ of seed or $4M+ of Series A institutional capital and meet the guidelines outlined in the program FAQ, may apply now to begin the process of getting connected to the right investors.

About The Alliance for Southern California Innovation

The Alliance for Southern California Innovation (the “Alliance”) is a not for profit formed in 2017 that has successfully brought together the heft of Southern California’s top research institutions, local business leaders, and world-class advisors to focus on bridging critical gaps in the SoCal innovation ecosystem. The goal of the Alliance is to engage and unify SoCal’s compelling diversity of talent, ideas, and perspectives in order to optimize the conditions for the region’s innovators to bring breakthroughs to the world.

About HCVT

HCVT is the largest Los Angeles-based public accounting firm and the 33rd largest firm nationally. Founded in 1991, HCVT provides tax, business management, and advisory services to public and closely held companies; high-net-worth individuals and families and their related entities; and family offices. The firm also provides audit and assurance services to privately held companies and employee benefit plan sponsors. With more than 800 team members, which include more than 100 partners and principals, HCVT serves clients from 13 offices across Southern and Northern California; Ft. Worth, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; and Park City, Utah. To learn more about HCVT, visit https://www.hcvt.com/.  

Contact: Eric Eide, The Alliance for SoCal Innovation, Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Alliance for SoCal Innovation

BOSTON, Dec. 13, 2023 — AllSpice.io, the hardware development platform that empowers engineers to modernize their collaboration and workflows, has raised an additional $6 million in venture capital. The funding is being leveraged to develop new features for its growing enterprise customer base and expand complex implementations, integrations, and additional ECAD format support.

Investors participating in the recent round included Root Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Benchstrength, Bowery Capital, and a group of angel investors.

Founded and built by engineers,AllSpice.io empowers fellow engineers to modernize their workflows – all through the power of Git. With automation, cross-team collaboration, and version control, engineers can develop hardware more efficiently.

“After decades of stagnant toolsets, enterprises have a giant appetite to modernize their electronics design processes. In a difficult market, driving greater team efficiency is crucial,” said Valentina Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO ofAllSpice.io.

Hardware teams today have more complex requirements and constantly shirking delivery timelines. “A car 20 years ago had a dozen or so PCBs – now it’s hundreds,” said Kyle Dumont, Co-Founder & CTO ofAllSpice.io. “As an electrical engineer before creating AllSpice.io, I experienced these same significant challenges building a hardware design and review process that could proactively adapt to changing business and operational requirements.”

Hardware products used to take many years of research and development. Nowadays, if companies take that long, by the time they launch, the technology is already obsolete.

“We see these challenges rising from the engineering leaders at enterprises approaching us,” continued Ratner. “Hardware development timelines have compressed from years to months in the last decade, which means hardware and electrical engineering teams need to be 10x more efficient, yet their tools have remained largely the same.”

AllSpice.io serves as a home base for hardware teams, similar to what GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket have done for software teams.

Hardware Engineers, PCB Designers, and Electrical Engineers are the primary users of the AllSpice.io platform. Additionally, other teams and third parties that work in parallel to these counterparts, including Firmware Engineers, Software Engineers, Contract Manufacturers, and Procurement Departments, also collaborate on the platform.

AllSpice.io customers range from startups to Fortune 500s across the robotics, instrumentation, aerospace, consumer electronics, transportation, medical devices, and automotive industries.

Funding purpose

• Release of CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Deployment) for hardware development
• Implementation of AI for electronics design
• Support a growing number of enterprise customers
• Product roadmap and team growth
• Support of additional ECAD formats
• Support of additional SaaS integrations

About AllSpice.io

AllSpice.io is a hardware collaboration platform that connects native engineering design tools to provide effortless Git-based revision control, a central hub for cross-team collaboration, workflow automation, and design analytics.

Contacts:

Enterprise/ Business Development Inquiries

Valentina Ratner

Co-Founder & CEO

[email protected]

Product Inquiries

Kyle Dumont

Co-Founder & CTO

[email protected]

Press Inquiries

Robert Byrne

Director of Marketing

[email protected]

General

www.AllSpice.io

[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/company/allspice-io/

SOURCE AllSpice.io

With the vast amount of LLMs being used by enterprise companies, the Feature Store is here to save data scientists by simplifying big data workflows

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 13, 2023 — Featureform, the MLOps feature store for building AI and ML systems, has announced $5.5MM in Seed funding led by GreatPoint Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners with participation from Tuesday Capital and Alumni Ventures. This round of capital allows Featureform to expand its product growth and increase support for existing and new enterprise customers, in addition to its open-source community. The completion of the Seed round brings Featureform’s total funding to date to $8.1MM.

At enterprise companies, LLM usage has surged alongside traditional ML use cases. At the heart of both these systems is private data. The most critical thing that ML teams do is take their raw data and transform it into valuable signals to feed into LLMs via prompts or ML models as inputs. Featureform believes there needs to be a unified framework to define, manage, and deploy these signals (or features). This creates a unified resource library that can be used by all ML/AI teams across an organization with built-in search & discovery, monitoring, orchestration, and governance. Featureform has seen to this be true with their existing customers in the ML space and has begun spearheading this approach in the LLM space.

“MLOps is moving out of the hype phase and entering the actual productivity phase,” says Featureform Founder and CEO Simba Khadder. “On the backend of this, we’re seeing a huge wave of new use-cases that have been unlocked with LLMs. Data is at the core of these two systems, and in practice, the problems look almost identical. Featureform’s frameworks will fundamentally change the way ML and AI teams work with data.”

The rise of Retrieval Augmented Generation architecture, or RAG, has provided a way for data scientists to inject relevant signals and content from their data sets into their prompts as content to increase an LLMs accuracy and decrease likelihood of hallucination. These signals are analogous to traditional machine learning features that you’d find in a feature store. The big difference is that, after being processed, they are stored in a vector database. By adding vector database support, Featureform becomes the hub where data scientists can define, manage, and deploy their features for both ML and LLM systems.

“Featureform’s feature store platform offers a distinct advantage in the market with its unique virtual architecture,” says Gautam Krishnamurthi, Partner at GreatPoint Ventures. “This virtual approach not only sets them apart from the competition, but also significantly lowers the cost of feature store implementation in the large and growing MLOps market. Coupled with their expert team, Featureform provides a best-in-class solution in the market for building out machine learning feature management. We are excited to support the Featureform team in their Seed round and beyond!”

Featureform provides data scientists with a framework to turn their data into useful features for ML models and LLMs. By using Featureform, these teams:

• Accelerate time to build and deploy new features from months to hours.
• Deduplicate and leverage existing work by allowing data scientists to collaborate on, share, and discover features.
• Improve models in production by guaranteeing consistency between serving and training data, and catch feature drift before it becomes a problem.
• Effortlessly enforce access control and governance policies in the feature workflow.

To learn more visit https://featureform.com.

About Featureform
Featureform is the creator of the virtual feature store. Our mission is to streamline how data and model features are built and maintained in machine learning orgs. Our python framework and feature store does away with copy and pasting between scattered notebooks with names like “Untitled18.ipynb,” unifies feature pipelines between experimentation and production, deduplicates repeated features across teams, and eliminates ambiguously named tables like “feature_table_v5.” While we pride ourselves on our open-core model, we also offer a robust enterprise solution with governance, streaming, and more. We are proudly based out of San Francisco. Discover more about how we’re reshaping the MLOps landscape at https://featureform.com.

Press Contact
Rick Medeiros
[email protected]
510-556-8517

SOURCE Featureform

• Inductive Bio emerged with $4.3M in a seed funding round co-led by a16z Bio + Health and Lux Capital, with participation from Character, Bessemer Venture Partners, Alleycorp, and others.
• Inductive’s team has deep expertise building innovative ML products and bringing drugs into the clinic.

NEW YORK, Dec. 13, 2023 — Inductive Bio, a technology company developing a machine learning (ML) platform designed to dramatically accelerate the compound optimization process, emerged from stealth today with $4.3M in funding. Their seed round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health and Lux Capital, with participation from Character, Bessemer Venture Partners, Alleycorp, and others.

Half of the time and money spent in small molecule preclinical drug discovery is focused on optimizing compounds to effectively balance potency with Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) properties. Inductive’s platform maps the drivers of small molecule ADMET by pairing a proprietary dataset with state-of-the-art ML, helping scientists to optimize initial compounds into leads and development candidates faster and with a better balance of ADMET properties.

Inductive Bio was co-founded by Josh Haimson and Ben Birnbaum who had previously built out the ML organization at Flatiron Health, which was acquired by Roche in 2018. “We set our sights on compound optimization after talking to dozens of medicinal chemists who all described this process as a complex game of ‘whack-a-mole’ with dramatic consequences for the success or failure of drug programs,” said Josh Haimson, co-founder and CEO of Inductive Bio. “From our experience at Flatiron and Google, we knew it would be possible to help chemists leverage vast quantities of data to make better decisions.”

“Our deep graph learning algorithms have been tailored to the specific needs of real-world, heterogeneous data and trained on the world’s best-curated ADMET dataset,” said Ben Birnbaum, Ph.D., co-founder and CTO of Inductive Bio. “Traditional QSAR approaches make accurate predictions in novel chemotypes only around 30% of the time, whereas our algorithms are predicting accurately across 80% of novel chemotypes, and that number is continuing to improve as our data set grows.”

Wendy Young, Ph.D., a life sciences senior executive and former SVP of small molecule discovery at Genentech, where she oversaw the discovery and progression of more than 25 clinical candidates into development, joined Inductive’s advisory board in the summer of 2022. “When we were building out the small molecule discovery organization at Genentech, I pushed for our teams to leverage earlier generations of ML because I saw how impactful they were for focusing our resources on the experiments with the highest chance of success in the lab,” said Dr. Young. “I’m excited that at Inductive, we’re building the next-generation technology that the entire biopharma industry can tap into.”

One of Inductive’s early partners is Denali Therapeutics, who is leveraging Inductive’s ML capabilities for ADME property predictions. Denali has integrated custom ADME models from Inductive into their small molecule drug design platform to support rapid, data-driven decision making.

Ankit Mahadevia, M.D., a serial biotech entrepreneur, former Venture partner at Atlas Ventures, and co-founder of nine therapeutics companies, also joined Inductive’s advisory board. “Having launched and run many biotech companies in my career, I’ve seen the pain of compound optimization first hand – years of intuition-driven science and millions of dollars spent to find one or two compounds that have the right balance of potency and ADMET,” said Dr. Mahadevia. “When I learned about the platform Inductive is making available to the biopharma industry I was excited to get involved because I know how much this will accelerate our industry’s ability to bring safer and more effective therapies to patients.”

About Inductive Bio
Inductive Bio is a technology company developing a machine learning (ML) platform designed to dramatically accelerate the compound optimization process, a critical and time-consuming step in developing new therapeutics. By building datasets and state-of-the-art ML models designed to map the drivers of small molecule Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET), Inductive’s platform allows scientists to optimize initial compounds into leads and development candidates faster and with a better balance of ADMET properties. For more information, please visit www.inductive.bio.

About Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen Horowitz (“a16z”) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs who are building the future through technology. We invest in companies across multiple sectors, including bio + health, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism. For more than a decade, our bio + health team has invested in innovative companies leveraging AI and other technologies to drive process efficiencies, usher in the next generation of therapeutics and personalized care delivery, and ensure enduring healthcare for all. We believe the Future is Health.

About Lux Capital
Lux Capital invests in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what is possible. They partner with iconoclastic inventors challenging the status quo and the laws of nature to bring their futuristic ideas to life. Over the past two decades, Lux has expanded from its New York City roots to Silicon Valley, and built a $5 billion AUM firm of more than 30 full-time professionals, with the versatility to invest at any stage.

SOURCE Inductive Bio, Inc.