New financing round, led by Next Coast Ventures, S3 Ventures, and UPMC Enterprises, positions Company for continued growth, innovation, and integration 

BrainCheck expands Board of Directors with appointment of Nicholas Shapiro as New Board Member, further strengthening the Company’s strategic leadership

AUSTIN, Texas, March 6, 2024 — BrainCheck, Inc., a digital health innovator delivering first-of-its-kind technology into the growing digital cognitive assessment market, today announced a $15 million new financing round, led by Next Coast Ventures, S3 Ventures, and UPMC Enterprises, the innovation, commercialization, and venture capital arm of UPMC. The Company also expanded its Board of Directors with the appointment of Nicholas Shapiro, Vice President, UPMC Enterprises, as a new board member, further strengthening the Company’s strategic leadership.

The funding will accelerate BrainCheck’s commercial traction, expand innovation within its product portfolio, build upon existing clinical evidence, and extend the Company’s impact throughout the healthcare landscape, including major integrations with healthcare systems. This announcement follows the recent launch of BrainCheck’s next generation platform and 3-minute screening solution, which empowers clinicians to screen and monitor patients’ cognitive function anytime, anywhere.

“We are laser focused on commercializing and scaling a digital cognitive assessment platform that is clinically robust, easy for patients and their caregivers to use, enables a simplified provider experience and improves access to the actionable information needed to intervene sooner and potentially combat cognitive decline,” said Kim Rodriguez, CEO of BrainCheck. “We thank our current and new investors for their continued support and look forward to deploying this capital to play an important role in revolutionizing cognitive care.”

“We believe in BrainCheck’s vision to pioneer a fundamental shift in how cognitive care is delivered,” said Michael Smerklo, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Next Coast Ventures. “Dementia is projected to impact 14 million people in the United States and 152 million globally in the coming decades, underscoring the importance of proactive measures to address prevention, early detection, and effective management strategies.^i,ii“

Trusted by hundreds of the country’s most prestigious providers and specialists, BrainCheck’s clinically proven platform is the most comprehensive solution commercially available across the cognitive care continuum, streamlining screening, assessment, care planning and monitoring.

“Our decision to invest in BrainCheck is fueled by a deep understanding of the pressing burden of cognitive impairment on health care and the exciting solutions on the horizon to advance the industry. I am honored to join BrainCheck’s Board of Directors and look forward to working collaboratively with the team to drive strategic initiatives and shape the future growth trajectory of the Company,” said Nicholas Shapiro, Vice President, UPMC Enterprises. “BrainCheck’s solutions offer rapid, reliable resources to support accurate assessments, stratify individual risk, and deliver actionable insights that can help all stakeholders – patients, caregivers, providers, and risk-bearers.”

For more information about BrainCheck and its innovative cognitive assessment solutions, please visit www.braincheck.com.

About BrainCheck
To learn more, please visit braincheck.com.

Contact:
[email protected]

________________________________
ⁱ 2022 Alzheimer’s disease facts and figures. Alzheimers Dement. 2022 Apr;18(4):700-789. doi: 10.1002/alz.12638. Epub 2022 Mar 14. PMID: 35289055.

ⁱⁱ GBD 2019 Dementia Forecasting Collaborators: “Estimation of the global prevalence of dementia in 2019 and forecasted prevalence in 2050: an analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019.” The Lancet Public Health, January 6, 2022.

SOURCE BrainCheck, Inc.

– Company positioned to have four compounds in clinical trials in 2024 including three NBD1 stabilizers and one ICL4 modulator –

– Edd Fleming, M.D., of Enavate Sciences joins company’s Board of Directors –

BOSTON, March 6, 2024 — Sionna Therapeutics, a clinical-stage life sciences company dedicated to developing highly effective and differentiated treatments for cystic fibrosis (CF), today announced the closing of a $182 million Series C financing to support the clinical development of first-in-class small molecules designed to fully restore the function of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) protein by stabilizing the first nucleotide-binding domain (NBD1).  

The Series C round, which was upsized and oversubscribed, was led by Enavate Sciences with additional new investors Viking Global Investors and Perceptive Advisors, as well as participation by all existing investors including RA Capital, OrbiMed, TPG’s The Rise Fund, Atlas Venture, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and Q Healthcare Holdings, LLC., a wholly owned subsidiary of QIA. Sionna also announced today that Edd Fleming, M.D., Executive Vice President of Commercialization at Enavate Sciences, is joining its Board of Directors.

“We have deep experience in CF and a sharp focus on advancing the development of novel small molecules targeting NBD1 and complementary modulators that enable the potential for full restoration of CFTR function for most people living with CF,” said Mike Cloonan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sionna. “We are encouraged by the strong interest and validation from the excellent investors in our upsized Series C financing. This capital raise provides financial flexibility positioning us to execute our clinical development plan with funding through 2026 and multiple value-creating clinical readouts. We are also pleased to welcome Dr. Fleming to our Board and look forward to insights from his more than 30 years of experience in the health care industry.”

CF is caused by mutations in the CFTR gene, which codes for an epithelial ion channel that is essential for producing healthy, freely flowing mucus in the airways, digestive system, and other organs. The most common mutation in CFTR, ΔF508, causes NBD1 to unfold at body temperature and severely impairs CFTR function.

Sionna has presented preclinical data, including data from the clinically predictive human bronchial epithelial cell (CFHBE) model, that demonstrate its NBD1 stabilizers can restore ΔF508-CFTR maturation, trafficking, and function to wild-type levels when combined with complementary modulators. A Phase 1 clinical trial of its first clinical-stage NBD1 stabilizer, SION-638, has identified doses that are generally safe and well tolerated, and target exposure (based on the CFHBE assay) was achieved at all doses, with more time above target with increasing dose.

Sionna has nominated two additional NBD1 stabilizers from its second series, SION-451 and SION-719, and plans to advance both compounds to clinical trials in 2024 pending results from ongoing Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) toxicology studies. In addition, the company is continuing to advance the development of compounds targeting complementary mechanisms including SION-109, which targets NBD1’s interface with the CFTR intracellular loop 4 (ICL4) region; a Phase 1 clinical trial with SION-109 began in January 2024.

About Sionna Therapeutics

Sionna Therapeutics is a clinical-stage life sciences company dedicated to developing highly effective and differentiated treatments for cystic fibrosis (CF) by normalizing the function of CFTR, the key protein associated with disease progression in CF. Building on over a decade of extensive research on the genetic mutations associated with CF and founded in 2019, Sionna is advancing a pipeline of small molecules engineered to correct the protein defects caused by ΔF508, the most common mutation that affects the CFTR protein. The company has a first-in-class portfolio of programs directly targeting correction of NBD1, the key and unique mechanism to enable full restoration of ΔF508-CFTR function, and complementary programs targeting ICL4 and TMD1. Sionna’s pipeline has the potential to deliver best-in-class efficacy and reach previously unachievable levels of long-term benefit for people with CF. For information about Sionna visit https://www.sionnatx.com/.

Media Contact
Adam Daley
Berry & Company Public Relations
212.253.8881
[email protected] 

Investor Contact
[email protected] 

SOURCE Sionna Therapeutics

Yuno, a leading global payments orchestration platform, announces today it has secured $25 million from a consortium of prominent investors, including DST Global Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Kaszek Ventures and Monashees.

NEW YORK, March 5, 2024 — Yuno, a leading global payments orchestration platform, announces today it has secured $25 million from a consortium of prominent investors, including DST Global Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Kaszek Ventures and Monashees.

Founded by experienced tech entrepreneurs Juan Pablo Ortega and Julián Núñez, Yuno offers its clients fast and reliable payments orchestration, helping revolutionize retail, e-commerce, travel, mobility, and other industries. Yuno already serves customers like McDonald’s, Avianca, inDrive, Rappi, and others across 40 countries, offering innovative features such as one-click checkout modifications, smart routing, and the integration of information from all payment processors and anti-fraud tools into a unified interface.

Funds raised in this Series A round will help further strengthen Yuno’s operations in North and South America and enter new markets in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This should benefit Yuno’s customers, who already value the company’s innovative approach to integrating diverse payment methods, which is fueling their own growth by providing easy-to-use, reliable, and tailored solutions for different geographies.

Juan Pablo Ortega, CEO and Co-founder at Yuno, commented: “This financial backing validates our vision and our ability to take the global payments industry into the future, helping fuel positive change across many different sectors of the economy. We are thrilled to bring our cutting-edge solutions to new markets.”

Julián Núñez, Co-founder at Yuno, added: ”Yuno is already successfully facilitating financial transactions in over 40 countries, highlighting our versatility and adaptability in meeting the diverse demands of the global market. This latest round of funding will play a pivotal role in advancing Yuno’s technological infrastructure, expanding our team of exceptional professionals, and crafting innovative market strategies to strengthen our presence across different geographies.”

“We’re happy to be supporting Yuno in the next phase of its growth,” said Saurabh Gupta, managing partner at DST Global. “We’re impressed by the entrepreneurial track record of its founders, the strong team and customer base they’ve built, and the company’s proven ability to keep innovating in online payments.”

Contact:
Yuno
***@y.uno

Photos:
https://www.prlog.org/13010184

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE Yuno

• Razor Group has acquired Perch, the leading Amazon aggregator in the US, solidifying its position as the global leader in the aggregation of online marketplace consumer brands.
• This acquisition paves the way for Razor to reach over $1 billion in topline revenue in the medium-term and adds significant scale to its operations.
• The combined entity will manage an assortment of more than 40,000 products across various online channels in the US, UK, EU, and Latin America.
• The acquisition is part of Razor’s broader consolidation strategy in the e-commerce aggregator space, following successful acquisitions of Factory14, Valoreo and The Stryze Group.
• Presight Capital is leading Razor’s Series D financing round, demonstrating strong confidence in Razor’s long-term vision and further growth potential.
• The additional funding will be used to further invest in Razor’s technology infrastructure including leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to achieve complete automation of Razor’s consumer-to-manufacturer (C2M) retail operations.

BERLIN and BOSTON, March 5, 2024 — Razor Group (“Razor”) has acquired Perch, the leading Amazon aggregator in the US, solidifying its position as the global leader in the aggregation of online marketplace consumer brands and creating the #1 player in the industry.

The acquisition is part of Razor’s broader consolidation strategy, underscoring its capability to act as the key consolidator within the global e-commerce aggregator ecosystem, following successful acquisitions of Factory14, Valoreo and The Stryze Group.

It also paves the way for Razor to reach over $1 billion in revenue in the medium-term, add significant scale to its operations and create a highly profitable global technology and e-commerce powerhouse. The new combined entity will manage an assortment of more than 40,000 products across key brands selling on 30+ marketplace and direct-to-consumer channels in 10+ countries across North America, United Kingdom, Europe, and Latin America.

In conjunction with this acquisition, Razor is also announcing a Series D financing round, led by Presight Capital. This new round, against a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, underscores the strong confidence investors have in Razor Group’s long-term vision and its potential for further growth.

The additional funding will be used to further invest in Razor’s technology infrastructure throughout the entire supply chain. Moreover, recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and the emergence of large language models (LLMs) presents a valuable opportunity to achieve complete automation of Razor’s consumer-to-manufacturer (C2M) retail operations, optimising processes, improving efficiency, and driving faster product innovation cycles and delivery.

“The e-commerce aggregator space will undergo continued consolidation in the medium-term, driven by the current macroeconomic environment. The acquisition of Perch is a highly value-accretive and transformative transaction on Razor’s path to becoming a global technology-driven e-commerce powerhouse. Presight is delighted to lead this funding round and continue to support Razor on its future growth path. With this sizable investment, we are also doubling down on Razor’s technology stack and capabilities, led by its CTO Shrestha Chowdhury, to power the global marketplace ecosystem,” said Christan Angermeyer and Fabian Hansen, Co-Founders and General Partners of Presight Capital.

Tushar Ahluwalia, Co-Founder and CEO at Razor Group, commented: “We are excited to partner with Perch, the leading US player in our space. The transaction further strengthens our market leadership, solidifying Razor Group as the #1 player globally. In contrast to our peers, our focus has been to build the Western response to Chinese vertical C2M models like Temu and Shein, rather than an internet version of P&G. Therefore, our secret sauce has been to invest in sophisticated technology automation to ensure deep supply-chain integration and hyper-fast product innovation cycles right from the start, a prerequisite to making the model work and seeing us develop the industry’s leading automation stack. With the ongoing advancements in AI and LLMs, that work continues.”

Chris Bell, Founder and CEO of Perch, added: “Over the past 18 months, Perch has transformed its business through our proprietary technology, machine learning-based decision engine, and leading supply chain capabilities, creating one of the first large-scale, cash flow positive players in our space. This combination with Razor, which will combine the best technology and people across two top players in our industry, creates a clear global platform for the next stage of consolidation and growth.”

About Razor Group
Razor Group GmbH (“Razor”) was founded by e-commerce experts and serial founders Tushar Ahluwalia, Christoph Gamon, Shrestha Chowdhury and Dr. Oliver Dlugosch. The Berlin-based company acquires and operates profitable Amazon FBA businesses and other online marketplace sellers which have consistently demonstrated superior product quality, outstanding customer satisfaction and sharp business acumen. Razor pairs significant growth capital with extensive e-commerce and technology expertise, thereby ensuring that the acquired businesses reach the next stage in their development. Razor defines itself as a technology-driven e-commerce business to push world-class consumer products in relevant categories into all leading marketplaces globally. 

About Perch
Perch is a technology-driven commerce company that acquires and operates Amazon FBA and other D2C brands at scale. With roughly 100 brands and 5,000 products, Perch offers a diversified portfolio of leading consumer goods across multiple popular categories such as Home & Living, Sports, Health and Toys. Through its proprietary technology platform, strong focus on the US Amazon sales channel, and leading supply chain capabilities, Perch has quickly become the established leader within the US Amazon aggregator segment. Perch was founded by Chris Bell in 2019 in Boston, USA. 

About Presight Capital
Presight Capital is a leading venture capital fund with >$600m assets under management that backs ambitious founders across multiple sectors globally including Consumer, Fintech, Healthcare, Robotics etc. Presight was launched in 2019 by serial entrepreneur Christian Angermayer and seasoned investor Fabian Hansen, as the flagship venture capital investment arm of Apeiron Investment Group, the family office of Christian Angermayer. Since its inception, Presight has invested in 70+ companies and completed 8+ portfolio public listings.

Contact:
Ben Li
VP Corporate Finance
[email protected]

Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2355116/Razor_Group_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Razor Group

Leading data observability platform for data teams experiences rapid growth, closes capital from top tier investors

BOSTON, March 5, 2024 — Metaplane, the leading data observability platform for data teams, today announced its $13.8 million Series A funding round led by Felicis, with participation Khosla Ventures, Flybridge, Y Combinator, Stage 2 Capital, B37, and SNR. This comes on the heels of a successful 2023 that saw impressive revenue growth, accelerated customer acquisition, and rapid product innovation. With the close of its Series A round, Metaplane has now raised a total of $22.2 million including its Seed round, which was raised less than one year ago, and includes leading investors like Khosla Ventures, Flybridge, and Y Combinator. Metaplane will use the fresh round of capital to continue building the next evolution of data observability, with the goal of helping data teams monitor data more deeply, easily, and faster than ever before. In 2023, the Metaplane customer base tripled to over 100 companies and now includes the data teams at leading companies like Klaviyo, Sigma, Census, GoFundMe, Bose, Ramp, and ClickUp.

“We are so proud of what Metaplane was able to accomplish in 2023. Data is foundational to modern businesses, and our commitment to bring insights, fast resolution times, and peace of mind to our customers is our company mission. With this funding, Metaplane will enhance its data observability platform to support the evolving needs of data engineers. Our main areas of focus will be adding new automations, deeper data observability analytics and new ways to integrate Metaplane into data workflows so everyone using the data can check performance,” said Kevin Hu, CEO and co-founder of Metaplane. “We are honored to count Felicis and all our other investors as our partners in this effort. Their belief in Metaplane makes this all possible.” Metaplane usage has surged this past year – as of January 2024, Metaplane customers have run more than 500 million data quality checks on over 40 million data assets and over 30 million data lineage connections. Metaplane customers tripled the number of monitors created while detecting and resolving over 80,000 incidents.

Metaplane was founded by Kevin Hu, Guru Mahendran, and Peter Casinelli in 2019 to provide instant visibility into data quality issues that negatively impact businesses. Data pipelines today are more complex than ever, with hundreds of data sources, convoluted business logic, and many cross-functional stakeholders. Testing, monitoring, and fixing issues across the entire data stack is critical and nearly impossible for one team or department to accomplish on their own. Metaplane data observability empowers data engineers to identify issues with machine learning-based data quality monitoring, enabling users to discover unknown incidents in real-time.

“Metaplane has changed the way we monitor our operational data,” said Evan Cover, Director, BI Engineering and Governance at Klaviyo. “In the past, data teams had to be reactive and fix issues after they became problems. If data teams don’t catch these problems, the business teams risk making important decisions with incorrect information. Metaplane puts us, the data team, in the driver’s seat. At Klaviyo, we now more proactively monitor data quality and fix problems before the business teams are impacted. Within a week of deploying Metaplane, we were able to more quickly catch issues for the data and business teams. This led to even greater trust across the company. I sleep a bit easier at night knowing that Metaplane has our back.”

“We believe that data will only continue to increase in importance, and as it does, additional layers of monitoring, tooling, and services will make data stacks even more efficient and crucial to all kinds of businesses, ” says Javier Soltero, who joined the Metaplane board, is a Senior Venture Partner at Felicis, and is the SVP & GM of Canva Enterprise. “Metaplane’s excellent team has built a compelling feature set that promises to drive deep technical innovation for data teams. But, what overwhelmingly made this investment decision a no-brainer was how passionate and happy Metaplane’s customers are. They love both the product and team. In my experience, these are the fundamental drivers of growth and success.”

Data teams interested in learning more about Metaplane can schedule a live demonstration at https://www.metaplane.dev/book-a-demo. Metaplane is hiring across all functions, and open positions can be found at https://www.metaplane.dev/careers.

About Metaplane
Metaplane, the leading data observability platform for data teams, ensures that companies can trust the data that powers their business. Metaplane’s best-in-class data observability platform monitors your data warehouse to catch data quality issues when they happen and help prevent incidents before they occur. In doing so, Metaplane helps avoid costly mistakes, saves data teams hours spent debugging, and fixes issues before downstream users and customers are affected. Founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 2019, Metaplane has raised capital from Felicis, Khosla Ventures, Flybridge, Y Combinator, and others, and counts as its customers leading companies, like Klaviyo, Sigma, Census, GoFundMe, Bose, Ramp, and ClickUp. To learn more or get started for free, visit https://www.metaplane.dev.

About Felicis
Founded in 2006, Felicis is a venture capital firm investing in companies reinventing core markets, as well as those creating frontier technologies. The firm was the first to offer a Founder Development pledge, providing needed resources to help founders scale themselves. Felicis focuses on early-stage investments and currently manages over $3B in capital across nine funds. The firm is an early backer of more than 49 companies valued at $1B+. More than 100 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Adyen, Credit Karma, Cruise, Fitbit, Guardant Health, Meraki, Ring, and Shopify. The firm is based in Menlo Park and San Francisco in California. Learn more at felicis.com.

Media Contact
Guru Mahendran
[email protected]
(510) 449-3805

SOURCE Metaplane

Series A funding will drive expansion of platform, which enables quick, AI-powered insights previously unavailable in the energy sector

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., March 5, 2024 — HData, a company using AI and automation to help the U.S. energy industry to file, explore, analyze, and leverage regulatory data, today announces the close of $10 Million in Series A funding, led by Buoyant Ventures, an early-stage venture fund that invests in digital solutions to combat climate change. Participating investors include Victorum Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and Firebrand Ventures, among other prominent investors. Funds will be used to accelerate the expansion of the flagship HData platform with enhanced capabilities for energy industry professionals.

HData’s innovative AI-powered platform enables clients to receive, analyze and understand crucial data, empowering key strategic decision-making for energy initiatives. HData’s expanded platform will play a crucial role by amassing the largest authoritative library of structured and unstructured regulated energy data in the industry, and equipping companies with powerful AI tools that can quickly unearth intelligence that previously would have taken months to uncover, if at all. This caliber of analysis will transform energy companies’ day-to-day while also providing the critical energy transition intelligence required to solve significant regulatory and climate-related issues.

“HData stands at the digital forefront, bridging the gap between the current energy sector and its sustainable future,” said Hudson Hollister, co-founder and CEO of HData. “With our Series A funding from Buoyant Ventures and other key investors, we are set to broaden our platform’s impact, unlocking insights from industry data to make better decisions today and positioning our customers to navigate the changing industry tomorrow.”

Allison Myers, general partner and co-founder at Buoyant Ventures, emphasized HData’s transformative potential: “HData’s platform can unlock and analyze the industry data that is crucial to transitioning our energy economy efficiently,” Myers said. “Buoyant is passionate about energy transition intelligence, and we see HData’s technology as an essential tool and opportunity to help the industry and regulators address the climate crisis. We also see HData’s work as a blueprint for addressing other monumental issues and heavily regulated industries which require precise data analytics.”

This funding also spotlights HData’s work with leading energy companies, such as Southern Company, to enhance reporting, decision-making, rate case analysis, and industry benchmarking, ultimately streamlining compliance and risk management and fostering a more efficient, data-driven approach within the utility sector.

“HData’s AI-enhanced data analytics is an exciting development for the sector,” said Noel Black, SVP of Federal Regulatory Affairs at Southern Company. “At Southern Company, we are committed to serving customers with safe, reliable and affordable energy. Our commitment to net zero goals and our customers will be greatly assisted by the insights and intelligence provided by HData.”

Currently used by more than 30 regulated energy companies and supporting organizations like consultants, intervenors, and regulators, HData’s platform automates the entire regulatory data lifecycle from collection to actionable insights, allowing energy professionals to focus on strategies that drive growth and sustainability. To learn more about HData and its pioneering solutions in the energy industry, visit www.hdata.us.

About HData
HData is a technology company that enables anyone in the energy industry to file, explore, analyze, and capitalize on authoritative regulatory data. Using AI and analytics, HData’s platform transforms millions of pages of filings and dockets – previously tedious, manual, and error-prone to manage – into rich intelligence, empowering analysts, and executives to make crucial decisions with confidence. HData’s groundbreaking Regulatory AI allows users to query fully secured data libraries (including their own private documents) to get quick and accurate answers to their business-critical questions. The company was named to the GovTech 100 by Government Technology Magazine, appointed to the SAP.iO Munich Sustainability and Energy Management cohort, and recognized as the ‘Best Regulatory or Compliance Startup’ at the 2023 TLTF Summit. Visit www.hdata.us for more information.

Media Contact:
Truc Nguyen
[email protected]

SOURCE HData

Tech Founders Raise nearly $7M in Funding to Create a New Infrastructure that Allows AI Bots and Data Scrapers to Efficiently Pay for Website Content

TollBit will Benefit Publishing Industry, Tech Companies, and Consumers by Boosting Content Revenue, Protecting Quality Information, and Reducing Legal Uncertainty

NEW YORK, March 5, 2024 — TollBit founders Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi today announced the company has raised $7M for their new platform aimed at addressing the shifting economics of web content in the age of AI. TollBit allows AI bots and data scrapers to pay websites directly to license their content. The technology allows websites to monetize data and content, monitor bot traffic to sites, and easily onboard AI and LLM partners. By providing a tech infrastructure,TollBit helps to establish clear guardrails to reduce the legal uncertainty of scraping. The system relies on tokens that are issued and validated by the platform to ensure every scrape is authorized and logged.

“We are seeing a fundamental shift in the economics of the Internet: as more consumers turn to AI to meet their needs, less eyeballs will reach websites. This trend inadvertently undercuts the financial health of the publishers and websites that reliable AI needs to thrive. AI agents and LLMs are only as good as the information they can access so this poses a massive threat to the entire ecosystem. TollBit is building the infrastructure to help power the Internet in this new era by ensuring publishers and content creators can be fairly paid for their work,” said Joslin and Panigrahi.

TollBit has raised initial funding from top investors with ties across digital media, tech, and AI. The round was led by Sunflower Capital and includes participation from AIX, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Collective, and Liquid 2 Ventures. Among other things, the funding will be used for the continued expansion of TollBit’s tech team.

Researchers have already raised concerns that AI companies may be running out of high quality content and data and many publishers see language models and web-enabled AI tools as an existential threat to website traffic.

“Modern AI agents rely on a steady stream of fresh and high-quality content and data to provide users with trustworthy and timely answers. We believe TollBit will be a key part of the future AI stack, providing a mechanism to incentivize and compensate publishers for the content and data they produce,” said Anthony Goldbloom, Partner at AIX.

“This disruption is coming for every industry. Any company that relies on traffic to a website or app will need to rethink their approach. User-generated and aggregated content sites will soon be impacted as AI products begin to be able to take actions on end-users’ behalf,” added Liu Jiang, Founder of Sunflower Capital.

“Our fund and leadership have spent decades managing and investing in legacy and digital media businesses, so we’ve seen the enormous impact technology has had on the sector,” said Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau. “The incredible power of AI promises tremendous benefits to society, but we need to act swiftly to coalesce around a sustainable content model that satisfies both the supply and demand sides of the market. If we fail to establish systems-wide guardrails and incentivize rich content creation, the entire system will collapse – it’s the start of a sinkhole and we’re all at risk of falling in. TollBit’s solution benefits all parties, protecting world-class journalism, creative content, accurate data, and LLMs’ ability to mature and improve.”

TollBit is currently onboarding publishers to the platform. Learn more at https://tollbit.com/

About TollBit
TollBit offers AI bots and data scrapers an easy and compliant way to compensate websites directly for content. The platform seeks to address the new economics of content creation in the AI era by reducing the legal uncertainties of scraping and protecting the health of the entire content ecosystem.

About Sunflower
Sunflower Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that partners with foundational infrastructure companies building for the modern enterprise. We specialize in B2B products with technical moats in categories like data and machine learning, developer tooling, cybersecurity, frontier tech, and more. Sunflower was founded by solo GP Liu Jiang, who has invested in companies including Athelas, Clay, DBT, Hadrian, Retool, Semgrep, Temporal, Vercel, Verkada and Warp.

About AIX
AIX Ventures is an AI-native, early-stage venture capital firm, founded in 2021 by Richard Socher and Shaun Johnson, that includes some of the world’s top AI practitioners: Pieter Abbeel, Anthony Goldbloom, and Christopher Manning. AIX Ventures invests in founders who are developing industry-changing AI technologies. Its portfolio includes HuggingFace, Perplexity, Weights & Biases, You.com, Chroma, and others. AIX Ventures is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau is an early-stage venture capital firm founded and operated in New York City. Our portfolio includes more than 400 leading enterprise and consumer businesses including Zipline, Guideline, MIRROR, Blockdaemon, K Health, Warby Parker, and ZenBusiness. We’re experienced operators who invest early and stay in our founders’ corners as they build iconic companies. Learn more at lererhippeau.com.

About Liquid 2
Liquid 2 is building the most valuable ecosystem at seed.  Founded in 2016 by Joe Montana, our ecosystem is defined by a network of deeply rooted connections with our founding advisors (Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham), top-tier co-investors, and a portfolio of over 800 technology companies representing over $100B of combined enterprise value.  Liquid 2 invests $250K – $1M in pre-seed and seed rounds and our portfolio includes Gitlab, Rippling, Jasper AI, Retool, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Remote, Solugen, Astranis, Stoke Space, Rappi, WhatNot, Modern Treasury, Athelas and many more.

About Operator Collective
Operator Collective is an early-stage B2B venture firm and community backed by tech’s most exceptional operators and top-tier institutions. OpCo brings together leaders who are critical to a startup’s success but largely absent from the venture ecosystem – senior operating executives from diverse backgrounds who have built the world’s most admired tech companies. Our proprietary platform enables portfolio founders to efficiently tap into 200+ active Operator LPs to help companies as they build and scale, reach potential customers, and connect with talent networks for potential executives, board members, and industry leaders.

For more information contact: press@tollbit.com

SOURCE TollBit

Led by veteran silicon entrepreneurs, Taalas’ direct-to-silicon foundry will pave the way to a 1000x improvement in the cost of AI, with a single chip able to outperform a small GPU data center.

TORONTO, March 5, 2024 – Taalas Inc., an innovator in AI and silicon, is pleased to announce today that it has exited stealth mode and raised $50 million dollars over two rounds of funding led by Pierre Lamond and Quiet Capital.

Over the last year, AI has undergone a large scale productization and has already begun reshaping the world. Concurrently, deep learning models have become the world’s most demanding computational workload, unsustainably capital intensive, power hungry, and GPU constrained.

“Artificial intelligence is like electrical power – an essential good that will need to be made available to all. Commoditizing AI requires a 1000x improvement in computational power and efficiency, a goal that is unattainable via the current incremental approaches. The path forward is to realize that we should not be simulating intelligence on general purpose computers, but casting intelligence directly into silicon. Implementing deep learning models in silicon is the straightest path to sustainable AI,” said Ljubisa Bajic, Taalas’ CEO.

Taalas is developing an automated flow for rapidly implementing all types of deep learning models (Transformers, SSMs, Diffusers, MoEs, etc.) in silicon. Proprietary innovations enable one of its chips to hold an entire large AI model without requiring external memory. The efficiency of hard-wired computation enables a single chip to outperform a small GPU data center, opening the way to a 1000x improvement in the cost of AI.

“We believe the Taalas ‘direct-to-silicon’ foundry unlocks three fundamental breakthroughs: dramatically resetting the cost structure of AI today, viably enabling the next 10-100x growth in model size, and efficiently running powerful models locally on any consumer device. This is perhaps the most important mission in computing today for the future scalability of AI. And we are proud to support this remarkable n-of-1 team as they do it,” said Matt Humphrey, Partner at Quiet Capital.

The company is taping out its first large language model chip in the third quarter of 2024 and planning to make it available to early customers in the first quarter of 2025.

“Making chips is a difficult and risky endeavour in which success requires experience, ingenuity, and persistence. Taalas’ founders have produced numerous cutting-edge chips and systems. Their track record in the industry is second to none,” said Pierre Lamond, a legend in the field, whose work across Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Sequoia, and many other organizations, helped lay the foundation of the semiconductor industry.

Taalas was founded by Ljubisa Bajic, Drago Ignjatovic, and Lejla Bajic. Prior to co-founding Taalas, Ljubisa founded Tenstorrent in 2016. Drago and Lejla joined Tenstorrent soon after as early engineering leaders. The team has spent decades collectively working together on a long list of AI processors, GPUs, and CPUs across Tenstorrent, AMD, and NVIDIA.

SOURCE Taalas Inc.

READING, England, March 5, 2024 — OQC, a global leader in quantum computing-as-a-service (QCaaS), today announced that Chevron Technology Ventures, part of Chevron Corporation (CVX: NYSE), has joined its $100m Series B funding round.

Quantum computing in the energy market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 37.9%, owing to the increasing demand for efficient optimisation and simulation across the sector^[1]. Chevron’s investment marks a significant move by a supermajor into the rapidly evolving field of quantum computing.

“OQC’s development of the quantum computer has the potential to change the information processing landscape by merging the bounds of engineering and physics,” said Jim Gable, Vice President, Innovation and President of Technology Ventures at Chevron. “This is the latest investment from our Core Energy Fund, which focuses on high-tech, high-growth startups and breakthrough technologies that could improve Chevron’s core oil and gas business performance as well as create new opportunities for growth.”

OQC recently launched OQC Toshiko, an upgradable 32-qubit platform and the world’s first Enterprise Ready Quantum Computing Platform. As the first company in the world to integrate quantum computing into commercial data centres, OQC is bringing quantum out of the lab and into the data centre. The company aims to make it possible to offer hybrid computing, integrated quantum and high-performance computing, to the market.

A quantum future for energy
OQC’s technology provides several potential groundbreaking opportunities for the energy sector, including  the development and optimisation of catalysts and the efficiency of transportation and distribution networks. Quantum is anticipated to accelerate the energy industry’s discovery and development of new materials through the simulation of complex molecules to lower carbon products.

To realise this future, the energy industry requires secure, accessible and powerful quantum computing that is integrated with existing high-performance computing. Prior to the launch of OQC Toshiko, quantum computers were only available in labs, making secure access for companies and integration with existing high-performance computing the largest barriers to wider business adoption of this groundbreaking technology.

Spearheading industry-leading R&D
OQC recently announced that SBI Investment, Japan’s premier venture capital fund, is leading OQC’s $100m Series B raise. Existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), Lansdowne Partners, and OTIF, acted by manager Oxford Investment Consultants (OIC), are also participating.

The ongoing round is the UK’s largest ever Series B in quantum computing enabling industry-leading R&D that could pave the way to quantum advantage and furthers OQC’s ability to bring next generation platforms of hundreds of qubits to businesses globally.

Commenting on the news, Ilana Wisby, Chief Executive Officer at OQC, said: “Chevron’s investment marks a significant milestone in harnessing quantum computing for the energy sector. We’re excited to drive innovation and efficiency in exploration and renewables and pioneer enterprise-ready quantum in the energy sector.”

About Chevron Technology Ventures
Chevron Technology Ventures identifies and invests in externally developed technologies and new business solutions with the potential to enhance the way Chevron produces and delivers affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner energy. CTV has more than two decades of being the primary on-ramp for external innovation into Chevron. For more information, visitwww.chevron.com/technology/technology-ventures.

About OQC
OQC is a global leader in quantum computing-as-a-service, building a brighter future by providing enterprise-ready quantum solutions that seamlessly integrate into digital infrastructures and customer workflows. Its award-winning and world-first integration of quantum computing into colocation facilities removes technical, financial, and geographical barriers to quantum; offering every enterprise a chance to seize a competitive edge.

Prior to Series B, OQC raised $52 million including the largest Series A in quantum in the UK at that time. In 2023, OQC’s team grew to over 100, attracting talent from across the globe. The team has built and deployed OQC Toshiko platforms to colocation data centres expanding its operations in the UK, Japan and Spain.

OQC Toshiko is the world’s first and only enterprise ready platform: a powerful next generation system, deployed to commercial data-centres, enabling businesses to securely tap into ground-breaking technology from anywhere in the world. This new technology is now in private preview and coming soon on public cloud and data centre fabric. For more information, visit our website: www.oxfordquantumcircuits.com.

^[1] UnivDatos Market Insights

SOURCE Oxford Quantum Circuits