• Significant support from investors including the European Investment Fund
• Fund to invest in first and best-in-class European life science companies in drug development and digital health

STRASSEN, Luxembourg, June 29, 2023 — Vesalius Biocapital, the specialist life sciences venture capital investor, announces the first close of its fourth fund, Vesalius Biocapital IV, securing over €95 million of commitments. The fund has attracted blue chip investors including the European Investment Fund (EIF). Starting immediately Vesalius Biocapital IV is to invest in first and best-in-class European life science companies in drug development and digital health. The goal is to build a well-balanced portfolio of 10-15 companies, providing capital and the Vesalius team’s experience and expertise to support their development.

Now in its sixteenth year, Vesalius Biocapital has a successful track record of backing highly innovative companies and has raised over €270 million from a renowned investor base for its three previous funds. It has completed over 30 investments with lead or co-lead positions and achieved numerous exits through trade sales and IPOs. These include: Forendo, acquired by Organon; Sword Health sold to a group of private equity investors; Apitope acquired by Chinese company Worg Pharma; and Ogeda acquired by Astellas Pharma. With a well-balanced portfolio between drug development and non-drug development investments, Vesalius has a successful track-record of strong and consistent financial performance and has generated significant returns for its investors.

Commenting on the first close, Stéphane Verdood, Managing Partner at Vesalius Biocapital IV said:

“Our successful track record placed us in a strong position to attract high quality investors such as the EIF (European Investment Fund) to Vesalius Biocapital IV. Furthermore, it is fantastic validation of our investment approach and strategy that a significant number of investors in our previous funds are backing us in Vesalius Biocapital IV. This is an exciting time in healthcare; the industry is at a key inflection point between science, technology and medicine, and our investors support our strategy to invest in companies developing innovative first in class products and technologies.”

Guy Geldhof, Managing Partner at Vesalius Biocapital IV, added:

“While our investment focus remains in Europe where we continue to see many high-quality life science companies, we will continue to help our portfolio companies to expand to the US to enable them to achieve optimum valuations and to access the US capital markets. We will also be looking to invest in North American companies that are looking to Europe for development, expansion or access to innovation.”

Marjut Falkstedt, Chief Executive Officer at the European Investment Fund, commented:

“The development of new therapies and digital health solutions are revolutionising the healthcare sector, but these innovations need targeted, dedicated investment. The EIF is glad to partner with Vesalius for its fourth fund, building on a strong track record in the sector, which also aims to channel investment towards underserved areas in the innovation landscape, particularly in southern Europe.”

Vesalius Biocapital IV is targeting €150M and will accept new investors on a “rolling closing” basis until the final closing in 2024.

ABOUT VESALIUS BIOCAPITAL

Vesalius Biocapital (Vesalius), the specialist life sciences venture capital investor, has supported companies active in human health through venture capital funds since 2007. In the sixteen years since inception, the three predecessor funds have raised over €270 million.

The investment portfolio is well balanced between drug development and non-drug development investments and committed to providing capital to science-backed innovation and ambitious entrepreneurs, with a strong focus on exit within five years.

Vesalius Biocapital IV, launched in June 2023, targets first and best-in-class European life science companies in drug development and digital health. The fund secured over €95 million of commitments in a first closing in June 2023, with a target size of minimum €150 million.

The specialist team consists of seasoned life science professionals with healthcare industry, corporate finance and strategy development experience, supporting companies through their growth cycle. The team is based in Europe to explore investment opportunities and valuation potential for the portfolio. Managing Partners include Guy Geldhof, Dr Jean-Christophe Renondin and Stéphane Verdood. Partners include Dr Fabienne Roussel and Olivier Houben. The investment team is complemented by Dr David Cristina and Qasim Zawawi who joined as principals and Dr Hayley French and Dr Stephane Heymans who joined as venture partners.

SOURCE Vesalius Biocapital

Funding Accelerates Development of Robot Technology Powered with Augmented Intelligence

AUSTIN, Texas, June 28, 2023 — Today Contoro Robotics, a company augmenting robot intelligence with AI and teleoperation, announced that it has raised $4.7 million in Seed funding. The round was led by SV Investment with participation from Kakao Ventures, Bass Investment, Future Play, and UT Austin Seed Fund.

Last year, Contoro Robotics raised a $1.3 million Pre-seed round led by Village Global, which is backed by industry luminaries such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Including Seed Round, Contoro has raised $6M up to date.

“We are excited to announce this investment which will allow us to accelerate the deployment of our augmented intelligence technology,” said Youngmok Yun, CEO and founder of Contoro Robotics. “We’re making headway in the logistics domains and we’re confident diverse industries can benefit from our innovative solutions.”

Contoro Robotics’ technology combines artificial intelligence (AI) with human expertise. AI is used to control the robot in most situations, but humans can intervene when necessary. This approach allows Contoro Robotics’ technology to be used in a wide range of applications, from simple tasks that can be easily automated to complex tasks that require human judgment.

“We believe that Contoro Robotics’ technologies including exoskeleton, haptics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation have the potential to effectively optimize algorithm structures that robot human-like thinks and acts,” said Il-Yong Choi, Ph.D., Investor at SV Investment. “It means that Contoro Robotics’ approach can be applied to a lot of ordinary tasks and then accelerate that robot itself can be much more accessible and affordable in our daily lives.”

Contoro Robotics is currently focused on solving oversea container unloading challenges for warehouse businesses. Contoro robots will help reduce the cost and time of container unloading, and will also improve safety. A pilot program using Contoro Robotics’ technology is scheduled to launch in Q3 of 2023.

About Contoro Robotics (http://contoro.com)
Contoro Robotics is a company developing AI/teleoperation technology that enables robots to be controlled autonomously and remotely from anywhere in the world. The company’s mission is to introduce advanced intelligence to robotic arms by combining AI and human intelligence. This will open a wide range of possibilities for robot usage in a variety of industries such as logistics, manufacturing, and agriculture.

Contact: 

John Cook, [email protected] 

1807 W Braker Ln, STE C500, Austin, TX 78758

SOURCE Contoro Inc.

Prestigious International Annual Awards Program Honors Standout AI and Machine Learning Solutions and Companies

SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 28, 2023 — Roambee, the global real-time supply chain visibility and intelligence provider, today announced that it’d been selected as the winner of the “Best AI-based Solution for Supply Chain” designation in the sixth annual AI Breakthrough Awards program conducted by AI Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies, and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market today.

Roambee’s cutting-edge AI-powered platform leverages verifiable IoT sensor information to provide unparalleled supply chain intelligence, enabling accurate predictions of business KPIs. With its advanced sensor data analytics, this platform empowers organizations to deliver the right product at the precise time, in the correct place, and in optimal condition.

Roambee’s platform seamlessly integrates real-time IoT sensor inputs with a diverse range of data streams, including carriers, port operations, airport operations, rail operations, traffic, and weather. This extensive data collection is then transformed into invaluable predictive and contextual business signals, insights, and forecasts, such as replenishment triggers, security, and quality compliance predictions. This allows enterprises to effectively address supply chain challenges, automate operations, foster sustainability, and effectively implement successful future growth strategies.

“Our AI platform is founded on premium, firsthand information derived from IoT sensors, enabling it to deliver predictions for supply chain or business KPIs that are 100 times more accurate compared to other Supply Chain AI solutions,” stated Sanjay Sharma, CEO of Roambee. “Roambee’s AI endeavors are centered around establishing a strong foundation of practical forecasts at a time when most supply chain tools prioritize Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models, primarily used for text summarization, content generation, and search, which may not faithfully represent reality. The recognition of our AI Breakthrough reinforces our commitment to enhancing the dependability and usefulness of supply chain data for enterprises.”

The mission of the AI Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work, and success in a range of AI and machine learning-related categories, including Generative AI, Computer Vision, AIOps, Deep Learning, Robotics, Natural Language Processing, industry-specific AI applications and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 3,200 nominations from over 20 different countries throughout the world, with winners including AMD, OpenAI, Microsoft, Bosch, Qualcomm, Palo Alto Networks, SoftBank Robotics, Honeywell, Mercedes Benz, and an impressive list of top companies and startups in the industry.

“At a time when enterprises are looking to build sustainable, autonomous, and resilient supply chains, Roambee’s AI-enabled analytics platform, sensor-based visibility, and innovation provide enterprises with accurate visibility data and intelligence. Congratulations on winning the ‘Best AI-based Solution for Supply Chain’ award,” said James Johnson, managing director of AI Breakthrough. “Most supply chain software platforms, planning tools, and monitoring and tracking solutions lack timely, actionable, direct-from-source data. To truly empower firms to automate their supply chain planning and execution with confidence, there is a critical need for AI solutions built on verifiable visibility. Roambee’s AI-powered platform stands as a proven innovation in this field, delivering unparallel accuracy and reliability in providing the necessary data and insights to optimize supply chain operations.”

About Roambee
Roambee is a supply chain visibility & intelligence provider enabling on-time, in-full, in-condition delivery of shipments and assets anywhere in the world. 300+ enterprises are improving customer experience, service levels, product quality, order-to-cash cycles, business efficiencies, sustainability, and automating logistics with Roambee’s real-time insights & foresights. More than 50 of them are the top 100 global companies in the Pharma, Food, Electronics, Chemicals, Automotive, Packaging & Containers, and Logistics sectors. Roambee’s innovative AI-powered platform, and end-to-end monitoring solutions, deliver reliable business signals built on item-level, firsthand IoT sensor data and non-sensor inputs. The outcome is 70% better multimodal ETAs, OTIF deliveries, 80%+ cold chain compliance, and more, including 4X+ ROI on supply chain asset performance.

About AI Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the AI Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in Artificial Intelligence technologies, services, companies and products. The AI Breakthrough Awards provide public recognition for the achievements of AI companies and products in categories including AI Platforms, Robotics, Business Intelligence, AI Hardware, NLP, Computer Vision and more. For more information visit AIBreakthroughAwards.com.

Media Contact
Susana Leiser
Warner Communications
[email protected]com
+1 (786) 403-8393

SOURCE Roambee

AUSTIN, Texas, June 28, 2023 — gigaroo, an innovative startup dedicated to empowering GenZ individuals with financial stability, announced today that it has successfully raised $2.5M in pre-seed funding. Since its app launch in early January, the company has garnered a substantial user base of thousands of GenZ individuals and is working with dozens of service industry customers.

Adir Oren, Co-founder & CEO of gigaroo, expressed the company’s commitment to addressing the unique challenges faced by GenZ’s in today’s evolving economic landscape. “At gigaroo, we are devoted to equipping GenZ with the tools, resources, and opportunities needed to thrive financially,” stated Oren. “Our AI-powered app serves as a bridge, connecting GenZ with flexible service industry job options that are aligned with their lifestyle. By providing next-day payments, we enable them to access their earnings promptly and plan for both short-term obligations and long-term goals.”

Looking towards the future, gigaroo has ambitious expansion plans. Oren outlined, “We aim to scale our operations in Austin, Dallas, Miami, Boston, and beyond. Additionally, we plan to establish partnerships with the restaurant’s point of sale and management systems, helping businesses fill their open positions and help them retain their employees. This approach creates a win-win scenario, as GenZ individuals gain the flexible financial stability they seek while businesses reduce turnover, increase profit, and recover and average of over 200K of their annual lost revenue.”

gigaroo, founded in 2022 by Adir Oren and Yair Almagor, renowned Israeli entrepreneurs, is headquartered in Austin, TX, with its research and development center located in Israel. The company plan to raise its seed round in the coming months.

For further information about Gigaroo and its innovative solutions, please contact [email protected] or call 512-333-1979.

Note to editors: High-resolution images and further media assets are available upon request.

SOURCE gigaroo

Led by Highland Europe, this round brings Nothing’s total funding to $250M – just as company crosses 1.5M products sold

LONDON, June 28, 2023 — Nothing, the London-based consumer technology brand, announces a $96M fundraising round led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investors GV (Google Ventures), EQT Ventures and C Capital, alongside house music supergroup Swedish House Mafia.

With over 450 people across seven offices worldwide, Nothing is here to make tech fun again. Through cutting-edge design, user interface innovation and community collaboration, the company is creating an ecosystem of tech products for the young and creative. These products are thoughtfully built to contribute to a more sustainable future.

In less than three years, Nothing has proven that there is room for a new alternative. In 2022, Nothing’s Phone (1) was regarded as one of the most anticipated tech launches in recent times and showcased in Time Magazine’s prestigious “Best Inventions of 2022” list for its innovative smartphone design. In 2023, Phone (1) received the renowned Red Dot Design Award, along with the rest of Nothing’s current product portfolio, including the true wireless audio devices Ear (2) and Ear (Stick). Looking ahead, the company is gearing up to launch Phone (2) on July 11th. Phone (2) features a lower carbon footprint than its predecessor as a result of the company’s ongoing sustainability initiatives.

Nothing wants to bridge the gap between the company and its users – driving product innovation by delving deeper into consumer insights through its community feedback programs. To further support this goal, Nothing has held two community financing rounds and attracted over 8,000 private investors. Additionally, the company has appointed a community member as a Board Observer, ensuring that user interests remain at the forefront at all times.

“In just over two years, we’ve assembled one of the strongest teams in the industry and sold over 1.5 million devices worldwide,” said Carl Pei, Nothing CEO and Co-founder. “It’s clear that there’s real demand for an innovative challenger in the consumer tech industry, and with this new round of financing, we’ve never been better positioned to realize our vision to make tech fun again.“ 

Highland Europe, a London-based venture capital firm focusing on high-potential technology companies, invested based on Nothing’s success to date and future potential. Partner Tony Zappalà led the recent round and will be joining Nothing’s board.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Carl and his team, who share our vision of bridging technology with the younger generation,” added Tony Zappalà, Partner at Highland Europe. “In an industry as challenging as this, it has been quite some time since a new company of this scale and ambition has reached this stage, given the difficulty and complexity of surviving in such a competitive environment. We firmly believe that Nothing has something truly distinctive to offer, coupled with an exceptional team. We are enthusiastic about supporting Nothing as they take on the consumer tech giants and challenge the prevailing norms.”

For more information and updates about Nothing, follow the company on Instagram and Twitter, or visit nothing.tech.

About Nothing 

Nothing is here to make tech fun again. Founded in 2020, their debut smartphone, Phone (1), made Time Magazine’s prestigious “Best Inventions of 2022”. Through cutting-edge design and user interface innovation, the London-based company is creating an alternative ecosystem of tech products for the young and creative. Nothing’s products are developed in close collaboration with their community, which includes over 8,000 private investors, and are crafted with sustainability at the forefront.

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2142465/Nothing_Fund.jpg
Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2142464/Nothing_logo.jpg

SOURCE Nothing

Data automation leader uses capital infusion to make operational excellence accessible

SAN FRANCISCO, June 28, 2023 — Parabola, a collaborative data tool enabling non-technical teams to automate solutions for manual, spreadsheet-based processes, today announces a $24 million Series B funding round led by OpenView, with participation from existing investors Matrix and Thrive Capital. Additional new investors include Flexport, Webflow, and the founders of Harry’s, Warby Parker, and Allbirds. With this funding, Parabola will expand its product capabilities and grow its team in pursuit of empowering everyone to leverage automation and AI in their daily work, regardless of their technical capabilities.

Parabola provides a solution for businesses beyond hiring more people for every new problem. Instead, non-technical teams can stop doing things manually, and start creating, documenting and sharing reusable workflows. Combining the power of AI with familiar spreadsheet functionality, Parabola enables users to extract, analyze, categorize and experiment with data to solve real use cases.

“For the past few years, we’ve been working with incredible operators at category-defining companies who were drowning in manual work. Using Parabola, they’ve achieved tremendous value nearly overnight by automating the messy processes they thought were un-automatable.” said Alex Yaseen, Founder and CEO of Parabola. “From modern companies like Sonos and Flexport to 90-year-old businesses like NFI that are rapidly transforming, Parabola has helped teams achieve immediate ROI. This new funding means we can help far more companies unlock the latent potential within their teams.”

This funding will allow Parabola to double down on serving its ecommerce, retail, CPG, freight and logistics customers while expanding to new verticals. OpenView’s Blake Bartlett will join the Parabola Board of Directors as part of this investment. Flexport, a worldwide freight forwarder and logistics platform, has invested in Parabola and serves as a valued customer, underscoring the platform’s transformative potential.

“Automation has become a necessity. However, most people are still stuck in spreadsheets and are under-served by the existing technology,” said Bartlett. “When we talked with Parabola’s customers, we knew we had found a company that was bottling magic. Teams using Parabola can actually do more with less – and that’s priority for virtually every business in 2023.”

For more information on how Parabola is shaping the future of data automation and operations, visit https://parabola.io/.

Learn more about Parabola’s pricing options and check out their open roles across all departments.

About Parabola
Parabola is transforming the way companies operate by empowering non-technical teams to automate complex data processes with ease. With powerful collaboration and documentation capabilities, users leverage Parabola’s drag-and-drop interface to access, manipulate, and act on their data, regardless of where it lives. By empowering teams to solve the problems they’re already experts on, Parabola helps businesses of all shapes and sizes improve operations, drive revenue, and ultimately operate with excellence.

Parabola is proud to serve companies like Flexport, Sonos, Uber Freight and Durex and is backed by OpenView Partners, Matrix, Thrive Capital and many other amazing investors. Visit parabola.io to learn more or try the product for free.

Media Contact
Emylee Eyler
[email protected]
317.806.1900 ext. 139

SOURCE Parabola

AMHERST, N.Y., June 28, 2023 — Parkview Health Services, LLC (“Parkview” or “PHS”), an innovative provider of specialized pharmacy services, is excited to announce a strategic growth investment from ArtesRx, LLC (“ArtesRx”), an affiliate of Flexpoint Ford (“Flexpoint”), a private equity firm specializing in investments in the healthcare and financial services industries. The transaction closed on June 23, 2023. 

Flexpoint partnered with experienced pharmacy executive, Dom Meffe, to establish ArtesRx as a new company to acquire, scale and support pharmacy businesses that serve complex patient populations. Mr. Meffe has built and led several successful specialty pharmacies as CEO including ModernHEALTH and CuraScript. He will serve as CEO of ArtesRx and make an investment in the company alongside Flexpoint. “ArtesRx was founded to bring dedicated resources to pharmacy businesses across the country in order to build a national, patient-focused platform that differentiates based on clinical excellence and customer service,” said Dom Meffe, CEO of ArtesRx. “We have been impressed with Parkview’s culture and its deep commitment to the communities it serves, and we are excited to partner with Paul O’Leary and the PHS team in their mission to expand their high-touch service model into new markets.” 

Parkview provides pharmacy services to patients who are treated in group homes, mental health clinics, addiction services provider offices and other care settings. With a patient-centric approach and a reputation for delivering tailored solutions to its customers, PHS is well-positioned for continued growth. The company will remain headquartered in Amherst, New York and continue to be led by CEO Paul O’Leary and the current management team. 

“We are thrilled to partner with ArtesRx and Flexpoint, and we look forward to leveraging their domain knowledge and expertise in growing pharmacy and outsourced pharmacy services businesses,” commented Paul O’Leary. “This new investment not only ensures that we can continue providing our customers and patients with the exceptional care they have come to expect from our team over the past 38 years, but also enables us to accelerate growth both organically and through complementary acquisitions.”

“We couldn’t be more excited about partnering with Paul O’Leary and the Parkview team and establishing ArtesRx with Dom Meffe,” said Michael Fazekas, Managing Director at Flexpoint. “We have been actively searching for the ideal starting platform for ArtesRx and have found it in Parkview. Parkview has built a strong position in its markets through its differentiated ability to serve complex patient populations and help deliver improved clinical outcomes, and we believe Parkview’s demonstrated care model can address unmet needs in other markets across the country.” 

Lincoln International LLC served as financial advisor and Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP served as legal counsel to Parkview Health Services. Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Bass, Berry & Sims PLC served as legal counsel to Flexpoint Ford. 

About Parkview Health Services

Parkview Health Services, LLC (“PHS”), based in Amherst, New York, owns and operates three pharmacies; Parkview Health Services, Riverview Professional Pharmacy, and Parkview RX Niagara Falls. With over 38 years of experience, PHS pharmacies provide comprehensive medication solutions to group homes, mental health clinics, addiction services providers, and other congregate care settings in addition to patients who need assistance managing their medications at home. For more information, visit www.parkviewhs.com.

About Flexpoint Ford

Flexpoint Ford is a private equity investment firm that has approximately $7.5 billion of regulatory assets under management and specializes in privately negotiated investments in the healthcare and financial services industries. Since the firm’s formation in 2005, Flexpoint Ford has completed investments across a broad range of investment sizes, structures and asset classes. Flexpoint Ford has offices in Chicago, Illinois, and New York, New York. For more information, visit www.flexpointford.com.

Contact

Prosek Partners on behalf of Flexpoint Ford
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Parkview Health Services, LLC

BERLIN, June 28, 2023 — BLUU Seafood, the leading European food biotech to produce cultivated fish, continues its growth path and successfully closes its Series A. By raising EUR 16 million, the German start-up secures the capital to further advance the work on its groundbreaking technology and the market launch of first products. Cultivated fish is real animal protein directly grown from fish cells without killing the animal.

The Series A funding was led by Sparkfood and LBBW VC. Further participants in the round were SeaX Ventures, Manta Ray Ventures, Norrsken VC, Delivery Hero, Innovationsstarter Fonds Hamburg GmbH and Dr. Oetker. In total, BLUU Seafood has raised more than EUR 23 million since its founding in 2020.

The company will use the fresh money to drive regulatory approval of its first products, expanding research work and initiating pilot production. The focus will be on hybrid products such as fish balls and fish fingers made from cultivated fish cells blended with plant-based proteins, which BLUU first presented in 2022. The start-up aims for market entry in Singapore by 2024, where the sale of cultivated chicken has already been approved by regulators in 2020.

In the US, cultivated meat and fish are also about to be launched following recent USDA and FDA approvals for cultivated protein start-ups GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods. With the final approval of the US Department of Agriculture granted a few days ago, the sale is now officially allowed. BLUU Seafood, too, has initiated the approval process with the FDA. Europe will follow next.

The company is also currently preparing to open its pilot production plant with construction work to be completed by fall this year. With this plant, BLUU Seafood will leave lab scale and reach another important milestone by scaling up production into larger fermenters of up to 500 liters.

Dr. Sebastian Rakers, Co-Founder and CEO of BLUU Seafood:

“Our successful Series-A demonstrates the enormous potential that lies in cultivated fish as a platform technology for sustainable animal protein and underlines the strong scientific development that we at BLUU Seafood have delivered so far. Together with our strong, international investor base, we can start the next stage of development and bring our first products to market.”

More about BLUU Seafood at www.bluu.bio

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2142191/BLUU_cultivated_fish_fingers.jpg
Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1874870/Bluu_Seafood_Logo.jpg

SOURCE BLUU Seafood

The investment will allow enterprises to further secure non-human identities and safely leverage the soaring adoption of third-party apps and generative AI services

NEW YORK, June 28, 2023 — Astrix Security, the enterprise’s trusted solution for securing non-human identities, has secured $25 million in Series A funding led by CRV with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and F2 Venture Capital. This new investment brings Astrix’s total funding to almost $40 million.

Fueled by the increased adoption of automation and generative AI initiatives, the enterprise’s connectivity to third-party applications is growing, resulting in an increase in cyber attacks targeting non-human app-to-app connections (via API keys, access tokens, service accounts, etc.) – as seen in high profile attacks against CircleCI, Mailchimp, GitHub, Microsoft, and Slack.

Despite financial instability within the market, Astrix is experiencing exponential year-over-year growth and momentum as a leader in securing this growing threat vector. The company recently added Figma, Priceline, Bloomreach, Rapyd and many others to its customer roster and was recognized as a finalist in the 2023 RSA Innovation Sandbox contest. The business also doubled its headcount, and will use this funding to continue expanding the team in both the U.S. and Tel Aviv offices, including its research team who recently discovered GhostToken, a critical 0-day vulnerability in the Google Cloud Platform.

“We founded Astrix to close a significant and unaddressed security gap, by allowing security teams to extend access management and threat detection to the non-human identity layer,” said Alon Jackson, CEO and co-founder at Astrix. “It’s amazing to experience the tremendous adoption by security teams, as well as see Astrix’s capabilities become essential to their every-day security arsenal. We look forward to continuing to expand our capabilities and partnerships, allowing organizations to truly reap the benefits of third-party services, especially Gen-AI apps, without compromising security.”

The enterprise environment depends on a vast web of interconnected apps, supported with an average of 10,000 app-connections for every 1,000 employees. More so, with AI-powered apps being downloaded 1506% more than last year, and often connected by employees across departments without the security team’s knowledge, having visibility and governance into every third-party connection is virtually impossible. While existing solutions focus on securing user-connections, Astrix is the first solution to focus on securing app-to-app connections, allowing the enterprise to ensure their core systems are securely connected to each other and to third-party services.

“As a growing threat vector, there has been a shift in the market to focus on third-party connectivity,” said James Green, General Partner at CRV. “Astrix caught our eye for their innovative approach to extending IAM and threat detection to all non-human identities, giving unprecedented capabilities to manage the growing API-based third-party attack surface across all environments.”

“Partnering with Astrix from inception, we’ve seen the vast impact they’ve had on the industry in a short amount of time,” said Amit Karp, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “From raising awareness to this growing attack surface to supporting some of the leading companies in the world, we’re excited for what’s to come as Astrix expands and continues protecting customers from the next supply chain attack.”

“The progress Astrix has made from seed funding to now is incredible,” said Jonathan Saacks, Managing Partner at F2 Venture Capital. “The company has made a mark on the industry already, and with the wealth of knowledge and experience from this team, we are confident they will continue to be the security asset every business needs and relies on in their toolbox.”

The Astrix Security Platform is the first solution to provide holistic visibility into all non-human connections and identities. Astrix provides a consolidated, comprehensive view of all the internal and third-party integrations within a business environment, as well as all access keys in use (i.e., API keys, OAuth tokens, service accounts, and webhooks) and the permissions and level of access granted to each one. With Astrix, businesses can extend their identity threat detection and response capabilities to non-human identities by continuously running behavioral analysis of internal and third-party apps connected to core SaaS, IaaS and PaaS systems to detect anomalies that may indicate compromised access tokens and automatically remediate risky connections.

About Astrix Security
Founded in Tel Aviv in 2021, Astrix Security helps cloud-first companies defend against a new generation of supply chain attacks. Astrix provides holistic visibility into all non-human connections and identities – automatically detecting and remediating over-privileged, unnecessary, misbehaving and malicious app-to-app connections to prevent supply chain attacks, data leaks and compliance violations. Led by two veterans of the Israel Defense Force 8200 military intelligence unit, CEO Alon Jackson and CTO Idan Gour, Astrix’s team is rapidly expanding. Astrix has raised nearly $40M in funding, with a Series A led by CRV, and additional investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, F2 Venture Capital, Venrock and Kmehin Ventures. Learn more at https://astrix.security or follow us on LinkedIn.

About CRV
CRV is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups. Since 1970, the firm has invested in more than 500 startups at their most crucial stages, including Airtable, DoorDash and Vercel. Founders need more than capital to build a great company. It takes a partner who understands the entrepreneurial journey and knows what it takes to win. From founding to IPO and beyond, CRV is there every step of the way. Founders rely on CRV to be trusted, long-term, committed partners, which has helped make CRV into one of the longest-running venture capital firms in the world. Learn more about CRV and the companies shaping the future at https://www.crv.com.

About Bessemer Venture Partners 
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has $20 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).

About F2
F2 Venture Capital is a Tel Aviv-based VC firm that invests in early-stage technology companies on the cutting edge. 
Our team members have been investors, operators, and engineers in startups and multinational giants that changed the game over the last twenty years. With $500 million assets under management and personalized support, F2 powers visionary founders on their bold missions. F2 also operates Israel’s most active pre-seed investment platform, to back founders with guidance, network, and capital from day zero. More details @ www.f2vc.com

CONTACT: Kayla Armstrong, [email protected]

SOURCE Astrix Security