While a site like Kayak can help you get a clear understanding of costs when it comes to travel, other sites offering recommendation options are typically a crapshoot, littered with fabricated reviews and manipulated results that do not take into account the traveler. With such a glut of information (some accurate, some not) available, one can easily get overwhelmed. Welcome is a newly-launched app, just out of beta, that serves as a curated city and travel guide that leverages AI coupled with vetted recommendations from experts and friends to give travelers personalized recommendations that take into account preferences, weather, time of day, and a host of other factors fueled by a robust data-driven and tech-enabled approach focused on contextual place discovery. The app elegantly delivers seamless recommendations that allow users to actually enjoy their travels instead of endlessly researching for it. The app comes out of beta with over 50,000 users in 350+ cities that have provided over 300K reviews. LA TechWatch caught up with Welcome Founder, serial entrepreneur, and CEO Matthew Rosenberg (founded and exited Cameo) to learn more about how his travels after his previous exit inspired the business, the challenges of raising funding for a travel-related business during a pandemic, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding from investor that include Accel and Lakestar Ventures.
Business
Bruvi Raises $7M for its Single Serve Coffee System That Brings Great Tasting Coffee to Your Home
8 out of 10 cups of coffee are consumed at home. 27% of American coffee drinkers have used a single-service coffee brewing machine in the past year. The diversity of choice and enhanced taste profiles coupled with the efficiency of these systems are responsible for the single pod coffee segment becoming the leading segment in terms of dollar amount spent annually as a part of the overall coffee market. Bruvi is a next-generation single-serve coffee system that offers tastier coffee along with environmentally friendly pods. The system can brew filter coffee, espressos, Americanos, ice coffees, infused coffee, and tea. For the pods, Bruvi offers sustainably sourced coffees as well as choices from Los Angeles’ most prominent roasters. LA TechWatch caught up with Bruvi Cofounder Mel Elias to learn more about the single-serve coffee market, the company’s strategic plans including national expansion, latest round of funding from investors that include The Merchant Club, Terpsi Capital, 9Yards Capital, Cambridge Companies SPG, Miroma Ventures, and M1.
Elodie Games Raises $32.5M for its Gaming Studio Focused on Providing Seamless Gaming Experiences Across Any Platform
A seamless user experience, regardless of channel or device, is one of the main pillars of a usable omnichannel experience. The same is true for gaming. Presently, incongruent and inconsistent experiences across devices often give some players advantages while creating differences in engagement rates among others. Elodie Games is a gaming studio that firmly believes that building truly synchronous experiences across any platform will lead to deeper social gaming experiences. The company, founded last year by two Riot Games executives that had worked on League of Legends, is in the process of developing its debut title, which is currently in pre-Alpha. The company has not disclosed more on the specifics but will use this latest funding to expand the team and complete the game. LA TechWatch caught up with Elodie Games CEO and Cofounder David Banks to learn more about the company’s mission, strategic plans, differentiators, latest round of funding from investors that include Galaxy Interactive, Andreessen Horowitz, Brian Cho, and Chris Ovitz.
Nacelle Raises $50M for its Headless E-Commerce Platform That Truly Decouples the Back and Front Ends
In a crowded digital realm, e-commerce companies are constantly updating the customer experience to respond to emerging touchpoints and to engage consumers in novel ways. Headless commerce is gaining in popularity, designed with a flexible architecture that decouples the front end of a site from the back-end commerce functionality. By decoupling, companies can rapidly iterate and test without disrupting the core commerce functionality, resulting in reduced development time while enriching the customer experience Nacelle is an e-commerce infrastructure platform that allows merchants and brands to move to headless architectures in order to innovate and iterate quickly while reducing dependency on third-party solutions. The company’s core technology, the unified GraphQL API layer, integrates with various commerce platforms and content management systems including Shopify Plus with minimal effort. Merchants on the platform have the flexibility to build true headless solutions with benefits like reduced page speeds and increased conversions while maintaining a single codebase that’s optimized for all devices. The company, founded in 2019, powers the e-commerce presence of brands like LOLA, FTD, Flex, Boll & Branch, Thinx, and ILIA Beauty. LA TechWatch caught up with Nacelle CEO and Founder Brian Anderson to learn more about the state of headless commerce, the company’s strategic plans, and recent round of funding from Tiger Global Management.
Involve.ai Raises $16M for its Customer Intelligence Platform Designed to Reduce Churn and Accelerate Sales
Customer acquisition, lifetime value, and customer attrition (churn) are some of the main metrics that need to be managed closely for any growing business. Churn is one of the critical metrics that closely impacts the others from lifetime value, growth rate, virality, and CAC payback. In fact, 80% of a company’s revenue comes from existing customers. A small increase in retention can have an oversized impact on profitability. Involve.ai is a customer intelligence platform that leverages a company’s existing data points to build detailed profiles to determine which customers are most likely to churn, allowing teams to triage the relationship before it’s too late. Customer success teams are often manually going through disparate records across internal and external tools to do this work, neglecting revenue enhancement opportunities; Involve’s platform automates this laborious process with AI with a reported 94% accuracy in predicting churn. The business is born from an internal tool built at the founding team’s previous startup; the team recognized that this tool had widespread adaptability as a stand-alone product. LA TechWatch caught up with Involve.ai CEO Gaurav Bhattacharya to learn more about the Aha moment, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding from investors that include Sapphire Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, Greycroft, Launch Capital, BDMI, GTM Fund, Fenwick, Gokul Rajaram, Stanford University, and Michael Whitmire.
Coco Raises $36M for its Last Mile Robotic Delivery Service
Grubhub is piloting the use of delivery robots, manufactured by self-driving startup Yandex, at Ohio State University this academic year. The convergence of autonomous vehicle technology and robotics is bringing a future that we only saw in movies to us today, and rapidly. However, the accuracy of autonomous technology aspect has always been the stumbling block that has prevented widescale deployment in the case of delivery. This LA startup has found the answer. Coco is a last-mile delivery service that uses remote human-piloted robots to power deliveries. The technology is versatile enough to be used by restaurants, groceries, convenience stores, and pharmacies; basically, all the essentials that you have become accustomed to ordering on-demand. These industries have been forced to adopt technology in a rapid fashion to address the pandemic and Coco makes local delivery faster, smarter, and more cost-efficient. In fact, Coco estimates that it is able to save up to 30% on delivery times while reducing the environmental footprint. The company, founded in 2019, already has 50+ customers using the technology and has scaled the team to 120. LA TechWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Zach Rash to learn more about the state and future of the delivery market, the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding from investors that include Sam Altman, Silicon Valley Bank, and Founders Fund.
Addicting Games Acquired by Enthusiast Gaming for $34.4M
Addicting Games, a maker of casual games, has agreed to be acquired by Enthusiast Gaming, a publicly traded (TSX:EGLX) community platform for gamers and esports fans that reaches over 300M per month.
Dear President Joe Biden: Regulations Won’t Solve Tech Monopolies, But Decentralization Will
By a very wide margin, the most effective thing the federal government can do to address FAMGA’s impact is to provide a friendly regulatory environment for crypto and let capitalism do its thing.
ForeVR Raises Another $7M for its VR Studio Focused on Bringing Popular Games to Life
The virtual reality market is on pace to reach $160B/yr by 2023. VR sets like Oculus’s Quest 2 becoming more and more accessible to the masses contributes to this expected meteoric growth. ForeVR, launched by two early Zynga employees, is a VR-focused gaming studio looking to bring popular games to the virtual reality universe. The company’s first title, launched in the Spring, is a bowling game that combines real gameplay with stunning visuals and is designed for all ages. LA TechWatch caught up with CEO Marcus Segal to learn more about the company’s launch, strategic plans, hosting fundraising meetings within the Bowling game, latest round of funding from investors that include Bessemer Venture Partners, Galaxy Interactive, and All Star Capital.
Tango Raises $5.7M for its Platform That Nearly Automates Workflow Documentation
COVID has generated a new need for collaboration tools as the world moved to remote work. With companies struggling to keep their workforce on the same page, communication and training platforms shifted from nice to have to necessities for the health of businesses. According to McKinsey, 97% of employees and executives believe a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. Tango is a workflow documentation platform that simplifies capturing processes and providing step-by-step tutorials for virtually any process, ensuring that teams and employees are seamlessly on the same page. The platform offers a browser extension that captures workflows and allows employees to annotate and document on the go without friction. Tango, founded in 2020, focuses on the workplace learning market ($370B), allowing organizations to ensure that their employees are able to optimize productivity and scale up their skills while new hires are on-boarded quickly with an enduring repository of company best practices available. The platform is currently in private beta with public beta opening next month. LA TechWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Ken Babcock to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding from investors that include Wing Venture Capital, General Catalyst, GSV Ventures, Outsiders Fund, Red Sea Ventures, Michael Stoppelman, Jai Ranganathan, Shoaib Makani, and Julia Lipton.
PayEngine Raises $1.6M for its Payment Facilitation Platform for SaaS Companies
There are countless options for SaaS platforms to collect payments from their customers within their applications. But what if the application is designed to enable clients to accept payments from their customers. PayEngine is a payment platform that seamlessly integrates into SaaS applications to directly address this. SaaS businesses using PayEngine are able to set […]