Rheaply raises a Series A led by High Alpha
Plus Columbus-based eFuse picks up $6M, podcast tech in Utah, cloud software in Colorado, and more...
Welcome to Excoastal, a newsletter covering deals, startups, venture capital, and more from Chicago to Boulder, Detroit to Columbus, and beyond. I’m Evan Lonergan, a native Midwesterner.
You can connect with me on Twitter @evanjlonergan, on Medium, and send deals/jobs/intel to evanlon92@gmail.com
What’s New
Excoastal Stats 📊
Last Week’s Open Rate: 32% (this was an unusually low open rate, I wonder why?)
Last Week’s Views: 172
ICYMI: the Excoastal Investors Airtable sheet:
Midwest Venture Capital Firms and Angels
Venture Capital Deals
📍 Chicago
Copado, a Chicago-based dev-ops platform, raised $96 million in Series B funding. Insight Partners and Salesforce Ventures co-led, and were joined by Lead Edge Capital, ISAI Capital Venture and Perpetual Investors.
Rheaply, a Chicago-based startup focused on recycling unused items, raised $8 million in Series A funding led by High Alpha. See more below 👇🏼
📍 Ohio
eFuse, a Columbus-based startup which provides a platform for gamers to find jobs, raised $6 million in funding. Ohio Innovation Fund led the round.
📍 Denver/Boulder
Cloud data integration platform Matillion, which helps businesses move data to large cloud warehouses and then transform that data so it easily can be digested and deployed, raised $100 million in a Series D round. Lightspeed Venture Partners led. The company is headquartered in Denver and Manchester, England.
Boulder-based Strata Identity, a multicloud identity management platform that lets companies manage identity and security policies in a central location, raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Menlo Ventures. ForgePoint Capital also participated.
Red Canary, a Denver-based enterprise security software startup, raised $81 million in Series C funding. Summit Partners led and was joined by investors including Noro-Moseley Partners and Access Venture Partners.
Nomad, a Denver-based real estate platform for guaranteed rent, raised a $2 million seed round. Investors included Range Ventures, Kickstart, Peterson Ventures, 8Z and Planomatic. Term Sheet
📍 Silicon Slopes
Zencastr, a Utah-based virtual podcasting platform, raised $4.6 million led by Kickstart.
Opiniion, a Lindon-based maker of software for resident relations and reputation management, raised $3 million in funding. Frazier Group led the round and was joined by investors including RET Ventures, AIM Ventura Capital, and Tamarak Capital Partners. Term Sheet
📍 Texas
Austin-based Founderpath, a provider of loans for SaaS companies to finance their growth, raised $10 million in debt.
Interplay Learning, an Austin-based training platform for trade workers, raised $18 million in Series B funding. Owl Ventures and S3 Ventures co-led the round and were joined by Strada Education Network and The Venture Reality Fund, SJF Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Holt Ventures, Wild Basin Investments, and Shelter Capital Partners.
Axiom Space, a Houston-based developer of what would be the world's first commercial space station, raised $130 million in Series B funding led by C5 Capital. Also participating were investors including TQS Advisors, Declaration Partners, Moelis Dynasty Investments, Washington University in St. Louis, The Venture Collective, Aidennlair Capital, Hemisphere Ventures, and Starbridge Venture Capital.
📍 Arizona
Botco.ai, a Scottsdale-based marketing chatbot for health care, raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by Stout Street Capital with participation from Sterling Road, PHX Ventures, and Arizona Tech Investors.
Private Equity Deals
Alden Global Capital has agreed to acquire the remaining stake it doesn't already own in the Chicago-based Tribune Publishing Company. The deal reportedly values the company at $630 million. Tribune Publishing Company owns a range of publications including The Chicago Tribune.
Zelnick Media Capital is in advanced negotiations to acquire the Chicago-based comedy group Second City in a deal worth around $50 million, according to the Financial Times.
New Mountain Capital invested in Accolite Digital, an Addison, Tx.-based cloud and digital product engineering services company. Term Sheet
M&A
JLL Partners acquired Breakwater Solutions, an Austin, Texas-based information governance and risk mitigation platform.
Sinch agreed to buy Inteliquent, a Chicago-based interconnection provider for voice communications, from GTCR.
New Funds
Ironspring Ventures has closed its debut fund with $61 million in commitments per TechCrunch. The Austin-based firm targets early-stage startups in sectors including construction, transportation, mining and resources, and energy.
Volta Energy Technologies, an Illinois-based energy VC firm, has secured nearly $90 million of a new $150 million-targeted VC fund, per TechCrunch.
Chicago-based Wind Point Partners has closed its ninth flagship fund with $1.5 billion in total commitments. Wind Point pursues middle-market deals across the consumer products, industrial products and business services sectors.
What I’m Reading
How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time
TechCrunch’s favorites from Techstars’ Boston, Chicago and workforce accelerators
Access Ventures & Crunchbase Report: The State of VC & Investment Activity in Colorado in 2020
What Went Wrong With Texas’s Main Electric Grid and Could It Have Been Prevented?
Startup/VC Twitter
Podcast Addiction
Matt Auxier, The University of Chicago- Origins Podcast
Culture Break
📚Read- Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich (this was required reading for a class on Bitcoin and the Securities Laws, it’s a breezy high level overview on the Winklevoss Twins’ early bets on Bitcoin and Bit Instant. A good weekend read.)
🎬Watch- It was a busy week, nothing new to recommend here.
🎧Listen-
🧐Think- Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court
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