Seattle tech companies kept themselves busy last week with new fundings, acquisitions and more. Here’s the news you may have missed.
Esper raised a $60M Series C round. This comes just four and a half months after the startup raised its $30 million Series B, bringing its total funding raised to nearly $100 million. Esper is a DevOps company that gives teams of developers and engineers the tools they need to manage a fleet of connected Android devices. Plenty of businesses rely on these connected devices — whether its a point-of-sale terminal or ordering kiosk — and the people who build these devices need a way to do things like push out updates or provide support. For that, they turn to Esper. [Built In Seattle]
The founder of Amazon Air raised $30M for his new startup. Scott Ruffin, the former head of Amazon Air and VP of Walmart’s e-commerce transportation division, now runs Pandion, a shipping company built for online retailers. Pandion leverages the experience of Ruffin and his team, as well as advanced machine learning algorithms, to come up with efficient shipping solutions for e-commerce companies. This helps save the retailer money while ensuring packages get delivered to customers faster. [Built In Seattle]
SEATTLE TECH QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Copper Banking completed its $13.3M seed funding round. Plenty of parents may joke about how their teenagers are experts at spending money, but the reality is that many teens aren’t financially literate. Banking app Copper wants to change that. Copper Banking provides teens with a digital bank account, debit card, access to a network of thousands of ATMs, peer-to-peer payments, automatic savings options and alerts and controls to help them budget. Copper’s goal is to get teens managing their own money (while also giving parents some functions through the app too). [Copper Banking]
Chronosphere raised $200M, reaching a $1B valuation. The cloud-native monitoring platform is now officially a unicorn thanks to its Series C funding round led by General Atlantic. This is more than 4x the size of its Series B, announced in January. The company, co-founded by Uber alums Martin Mao and Rob Skillington, says demand for its platform has risen 10x, and that this funding will help the company go on a hiring spree to keep pace with that growth. [TechCrunch]
Fiverr acquired Seattle-based CreativeLive. You may have heard of Fiverr, the online platform that connects freelancers with people looking to book their services. This week, the Israeli company announced that it has acquired CreativeLive, a community that helps people build creative skills through online courses. CreativeLive will remain a standalone business, but the combination of the two companies will allow people to build creative skills (like design and photography) and then have a place to find work related to those skills. Exact terms of the deal were not announced. [CreativeLive]
Rendered.ai closed a $6M seed round. It takes a lot of data to train AI, and sometimes that data can be hard to come by. Software startup Rendered.ai has created a developer framework that uses synthetic data in order to train AI algorithms. The synthetic data is generated from real physical sensor modeling and its closed loop data engineering workflow, turning simulations into usable synthetic data. The new funding will be used to grow the team and expand on the company’s product. [Rendered.ai]
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