High Alpha Capital
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Orbiit raises seed funding to automate the interactions within an online community
Orbiit, a startup that automates the interactions within an online community, has raised a $2.7 million round led by Bread and Butter Ventures, with participation from new investors High Alpha Capital, LAUNCHub Ventures and Company Ventures. Existing investors Founders Fund, which led Orbiit’s $1 million pre-seed round, Acceleprise and other angels also participated. The capital will be used to build out the Orbiit product and engineering team.
Orbiit says its platform handles the communications, matching, scheduling, feedback collection and analytics for people connecting with each other in an online community. The idea is that the communities therefore learn and network better, engage more and share more knowledge.
CEO and co-founder Bilyana Freye said: “Tailored 1:1 connections allow members to discuss difficult topics, be vulnerable and share learnings with one another. Those 1:1 connections are the hardest to execute, but when you start investing in them, with the help of Orbiit, you see engagement feeding into all other initiatives and a vibrant, active community that truly delivers on the promise to its members.”
Bread and Butter Ventures Managing Partner Mary Grove added: “This age-old question of how to leverage technology at scale to drive meaningful connections across communities both internal to an organization and across the globe is a problem we’ve been actively seeking a solution to for a decade. Orbiit brings the perfect blend of tech-enabled software with human curation to create strong connections and provide insights back to community managers.”
The platform is being used by startup communities at True Ventures, GGV and Lerer Hippeau; private networking groups such as Dreamers & Doers; and customer communities, like the CFO community run by fintech leader Spendesk.
Founders Fund Principal Delian Asparouhov said: “We see Orbiit as a key platform for peer learning within companies and communities, unlocking untapped knowledge through curated matchmaking.”
LAUNCHub Ventures participated in the round, following the recent first close of its new $70 million fund.
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Indy-based High Alpha Capital launches new $110M fund
We know that a lot of elements go into the formation of a startup ecosystem. When your city is outside of the major coastal tech centers, it takes a deliberate effort to get such a system off the ground. For Indianapolis, Indiana, it started with the creation of ExactTarget in 2000. When that company was sold to Salesforce for $2.5 billion in 2013, it helped bring a bushel of cash into the startup system.
Today, the venture capital firm that connects back to that ExactTarget acquisition, High Alpha Capital, announced a new $110 million fund. The company concentrates on B2B SaaS startups. Kristian Andersen, partner and co-founder at High Alpha sees the fund in the context of the pandemic and the changes it has brought to how businesses are run.
“We are living in a [time] of almost unrivaled disruption, which has created a host of challenges for individuals, businesses, and society as a whole. In spite (or possibly because) of those challenges, we’re more confident and motivated than ever to help support the next generation of founders as they seek to transform the world through the marriage of entrepreneurship and technology,” Andersen said.
Of course, cash is a key ingredient in any startup system recipe. ExactTarget’s founders were flush with it after the acquisition and Scott Dorsey, one of the firm’s founders says they wanted to build a system from the ground up that included education, a system to encourage entrepreneurship, math skills, a pool of engineering talent and of course, a venture capital firm to drive investment.
“I think of the recipe as talent, capital, support and mentorship. So talent has to be a sharp focus, which is certainly is for us at High Alpha and across the Indianapolis market. The second piece is capital, and markets like Indy often don’t have access to capital and that’s been important that we’re raising our own funds,” he said.
He added, “Thirdly, I think it’s just support and mentorship and that’s really what High Alpha is built to do. We have 40 of us on the team with SaaS experts across design, marketing, product engineering, finance and HR — all Centers of Excellence you need to start and scale a SaaS company,” he said.
The firm is divided into two parts. The first is High Alpha Studio, which is a kind of incubator for really early stage founders and the second is High Alpha Capital, which is the focus of today’s announcement.
This is third fund for the company. The first was High Alpha One worth $21 million. The second one, High Alpha Two was worth $85 million. Combined with today’s announcement, the total raised across the three funds is $216 million. While the first two funds’ investments were mostly in the Indy area, the plan with the newest one is to expand beyond the region with at least some of the investments.
The firm concentrates on enterprise B2B SaaS companies from pre-seed through Series A investments, so concentrating on early stage companies that it can help nurture and learn from their experiences building ExactTarget into a successful company.
Among the companies they invested in include Attentive, SalesLoft, Zylo, Terminus, The Mom Project, Lessonly, LogicGate, MetaCX and Socio.
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As the pandemic creates supply chain chaos, Craft raises $10M to apply some intelligence
During the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains have suddenly become hot. Who knew that would ever happen? The race to secure PPE, ventilators and minor things like food was and still is an enormous issue. But perhaps, predictably, the world of “supply chain software” could use some updating. Most of the platforms are deployed “empty” and require the client to populate them with their own data, or “bring their own data.” The UIs can be outdated and still have to be juggled with manual and offline workflows. So startups working in this space are now attracting some timely attention.
Thus, Craft, the enterprise intelligence company, today announces it has closed a $10 million Series A financing round to build what it characterizes as a “supply chain intelligence platform.” With the new funding, Craft will expand its offices in San Francisco, London and Minsk, and grow remote teams across engineering, sales, marketing and operations in North America and Europe.
It competes with some large incumbents, such as Dun & Bradstreet, Bureau van Dijk and Thomson Reuters . These are traditional data providers focused primarily on providing financial data about public companies, rather than real-time data from data sources such as operating metrics, human capital and risk metrics.
The idea is to allow companies to monitor and optimize their supply chain and enterprise systems. The financing was led by High Alpha Capital, alongside Greycroft. Craft also has some high-flying angel investors, including Sam Palmisano, chairman of the Center for Global Enterprise and former CEO and chairman of IBM; Jim Moffatt, former CEO of Deloitte Consulting; Frederic Kerrest, executive vice chairman, COO and co-founder of Okta; and Uncork Capital, which previously led Craft’s seed financing. High Alpha partner Kristian Andersen is joining Craft’s board of directors.
The problem Craft is attacking is a lack of visibility into complex global supply chains. For obvious reasons, COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains, which tended to reveal a lot of risks, structural weaknesses across industries and a lack of intelligence about how it’s all holding together. Craft’s solution is a proprietary data platform, API and portal that integrates into existing enterprise workflows.
While many business intelligence products require clients to bring their own data, Craft’s data platform comes pre-deployed with data from thousands of financial and alternative sources, such as 300+ data points that are refreshed using both Machine Learning and human validation. Its open-to-the-web company profiles appear in 50 million search results, for instance.
Ilya Levtov, co-founder and CEO of Craft, said in a statement: “Today, we are focused on providing powerful tracking and visibility to enterprise supply chains, while our ultimate vision is to build the intelligence layer of the enterprise technology stack.”
Kristian Andersen, partner with High Alpha commented: “We have a deep conviction that supply chain management remains an underinvested and under-innovated category in enterprise software.”
In the first half of 2020, Craft claims its revenues have grown nearly threefold, with Fortune 100 companies, government and military agencies, and SMEs among its clients.
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