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Stockly lets e-commerce websites sell out-of-stock items from a shared inventory
Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site.
If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re currently out of stock. The startup automatically finds a third-party Stockly supplier with that specific item.
The order will go through and be sent by that supplier directly. Stockly tells its partners to use neutral packaging so that the end consumer isn’t confused.
This could be particularly useful for small-scale e-commerce companies that don’t have a healthy marketplace of third-party retailers. For instance, Amazon can already sell you an out-of-stock item if a supplier has listed that specific item on Amazon’s own marketplace. But that’s not the case for most e-commerce websites.
The main challenge for Stockly is that it has to sort through various catalog formats and match the different inventories of different retailers. It is focusing on clothing items at first. When an order is routed through Stockly, it selects a specific supplier based on different criteria, such as logistics, delivery time and historical data.
So far, Stockly has been working with Galeries Lafayette, Go Sport, Foot Shop and others. The startup has recently raised a $6 million (€5.1 million) funding round from Idinvest Partners, Daphni, Techstars, Checkout.com CEO Guillaume Pousaz and various business angels.
With this funding round, the company plans to expand its team to 20 people, add new clients and iterate on its product.
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Hyper casual game publisher Homa Games raises $15 million
French startup Homa Games has raised a $15 million seed round led by e.ventures and Idinvest Partners. The company has built several in-house technologies that can take a game from prototype to App Store success. It partners with third-party game studios and has a few in-house game studios as well.
OneRagtime, Jean-Marie Messier, Vladimir Lasocki, John Cheng and Alexis Bonillo are also participating in today’s funding round. This is quite a big funding round, but Homa Games already has some impressive metrics.
For instance, the startup’s games have been downloaded 250 million times overall since the creation of the company in 2018. It has signed an IP partnership with Hasbro to launch a Nerf-themed game that has been working quite well. Other games include Sky Roller, Idle World and Tower Color.
Home Games has developed three products in particular to optimize mobile game creation. Homa Lab helps you learn more about the competitive landscape with market intelligence and testing tools. Homa Belly is an SDK that helps you iterate and manage your game. And Homa Data optimizes monetization using data for both in-app purchases and ads.
Third-party developers can submit their games and choose Homa Games as their publisher. Both companies agree on a revenue-sharing model.
In addition to third-party games, Homa Games has also acquired IRL Team in Toulouse and has in-house game development teams in Skopje, Lisbon and Paris. Overall, there are 80 people working for Homa Games.
Benoist Grossmann from Idinvest Partners and Jonathan Userovici from e.ventures are both joining the board of the company.
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DNA Script picks up $38.5 million to make DNA production faster and simpler
DNA Script has raised $38.5 million in new financing to commercialize a process that it claims is the first big leap forward in manufacturing genetic material.
The revolution in synthetic biology that’s reshaping industries from medicine to agriculture rests on three, equally important pillars.
They include: analytics — the ability to map the genome and understand the function of different genes; synthesis — the ability to manufacture DNA to achieve certain functions; and gene editing — the CRISPR-based technologies that allow for the addition or subtraction of genetic code.
New technologies have already been introduced to transform the analytics and editing of genomes, but little progress has been made over the past 50 years in the ways in which genetic material is manufactured. That’s exactly the problem that DNA Script is trying to solve.
Traditionally, making DNA involved the use of chemical compounds to synthesize (or write) DNA in chains that were limited to around 200 nucleotide bases. Those synthetic pieces of genetic code are then assembled to make a gene.
DNA Script’s technology holds the promise of making longer chains of nucleotides by mirroring the enzymatic process through which DNA is assembled within cells — with fewer errors and no chemical waste material. The enzymatic process can accelerate commercial applications in healthcare, chemical manufacturing and agriculture.
“Any technology that can make that faster is going to be very valuable,” says Christopher Voigt, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, told the journal Nature.
DNA Script isn’t the only company in the market that’s looking to make the leap forward in enzymatic DNA production. Nuclear, a startup working with Harvard University’s famed geneticist, George Church, and Ansa Bio, a startup affiliated with Jay Keasling’s Berkeley lab at the University of California, are also moving forward with the technology.
But the Paris-based company has achieved some milestones that would make its technology potentially the first to come to market with a commercially viable approach.
At least, that’s what new investors LSP and Bpifrance, through its Large Venture fund, are hoping. They’re joined by previous investors Illumina Ventures, M. Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, Kurma Partners and Idinvest Partners in backing the company’s latest funding.
The company said the money would be used to accelerate the development of its first products and establish a presence in the United States.
“As we announced earlier this year at the AGBT General Meeting, DNA Script was the first company to enzymatically synthesize a 200mer oligo de novo with an average coupling efficiency that rivals the best organic chemical processes in use today,” said Thomas Ybert, chief executive and co-founder of DNA Script. “Our technology is now reliable enough for its first commercial applications, which we believe will deliver the promise of same-day results to researchers everywhere, with DNA synthesis that can be completed in just a few hours.”
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Search marketing company Botify raises $20M
Botify, a search engine optimization company that works with customers like Expedia and Nike, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding.
Co-founder and CEO Adrien Menard said that the opportunity in SEO is “even bigger now than in the past,” and that the problem is a much broader problem than many realize.
“Most people think about SEO in terms of keyword optimization, but more than 50 percent of the pages in large websites are not being indexed,” he said. So Botify can identify which pages aren’t being crawled by Google and make recommendations on how to better organize content.
Over time, Botify has also launched a keyword product, as well as tools like a JavaScript crawler and mobile versus desktop analysis. Menard said the company now offers a platform designed for “optimization of every stage of the search process.”
The new funding was led by France’s Idinvest Partners, with participation from Ventech. Botify has now raised a total of $27 million.
The company was founded in France, launching in the United States after taking the stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY conference in 2016. Next, it’s opening what it calls a “second U.S. headquarters” in Seattle (the first is in New York City), which Menard said will mostly provide sales and support for West Coast customers.
In addition to announcing the funding and the new office, Botify has also grown its leadership team, with the hiring of Christophe Frenet as senior vice president of product and Rachel Meranus as chief marketing officer, as well as the addition of Neolane co-founder Stephane Dehoche and former BuzzFeed president Greg Coleman to its board of directors.
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Klaxoon gets $50M to try to make boring meetings more interactive and productive
If you’ve ever been in a pointless meeting at work, odds are you’ve spent part of the time responding to messages or just putzing around on the Internet — but Klaxoon hopes to convert that into something a bit more productive with more interactive meetings.
The French startup today said it’s raised $50 million in a new financing round led by Idinvest Partners, with early round investors BPI, Sofiouest, Arkea and White Star Capital Fund also participating. The company offers a suite of tools designed to make those meetings more engaging and generally just cut down on useless meetings with a room of bored and generally unengaged people that might be better off working away at their desk or even taking other meetings. The company has raised about $55.6 million in total.
The whole point of Klaxoon is to make meetings more engaging, and there are a couple ways to do that. The obvious point is to translate what some classrooms are doing in the form of making the whole session more engaging with the use of connected devices. You might actually remember those annoying clickers in classrooms used to answer multiple choice questions throughout a session, but it is at least one way to engage people in a room — and offering a more robust way of doing that may be something that helps making the session as a whole more productive.
Klaxoon also offers other tools like an interactive whiteboard (remember Smartboards, also in classrooms?) as well as a closed networks for meeting participants that aims to be air-gapped from a broader network so those employees can conduct a meeting in private or if the room isn’t available. All this is wrapped together with a set of analytics to help employees — or managers — better conduct meetings and generally be more productive. All this is going to be more important going forward as workplaces become more distributed, and it may be tempting to just have a virtual meeting on one screen while either working on a different one — or just messing around on the Internet.
Of course, lame meetings are a known issue — especially within larger companies. So there are multiple interpretations of ways to try to fix that problem, including Worklytics — a company that came out of Y Combinator earlier this year — that are trying to make teams more efficient in general. The idea is that if you are able to reduce the time spent in meetings that aren’t really productive, that’ll increase the output of a team in general. The goal is not to monitor teams closely, but just find ways to encourage them to spend their time more wisely. Creating a better set of productivity tools inside those meetings is one approach, and one Klaxoon seems to hope plays out.
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Neurala closes $14M Series A to bring machine learning to the edge
Artificial intelligence is swiftly becoming a commodity thanks to the rise of AI-as-a-Service offerings from Amazon and IBM. Today, Neurala is joining this list thanks to a $14 million Series A led by Pelion Ventures. The team is looking to put AI in the hands of toy makers, drone enthusiasts and IoT engineers alike. Neurala’s real value-proposition is its ability to execute… Read More
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French IoT startup Sigfox confirms €150M Series E at €600M valuation
Sigfox, the IoT company based out of France that is building a dedicated, global network to connect, monitor and control devices like smart-home alarms, machinery, refrigerators and city streetlights, today confirmed that it has closed its latest round of funding, a Series E round of €150 million ($160 million). We broke the news of this round in October, noting it was likely to be… Read More
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Peakon Raises €4M To Bring ‘People Analytics’ To Employee Engagement And Retention
Peakon, the self-described ‘people analytics platform’ for employee engagement and retention, is fully launching today and announcing it’s closed €4 million in Series A funding. Botify Grabs $7.2 Million To Turn You Into An SEO Wizard
French startup Botify just raised a $7.2 million Series A round from Idinvest and Ventech. The company uses a software-as-a-service approach to make it as seamless as possible to crawl your website and give you insights into your search engine optimization strategy. Yet, Botify isn’t about making optimizations for you. Instead, it gives you data so that you can make optimizations. Botify… Read More
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French startup Azalead just raised $5 million (€4.5 million) from Idinvest, with existing investor Aurinvest also participating. The startup is building a platform for account-based marketing, a recent and interesting trend for marketing and sales teams.