Ludlow Ventures
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Playbyte’s new app aims to become the ‘TikTok for games’
A startup called Playbyte wants to become the TikTok for games. The company’s newly launched iOS app offers tools that allow users to make and share simple games on their phone, as well as a vertically scrollable, fullscreen feed where you can play the games created by others. Also like TikTok, the feed becomes more personalized over time to serve up more of the kinds of games you like to play.
While typically, game creation involves some aspect of coding, Playbyte’s games are created using simple building blocks, emoji and even images from your Camera Roll on your iPhone. The idea is to make building games just another form of self-expression, rather than some introductory, educational experience that’s trying to teach users the basics of coding.
At its core, Playbyte’s game creation is powered by its lightweight 2D game engine built on web frameworks, which lets users create games that can be quickly loaded and played even on slow connections and older devices. After you play a game, you can like and comment using buttons on the right-side of the screen, which also greatly resembles the TikTok look-and-feel. Over time, Playbyte’s feed shows you more of the games you enjoyed as the app leverages its understanding of in-game imagery, tags and descriptions, and other engagement analytics to serve up more games it believes you’ll find compelling.
At launch, users have already made a variety of games using Playbyte’s tools — including simulators, tower defense games, combat challenges, obbys, murder mystery games, and more.
According to Playbyte founder and CEO Kyle Russell — previously of Skydio, Andreessen Horowitz, and (disclosure!) TechCrunch — Playbyte is meant to be a social media app, not just a games app.
“We have this model in our minds for what is required to build a new social media platform,” he says.
What Twitter did for text, Instagram did for photos and TikTok did for video was to combine a constraint with a personalized feed, Russell explains. “Typically. [they started] with a focus on making these experiences really brief…So a short, constrained format and dedicated tools that set you up for success to work within that constrained format,” he adds.
Similarly, Playbyte games have their own set of limitations. In addition to their simplistic nature, the games are limited to five scenes. Thanks to this constraint, a format has emerged where people are making games that have an intro screen where you hit “play,” a story intro, a challenging gameplay section, and then a story outro.
In addition to its easy-to-use game building tools, Playbyte also allows game assets to be reused by other game creators. That means if someone who has more expertise makes a game asset using custom logic or which pieced together multiple components, the rest of the user base can benefit from that work.
“Basically, we want to make it really easy for people who aren’t as ambitious to still feel like productive, creative game makers,” says Russell. “The key to that is going to be if you have an idea — like an image of a game in your mind — you should be able to very quickly search for new assets or piece together other ones you’ve previously saved. And then just drop them in and mix-and-match — almost like Legos — and construct something that’s 90% of what you imagined, without any further configuration on your part,” he says.
In time, Playbyte plans to monetize its feed with brand advertising, perhaps by allowing creators to drop sponsored assets into their games, for instance. It also wants to establish some sort of patronage model at a later point. This could involve either subscriptions or even NFTs of the games, but this would be further down the road.
The cutest lil sprite blob I’ve ever seen
#pixelart #gamedev pic.twitter.com/7uBRzs6ix0
— Playbyte (@PlaybyteInc) August 21, 2021
The startup had originally began as a web app in 2019, but at the end of last year, the team scrapped that plan and rewrote everything as a native iOS app with its own game engine. That app launched on the App Store this week, after previously maxing out TestFlight’s cap of 10,000 users.
Currently, it’s finding traction with younger teenagers who are active on TikTok and other collaborative games, like Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite.
“These are young people who feel inspired to build their own games but have been intimidated by the need to learn to code or use other advanced tools, or who simply don’t have a computer at home that would let them access those tools,” notes Russell.
Playbyte is backed by $4 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including FirstMark (Rick Heitzmann), Ludlow Ventures (Jonathon Triest and Blake Robbins), Dream Machine (former Editor-in-Chief at TechCrunch, Alexia Bonatsos), and angels such as Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase; Nate Mitchell, co-founder of Oculus; Ashita Achuthan, previously of Twitter; and others.
The app is a free download on the App Store.
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Commercial real estate lending startup Lev brings in $30M on a $130M valuation
Commercial real estate has been slow to embrace technology; though it has an addressable financing market of more than $40 billion, putting together a deal is still mostly manual, paper-heavy and complicated.
New York-based Lev is taking on this problem by automating workflows online and gathering hundreds of millions of data points into machine learning software to ensure financing accuracy. To do this, the commercial real estate financing transaction platform raised $30 million to give it a $130 million valuation just two years into its inception.
The latest financing comes four months after the company raised $10 million in seed funding led by NFX. Greenspring led the latest round, with participation from First American Title. Existing investors NFX, Canaan Partners, JLL Spark, Animo Ventures and Ludlow Ventures also joined in to give Lev total investments of more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Lev founder and CEO Yaakov Zar previously co-founded Boston-based Dispatch, which built tools for home services businesses. It was when he and his wife went through the homebuying process — and their mortgage fell through — that Zar decided to look at real estate financing.
He channeled his frustration into becoming a licensed mortgage loan originator. After relocating to New York, Zar was helping a friend at a nonprofit organization refinance their building and got a firsthand look at what he said was a fragmented commercial real estate mortgage industry.
Companies like Blend are addressing the problem of real estate lending, Zar told TechCrunch, but very few are focusing on commercial real estate, where lending is sensitive to interest rates and total amortization. In addition, property owners have a burden of refinancing every five to 10 years.
“Legacy businesses like JLL, which is an investor, Cushman Wakefield and CBRE work on lending, but they are much more ‘relationship focused’ than tech focused,” Zar said. “We think that it is a necessary part because the deals are so large and complex that you need a relationship for them, but transactions less than $1 billion are pretty straightforward. On experience and product, no one is close to us.”
Initially, Zar and his team wanted to build the “Rocket Mortgage of commercial real estate lending,” but found that to be difficult because real estate brokers are putting together their own pitch books for lenders. Instead, Lev is building a technology platform of more than 5,000 lenders with information on what projects they like to finance. It then analyzes a customer’s portfolio and connects them in minutes with the right lender, taking 1% of the loan amount for each transaction as payment. Lev is also working to be able to close deals online.
Zar wasn’t looking for funding when he was approached by investors, but said he was introduced to some people who liked the company’s growth and trajectory and decided to accept the funding offer.
He intends to use the new funding on product development, with the aim of giving a term sheet in seconds and closing a loan in seven days. Right now it can take a week or two to get the term sheet and 45 to 90 days to close a loan.
The company has about 40 employees currently in its New York headquarters, Miami R&D center, Los Angeles outpost and remotely. Continued investments will be made to expand the team.
Lev grew 10 times in volume in the past year, closing approximately $100 million of loans in 2020. Zar expects to close over $1 billion in 2021.
“Customers come back to us repeatedly, and there are a ton of referrals,” Zar said. “We want to be the platform on which capital market transactions are processed. You need an advantage to network and find great deals. I don’t want to mess with that, but when you find it, bring it to us, we will close it and provide the asset management with the best option to close online and manage the deal from a single platform.”
Meanwhile, Pete Flint, general partner at NFX, told TechCrunch that he got to know the Lev team over the last 18 months, checking in on the company during various stages of the global pandemic, and was impressed at how the company navigated it.
As co-founder of Trulia, he saw firsthand the problems in the real estate industry over search and discovery, but as that problem was being solved, the focus shifted to financing. NFX is also an investor in Tomo and Ribbon, which both focus on residential financing.
Wanting to see what opportunities were on the commercial real estate side, Flint heard Lev’s name come up more and more among brokers and industry insiders.
“As we got to know the Lev team, we recognized that they were the best team out there to solve this problem,” Flint said. “We are also among an amazing group of people complementing the round. The folks that are deep industry insiders will put a helpful lens on strategy and business development opportunities.”
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Diet ID wins TechCrunch’s Detroit City Spotlight pitch-off — watch the event here
TechCrunch just hosted its first pitch-off in Detroit and we’re pleased to announce Diet ID won the event. The company, based in Detroit and founded in 2016 by Dr. David Katz, gives users a clinically tested approach to dietary assessment and management.
Diet ID competed against other Detroit-area startups, including Rivet Work, Plain Sight and FixMyCar. Local investors acted as judges: Jim Tenzillo, VP at Invest Michigan; Dawn Batts, Capital Strategist at TechTown and co-founder of Commune Angels; and Ben Bernstein, principal at Invest Detroit Ventures.
The entire pitch-off is embedded above.
The event also featured talks from local VCs on fundraising in Detroit, where Jonathon Triest from Ludlow Ventures and Patti Glaza from Invest Detroit Ventures spoke extensively on the growing startup scene. Ryan Landau, founder of Purpose Jobs, also spoke on startup hiring practices and trends in the Midwest. That video is found below.
This event is part of TechCrunch’s City Spotlight series, where we dive into the culture of growing startup ecosystems found throughout the United States. We’re going to Pittsburgh next and hope you can join us.
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Detroit VCs weigh in on fundraising and building startups in Michigan and the Midwest
TechCrunch just hosted a small virtual meetup with Detroit startups and venture capitals. Like the one we held last month in Miami, the event was a blast and featured a talk with two local VCs on which startups work in Detroit and how to raise money from local investors.
In case you missed it, the video of this talk is below. Jonathon Triest from Ludlow Ventures and Patti Glaza from Invest Detroit Ventures spoke extensively on the wide-ranging types of startups that call Detroit home. They point to Bloomscape (houseplants) and StockX (sneakers) and the numerous medical and security startups in Detroit, nearby Ann Arbor and the surrounding metro area. Both firms invest in early-stage startups, but do so in radically different ways.
All about Detroit
- A quick peek inside Fontinalis, one of Detroit’s best-known young venture firms
- Origin story: How StockX became the stock market of hype
- Bloomscape’s Justin Mast explains how he built a thriving garden startup in Detroit
- Hardware is still hard in the Motor City
- Building tech for worker safety, Guardhat Technologies is a company that could only come from Detroit
The 20-minute conversation covers the types of founders who can find success in Detroit and other Midwestern areas.
This event was part of TechCrunch’s growing series of City Spotlights, where we focus on a growing startup ecosystem and highlight what makes the area attractive for startups. We’re going to Pittsburgh next and hope you can join us.
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Notarize raises $130M, tripling valuation on the back of 600% YoY revenue growth
When the world shifted toward virtual one year ago, one service in particular saw heated demand: remote online notarization.
The ability to get a document notarized without leaving one’s home suddenly became more of a necessity than a luxury. Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Boston-based Notarize, worked to get appropriate legislation passed across the country to make it possible for more people in more states to get documents notarized digitally.
That hard work has paid off. Today, Notarize has announced $130 million in Series D funding led by fintech-focused VC firm Canapi Ventures after experiencing 600% year over year revenue growth. The round values Notarize at $760 million, which is triple its valuation at the time of its $35 million Series C in March of 2020. This latest round is larger than the sum of all of the company’s previous rounds to date, and brings Notarize’s total raised to $213 million since its 2015 inception.
A slew of other investors participated in the round, including Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG, Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo, True Bridge Capital Partners and existing backers Camber Creek, Ludlow Ventures, NAR’s Second Century Ventures and Fifth Wall Ventures.
Notarize insists that it “isn’t just a notary company.” Rather, Canapi Ventures partner Neil Underwood described it as the “last mile” of businesses (such as iBuyers, for example).
The company has also evolved to “also bring trust and identity verification” into those businesses’ processes.
Over the past year, Notarize has seen a massive increase in transactions and inked new partnerships with companies such as Adobe, Dropbox, Stripe and Zillow Group, among others. It’s seen big spikes in demand from the real estate, financial services, retail and automotive sectors.
“In 2020, the world rushed to digitize. Online commerce ballooned, and businesses in almost every industry needed to transition to digital basically overnight so they could continue uninterrupted,” Kinsel said. “Notarize was there to help them safely close these deals with trust and convenience.”
The company plans to use its new capital to expand its platform and product and scale “to serve enterprises of all sizes.” It also plans to double down on hiring in the next year.
“Notarize is disrupting outdated business models and technologies, and there’s massive potential, particularly in the financial services space, as more companies will need to offer secure digital alternatives to in-person transactions,” Canapi’s Underwood said.
Notarize’s success comes after a difficult 2019, when the company saw “critical financing” fall through and had to lay off staff, according to Kinsel. Talk about a turnaround story.
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Onboard says it can help SaaS companies bring their new customers up to speed faster and better
While companies have embraced the offerings of software-as-a-service companies with growing vigor, getting those new offerings to work in a seamless way from the outset isn’t so easy, with some business customers feeling forgotten as soon as the digital ink dries.
Enter Onboard, a 10-month-old startup that aims to help SaaS businesses delight those new customers instead of turning them off.
The company was co-founded by CEO Jeff Epstein, who previously launched the referral marketing and affiliate marketing software company Ambassador, which sold in 2018, eight years after it was founded.
Terms of the sale to West Corporation — now Intrado — were never disclosed, but Epstein says it was a “good outcome” for shareholders. (Ambassador was sold again last month to a small Seattle company.)
As for how Onboard works, Epstein makes the process sound straightforward. “You determine the variables of your customer segment, because different plan types might mean that companies need to do something different.” (They could use an API or some code snippet, for example.) After that, Onboard works with the SaaS company to create a global task list with requirements it has hopefully gleaned from the sales process, and helps it create a kind of dynamic, drop-down task list with assignees and due dates and alerts and notifications.
It’s largely a self-service product that makes accountability more transparent, ultimately, though Epstein describes the onboarding process as a “shared responsibility” between his company and its customers. He also says his nascent startup is already working on building out a more sophisticated notification layer with automated nudges that are helpful yet not obnoxious.
The five-person company is not charging its dozens of beta customers right now. It wants to get the product right before it shifts into revenue gear, says Epstein. The plan eventually is to charge the types of customers it is chasing — mid-size companies — hundreds of dollars of month, plus a per-person-per-month fee. (“We don’t plan on being enterprise-y in any way,” says Epstein of the company’s plan to eschew long contracts.)
Onboard is not without competitors. On the contrary, a lot of upstarts have sprung up around this problematic slice of the enterprise universe. That it’s an aggravating period for many new customers was brought to Epstein’s attention by one of his co-founders, William Stevenson, who spent four years as Ambassador’s VP of customer success, where, like a lot of people in his position at other companies, he was trying to make do with a less-than-ideal patchwork of offerings, sometimes from Monday or Asana or Basecamp or Google Docs.
It was the same problem that Jonathon Triest of Ludlow Ventures — whose firm quietly led a $1.25 million seed round for Onboard in late summer, joined by Zelkova Ventures and Detroit Venture Partners — says he knows well.
Image Credits: Onboard
“Over and over again, throughout our portfolio, especially in B2B SaaS sales,” Ludlow’s portfolio companies have been “forced to piece together solutions or use tools not made for them,” Triest says.
The question is whether Onboard can gain a foothold faster than some of its other rivals, and unsurprisingly, Epstein believes his team has what it takes to get started. (A third founder, Matt Majewski, more recently left Ambassador to help the company gain momentum.)
Epstein’s resume is helping, too, he says. As a founder in Detroit who sold a company, he’s known to local investors, and then some. (“We were able to be a big fish in a small pond,” he says.)
Epstein also says that investors realize there’s “an opportunity generally in the space,” adding that “partners [from venture firms] have been calling — not associates — and they are coming through third-party connections on LinkedIn in some cases.”
He has “obviously raised a bit of money” in the past, Epstein says, but he hasn’t seen anything quite like this before. “It’s weird,” he adds, “but cool.”
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Welcome raises $6M to help your company hire and keep employees
Welcome, the HR software that helps organizations make and close offers to new candidates, announced the close of a $6 million seed round today, led by FirstMark Capital. Participating investors include Ludlow Ventures, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, and Keenan Rice and Ben Porterfield (which were existing investors), as well as a wide array of angels.
TechCrunch last covered Welcome in August, when it announced a $1.4 million funding round. That the startup was able to raise more as quickly as it has is testament to how hot the early-stage venture capital market is today, and likely an endorsement of Welcome’s economic profile and recent growth.
Past the new capital, Welcome is also launching a new product today called Total Rewards, which helps not just new candidates but also existing employees get a complete, easy-to-understand picture of their compensation, across salary, benefits, equity, etc.
But let’s back up.
Welcome was founded in 2019 by Nick Gavronsky and Rick Pereira, with a mission to help organizations close offers on candidates by providing a much clearer picture of compensation, particularly around equity. Co-founder and CEO Nick Gavronsky explained that many candidates don’t truly understand the value of the equity they’re offered, or how it works.
“A lot of recruiting teams aren’t well-equipped to use it as a selling tool and explain it effectively and showcase the value to candidates to help them think about their ownership at the company,” he added.
Image Credits: Welcome
Welcome allows companies to organize their compensation offers based on level and position, and deliver that information digitally to candidates in a way that makes sense.
The startup integrates with a variety of other software providers, including Slack, Lever, Greenhouse, ADP and Justworks to name a few, simplifying onboarding for Welcome clients and bringing a broad array of information into one place.
Offers sent through Welcome show a description of the role, equity details, total compensation and even include a welcome note and video. This is in stark contrast to the black and white legal PDF often sent to candidates.
Image Credits: Welcome
The next phase for the company comes in the form of the launch of Total Rewards, which is meant to help retain existing employees, helping them understand their compensation value and their potential at the company.
“Painting a better picture becomes a pre-retention tool,” said Gavronsky. “An employee will sometimes leave thousands of dollars on the table because they don’t understand what they’re walking away from. A lot of times companies will wait until that person is going to resign. Let me now bring up all the things that are great about our company and talk through your stock options. But the decision’s already made. So we wanted something that we can kind of put in with performance reviews.”
Welcome also has plans to offer a third product pillar in the form of real-time accurate industry-wide compensation data, helping companies understand where they fit into the larger ecosystem with regards to compensation.
Thus far, Welcome has 40 companies on the platform, including Uncork and Betterment, with hundreds on the waitlist, according to the co-founders. The company plans to use the funding to build out the team and the product.
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Welcome raises $1.4M to streamline the hiring process
Thinking back to the last time I accepted a job, I can’t recall actually reading any of the material that was sent over. I think I skimmed some docs to make sure the numbers written down matched what I had been told over the phone, but after that it was a blur of digital signing and emailing and precisely no due diligence from myself.
Not great, really. I bet that your experience accepting new gigs has been somewhat similar. In startups, jobs are offered with exotic types of pay, chock full of startup stock options in all their 409A and vesting-period glory. Some folks might not really understand what is being offered. Like what the value of their full comp package really is, when performance pay and other sweeteners are stacked on top of base rates. With remote learning in the equation, it’s even more confusing.
This is the market space that Welcome, a startup that is announcing a $1.4 million fundraise, wants to fix. (Update: Forgot to add the capital sources, which include Ludlow Ventures, the Weekend Fund, Global Founders Capital, both Shrug and Basement, as well as a number of angels.)
The company told TechCrunch it is a “first offer management and closing platform.” Its service helps provide a clear picture of total comp to candidates, helping them accept or deny an offer that they can fully understand.
Here’s a screengrab from the candidate’s side of the employer-employee divide:
If “offer management and closing” sounds like a small niche to target, it both is and is not.
It is, in that if Welcome stayed in its current market-position forever it would have a smaller product target than most startups. But the company has plans to expand its product-set over time. For example, its co-founders Nick Gavronsky and Rick Pereira explained that Welcome wants to offer real-time salary data in the future, based on the information that will flow through its service.
Want to close an engineer in North Carolina with a high level of confidence in the offer? Welcome should be able to tell you, later on, what a comp package should look like if you want make sure the candidate will accept.
Gavronsky and Pereira have experience in product and people work, respectively, making their union at Welcome a good fit. The company’s team is currently just four folks, though the startup expects that it will double in size this year. The capital it raised in January, but is only talking about now, is making the hiring possible.
Now, the $1.4 million number is pretty dated. Normally I’d skip over a round so far from the past, but Welcome caught my eye, as I’ve recently written about another HR tech provider, Sora, and the Welcome deal felt like an illustrative event: This is how seed rounds are announced, long after the fact, which makes reporting on seed-stage trends really hard. Something to keep in mind.
Welcome is barking up a winsome tree with its product, not only because the offer/offer acceptance process is garbage today — let’s email some PDFs and hand a candidate off between departments! — but because it has seen strong early demand from potential customers. Its service is currently in a private alpha that was a bit oversubscribed, though the company is not yet charging for its service. (Welcome will be a SaaS play, priced on company size, which seems reasonable.)
Past all that, what’s exciting about Welcome is that if it can get a number of customers aboard when it makes it to beta or launch, the company will have placed itself in a position where it can expand in several directions. It could, for example, extend its feature set to help with pre-onboarding or onboarding itself, given that it already knows a new candidate and their new employer. Of course, the startup wants to talk more about what it’s building today, but it’s also fun to look ahead.
That’s enough on Welcome, we’ll chatter about them again when they formally launch, or share some neat growth metrics. Until then, good luck getting into the alpha.
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Free Agency wants to give every tech worker a career and salary boost
Labor markets, particularly those in the tech industry, are incredibly lopsided against employees. Companies screen, interview, and negotiate with thousands of candidates per year, while employees may only go through recruiting a handful of times in their lives. Inevitably, they can select the wrong positions, pick the wrong managers to work with, and end up with a salary well below market rate.
New York City-based Free Agency wants to become the advocate of choice for this high-priced talent. Taking its cue from Hollywood and the sports world, the growing startup wants to identify great workers and offer them the career counseling, interview guidance, and salary negotiation prowess to let them do their best work — and at the right wage.
The company, which was founded last year by Sherveen Mashayekhi and Alex Rothberg, exclusively told TechCrunch that it has now reached 100 “Free Agents” on its platform, and it also announced that it has netted a combined $5.35 million in seed investments led by Resolute Ventures and Bloomberg Beta last year.
The way Free Agency works is simple. In exchange for the service’s help in finding and negotiating a career change, the startup takes 5-10% of its client’s first-year salary at their new company. As an example, given that median tech salaries at top companies have hovered around $200,000, that would be a fee of $10,000-$20,000.
That may sound exorbitant, but for the founders of Free Agency, it is anything but. They believe that many employees regularly fail to find the most ideal companies to work for and to negotiate the best salaries, which means that a significant amount of money is being left on the table by their potential clients.
Free Agency founders Alex Rothberg, COO, and Sherveen Mashayekhi, CEO. Photo via Free Agency.
“Our business model keeps us incentive-aligned with the candidate, driven by outcomes rather than upfront fees,” Mashayekhi, who is CEO, explained to me. “But it’s also important to note that Free Agency is, philosophically, also aligned with what employers want. Happy candidates who feel fairly paid will remain at their jobs longer and contribute more productivity. We help make happy candidates.”
Free Agency is in many ways a parallel to the rise of income-share agreements (ISAs) in the edtech world, which my colleague Eric Peckham has written about extensively in recent months. In lieu of tuition, some new education startups are using ISAs as a way to guarantee better employment outcomes for students while limiting their debt burden. Their growing popularity has spawned significant investor interest.
Today, Free Agency is barely one year old with just about 11 employees on the payroll. Longer term though, it wants to manage the budding careers of tech workers in much the way that Hollywood agents often do — finding new projects to work on, helping its talent develop their own skills, brands, and thought leadership, and helping them network with key decision-makers so they get called upon when great new opportunities arise.
“Today, we’re focused primarily on the job search inflection point, but Free Agency is really a career-long partner. You’ll see us continue to add ways to help our Free Agents succeed along 5 or 10 years of partnerships through intentional career management,” Mashayekhi said.
Talent agents exist in industries like Hollywood, book publishing, and sports because the talent themselves often don’t want to take on the burdens of managing their own careers. Film directors and baseball pitchers want to practice and hone their craft, not spend hours negotiating with studio execs and club owners. Agents also are more up-to-date on industry salary trends, and also where new opportunities are arising. Plus, they often work with talent managers to optimize all the ancillary revenues that comes from these careers (product endorsements, speaker engagements, etc.)
Furthermore, these industries have extremely strong superstar income patterns, where top talent can easily make tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a career.
While the tech industry has traditionally not had agents, tech talent is increasingly having similar superstar properties. Star engineers, product managers, and designers can make tens of millions of dollars across salary and equity packages, and often have a range of ancillary revenue sources from consulting engagements with VC firms to lecture circuit payments. Even better, new talent is often making six-figures, whereas the early years in an entertainment or sports career is often focused on securing any paying job.
What remains to be see is whether engineers will willingly give up a segment of their income in order to get better career help. Certainly Free Agency is not the first company that has tried to tackle this emerging field. 10x Management is a talent agency that has focused on vetting top freelance developers, and was profiled in The New Yorker a few years ago. Other startups have also entered the space over the past decade.
Free Agency believes it has the timing and service quality to win this market. While it is early days, much like the excitement around ISAs in education, I expect models like Free Agency to increasingly become popular as a way to manage our careers, and this is one startup worth paying attention to in the coming years.
In addition to Resolute and Bloomberg, Ludlow Ventures, Background Capital, Parker Thompson, Will Oberndorf, Amrit Saxena, Jenny Fielding, Greg Schroy, Gordon Wintrob, and Orrick LLP also joined the round as investors.
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Playing traffic cop for drones in cities and towns nets Airspace Link $4 million
As the number of drones proliferates in cities and towns across America, government agencies are scrambling to find ways to manage the oncoming traffic that’s expected to clog up their airspace.
Companies like Airmap and KittyHawk have raised tens of millions to develop technologies that can help cities manage congestion in the friendly skies, and now they have a new competitor in the Detroit-based startup, Airspace Link, which just raised $4 million from a swarm of investors to bring its services to the broader market.
The financing for Airspace Link follows the company’s reception of a stamp of approval from the Federal Aviation Administration for low-altitude authorization and notification capabilities, according to chief executive Michael Healander.
According to Healander, what distinguishes Airspace Link from the other competitors in the market is its integration with mapping tools used by municipal governments to provide information on ground-based risk.
“We’re creating the roads based on ground-based risk and we push that out into the drone community to let them know where it’s okay to fly,” says Healander.
That knowledge of terrestrial critical assets in cities and towns comes from deep integrations between Airspace Link and the mapping company ESRI, which has long provided federal, state and local governments with mapping capabilities and services.
“We’ve just spent the past month understanding what regulation is going to be around to support it. In two years from now every drone will be live tracked in our platform,” says Healnder. “Today we’re just authorizing flight plans.”
As drone operators increase in number, the autonomous vehicles pose more potential risks to civilian populations in the wrong hands.
Parking lots, sporting events, concerts — really any public area — could be targets for potential attacks using drones.
“Drones are becoming more and more powerful and smarter,” EU Security Commissioner Julian King warned in a statement last summer, “which makes them more and more attractive for legitimate use, but also for hostile acts.”
Already roughly half of the population of the U.S. lives in controlled airspace where drones flying with more than a half a pound of weight require flight plan authorization, according to Healander.
“We build out population data and give state and local governments a tool to create advisories for emergency events or any areas where high densities of people will be,” says Healander. “That creates an advisory that goes through our platform to the drone industry.”
Airspace Link closed a $1 million pre-seed round in September 2019 with a $6 million post-money valuation. The current valuation of the company is undisclosed, but the company’s progress was enough to draw the attention of investors led by Indicator Ventures with participation from 2048 Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners and Invest Detroit.
For Healander, Airspace Link is only the latest entrepreneurial venture. He previously founded GeoMetri, an indoor GPS tracking company, which was acquired by Acuity Brands.
I’ve been a partner of ESRI my entire life,” says Healander. “I’ve been in the geospatial industry for four or five companies with them.”
The company has four main components of its service. There’s AirRegistry, where people can opt-in or out of receiving drone deliveries; AirInspect, which is a service that handles city and state permitting for drone operators; AirNetm, which works with the FAA to create approved air routes for drones; and AirLink, an API that connects drone operators with local governments and collects fees for registering drones.
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