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Ketch raises another $20M as demand grows for its privacy data control platform
Six months after securing a $23 million Series A round, Ketch, a startup providing online privacy regulation and data compliance, brought in an additional $20 million in A1 funding, this time led by Acrew Capital.
Returning with Acrew for the second round are CRV, super{set} (the startup studio founded by Ketch’s co-founders CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya), Ridge Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The new investment gives Ketch a total of $43 million raised since the company came out of stealth earlier this year.
In 2020, Ketch introduced its data control platform for programmatic privacy, governance and security. The platform automates data control and consent management so that consumers’ privacy preferences are honored and implemented.
Enterprises are looking for a way to meet consumer needs and accommodate their rights and consents. At the same time, companies want data to fuel their growth and gain the trust of consumers, Chavez told TechCrunch.
There is also a matter of security, with much effort going into ransomware and malware, but Chavez feels a big opportunity is to bring security to the data wherever it lies. Once the infrastructure is in place for data control it needs to be at the level of individual cells and rows, he said.
“If someone wants to be deleted, there is a challenge in finding your specific row of data,” he added. “That is an exercise in data control.”
Ketch’s customer base grew by more than 300% since its March Series A announcement, and the new funding will go toward expanding its sales and go-to-market teams, Chavez said.
Ketch app. Image Credits: Ketch
This year, the company launched Ketch OTC, a free-to-use privacy tool that streamlines all aspects of privacy so that enterprise compliance programs build trust and reduce friction. Customer growth through OTC increased five times in six months. More recently, Qonsent, which developing a consent user experience, is using Ketch’s APIs and infrastructure, Chavez said.
When looking for strategic partners, Chavez and Vaidya wanted to have people around the table who have a deep context on what they were doing and could provide advice as they built out their products. They found that in Acrew founding partner Theresia Gouw, whom Chavez referred to as “the OG of privacy and security.”
Gouw has been investing in security and privacy for over 20 years and says Ketch is flipping the data privacy and security model on its head by putting it in the hands of developers. When she saw more people working from home and more data breaches, she saw an opportunity to increase and double down on Acrew’s initial investment.
She explained that Ketch is differentiating itself from competitors by taking data privacy and security and tying it to the data itself to empower software developers. With the OTC tool, similar to putting locks and cameras on a home, developers can download the API and attach rules to all of a user’s data.
“The magic of Ketch is that you can take the security and governance rules and embed them with the software and the piece of data,” Gouw added.
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Flymachine raises $21 million to build a virtual concerts platform for a post-pandemic world
As concerts and live events return to the physical world stateside, many in the tech industry have wondered whether some of the pandemic-era opportunities around virtualizing these events are lost for the time being.
San Francisco-based Flymachine is aiming to seek out the holy grail of the digital music industry, finding a way to capture some of the magic of live concerts and performances in a livestreamed setting. The startup hopes that pandemic-era consumer habits around video chat socialization combined with an industry in need of digital diversification can push their flavor of virtual concerts into the lives of music fans.
The startup’s ambitions aren’t cheap, Flymachine tells TechCrunch it has raised $21 million in investor funding to bankroll its plans. The funding has been led by Greycroft Partners and SignalFire, with additional participation from Primary Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners, Red Sea Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.
The virtual concert industry didn’t have as big of a lockdown moment as some hoped for. Spotify experimented with virtual events. Meanwhile, startups like Wave raised huge bouts of VC funding to turn real performers into digital avatars in a bid to create more digital-native concerts. And while some smaller artists embraced shows over Zoom or worked with startups like Oda, which created live concert subscriptions, there were few mainstream hits among bigger acts.
To make Flymachine’s brand of virtual concerts a thing, the startup isn’t trying to convert potential in-person attendees of a show into virtual participants, instead hoping to create an attractive experience for the folks who would normally have to skip the show. Whether those virtual attendees were too far from a venue, couldn’t get a babysitter for the night or just aren’t jazzed about a mosh pit scene anymore, Flymachine is hoping there are enough potential attendees on the bubble to sustain the startup as they try to blur the lines between “a night in and a night out,” CEO Andrew Dreskin says.
The startup’s strategy centers on building up partnerships with name brand concert venues around the U.S. — Bowery Ballroom in New York City, Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco, The Crocodile in Seattle, Marathon Music Works in Nashville and Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, among them — and livestreaming some of the shows at those venues to at-home audiences. Flymachine’s team has deep roots in the music industry; Dreskin founded Ticketfly (acquired by Pandora) while co-founder Rick Farman is also the co-founder of Superfly, which puts on the Bonnaroo and Outside Lands music festivals.
Image Credits: Flymachine
In terms of actual experience — and I had the chance to experience one of the shows (pictured above) before writing this — Flymachine has done their best to recreate the experience of shouting over the tunes to talk with your buddies nearby. In Flymachine’s world this is attending the show in a “private room” with your other friends livestreaming in video chat bubbles from their homes. It’s well done and doesn’t distract too much from the actual concert, but you can adjust the sound levels of your friends and the music when the time calls for it.
Flymachine’s platform launch earlier this year, arriving as many Americans have been vaccinated and many concert-goers are preparing to return to normal, might have been considered a bit late to the moment, but the founding team sees a long-term opportunity that COVID only further highlighted.
“We weren’t in a mad dash to get the product out the door while people were sequestered in their homes because we knew this would be part of the fabric of society going forward,” Dreskin tells TechCrunch.
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Orum raises $56M to help speed up interbank transfers
Orum, which aims to speed up the amount of time it takes to transfer money between banks, announced today it has raised $56 million in a Series B round of funding.
Accel and Canapi Ventures co-led the round, which also included participation from existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, Inspired Capital, Homebrew, Acrew, Primary, Clocktower and Box Group. The financing comes barely three months after Orum announced a $21 million Series A, and brings its total raised to over $82 million.
Orum CEO Stephany Kirkpatrick launched the company in 2019 after working for several years at LearnVest, a personal finance site founded by Alexa von Tobel that was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in 2015 for an estimated $375 million. Tobel went on to form Inspired Capital, a venture capital firm that put money in Orum’s $5.2 million seed round last August. Prior to that, the firm also provided Orum with an “inspiration check” that was the first money into the business.
As a certified financial planner, Kirkpatrick says she saw firsthand what she describes as “deep cracks” in this country’s financial infrastructure. The fact that it takes days for money to move from one bank to another is not only inconvenient for many, but unnecessary, she believes.
“Most Americans are not familiar with the intricacies of ACH [automated clearing house) or why it takes multiple business days to move money between accounts,” Kirkpatrick said. “But none of us can allow money to wait 5-7 days to hit our accounts. It needs to be instant.”
Her mission with Orum is straightforward even if the technology behind it is complex. Put simply, Orum aims to use machine learning-backed APIs to “move money smartly across all payment rails, and in doing so, provide universal financial access.”
Orum’s first embeddable product, Foresight, launched in September of 2020. It’s an automated programming interface designed to give financial institutions a way to move money in real time. The platform uses machine learning and data science to predict when funds are available and to identify any potential risks. Its Momentum product “intelligently” routes funds across payments rails and is powered by banking providers JPMorgan Chase and Silicon Valley Bank.
“They power the back end of our Momentum platform that allows the money to move on a multirail basis,” Kirkpatrick told TechCrunch. “They power our access to real-time payments.”
Orum says it serves a range of enterprise partners, including Alloy, HM Bradley, First Horizon Bank and Zero Financial (which was recently acquired by Avant).
The volume of transactions being conducted with Orum is growing 100% month over month, Kirkpatrick said. Most of its early growth has come from word of mouth.
The remote-first company prides itself on diversity — in both its employee and investor base. For one, 48% of its 55-person headcount are female, and 48% are “nonwhite,” according to Kirkpatrick. Orum also recently joined the Cap Table Coalition — a partnership between high-growth startups and emerging investors who want to work to close the racial wealth gap — to allocate over 10% of its Series B round to underrepresented founders. For example, the financing includes investors such as the Neythri Features Fund, a group of South Asian women investing in the next generation of female founders and diverse teams.
Jeffrey Reitman, partner at Canapi Ventures (a firm whose LPs mostly consist of banks), told TechCrunch that those bank LPs conduct hundreds of millions of ACH transactions annually,
“They need a path to achieving a state where funds can be transferred instantly,” he said. “Orum’s product paves the path for many players in financial services and fintech — and beyond — to partake in faster money movement without compromising key risk principles.”
To Reitman, the company’s major differentiators are its team, which he describes as consisting of “the best group of data scientists and engineers in the space.”
“Many of their customers consider the team to be instrumental in helping to set the risk dials on how they fund transactions by teasing out key data and insights from historical transaction data,” he said. “Second, Orum is building one of the densest and most comprehensive data sets around the risks of money movement. Better data means better risk models, and it will be hard for other offerings to match Orum’s approach to building this rich data set.”
Accel Partner Sameer Gandhi, who joined Orum’s board as part of the latest financing, agrees. He believes that in an 18-month period, Orum has built “game-changing technology and an exceptional team.”
“Orum is tackling financial infrastructure from its foundation,” he said.
The headline was updated post-publication to reflect the correct funding amount.
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Liberis, the embedded finance provider for SMEs, raises additional £70M in debt
Liberis, the U.K.-based fintech that provides finance for small businesses as an alternative to a traditional bank loan or extended overdraft, has replenished its own coffers with £70 million in funding. The round is a mixture of debt and venture debt, although the company is declining to disclose the percentage split, so we can likely chalk this up as mostly debt to fund the loans Liberis issues.
Providing the financing are previous backers British Business Investments, Paragon Bank and BCI Europe, along with new partner Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). It brings the total funding raised by Liberis to £200 million, including more than £50 million in equity funding. “The new funds will be used to fuel company growth, launch new products and markets, and provide additional customer financing solutions,” says the fintech.
To date, 2007-founded Liberis has provided over £500 million in financing to 16,000 SMEs across Europe, the U.S. and the U.K. (the product is available in five new countries: U.S., Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic and Slovakia). However, lending has really picked up lately, with £250 million lent in the past two years alone.
Liberis provides SMEs with funding from £1,000 to £300,000 based on projected credit and debit card sales. However, the clever part is that the loan is paid back via a pre-agreed percentage of the business’ digital transactions. In other words, bar any minimum monthly payment agreed, the repayment schedule is directly tied to the size and pace of a business’ card transactions.
Noteworthy, the go-to-market strategy has shifted toward B2B2B — or “embedded finance” — with Liberis now predominantly partnering with marketplaces, software providers and acquirers, such as Worldpay from FIS and Global Payments. These partners integrate with Liberis to offer personalised pre-approved revenue-based financing to their end customers.
“Liberis’ core business is to enable partners to offer embedded business finance to their customers,” Rob Straathof, CEO of Liberis, tells TechCrunch. “Back in 2015, we launched one of the world’s first embedded business finance partnerships with Worldpay from FIS, and have significantly expanded our partnerships across the globe over the past years, including Global Payments, Opayo (Sagepay), EPOS Now and Worldpay U.S.”
Straathof says that by integrating Liberis’ business finance platform into a partner’s existing ecosystem and customer experience, the fintech is able to provide “instant value” for its partners and the SMEs they support.
“Through our single API integration, we receive privileged data from our partners which enables Liberis to offer hyper-personalised and pre-approved finance to SMEs,” he explains. “By making finance more personalised, intuitive and accessible for SMEs, we in turn empower our partners to unlock greater customer value by improving engagement, satisfaction and loyalty which lowers churn. Ultimately, everyone wins”.
Comments Folake Shasanya, SVB’s head of EMEA warehouse financing: “We are pleased to become a new funding partner to Liberis and have been impressed with their ability to embed financing solutions across technology platforms, payments providers and more. At SVB, supporting innovation is in our DNA and we are delighted to provide this global growth opportunity to Liberis through our warehouse and venture debt products”.
Article updated to clarify the round is a mixture of debt and venture debt, without any pure equity funding.
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More debt, improving margins: How startups are retooling in the COVID-19 era
A new data set from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) details how startups are reacting to the post-unicorn era as COVID-19-related disruptions upset the global economy and remake the risk tolerance of private investors.
What SVB’s new report shows is unsurprising: venture capital deal volumes are falling, startups are tapping existing debt capacities to add cash to balances while they still can and some upstart firms are curtailing spend to reduce unprofitability. The last data point comes via the lens of startups that recently raised, making the data more a snapshot of what companies that are successfully attracting capital may have accomplished with regard to improving profitability — the directional shifts are material regardless of that particular nuance.
Let’s briefly examine what the data says and what it tells us about the state of the startup market.
Spending less, borrowing more
Venture capitalists are pulling back, SVB data indicates. A chart from its Q2 markets report notes that the “SVB Deal Activity Index” had fallen from a rating of 160 in early March to just over 70 by mid-to-late-April. That staggering decline means fewer rounds are getting done and that there is less capital going into startups of all sizes.
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In the shadow of Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle startups are having a moment
Venture capital investment exploded across a number of geographies in 2019 despite the constant threat of an economic downturn.
San Francisco, of course, remains the startup epicenter of the world, shutting out all other geographies when it comes to capital invested. Still, other regions continue to grow, raking in more capital this year than ever.
In Utah, a new hotbed for startups, companies like Weave, Divvy and MX Technology raised a collective $370 million from private market investors. In the Northeast, New York City experienced record-breaking deal volume with median deal sizes climbing steadily. Boston is closing out the decade with at least 10 deals larger than $100 million announced this year alone. And in the lovely Pacific Northwest, home to tech heavyweights Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is experiencing an uptick in VC interest in what could be a sign the town is finally reaching its full potential.
Seattle startups raised a total of $3.5 billion in VC funding across roughly 375 deals this year, according to data collected by PitchBook. That’s up from $3 billion in 2018 across 346 deals and a meager $1.7 billion in 2017 across 348 deals. Much of Seattle’s recent growth can be attributed to a few fast-growing businesses.
Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, closed a $400 million round last month bringing its valuation to $2.75 billion. The deal was remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was the largest venture round for a Seattle-based company in a decade, PitchBook claims. And it pushed Convoy to the top of the list of the most valuable companies in the city, surpassing OfferUp, which raised a sizable Series D in 2018 at a $1.4 billion valuation.
Convoy has managed to attract a slew of high-profile investors, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and even U2’s Bono and the Edge. Since it was founded in 2015, the business has raised a total of more than $668 million.
Remitly, another Seattle-headquartered business, has helped bolster Seattle’s startup ecosystem. The fintech company focused on international money transfer raised a $135 million Series E led by Generation Investment Management, and $85 million in debt from Barclays, Bridge Bank, Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year. Owl Rock Capital, Princeville Global, Prudential Financial, Schroder & Co Bank AG and Top Tier Capital Partners, and previous investors DN Capital, Naspers’ PayU and Stripes Group also participated in the equity round, which valued Remitly at nearly $1 billion.
Up-and-coming startups, including co-working space provider The Riveter, real estate business Modus and same-day delivery service Dolly, have recently attracted investment too.
A number of other factors have contributed to Seattle’s long-awaited rise in venture activity. Top-performing companies like Stripe, Airbnb and Dropbox have established engineering offices in Seattle, as has Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Disney and many others. This, of course, has attracted copious engineers, a key ingredient to building a successful tech hub. Plus, the pipeline of engineers provided by the nearby University of Washington (shout-out to my alma mater) means there’s no shortage of brainiacs.
There’s long been plenty of smart people in Seattle, mostly working at Microsoft and Amazon, however. The issue has been a shortage of entrepreneurs, or those willing to exit a well-paying gig in favor of a risky venture. Fortunately for Seattle venture capitalists, new efforts have been made to entice corporate workers to the startup universe. Pioneer Square Labs, which I profiled earlier this year, is a prime example of this movement. On a mission to champion Seattle’s unique entrepreneurial DNA, Pioneer Square Labs cropped up in 2015 to create, launch and fund technology companies headquartered in the Pacific Northwest.
Boundless CEO Xiao Wang at TechCrunch Disrupt 2017
Operating under the startup studio model, PSL’s team of former founders and venture capitalists, including Rover and Mighty AI founder Greg Gottesman, collaborate to craft and incubate startup ideas, then recruit a founding CEO from their network of entrepreneurs to lead the business. Seattle is home to two of the most valuable businesses in the world, but it has not created as many founders as anticipated. PSL hopes that by removing some of the risk, it can encourage prospective founders, like Boundless CEO Xiao Wang, a former senior product manager at Amazon, to build.
“The studio model lends itself really well to people who are 99% there, thinking ‘damn, I want to start a company,’ ” PSL co-founder Ben Gilbert said in March. “These are people that are incredible entrepreneurs but if not for the studio as a catalyst, they may not have [left].”
Boundless is one of several successful PSL spin-outs. The business, which helps families navigate the convoluted green card process, raised a $7.8 million Series A led by Foundry Group earlier this year, with participation from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners, PSL, Two Sigma Ventures and Founders’ Co-Op.
Years-old institutional funds like Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group have done their part to bolster the Seattle startup community too. Madrona raised a $100 million Acceleration Fund earlier this year, and although it plans to look beyond its backyard for its newest deals, the firm continues to be one of the largest supporters of Pacific Northwest upstarts. Founded in 1995, Madrona’s portfolio includes Amazon, Mighty AI, UiPath, Branch and more.
Voyager Capital, another Seattle-based VC, also raised another $100 million this year to invest in the PNW. Maveron, a venture capital fund co-founded by Starbucks mastermind Howard Schultz, closed on another $180 million to invest in early-stage consumer startups in May. And new efforts like Flying Fish Partners have been busy deploying capital to promising local companies.
There’s a lot more to say about all this. Like the growing role of deep-pocketed angel investors in Seattle have in expanding the startup ecosystem, or the non-local investors, like Silicon Valley’s best, who’ve funneled cash into Seattle’s talent. In short, Seattle deal activity is finally climbing thanks to top talent, new accelerator models and several refueled venture funds. Now we wait to see how the Seattle startup community leverages this growth period and what startups emerge on top.
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The future of car ownership: Cars-as-a-service
Car shoppers now have several new options to avoid long-term debt and commitments. Automakers and startups alike are increasingly offering services that give buyers new opportunities and greater flexibility around owning and using vehicles.
Cars-as-a-Service
In the first part of this feature, we explored the different startups attempting to change car buying. But not everyone wants to buy a car. After all, a vehicle traditionally loses its value at a dramatic rate.
Some startups are attempting to reinvent car ownership rather than car buying.
Don’t buy, lease
My favorite car blog Jalopnik said it best: “Cars Sales Could Be Heading Straight Into the Toilet.” Citing a Bloomberg report, the site explains automakers may have had the worst first half for new-vehicle retail sales since 2013. Car sales are tanking, but people still need cars.
Companies like Fair are offering new types of leases combining a traditional auto financing option with modern conveniences. Even car makers are looking at different ways to move vehicles from dealer lots.
Fair was founded in 2016 by an all-star team made up of automotive, retail and banking executives including Scott Painter, former founder and CEO of TrueCar.
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Grasshopper’s Judith Erwin leaps into innovation banking
In the years following the financial crisis, de novo bank activity in the US slowed to a trickle. But as memories fade, the economy expands and the potential of tech-powered financial services marches forward, entrepreneurs have once again been asking the question, “Should I start a bank?”
And by bank, I’m not referring to a neobank, which sits on top of a bank, or a fintech startup that offers an interesting banking-like service of one kind or another. I mean a bank bank.
One of those entrepreneurs is Judith Erwin, a well-known business banking executive who was part of the founding team at Square 1 Bank, which was bought in 2015. Fast forward a few years and Erwin is back, this time as CEO of the cleverly named Grasshopper Bank in New York.
With over $130 million in capital raised from investors including Patriot Financial and T. Rowe Price Associates, Grasshopper has a notable amount of heft for a banking newbie. But as Erwin and her team seek to build share in the innovation banking market, she knows that she’ll need the capital as she navigates a hotly contested niche that has benefited from a robust start-up and venture capital environment.
Gregg Schoenberg: Good to see you, Judith. To jump right in, in my opinion, you were a key part of one of the most successful de novo banks in quite some time. You were responsible for VC relationships there, right?
…My background is one where people give me broken things, I fix them and give them back.
Judith Erwin: The VC relationships and the products and services managing the balance sheet around deposits. Those were my two primary roles, but my background is one where people give me broken things, I fix them and give them back.
Schoenberg: Square 1 was purchased for about 22 times earnings and 260% of tangible book, correct?
Erwin: Sounds accurate.
Schoenberg: Plus, the bank had a phenomenal earnings trajectory. Meanwhile, PacWest, which acquired you, was a “perfectly nice bank.” Would that be a fair characterization?
Erwin: Yes.
Schoenberg: Is part of the motivation to start Grasshopper to continue on a journey that maybe ended a little bit prematurely last time?
Erwin: That’s a great insight, and I did feel like we had sold too soon. It was a great deal for the investors — which included me — and so I understood it. But absolutely, a lot of what we’re working to do here are things I had hoped to do at Square 1.
Image via Getty Images / Classen Rafael / EyeEm
Schoenberg: You’re obviously aware of the 800-pound gorilla in the room in the form of Silicon Valley Bank . You’ve also got the megabanks that play in the segment, as well as Signature Bank, First Republic, Bridge Bank and others.
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Which type of funding is actually best for your business?
Jared Hecht is the co-founder and CEO of Fundera, an online marketplace for small business financial solutions including small business loans. Prior to Fundera, Hecht co-founded group messaging app, GroupMe.
When starting a tech company, there seems to be a playbook that most entrepreneurs follow. While some may start with a bit of bootstrapping, most will dive straight into raising seed money through investors. In many cases, this is a great path. It’s a path I’ve taken twice myself, first with GroupMe, and then again with Fundera.
Ironically, though, my second venture-backed company is a business focused on helping entrepreneurs find debt financing—a process I’ve gone through only once myself. But after five years of building and scaling this business, it’s made me take a step back and consider the question of when and where debt financing might be a better option for a business than equity financing, and vice versa.
I view these financing vehicles differently now than I did half a decade ago, and think it’s time we start to think a bit wider and diversely about how we finance our growing endeavors.
After all, when entrepreneurs take venture capital, they usually sign up to provide a 10x return on an investor’s capital. This expectation ultimately influences how they operate their business in the short-term. Maybe they’re not always ready for that expectation.
Or maybe they know they need to focus on building a good business before a great one. In this case, debt may be the better vehicle, where the only expectation is to pay it back.
Whether it’s money to get your business off the ground, capital to fuel additional growth, or cash to cover a gap, and whether you’re guiding the growth of a burgeoning startup, a smaller business, or even consulting firm helping other entrepreneurs, you should think critically about how you finance your business.
Here’s what to consider.
The power of debt
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Lidar startup Ouster raises $60 million in production run-up
Ouster has raised $60 million as the San Francisco-based lidar startup opens a new facility that will have the capacity to assemble and ship several thousand sensors a month by the end of 2019.
The new factory, which will have a grand opening ceremony March 28, currently produces hundreds of sensors per month. Ouster says at full capacity, the factory will produce $25 million to $50 million in inventory per month.
Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles (although not everyone agrees). However, the sensors are also useful in other industries — and this is where Ouster’s business model is targeted.
Ouster has cast a wider net for customers than some of its rivals. Unlike others vying solely for automotive customers working on the development of autonomous vehicles, Ouster is selling sensors to other industries. Ouster is selling its light detection and ranging radar sensors to robotics, drones, mapping, defense, building security, mining and agriculture companies.
The strategy has appeared to pay off. Ouster says it has 400 customers from 15 industries.
The $60 million in additional funding follows a Series A raise of $27 million announced back in 2017 as Ouster came out of stealth mode. In the years since, the company led by Angus Pacala has grown to more than 100 employees and announced four lidar sensors, with resolutions from 16 to 128 channels, and two product lines, the OS-1 and OS-2. The startup expects to nearly double its headcount in the coming year to support further product line development.
The $60 million in equity and debt funding includes investments from Runway Growth Capital and Silicon Valley Bank, as well as additional funding from Series A participants Cox Enterprises, Constellation Tech Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Carthona and others.
Ouster said the additional investment has helped to develop Ouster’s product lines, including the launch of the OS-1 128 lidar sensor, and fund the expansion of its production facilities.
The company also announced the appointment of Susan Heystee, senior VP for OEM business at Verizon Connect, to its board of directors.
Waymo, the self-driving car company under Google’s Alphabet, could be a new competitor to the company. Waymo announced this month it will start selling its custom lidar sensors to companies outside of self-driving cars. Waymo will initially target robotics, security and agricultural technology. The sales will help the company scale its autonomous technology faster, making each sensor more affordable through economies of scale, Simon Verghese, head of Waymo’s lidar team, wrote in a Medium post at the time.
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