Drone data scanning company Skycatch announces a $25M raise

Published March 25, 2021

Skycatch today announced a $25 million raise, led by ADB Ventures and Wavemaker. Founded in 2013, the Bay Area-based company provides centimeter-accurate 3D scanning services, primarily for construction sites and mining operations.

The service has already been rolled out in a number of different locations around the world — with north of 10,000 sites, according to founder and CEO Christian Sanz. The list includes Chile, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Australia, Canada, the U.S., Indonesia, China, Philippines, Thailand and Japan. In particular, the company is seeking to work with sites where connectivity is limited.

“The process of generating high-precision, centimeter-accurate data is extremely difficult. It typically is owned by the laser scanning market,” says Sanz. “Drones, in general, out of the box are not able to achieve that. We saw the true value prop for Skycatch is operating in edge environments where there’s no connection to internet. That’s where we saw the most demand, initially. That is typically mining companies, operating in all of these remote regions.”

Image Credits: Skycatch

The company’s technology works with off-the-shelf drones, including ones manufactured by DJI. It provides the 3D mapping software, as well as a base station with an edge processor, known as the Edge 1. Skycatch is also working with off-the-shelf lidar companies to help capture data in more difficult environments, including underground for mining operations.

Where top VCs are investing in construction robotics

“Asian Development Bank (ADB) aims to play a catalytic role to enable technology in infrastructure projects, which result in reduced carbon footprints and increased safety and operational efficiency,” ADB’s Daniel Hersson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “The enterprise-grade Skycatch technology for capturing, processing and analyzing high accuracy 3D drone data is a critical part to accomplishing that mission.”

The funds will go toward expanding the 50-person company’s sales and marketing team — both of which have been fairly small portions of the company’s overall headcount.

Skycatch Raises $13.2M To Field Data-Gathering Drones Both High And Low

Mobile messaging financial advisory service Stackin’ adds banking features and raises cash

Published July 30, 2019

When Stackin’ initially pitched itself as part of the Techstars Los Angeles accelerator program two years ago, the company was a video platform for financial advice targeting a millennial audience too savvy for traditional advisory services.

Now, nearly two years later, the company has pivoted from video to text-based financial advice for its millennial audience and is offering a new spin on lead generation for digital banks.

The company has launched a new, no-fee, checking and savings account feature in partnership with Radius Bank, which offers users a 1% annual percentage yield on deposits.

And Stackin’ has raised $4 million in new cash from Experian Ventures, Dig Ventures and Cherry Tree Investments, along with supplemental commitments from new and previous investors including Social Leverage, Wavemaker Partners and Mucker Capital.

“Stackin’ has a unique and highly effective approach to connect and communicate with an entire generation of younger consumers around finance,” said Ty Taylor, group president of Global Consumer Services at Experian, in a statement.

Founded two years ago by Scott Grimes, the former founder of Uproxx Media, and Kyle Arbaugh, who served as a senior vice president at Uproxx, Stackin’ initially billed itself as the Uproxx of personal finance.

It turns out that consumers didn’t want another video platform.

“Stackin’ is fundamentally changing the shape and context of what a financial relationship means by creating a fun, inclusive and judgement free environment that empowers our users to learn and take action through messaging,” said Scott Grimes, CEO and co-founder of Stackin’, in a statement. “This funding allows us to build out new features around banking and investing that will enhance the relationship with our customers.”

Later this fall the company said it would launch a new investment feature that will encourage Stackin’ users to participate in the stock market. It’s likely that this feature will look something like the Acorns model, which encourages users to invest in diversified financial vehicles to get them acquainted with the stock market before enabling individual trades on stocks.

According to Grimes, the company made the switch from video to text in March 2018 and built a custom messaging platform on Twilio to service the company’s 500,000 users.

“In a short time, we have built a large customer base with a demographic that is typically hard to reach. Having financial institutions like Experian come on board as an investor is a testament that this model is working,” Grimes wrote in an email.

Singapore’s SalesWhale raises $5.3M to bring AI to sales and marketing teams

Published April 23, 2019

SalesWhale, a Singapore-based startup that uses AI to help marketers and salespeople generate leads, has announced a Series A round worth $5.3 million.

The investment is led by Monk’s Hill Ventures — the Southeast Asia-focused firm that led SalesWhale’s seed round in 2017 — with participation from existing backers GREE Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and Y Combinator. That’s right, SalesWhale is one a select few Southeast Asian startups to have been through YC, it graduated back in summer 2016.

SalesWhale — which calls itself “a conversational email marketing platform” — uses AI-powered “bots” to handle email. In this case, its digital workforce is trained for sales leads. That means both covering the menial parts of arranging meetings and coordination, and the more proactive side of engaging old and new leads.

Back when we last wrote about the startup in 2017, it had just half a dozen staff. Fast-forward two years and that number has grown to 28, CEO Gabriel Lim explained in an interview. The company is going after more growth with this Series A money, and Lim expects headcount to jump past 70; SalesWhale is deliberating opening an office in California. That location would be primarily to encourage new business and increase communication and support for existing clients, most of whom are located in the U.S., according to Lim. Other hires will be tasked with increasing integration with third-party platforms, and particularly sales and enterprise services.

The past two years have also seen SalesWhale switch gears and go from targeting startups as customers, to working with mid-market and enterprise firms. SalesWhale’s “hundreds” of customers include recruiter Randstad, educational company General Assembly and enterprise service business Unit4. As it has added greater complexity to its service, so the income has jumped from an initial $39-$99 per seat all those years ago to more than $1,000 per month for enterprise customers.

SalesWhale’s founding team (left to right): Venus Wong, Ethan Lee and Gabriel Lim

While AI is a (genuine) threat to many human jobs, SalesWhale sits on the opposite side of that problem in that it actually helps human employees get more work done. That’s to say that SalesWhale’s service can get stuck into a pile (or spreadsheet) of leads that human staff don’t have time for, begin reaching out, qualifying leads and sending them on to living and breathing colleagues to take forward.

“A lot of potential leads aren’t touched” by existing human teams, Lim reflected.

But when SalesWhale reps do get involved, they are often not recognized as the bots they are.

“Customers are often so convinced they are chatting with a human — who is sending collateral, PDFs and arranging meetings — that they’ll say things like ‘I’d love to come by and visit someday,’ ” Lim joked in an interview.

“Indeed, a lot of times, sales team refer to [SalesWale-powered] sales assistant like they are a real human colleague,” he added.