PD Reporter is back from a hiatus!

Data from the Week 📊

Last week, 27 early-stage startups raised capital totalling USD 522.765m. The median amount raised was USD 5.2m.

Of the 27 startups, 14 had info on co-founders and CEO’s. Of that group of 14 startups, there are a total of 25 listed co-founders, of which only 4 are female.

A full list of early-stage deals can be found here. The list now includes investors.

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Highlighted Deals 📌

Oval Money, a London, UK and and Torino, Italy-based fintech startup, raised a new round of £1.3m back in April.

Benedetta Arese Lucini, co-founder of Oval Money, responded to some questions about the deal.

Q. How long did the company devote to raising the round?

A.  Funding rounds cannot be measured in time. It is all about relationships and we foster them over the growth of the company. We also decided to leverage these relationships in a crowdfunding round that was initiated about a month before the launch. We set an initial goal of £500,000 (GBP) and secured this less than 72 hours after launching on Crowdcube. This made it one of the most successful raises ever on the platform, surpassing everyone’s expectations.

Q. How many investors had the company spoken with during the period of discussions?

A. A great many. Oval Money has so far attracted more than 1,000 investors, with 35% of these already using the app from its crowdfunding round. This complements the angel investments received by prominent Italian  entrepreneurs, such as Fabio Cannavale, CEO of Lastminute.com, and Mauro Del Rio, founder of Buongiorno, which is part of the DOCOMO Digital Group.

Q. Any comment on valuation after the round, in broad strokes? (e.g. between USD 10m-USD 20m)

A. In broad strokes, our pre-money valuation was £5 million (GBP) before the round and since then has grown significantly.

Q. How will you look to deploy the capital from the round?

A. Using the capital, one of the biggest projects we’ll be resourcing is the introduction of an investment marketplace within the platform. This will provide an opportunity for people to move the money that they’ve saved, stored in their secure digital wallet, into an investment product that can help their finances grow even more.

We also see ourselves growing across Europe, bringing our solution to customers across multiple countries that still have very few opportunities to improve their financial management.

Q. What’s been the total amount raised to date?

A. To date we have raised £1.3 million (GBP) on this current round, and around another £1.1 million (GBP) of seed capital and government sponsored loans when we started.

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Seal Software, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of Contract Discovery and Contract Analytics solutions, secured USD 4m in funding in late June.

David Gingell, Seal Software's Chief Marketing Officer, told this newsletter that the company raised the round in two months and that the company serious discussions with high single digits and received a number of offers, but we chose to continue with Toba.

How will you look to deploy the capital from the round? 

Seal continues to expand. In the last 18 months alone, the company has grown employee base by around 60%, opened offices in Cairo, Munich and Columbus, Ohio. We have added sales teams across the US but also Nordics, Germany and Switzerland, and we will continue to expand geographically. Our product innovation remains at the vanguard of the industry and our dev teams in Sweden and Egypt continue to create outstanding ML and AI technologies (see press release on Version 6). Investment will continue to build on these – geographical expansion, brand building and marketing, development.

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StartEngine, an LA-based crowdfunding and securities offering platform, closed its Regulation A offering, raising approximately USD 5M in late June.

As per details of the deal, the company noted via email that:

We raised the USD 5m at a USD 65m valuation. Alongside the announcement of the successful close, we announced that we plan to raise another USD 10m through an ICO at a USD 130m valuation.

To date, the company raised USD 12m through three rounds.

How will you look to deploy the capital from the round?

The capital will help our growth: we are in the midst of hiring, scaling our business as more and more companies launch on our platform, creating an in-house agency to help companies achieve their capital raising goals, and funding marketing initiatives to expand brand awareness in investor and entrepreneurial communities. We have also applied to become a broker dealer ATS and are building a patent-pending blockchain application to introduce greater liquidity to our secondary market for investor trading of privately-held securities.

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Inspirit IoT, Inc., an, Illinois-based provider of smart IoT app enablement solutions, closed an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

Kyle Rupnow, Inspirit IoT’s CTO, told PD Reporter that the company was working with Senscape Technologies on the deal for roughly 6 to 8 months and that the valuation for the round is between USD 5m-10m.

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Read 📕

This entire thread about the situation that FanDuel founders found themselves in post-acquisition is worth a read.

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Job List: Show Me the Equity 💰

Your time is important. You should pick the right startup to work for. Below are all the early-stage startups that raised capital this week that have job postings on AngelList with a minimum equity amount offered of 0.01%. 

Senior Full Stack Software Engineer at Flow Kana - Oakland * 0.01% – 0.05%

Senior Front End Software Engineer - Contract or FTE and Senior Backend Software Developer - Ruby on Rails at Flow Kana - Oakland and San Francisco Bay Area * 0.01%

Backend Engineer and Account Executive at Oden Technologies - NYC * 0.01% - 0.3%

Frontend Engineer at Oden Technologies - NYC * 0.05% - 0.2%

Forward Deployed Engineer, Electrical Engineering and Forward Deployed Engineer, Project Management at Oden Technologies - NYC * 0.05% - 0.15%

Demand Generation Manager at Oden Technologies - NYC * 0.01% - 0.2%

Recruiter at Oden Technologies - NYC * 0.01% - 0.05%
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If you’re a startup and you’re raising capital and would like to be featured in next week’s newsletter, reach out by emailing: chris@pdreporter.com. 

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