Sharing Economy Goes Next Gen

Logistics Tech's Sharing Economy:

ShipBob, Inc. is a privately-held company that operates in the logistics services industry. It offers simple, fast, and affordable fulfillment for ecommerce businesses and crowdfunding campaigns. With a network of fulfillment centers across the US, ShipBob lets retailers split inventory across locations for faster and more affordable delivery. ShipBob, Inc., headquarted in Chicago, IL, was founded in 2014 by Dhruv Saxena, Divey Gulati, and Jivko Bojinov. 

Spot was founded in 2009 to move freight more efficiently. It provides quoting, booking, and tracking services that are customizable to clients.

From its inception in 2014, ShipMonk has helped small and medium-sized businesses scale by offering technology-driven fulfillment solutions. Their warehouses are strategically located on both coasts to cut costs and improve efficiency by shipping from either location. The company splits inventory across locations and matches the warehouse that gives the client the quickest turnaround at the best price.

Samsara is a fleet management company and a leader in Industrial IoT. Samsara's portfolio of complete Internet of Things ("IoT") solutions combine hardware, software, and the cloud to bring real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to operations. As of 2019, Samsara serves over 10,000 customers across diverse company sizes and industries, from transportation and logistics to field services, food production, energy, construction, local governments, and manufacturing. Samsara's growing suite of solutions includes vehicle telematics, driver safety, mobile workflow and compliance, asset tracking, and industrial process controls -- all in an integrated, open, real-time platform. Samsara was founded in 2015 by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, the same founders of Meraki (now part of Cisco Systems). Samsara's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. 

Interos Inc. is a privately-held company that operates in the professional services industry. Interos' platform identifies and visualizes patterns from real-time events, such as geopolitical, day-to-day business operations, financial markets, regional conflict, and acts of nature, enabling clients to identify, visualize and act confidently on the ripple effects that could impact their supply chains. Interos was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia.

Funding & Deal Highlights:

Milk Bar banks Series B funding for cult-favorite cookies. Founded nearly 11 years ago as an offshoot of Momofuku, another wildly popular network of eateries, Milk Bar has since expanded to 17 locations, including 9 in New York. Milk Bar's newest backer, Sonoma Brands, is a California-based growth equity firm that focuses exclusively on consumer companies, with a particular eye for food and beverage startups.

Variant Bio, which debuted Thursday with $16M in Series A financing, is betting that its narrower strategy of identifying small groups of “outlier humans” with variations in DNA that affect disease risk will lead to faster and cheaper drug discovery. Over the past year, Variant has partnered with groups on four continents based on research that indicates that those populations’ genetics could provide clues that may one day lead to drug discovery work in metabolic, autoimmune, and neurodegenerative disorders.

Wasabi announces $30M Series B as the cloud storage business continues to grow. 

Precision medicine tech company, Syapse, announces $30M funding. Syapse has been working closely with oncologists and drug companies to develop ‘real-world evidence in oncology.’ Today, Syapse announces $30M in new equity funding to accelerate the creation and use of real-world evidence in oncology.

PickUp, a technology platform that helps media companies make sports content more interactive while bringing fans closer to the game, has raised initial funding in a seed round led by KB Partners. It will launch later this year. PickUp enables publishers and content creators to make editorial content interactive through simple, contextual, and shareable questions. PickUp's platform lets publishers tap into the pulse of fan conversations and embed relevant questions, designed to further quantify said pulse, into their content. 

Apple Inc. bought machine-learning startup Inductiv Inc., adding to more than a dozen AI-related acquisitions by the technology giant in the past few years.

Connexity, a lead-gen platform for online retailers, has acquired Skimlinks, a U.K. platform for publishers to make money through affiliate links. The terms of the deal were undisclosed. According to Crunchbase, Skimlinks had raised a total of $25.5M and reached a Series C stage of funding, the final round coming from Frog Capital, which invested $16M.

Lineage Logistics, LLC, the world’s largest and most innovative provider of temperature-controlled logistics solutions, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Henningsen Cold Storage Co.

Zumasys acquires Total Computing Solutions.