Startup Monday: Latest tech trends & news happening in the global startup ecosystem (Issue 126- April 6)

Welcome to Startup Monday, my weekly newsletter that recaps the week in the global startup ecosystem. To have this newsletter emailed to you, you can sign up here.

Top startup news to follow this week:

1. Startup Manifold secures $15M for its AI-based clinical research platform

Initially founded as an AI lab in 2016, startup Manifold is using its AI expertise to modernize the tech infrastructure of clinical research organizations to help accelerate cancer studies.

Manifold developed an AI-based platform that helps reduce administrative burden for cancer centers and streamlines the manual workflows of clinical research study and data management. This helps research teams speed up the time to insights from months to minutes, according to the company.

The startup aims to modernize researchers’ workflows and move away from legacy technology like Excel spreadsheets and other data collection solutions.

The AI lab launched in 2016 at a time of exciting research advances in AI and machine learning, noted Vinay Seth Mohta, CEO and co-founder of Manifold. But, the team recognized that healthcare organizations struggled to build a solid data and AI technology foundation.

In 2022, Manifold shifted to building a software platform for clinical research.

“We realized there is something we can do to bring better care, better medicine and better clinical research to a lot more people,” Mohta said in an interview. “As we worked with healthcare organizations, we started to see some of the challenges they had with modern technology and data foundations. We saw a real opportunity to bring that technology to more organizations.”

Manifold is working with cancer centers and rare disease organizations to provide a purpose-built tech infrastructure platform.

Early adopters include Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center and Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Manifold plans to user the series A funding to grow its partnerships with cancer centers and other healthcare organizations and invest in R&D to build out more capabilities and features, Mohta said.

2. Amazon pours an additional $2.75 billion into AI startup Anthropic

Amazon will maintain a minority stake in San Francisco-based Anthropic, a rival of ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

“Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary.

The Seattle-based tech giant made an initial investment of $1.25 billion in Anthropic in September and indicated then it had plans to invest up to $4 billion.

The two companies are collaborating to develop so-called foundation models, which underpin the generative AI systems that have captured global attention.

Under the deal, Anthropic will use AWS as its “primary” cloud provider and use Amazon’s custom chips to build, train and deploy AI models. It will also provide AWS customers, which are mostly businesses, with access to models on an Amazon service called Bedrock. In its announcement Wednesday, Amazon said companies like Delta Air Lines and Siemens are already using Bedrock to access Anthropic’s AI models.

The investment is the latest example of how Big Tech companies are spending on artificial intelligence startups amid growing public and business interest in the technology. Earlier this year, U.S. antitrust regulators said they were reviewing these investments.

3. Deal Dive: EarliTec Diagnostics raises $21.5M to help diagnose autism earlier

The Atlanta-based startup’s FDA-authorized approach involves a child watching short videos and social interactions on a screen for 12 minutes while the device, using AI, tracks the child’s eye movements. According to EarliTec, children with autism won’t focus on the video the same way that kids without autism will.

EarliTec Diagnostics CEO Tom Ressemann told TechCrunch that traditional autism diagnoses involve three- or four hour-assessments that can have lengthy waitlists. EarliTec’s 12-minute test is designed to help clinicians get to a diagnosis faster, which helps them work with more children.

“You have to be able to work into their current workflow,” Ressemann said. “So with a test like ours that is flexible where you access it, it could be at the child’s home, it could be at a clinic or a school, it’s a tablet, we can work into most workflows. A quicker diagnosis is better for the child and the parent.”

The company plans to use the money to continue to expand its commercialization, Ressemann said. EarliTec currently works with children aged 16 months to 30 months and plans to funnel some of its fresh capital into research that could help the company expand the age group the system can diagnose. It also hopes the capital can help improve assessment and treatment options.

Ressemann, who was CEO at several other medical device startups prior to EarliTec, including Amphora Medical and Entellus Medical, said this fundraise was the most challenging and yet the most rewarding. He said despite the prevalence of autism in the U.S., it’s still a hard area in which to fundraise because only certain investors are interested in the space. But that’s starting to change.

4. Mike Lynch-backed legal tech startup Luminance raises $40 million, capitalizing on AI hype

The company told CNBC that it raised the fresh capital in a Series B funding round led by U.S. venture fund March Capital. National Grid Partners, the venture capital arm of the National Grid, and law firm Slaughter and May, also invested in the round.

“We had lots of interest from lots of VCs,” Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday.

The fact that AI is now a “hot topic” certainly helped, Lightbody said, but she added that Luminance had the metrics — such as its annual sales performance — to match the interest it’s gotten from investors.

Lightbody said that businesses are investing in AI tools like Luminance’s to keep a competitive edge, as well as to reduce costs.

“Everyone wants to stay competitive,” she told CNBC. “We want to build opportunities they didn’t know existed.”

Luminance said its annual recurring revenue jumped roughly fivefold in the past two years, but declined to share figures with CNBC. The company counts the likes of Koch Industries, Hitachi, Yokogawa, Liberty Mutual, LG Chem, and BBC Studios as its clients.

5. London-based CharitableBookings.com raises €5.8 million to redesign the charitable giving space

Featuring The Global Pledge, an initiative to raise £1 billion for charities worldwide, Charitablebookings.com Founder and Executive Chairman David Johnstone commented: “We are excited to bring wholesale travel and premium unique lifestyle benefits to our users, while with every booking we give back to a charity of their choice.”

Premium members have exclusive access to over 500,000 hotels at wholesale/trade prices across 200+ countries, with over 8 out 10 hotel prices at an average of over 10% cheaper compared to booking through major travel booking platforms. As a second benefit, they receive luxury lifestyle benefits with a range of restaurants, clubs, bars, boutiques and wellness spots, as well as entering into a luxury prize draw giving users monthly chances to win travel and lifestyle experiences and gifts worth between £100 — £25K.

Paris-based Pigment bags €133 million series D to further fuel adoption of its planning platform in North America

6. Jobs for the Future’s new $50M fund looks to invest in underrepresented founders

Two years ago, Jobs for the Future (JFF), a nonprofit dedicated to helping low-wage workers attain upward mobility, established a venture arm, JFFVentures, to back innovative employment tech.

The new fund — furnished in part by the Autodesk Foundation, the Workday Foundation and the American Council on Education — will target founders building HR, education and workforce solutions that “enable economic mobility for workers in middle to low-wage jobs,” said JFFVentures Fund managing partner Sabari Raja.

“We’re looking to invest in 30 to 35 pre-seed- and seed-stage startups, with initial check sizes between $250,000 [and] $1 million, with the ability to lead rounds,” Raja told TechCrunch. “We’ll reserve $1 million to $2 million for follow-on investments into companies that are outperforming from a financial and impact perspective.”

JFFVentures Fund II joins the growing number of impact-focused VC funds stateside, which seek to drive social, economic and environmental change while earning investment returns. Others include Collaborative Fund, Third Sphere, and the nonprofit Acumen Fund.

Impact investing is a massive — and expanding — opportunity. According to the Global Impact Investing Network, an international think tank, the private impact market grew to approximately $1.2 trillion at the end of 2021, up 63% since 2019.

But impact funds face challenges that many traditional startup investment vehicles don’t.

7. SiMa.ai secures $70M funding to introduce a multimodal GenAI chip

, a Silicon Valley-based startup producing embedded machine learning (ML) system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, today announced that it has raised a extension funding round as it plans to bring its second-generation chipset, specifically built for multimodal generative AI processing, to market.

The startup touts that its current generation of the ML SoC delivered the highest FPS/W results on the MLPerf benchmark across the MLPerf Inference 4.0 closed, edge and power division categories. However, the first-generation chipset was focused on classic computer vision.

The new GenAI SoC would adapt to any framework, network, model and sensor — similar to the company’s existing ML platform — and will also be compatible with any modality, including audio, speech, text and image. It would work as a single-edge platform for all AI across computer vision, transformers and multimodal GenAI, the startup said.

“You cannot predict the future, but you can pick the vector and say, hey, that’s the vector I want to bet on. And I want to continue evolving around my vector. That’s kind of the approach that we took architecturally,” said Rangasayee. “But fundamentally, we really haven’t walked away or had to drastically change our architecture. This is also the benefit of us taking a software-centric architecture that allows more flexibility and nimbleness.”

8. Paris-based Pigment bags €133 million series D to further fuel adoption of its planning platform in North America

, a business planning platform that helps organisations plan ahead and make better strategic decisions, announced a €133 million Series D funding round, led by ICONIQ Growth, who also spearheaded Pigment’s Series C investment close to a year ago. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners as well as several other existing investors including IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital have also participated in the round, demonstrating continued confidence in Pigment’s long-term growth trajectory.

The funding follows a successful year for Pigment as the company tripled its annual recurring revenue and doubled its customer base globally. The number of enterprise customers using Pigment also tripled. Global brands including Unilever, Merck, Keolis, Datadog, KAYAK and 6sense have all chosen Pigment for its unique combination of usability and scalability needed to make accurate yet timely decisions. Pigment has expanded its partner network, collaborating with leading consulting firms such as Deloitte, Slalom and BearingPoint.

“Our north star has always been to combine an exceptional product and customer experience, so that organizations can build the right plans and execute on them quickly. This funding puts us in an even stronger position to continue fulfilling this commitment,” said Eléonore Crespo, co-CEO, Pigment. “We’re incredibly proud of the trust and confidence our investors place in the entire Pigment team, and we look forward to working alongside them as we enter the next phase of our journey.”

In the past year, Pigment has strengthened its North American presence — the company’s largest market — following the opening of offices in New York and Toronto, along with several strategic hires. Notably, Jay Peir who joined as Global Head of Strategy from Tableau where he was EVP of Corporate Development and Strategy, and Sean Brophy as Global Head of Sales from Alteryx, where he led US Enterprise Sales. In France, Edouard Beaucourt is also joining from Snowflake as Pigment’s Head of EMEA.

Central to Pigment’s growth has been its ongoing emphasis on product innovation. On top of an already easy-to-use solution, notable product developments include generative AI capabilities to improve accessibility for all users and further adoption beyond the finance function. Today, more than 90% of Pigment customers use the platform across multiple departments, including finance, sales, HR, and supply chain.

9. Business planning startup Pigment raises $145M in rare French tech mega-round

But if you remove buzzy AI startups like Mistral AI and capital-intensive infrastructure plays that are not really tech startups, like EV charging networks (Driveco) and EV battery factories (Verkor), funding rounds are drastically down. Pure software startups have had a rough couple of years.

Pigment appears as an exception with its Series D. Existing investor Iconiq Growth is doubling down by leading this new funding round. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital are also participating — many of them were existing investors too.

“Our current investors told us ‘if you’re going to raise money in 18 months to scale with others, we might as well offer you great terms right now for an internal round.’ And everything happened very quickly … In one week, it was a done deal,” co-founder and co-CEO Eléonore Crespo told me.

Before Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google. She co-founded Pigment with Romain Niccoli, who was the co-founder and CTO of adtech startup Criteo — an early success of the French tech ecosystem.

“IVP — one of our backers — benchmarks the growth rate of all SaaS companies. And since we’ve been selling our product, we’ve been in the top 5% of SaaS companies with the best growth rate ever, in terms of revenue growth,” Crespo said.

10. Bristol-based Empirical Ventures targets €11.6 million fund to lead early-stage deep science rounds

The VC has already received a €5.8 million commitment from British Business Investments, through its Regional Angels Programme, to invest alongside Empirical Ventures’ new S/EIS Fund and its angel syndicate. Another €3.7 million has been committed as a first close into the S/EIS fund by other investors. Empirical Ventures are active investors across the UK, with most of its investments taking place outside of London.

Dr. Benjamin Miles (PhD, Physics) and Dr. Johnathan Matlock (PhD, Chemistry), met at the University of Bristol spinout company, Ziylo Ltd, in 2016 where they were part of the core scientific team. Ziylo was later acquired by Novo Nordisk in a deal potentially worth over $800 million — one of the largest acquisitions of a UK spinout company.

Miles and Matlock have been very active in the UK’s deep science ecosystem, founding Science Angel Syndicate, which along with personal investments, has made over 65 investments totalling over £6 million in deep science companies. Miles also founded Spin Up Science in 2018, which has supported over 4,500 scientists in entrepreneurship and catalysed over 200 deeptech companies across the UK.

Dr. Johnathan Matlock, VC investor and cofounder at Empirical Ventures, said: “We want to back the most innovative and advanced startups that address not only the necessities we’re facing for the future — climate change, dwindling resources, accessible healthcare — but also startups that create new markets and possibilities based on technology no one has seen before. We’re looking forward to bringing our experience and contacts together to support these startups to achieve their maximum positive impact.”

Dr. Ben Miles, VC investor and co-founder at Empirical Ventures, added: “We are looking at entirely new technologies driven by fundamental research. These startups have incredible potential but are also very hard to diligence and value at the early stages, and that is hurting the ecosystem as a whole in the UK. We’re addressing that gap in the market by validating and funding the most exciting and novel technologies from the beginning and helping the founders through their journeys based on our own experiences to make them into successful and significant companies.”

Empirical Ventures has already invested in 18 companies across advanced materials, life sciences, robotics, and energy transition technologies, including startups like BaseImmune, Anaphite, CheMastery, Wase, Ensilicated Technologies, and QV Bioelectronics. Augmenting the team as venture partners are Hon. Alexander Fink and Dr Keith Lipman (PhD, Physics).

Adam Kelly, Managing Director, British Business Investments, added: “We are excited to back Johnathan and Ben, who are addressing a large gap of undertaking significant due diligence in early-stage deep science investing which in turn increases angel involvement into this vital sector. This commitment highlights the Regional Angels Programme’s objectives of developing the early-stage funding ecosystem across the UK Nations and Regions, bringing together finance, business experience and skills to support the development of high-growth smaller businesses.”

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.