Startup Monday: Latest tech trends & news happening in the global startup ecosystem (Issue 140- September 28)

Narine Emdjian
9 min readSep 28, 2024

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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. Arch closes $3B-plus fund as biotech investment environment shows more signs of a revival

Though Arch didn’t get into detail about its goals for the new tranche of cash, the venture firm noted that beneficiaries of “Fund XIII” already include programmable cell therapy company ArsenalBio , inflammatory and fibrotic disease specialist , artificial intelligence drug discovery startup Mirador Therapeutics and , which just this week Xaira Therapeutics data on a new GLP-1 receptor agonist.

AI and data-driven insights into biology will be key for the future of healthcare, Robert Nelsen, Arch co-founder and managing director, stressed in a statement.

“Arch is first and foremost a company builder; we foster innovation at scale to develop new technologies and medicines as rapidly as possible,” Keith Crandell, managing director and Arch’s other co-founder, added in the firm’s release. “We remain incredibly excited by the pace of innovation and efforts to understand disease at a deeper level.”

Arch’s latest venture fund tops 2022’s “Fund XII,” which capped out at around $2.98 billion.

Several of 2024’s largest private biotech financing rounds have come thanks in part to Arch’s investments in ArsenalBio, Xaira, Mirador and Metsera.

2.Spanish VC closes $200M fund with plan to broaden investments worldwide

The fund is Asabys’ second and will be funneled toward life science companies, with money already invested in five companies, including Barcelona-based cytokine biotech Orikine Bio and Belgian neuro biotech Augustine Therapeutics.

Asabys announced the first closing of the fund-dubbed Sabadell Asabys Health Innovation Investments II (SAHII II)-in January 2023. That allowed the company to bring on new global and U.S. investors since its initial 117 million euro fund closed in 2022.

The firm’s strategy is to finance biopharma, medical device and digital health companies working to create new solutions for unmet medical needs.

“The successful and oversubscribed close of our SAHII II fund allows us to continue investing in the Spanish life sciences ecosystem, while strategically broadening our focus to Europe and other global markets,” Clara Campàs, Ph.D., founding and managing partner at Asabys, said in a Sept. 26 release.

The report focused on valuations in Europe broadly-not just in the life sciences-and found that VC trends seemed to be heading north.

Median deal sizes “continued to tick higher across all stages” in the first half of 2024, according to the report. In particular, AI is “buoying the dispersion in early and late stages,” though that did leave the question of how much other areas of the market were rebounding without the help of the “AI effect.”

3. Israeli AI startup forges $18m partnership with AstraZeneca for cancer drug trials

Immunai, founded in 2018, has developed an AI platform to comprehensively map and decode the human immune system with single-cell biology, machine learning capabilities, and big data computation in order to fuel discoveries of new therapeutics and accelerate drug development.

“Artificial Intelligence is transforming cancer drug discovery and clinical development,” said AstraZeneca chief data scientist IkerHuerga.

Huerga said the drugmaker will collaborate with Immunai to deploy its AI platform for its data-driven R&D strategy and to “glean potential new insights into mechanisms of action of immunotherapies.”

As part of the partnership, AstraZeneca said it will use Immunai’s AI model of the immune system and machine learning capabilities for clinical decision-making, including dose selection, elucidating mechanisms of action, patient responder analysis, and biomarker identification.

“Bringing a drug to market is incredibly challenging, time-consuming and expensive,” said Immunai CEO Noam Solomon. “Through this collaboration with AstraZeneca, we’re excited to leverage our AI-based engine to help make this process more efficient in bringing potential new therapies to patients.”

On average, developing a new drug or finding a potential blockbuster medicine takes billions of dollars over almost a decade because of the lengthy trials and lab work involved in the process. Despite these investments and efforts, over 90 percent of drug candidates in clinical trials fail to gain regulatory approval and make it to market primarily due to lack of efficacy and safety.

Immunai said it has been growing its staff in recent years to 170 employees made up of 85 experts in genomics, machine learning, bioinformatics, immunology, and software engineering. Headquartered in New York City, Immunai has offices in Tel Aviv, Zurich, and Prague.

4. Startup aiming to bring robotics into interventional radiology raises $73M

VC firm Threshold Ventures led the Series B funding round with participation from Lux Capital, PFM Health Sciences, and Fred Moll (founder of Intuitive Surgical and Auris Health). Silicon Valley-based Mendaera is working to commercialize a handheld interventional platform that incorporates robotics, artificial intelligence, imaging and virtual connectivity.

Leaders said the product is designed to be used across different medical specialties and sites of service as the company works to improve access to needle-based interventional care.

DeFonzo and colleagues highlighted the increasing demand for interventional procedures amid healthcare provider shortages. They hope utilizing this emerging technology will bolster the availability of commonplace procedures such as biopsies, organ and vascular access, and pain management interventions.

5. AI startup Scribenote raises $8.2 mln in Andreessen Horowitz-led funding round

The fundraise also saw participation from venture capital firm Inovia Capital and Velocity Fund, which invests in early-stage startups.

It wasn’t immediately clear at what valuation the funds were raised.

Scribenote, founded in 2019, uses artificial intelligence to automate documentation of medical records for veterinarians. It has automated more than 1.5 million medical records in less than a year, the company said.

6. Amazon’s $4 billion partnership with AI startup Anthropic gets UK competition clearance

The watchdog found that San Francisco-based Anthropic’s revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country’s merger rules.

“We welcome the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority decision acknowledging its lack of jurisdiction regarding this collaboration,” Amazon said in a statement. “By investing in Anthropic, we’re helping to spur entry and competition in generative AI.”

Under the deal, Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider and Amazon’s custom chips to build, train and deploy its AI models.

7. Prepared, which wants to ‘revolutionize’ emergency 911 calls, raises $27M

Prepared co-founder and CEO Michael Chime claims that the platform can give operators valuable context they wouldn’t otherwise have.

“The goal of our technology is to reduce the burden of each individual call so that emergency response can move faster,” Chime told TechCrunch. “If we can save even a few seconds on a given 911 call, we want to do that.”

Launched by Chime, Dylan Gleicher, and Neal Soni in 2019, Prepared initially focused on a single type of emergency response: school shootings. The trio, who grew up near the sites of devastating school shootings, including Sandy Hook Elementary, dropped out of Yale together to build a public safety app for school administrators.

8. French startup SURGAR raises €11 million to deploy AR for minimally invasive surgery

The company also benefited from the renewed support of its historical investors (UI Investissement and Crédit Agricole Capital Innovation). BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole Centre France, and Banque Populaire Auvergne Rhône-Alpes completed the financing.

SURGAR’s augmented reality software combines the best of computer vision and artificial intelligence. By merging the patient’s digital twin (obtained through MRI or CT scans) with the minimally invasive (laparoscopic) view in real-time, SURGAR makes the invisible visible: the surgeon can visualize internal organ structures (tumors, vessels, ducts). This technology makes surgeries safer, faster, and more efficient. The goal is to halve surgical complications and increase precision by 20 times! The benefits for patients are significant (minimally invasive surgery rates, cancer recurrence rates, complication rates) with substantial cost savings for healthcare providers (hospital stay duration, surgical efficiency).

This cutting-edge technology is the result of over 12 years of collaboration between the Clermont-Ferrand University Hospital and the EnCoV team of the Pascal Institute (Université Clermont-Auvergne, CNRS, INP Clermont-Auvergne). SURGAR combines artificial intelligence, computer vision, and clinical expertise, thanks to the synergy of Professors Bourdel, Bartoli, Canis, and Le Roy, co-founders of the startup.

The funding will enable SURGAR to launch U-SURGAR, a software dedicated to female patients suffering from fibroids and adenomyosis (a form of endometriosis within the uterus), and to finalize and commercialize L-SURGAR and K-SURGAR, aimed at treating liver and kidney cancers respectively. Other AI-driven applications, including those for endometriosis, are in development, and numerous collaboration agreements have already been signed with hospitals both in France and internationally.

9. London-based Raycast raises €27 million Series B to help iOS and Windows enhance productivity

, a software company redefining productivity, has raised a €27 million Series B funding round to reduce workplace context switching and improve focus. European investor Atomico led the round, alongside participation from Accel, Coatue, Y Combinator, Atlassian Ventures, World Innovation Lab and notable angels Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub) and Tobi Lütke (CEO of Shopify). As part of this round, Atomico Partner Luca Eisenstecken will join Raycast’s board.

As the Information Age transforms the way people live and work, the proliferation of software tools — which are meant to increase productivity and simplify lives — is in fact making work increasingly complex and fragmented. Knowledge workers are now constantly switching contexts between workflows and tools, leading to mental overload and significant productivity loss. A 2022 Harvard Business Review (HBR) study of mid and back-office workers at Fortune 500 companies found that the “cost” of each context switch is about two seconds, with the average user toggling between different apps and websites nearly 1,200 times each day. Over a year, this “toggle tax” added up to five working weeks or 9% of annual time — lost time which damages productivity and makes it hard to keep focus.

Raycast has been built to combat this digital fragmentation and help people achieve ‘Flow’ — a concept central to its mission to help knowledge workers achieve a perfect state of productivity. Acting as the ultimate shortcut to everything, its platform allows users to interact with different apps without fully switching contexts, enabling them to maintain a state of productive flow. Over 1500 open-source extensions are available to users to make the most of apps like GitHub, Zoom and Notion without losing track of their thoughts.

Since its launch in 2020, Raycast has become the go-to tool for software engineers, product developers and designers, building a 22k-strong community of developers who use and build on the tool. In total, Raycast has hundreds of thousands of daily active users for its Mac capabilities, and after significant demand the company is also today announcing that they will be launching upcoming iOS and Windows versions soon with users able to register their interest from today here.

10. German company Enginsight gets €6 million to strengthen cybersecurity for SMEs

Also joined as co-investors bm-t beteiligungsmanagement thüringen GmbH, Talanx AG, Smart Infrastructure Ventures, and Brandenburg VENTURES GmbH.

SMEs comprise 99.4% of the German economy and are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks due to their lack of resources and expertise to defend against increasingly sophisticated threats. Such cyberattacks caused damages of €203 billion in Germany in 2022, according to the annual IT security report by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

Unsurprisingly, various reports call for increased cybersecurity engagement from policymakers and organizations. Enginsight focuses its solutions on those most affected by this danger. The company’s innovative platform aims to shield SMEs from the financial damage these attacks can cause. Businesses of all sizes and industries — from small accounting firms to companies with 10,000 employees — can benefit from this offering.

“Our goal is to ease the burden on IT managers in SMEs and provide them with the transparency and control they need over their networks,” said Mario Jandeck, co-founder and CEO of Enginsight. “Every day, about 70 new vulnerabilities are discovered in software products — a massive threat, especially considering the sensitivity and importance of business data. With our holistic approach, which focuses on threat detection, prevention, and automated vulnerability management, companies can act proactively to protect themselves.”

Despite the growing threat, too few SMEs have stepped up their security efforts. A 2019 empirical study revealed that 53% of respondents took up to seven days to detect a cyberattack. This slow response is as concerning as the fact that only 62% of small businesses regularly install security updates, and just 18% have an emergency response plan in place.

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Narine Emdjian
Narine Emdjian

Written by Narine Emdjian

Founder at iFund Lab | Federal Funding Expert helping startups & tech entrepreneurs to raise non-dilutive funding through SBIR & other federal funding programs.

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