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Investors See Growth in Rental Robots
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Good day. Bracing for the holiday crunch, logistics firms like DHL, Ceva Logistics AG and Boots UK Ltd. are increasingly turning to robotics startups for seasonal help—and capturing the attention of investors.
Zach Barasz, a partner at G2 Venture Partners, is among those anticipating growing demand for package-handling robots across the logistics sector. G2 co-led a $117 million Series F round for Locus Robotics, a seven-year-old Wilmington, Mass.-based startup that provides logistics firms with robots on a subscription basis—a model known as robots-as-a-service.
Locus expects about a third of its 90 corporate customers this year to order extra robots, which it calls “SurgeBots.” That’s up from roughly a quarter of clients last year, the company said.
Mr. Barasz said he was attracted to Locus as one of the few robotics firms that have successfully implemented subscription robots in the logistics industry at scale.
Jordan Kretchmer, co-founder and CEO of Rapid Robotics, a three-year-old startup that raised $12 million in a Series A round last year, says it has seen a 733% increase in deployed robots over the past year. The San Francisco-based company provides subscription-based robots to logistics operators, as well as automakers, medical-device developers and other manufacturers.
The robots-as-a-service model is “essentially shifting capex into opex,” said Aaron Jacobson, a partner at Rapid Robotics investor NEA, referring to the upfront costs of buying a robot versus the spread-out expenses of leasing one month to month. The market for these robots is poised for growth, he said, because it solves chronic labor shortages in industries that are known for “being dull, dirty and or dangerous.”
And that’s true even during the holidays.
And now on to the news...
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Fanatics expects to complete an IPO but plans to wait until some of its newer business lines are more established. PHOTO: DUANE PROKOP/GETTY IMAGES
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Something to cheer about. Fanatics Inc. has raised about $700 million from a group of investors, pushing the sports-merchandising company’s valuation to $31 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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About two-thirds of the new money came from parties that hadn’t previously invested in the company, including private-equity firm Clearlake Capital Group LP, which led the round, and investment and merchant-banking firm LionTree LLC, the people said. Prior Fanatics investors such as Silver Lake, Fidelity Management & Research Co. and SoftBank Group Corp. were also among the participants, they said.
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Proceeds from the investment, which comes in the form of common stock, will be set aside for strategic M&A, the people said. The goal is to help Fanatics grow across its divisions and won’t be used to fund its day-to-day operations, they said.
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Fanatics’ latest valuation marks a relatively modest step up from March, when it raised $1.5 billion at a $27 billion valuation. Still, it stands out as one of the few instances of a big company raising money at a higher valuation during the market turmoil of 2022.
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$14.99
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What HBO Max costs after its just-announced return to Amazon Prime Video, the same price the service costs on other distribution platforms.
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Lawmakers Want Answers From Silvergate About FTX Transfers
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Lawmakers are demanding information from Silvergate Capital Corp. about transfers of customer funds between Sam Bankman-Fried‘s collapsed trading firm, Alameda Research, and his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, WSJ reports. In a letter to the bank Monday, Republican Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana and Roger Marshall of Kansas, along with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said an Alameda depository account at Silvergate “appears to be at the center” of the transfer of FTX customer funds to the trading firm. Failure to detect this “scheme,” the senators said, could mean the bank broke anti-money-laundering laws. Silvergate had no immediate comment
Tuesday. On Monday, CEO Alan Lane said the bank did “extensive due diligence” on FTX and Alameda before taking them on as customers. “By performing our risk management procedures and fulfilling our regulatory obligations, Silvergate plays a key role in helping law enforcement identify bad actors,” Mr. Lane said.
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Juul Reaches Settlement of Over 5,000 Lawsuits
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Juul Labs Inc. reached a sweeping legal settlement Tuesday covering more than 5,000 lawsuits and about 10,000 individual plaintiffs, resolving much of the legal uncertainty that had pushed the e-cigarette company to the brink of bankruptcy, WSJ reports. Juul said Tuesday that it had secured an equity investment to cover the cost of the settlement. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Juul has been in talks with early investors including two of its longtime board members, Hyatt Hotels heir Nick Pritzker and California investor Riaz Valani, to fund a bailout that would cover legal liabilities, the Journal previously reported.
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Alpine Investors Seeks $3.8 Billion for New Buyout Fund
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Alpine Investors is targeting $3.8 billion for its ninth main fund, or about 69% more than it collected for a predecessor vehicle, according to public documents prepared for the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, WSJ Pro reports. Alpine’s considerably higher target for the new pool is increasingly rare in today’s fundraising market for private-equity firms. Volatility in securities markets and a freeze up in initial public offerings has caused many fund investors to become overcommitted to the asset class, forcing them to write smaller checks to new funds or to hold off on new investments. San Francisco-based Alpine Investors will use the new fund to acquire software and technology
services companies.
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Osome, a London-based software startup, has raised $25 million in a Series B round, the company said. Investors in the round include Illuminate Financial and AFG Partners, among others. Osome is developing a small-business accounting platform designed to simplify financial management.
Lokavant Inc., a Princeton N.J. and New York City-based clinical trial intelligence company, raised a $21 million investment round led by Edison Partners, a growth equity investment firm.
BitAlpha Inc., which does business as Bitwave, a San Francisco-based financial technology startup, raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Hack VC and Blockchain Capital, with participation by SignalFire, Valor Equity Partners, Arca, Pulsar Trading, and Alumni Ventures Blockchain Fund.
Vaultree secured a $12.8 million Series A investment round, bringing the data-encryption startup's total funding to $16.1 million. Molten Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures led the round. Other investors include SentinelOne, Elkstone Partners, CircleRock Capital and Cyber Club London.
MALK Organics, an alternative milk brand, said it closed on more than $9 million in a Series B round led by Benvolio Group and Rotor Capital. MALK, which makes plant-based milk, said it will use this capital to expand its retail presence, increase marketing efforts, and recruit team members. MALK, founded in 2015, said its alternative milk products include unsweetened almond, vanilla almond, oat, vanilla oat and chocolate oat.
Rezonate, which builds defenses for cloud-based services, completed an $8.7 million round, with funding coming from State of Mind Ventures, Flybridge and other investors.
Dae Hair, a Phoenix, Ariz.-based hair-care brand, raised an $8 million Series A funding round led by Verity Venture Partners with participation from Digital Brand Architects, Whitney Port, Aimee Song, Christine Andrew, and Willow Growth Partners.
MoveEasy, a home management platform and concierge service, raised $7 million in a Series A round led by Moderne Ventures with a strategic investment from Travelers. MoveEasy said more than a million homeowners now use its platform.
Austin, Texas-based enterprise software startup Protopia AI announced a $6 million seed funding round led by ATX Venture Partners, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, Silverton Partners and DNX Ventures. The new capital will be used to build out engineering teams and advance AI-enabled data analytics software, the startup said.
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Meta has for years allowed users to opt out of personalizing ads based on data from other websites and apps. PHOTO: PETER DASILVA/REUTERS
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