Good day. Locus Robotics, a startup that makes robots to handle packages in fulfillment and distribution warehouses, has raised $117 million in a Series F funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and G2 Venture Partners, the company said this morning. As part of the deal, Goldman Managing Director Mark Midle and Zach Barasz, a G2 partner, will join the Locus board of directors, the startup said.

The funding round, which lifts the seven-year-old company’s private-market valuation to nearly $2 billion, comes at a time when many late-stage startups are going out of their way to avoid raising new capital for fear of fetching lower-priced equity stakes amid tanking public tech markets and the threat of recession.   

The warehouse robotics sector continues to build on the momentum precipitated by the outbreak of Covid-19, which led to a surge in online shopping and home deliveries. Ongoing problems in global supply chains—a chronic shortage of warehouse workers among them—have also fast-tracked automation efforts at logistics firms, analysts say.

DHL Supply Chain North America, a unit of Deutsche Post AG and a Locus customer, this year plans to deploy some 2,000 robots to transport goods around its warehouses—leveraging additional “surge bots” during the peak holiday shopping season, said DHL Chief Information Officer Sally Miller.

Goldman Sachs was drawn to Wilmington, Mass.-based Locus as an industry leader in the “massive warehouse fulfillment and distribution market,” Mr. Midle said in a statement. 

Spun out from Quiet Logistics Inc. in 2015, Locus today has more than 90 corporate customers, including DHL and other logistics giants, with robots at more than 230 sites around the world, the company said.

“Our goal is to build a really big business,” Locus Chief Executive Rick Faulk said.

And now on to the news...

BlockFi files for bankruptcy as latest crypto casualty. Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi Inc. filed for bankruptcy Monday, making it the latest major digital-assets firm to fail since FTX, with which BlockFi is financially intertwined, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

• BlockFi’s chapter 11 filing continues the march of crypto platforms forced into insolvency following this summer’s crypto-price downturn and this month’s failure of FTX, a big exchange with ties throughout the largely unregulated industry.
   
• BlockFi, based in Jersey City, N.J., is only beginning to answer how its customers will fare. The company’s top 10 creditors alone are owed close to $1.2 billion, according to its filings with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Trenton, N.J., with the total amount of liabilities likely to be much larger.
   
• The bankruptcy filing is a black eye for one of the industry’s biggest boosters, tech investor Peter Thiel, whose Valar Ventures owned 19% of BlockFi’s shares, according to documents filed with the bankruptcy court. 

After years of ambitious targets and bold promises, investors are growing impatient with the pace of driverless-car development, applying pressure on an industry that had become accustomed to latitude and piles of cash from investors, WSJ reports.

• Activist investor TCI Fund Management this month sent a letter to Alphabet Inc. questioning the company’s continued spending on its self-driving unit, Waymo.
   
• Driverless-delivery startup Nuro Inc. this month disclosed it would reduce staff by about 20%, citing difficulties raising new funds.
   
• Intel Corp. last month took its Mobileye car-tech unit public in an initial public offering that valued the company at $23 billion on the first day of trading—well below the $50 billion its leaders had initially targeted.

Private-equity firm TPG Inc. has recruited former Wall Street power broker Tom Montag and partnered with several blue-chip companies to launch a carbon-credit business it hopes will add transparency and boost growth in the nascent market for emissions offsets, WSJ reports. The firm is investing $300 million into the new company, called Rubicon Carbon, and is aiming to raise a total of $1 billion to kick-start the effort. Rubicon Carbon is intended to give buyers a simpler and safer way to invest in carbon credits. The investment represents one of the private sector’s largest efforts to expand the roughly $2 billion market for voluntary carbon credits that companies buy to offset their carbon emissions. Bank of America, the venture arm of JetBlue Airways Corp., and NGP Energy Capital Management have committed to invest in the new firm. General Electric Co., Honeywell International Inc. and McKinsey & Co. are among the companies helping launch the platform.

The political divide over the role that environmental, social and governance factors should play in state pension investments stands to deepen as Republicans gained some ground in the midterm elections and the Labor Department issued a new, pro-ESG rule for retirement plans, WSJ Pro reports. Certain Republican-controlled states, such as Florida, in recent months have launched or proposed rules that require state pensions and treasuries to consider only “pecuniary factors” in their investment decisions, as they believe investments based on ESG considerations violate those entities’ fiduciary duties. Other states, including Texas, have blacklisted asset managers for allegedly boycotting sectors such as oil and gas, coal and firearms, effectively barring them from investing with such managers.

Exits

Simfoni acquired fellow provider of spend-management and procurement technology Xeeva for an undisclosed amount. Last year, Simfoni said it raised a $15 million Series B round led by Peakspan Capital. Xeeva is listed in the portfolio of PeakEquity
Partners.

Edtech company Promethean purchased digital whiteboard platform Explain Everything for an undisclosed sum. EBRD Venture Capital and Credo Ventures list Explain Everything in their portfolios.

Escient Pharmaceuticals Inc., a San Diego-based startup advancing novel small molecule therapeutics for the potential treatment of neurosensory-inflammatory disorders, closed a $120 million Series C round led by New Enterprise Associates, Abingworth and Forge Life Science Partners. Additional new investors including Avego, PFM Health Sciences and the Eleven Fund also participated in the funding, along with previous backers the Column Group, 5AM Ventures, Redmile Group, Cowen Healthcare Investments, Sanofi Ventures, Osage University Partners and Altitude Life Science Ventures.

Deepgram, an automatic speech-recognition startup with offices in San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Mich., added $47 million in Series B funding, bringing the round total to $72 million. Madrona Venture Group led the round, which saw participation from Alkeon and others.

Bionaut Labs Inc., a Los Angeles-based startup using microscale robots to treat central nervous system diseases and disorders, raised $43.2 million in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures. New investors Deep Insight, OurCrowd, Sixty Degree Capital, Dolby Family Ventures, What if Ventures and Gaingels also joined the round, alongside existing backers Upfront Ventures, BOLD Capital Partners, Revolution and Compound.

V7, a London-based artificial-intelligence data engine startup, landed $33 million in Series A funding. Co-led by Radical Ventures and Temasek, the round included contributions from Air Street Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and Partech. Parasvil Patel, a partner at Radical Ventures, will join the company’s board.

Morse Micro, an Australian WiFi services provider for the Internet of Things, added 30 million Australian dollars (about $20 million) in Series B financing from investors including TelstraSuper, Hesta, Hostplus and others. Blackbird Ventures, Main Sequence Ventures and Skip Capital previously invested in Morse Micro.

Pearpop, a Los Angeles-based creator marketing and collaboration platform, snagged $18 million in additional Series A funding, giving the company a $300 million valuation. Sound Ventures, Seven Seven Six, Blockchange Ventures, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund and C2 Ventures provided the new investment.

Kiln, a Web3 staking platform, completed a €17 million funding round. Lead investor Illuminate Financial was joined by ConsenSys, Kraken Ventures, LeadBlock Partners, Sparkle Ventures, Third Kind Venture Capital, BlueYard Capital, Alven and SV Angel in the funding. 

Range Energy, a Mountain View, Calif.-based commercial transportation electrification startup, was seeded with an $8 million investment from UP Partners, R7 and Yamaha Motor Ventures.

SafeGuard Privacy, a New York-based privacy compliance platform, picked up a $7 million investment led by TechOperators.

• Facebook parent Meta fined $276 million in Europe for data-scraping leak

• JPMorgan, other banks in talks to reimburse scammed Zelle customers 
   
• Elon Musk’s tunnel-building Boring Co. ghosts cities across America 
   
• Elon Musk claims Apple is threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store 
   
• Amid streaming losses Disney’s theme parks are a sore spot for investors, too

• Amazon has a new drone for 30-minute urban deliveries (Axios)
   
• Move over, operators—consultants are the new nontraditional VC (TechCrunch) 

This newsletter was compiled by Angus Loten and Zachary Cole.

WSJ Pro Venture Capital is a premium service of The Wall Street Journal. We cover venture capital and the global startup ecosystem. Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The Team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, Brian Gormley, Angus Loten, Eric Sylvers and Marc Vartabedian.

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