Weekly Round Up: 9/11/20

At Greenspring we believe in venture capital's ability to propel innovation, job creation and positive societal change. We celebrate those who think differently, take measured risk and challenge perceptions. Here's what's trending in VC this week:

Melio, providing digital payment tools for small businesses to manage their supplier payments, has raised $80 million in Series C financing led by Greenspring primary managers Accel, Aleph and Bessemer Venture Partners and with participation from Greenspring primary manager LocalGlobe. Read more here.

Bay Area-based Iron Ox, a company that develops robotic greenhouses for high quality growth of produce, has raised $20 million in Series B financing with participation by Greenspring primary manager Amplify Partners. Read more here.

CRV- and Obvious-backed Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which uses artificial intelligence and other digital tools to speed up drug discovery, has inked a long-term strategic partnership with Bayer, whose #CVC arm also led the company’s $239 million Series D in support of new therapies for fibrotic diseases and other disorders resulting from the build-up of damaged tissue. Read more here. 

Mosaic Building Group, a Phoenix-based proptech startup, has raised $14.25 million in Series A financing with participation from Greenspring primary manager Founders Fund. Read more here. 

Hasura, providing instant GraphQL with built-in authorization for your data, has raised $25 million led by Greenspring primary manager Lightspeed Venture Partners. Read more here. 

Redpoint direct investment Snowflake is inching closer to its hotly anticipated IPO: the company announced Tuesday that it expects to offer 28 million shares at $75-$85/share for a midpoint IPO valuation of $2.24 billion. The company’s platform “enables customers to consolidate data into a single source of truth to drive meaningful business insights, build data-driven applications, and share data,” and added, “We deliver our platform through a customer-centric, consumption-based business model, only charging customers for the resources they use.” Read more here. 

StackRox, a Kubernetes-native container security platform, has raised $26.5 million in Series C financing with participation by Greenspring primary manager Redpoint Ventures. Read more here. 

Oyster, a platform bringing financial services to SMEs and freelancers, has raised $14 million in recent financing with participation from Greenspring primary manager Redpoint Ventures. Read more here. 

Congrats to Chef, a software automation platform backed by Greenspring primawait ry managers Scale Venture Partners and Amplify Ventures, for being acquired by Progress, a developer tool company. Read more here. 

“One of the beauties of our platform was when COVID hit customers could come to our platform and suddenly access this tremendous amount of manufacturing capacity to produce this much-needed PPE.” We’re thrilled to announce our continued partnership with Greenspring direct investment Xometry through participation in their $75 million Series E financing round. Read more here. 

Greenspring Associates is committed to incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into our operational and investment processes. After becoming a signatory to the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2018, we recently completed our first PRI Assessment, providing in-depth reporting on our responsible investment commitments and practices during 2019 across a series of scored modules. The results are in, and we are proud to share that we scored A+ on the majority of modules. Read more about this accomplishment here.

Please join us in welcoming our four new hires this week at Greenspring! Nicole Leffler is a current student at Princeton University where she will obtain a degree in Operations Research and Financial Engineering. This past summer she was a Financial Analyst Intern for Blue Umbrella Ventures. Nicole will be assisting the Investor Relations team this semester. Lilly Costello is also a current student at Princeton University. She is a graduate of Garrison Forest School. She has interned at Brown Advisory and participated in the One Love Student Summit. Lilly will be assisting the Investor Relations team this semester. Alec Campbell is a recent graduate of Stevenson University with a Bachelors degree in Business Administration. He has interned at A.G. Campbell Advisory, LLC. Alec will be an Intern on the Fund Operations Team. Graham Buck is joining GA as a Business Intelligence Analyst. He was most recently a Business Intelligence Analyst at Allegis Global Solutions. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the University of Maryland. 

💻Yesterday, the NVCA endorsed the Endless Frontier Act, a significant piece of legislation that creates a $100 billion dollar five-year program to fund basic research and encourage technology commercialization in ten core technology areas. This legislation will meaningfully increase federal basic research investment and technology commercialization, improve our nation’s long-term economic competitiveness, create new industries and high-quality 21st century jobs and increase economic growth in regions across the country. Learn more here.

❗Interesting read on the impact of no-code startups on the VC investment space! Read about what Arun Mathew, Partner at Greenspring manager Accel, has to say about this and how it impacted Accel’s investment thesis here. 

The content here is for informational purposes only and should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice. It does NOT constitute an offer or solicitation to purchase any investment or a recommendation to buy or sell a security. In fact, the content is not directed to any investor or potential investor and may not be used to evaluate or make any investment.