In a field where the laboratory notebook is still considered the state of the art, it’s no wonder a company like Benchling, which provides software for managing life sciences research, was able to nab $34.5 million.

Considering how much detailed technical work goes into the research that produces all of our great leaps forward in biotechnology, it’s a wonder that the practice wasn’t digitized sooner.

Financiers certainly see the benefit in Benchling’s technology — a new twist on what’s now a standard verticalized software as a service for a niche industry. Y Combinator Continuity, Thrive Capital and Benchmark Lead Edge Capital joined lead investor Menlo Ventures in financing the company.

The company said it would use the money to grow internationally and develop new products and services.

“Life science R&D has become incredibly complex across molecules, processes, and data structures. And until Benchling, there had been no end to end purpose-built SaaS application to enhance, streamline, and drive collaboration across R&D processes,” said Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures, in a statement. “Biologics are the future of life sciences and the faster that innovation gets to market, the more society benefits. Benchling‘s software replaces pen and paper workflows and becomes the system of record for a wide range of biotech and pharma R&D projects from medicine and cancer treatment to plant-based meat and sustainable materials.”

Screenshot of Benchling’s molecular modeling tool

Benchling’s software is used by more than 170,000 scientists around the world in academic labs at Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Berkeley, according to the company. Its paying customers include Beam Therapeutics, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Zoetis and Zymergen .

Benchling started out with free software for researchers to replace notebooks with an electronic records management system and a digital model of molecules that could be collaboratively updated by a team of researchers.

Since those initial products, the company added project management, cross-project visibility and real-time views of development progress for business customers, according to Menlo’s Murphy.

“Benchling was created for today’s researchers who are working on cutting-edge science, allowing them to focus on achieving the next breakthrough outcomes,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, co-founder and CEO at Benchling, in a statement. “The next generation of scientists is already on Benchling and at the forefront of establishing the future of the life science and biotech industries. We’ll use this investment to support deeper engagements with large commercial customers and bring the power of the cloud to tackle the complexity of biotech.”

Screenshot of Benchling’s batch management software

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Benchling’s software for managing biotech research nabs .5 million

Raena, an Indonesian startup that helps social media influencers launch their own e-commerce brands, announced today that it has raised $1.82 million in seed funding. The round was led by Beenext, with participation from Beenos, Strive and the personal offices of Shailesh Rao, a partner with TPG Growth, and Sanjay Nath, managing partner of Blume Ventures. Like Revolve Group in the United States and Ruhnn Holding in China, which both recently went public, Raena partners with influencers, providing them with the resources to create products under their own branding.

The company launched two months ago and is currently focused on Southeast Asia, where it has partnered with seven influencers so far, who have a total following of 12 million. Founded by CEO Sreejita Deb, who previously held roles at Amazon, InMobi and Google, Raena started by selling Japanese and Korean beauty brands to Indonesian customers. Deb says the company decided to start working with influencers after the products sold well, despite their premium prices and having little brand recognition in Indonesia.

She adds that Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand have some of the highest rates of social media penetration in the world, especially on Instagram, but influencers still have few ways to make money no matter how large their follower base.

“The internet ad market is not as robust as in the U.S. or China, so influencers have a ready-made audience, but their opportunity to monetize their audience is very low,” says Deb. “That’s the premise on which I started the company. If influencers want to monetize their audiences, one way is to become their own e-commerce unit.”

Raena’s team includes people who previously worked at Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Zalora, beauty brand Foreo, Indonesian education startup Ruangguru and Benscrub, an online skincare store. The company draws on their connections to product development teams, suppliers and distribution networks in India, China, Japan and Korea. In order to figure out who to work with and which products to launch, Raena takes a data-driven approach, Deb says.

The company looks for influencers that have at least 500,000 subscribers on YouTube or Instagram and has had discussions with people who have as many as 6.6 million followers. Its most important metric, however, is audience engagement, and to gauge that, Raena has developed internal tools that crawl the last 50 posts made by an influencer on Instagram to see how many of their followers liked or commented on it (in the case of videos, it checks the percentage of people who watched the whole thing). Deb says a good engagement rate is anywhere around 2%, with 10% being “amazing.”

Because Raena is currently focused on women’s beauty products, its internal tools then hone in on how many of their posts are about beauty related products, and checks if engagement on those posts is higher or lower than the average aggregated engagement for their other posts.

“If someone has a million followers and has 10% engagement on average, but when you check branded content or a promo she’s done and see the engagement dips to .5%, that indicates her audience doesn’t want to hear her talking about brands or beauty,” Deb says. “Those nuances become very important for us. We look for influencers who have a certain threshold of engagement and influence in different categories.”

For influencers who meet their metrics, Raena provides product development and logistical resources. The first brand it launched was Moonella and Family, created with babymoonella, a family with a total audience of more than two million. Deb says its debut offering, the Calm and Rescue Balm, took five weeks to create from conception to launch and was chosen because the company saw demand among milliennial parents for childcare products that are paraben- and sulphate-free. They also saw that many young women, even those without children, like to buy all-purpose balms to use on their lips or dry skin.

Raena’s team first discusses consumer research with its influencer partners, who are usually presented with about five product concepts. Then they go back to suppliers with feedback and the influencer’s criteria. After that, products are refined over several iterations. During that process, the influencer polls followers about what they want in the final product, before it goes into production. Deb says Raena plans to keep a very standardized product development process in order to ensure quality as the company scales up. Raena isn’t disclosing how much revenue it shares with influencers, but Deb says they get a cut of sales, without flat fees or minimum guarantees, so the company and its partners share risk more evenly.

One key difference between Southeast Asia and many other markets is the importance of marketplaces versus individual online stores. For example, the Calm and Rescue Balm is sold on Shopee and Lalabee.co. Deb says that presents unique distribution challenges, but on the other hand, it also leaves a lot of room for new products and direct-to-consumer brands.

“One of the biggest things in our favor is that in the U.S., the U.K. or Europe, when companies like Unilever or Procter & Gamble plan out a pipeline, those come to the top in more mature, developed markets like that. Essentially there is still very little product innovation for audiences in markets like Indonesia or India and a lot of direct-to-consumer brands have rushed to fill that void,” she says.

“We are launching in new markets and there are key differences,” she adds. “The approach to distribution needs to be more thoughtful and tailored to the market. You can’t copy and paste distribution models from the U.S., but on the plus side, video and social media have much higher penetration and because consumer companies are not moving at a fast enough pace for these markets, it leaves them ripe for direct-to-consumer innovation.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Raena raises .82 million to help influencers in Southeast Asia launch their own consumer brands

Adam Nelson, an early Dropbox employee and partner at Social Capital, has today announced that he’s joined New York-based FirstMark Capital as a partner.

Nelson was actually born and raised here in New York City on the Upper East Side and moved out to the West Coast when he attended Stanford for his MBA. It was there that he felt the first spark of Silicon Valley inspiration, which ultimately led him to join Dropbox as an early employee.

There, Nelson led their partner network, helping mom-and-pop IT shops serving SMBs sell Dropbox products to their clients. He also worked on the revenue partnerships team, which was mostly focused on strategic business development with large flagship partners, such as Vodafone and SoftBank, in international markets.

Nelson then moved on to Social Capital, where he spent a few years investing in startups, with a portfolio that includes Slack, Clearbanc, WeeCare and FareHarbor.

After some turmoil at the firm, Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya changed the structure of the firm to become more of a holding company than a traditional VC firm.

Now, Nelson has landed at FirstMark Capital.

FirstMark is one of the most vital VC firms in New York City, with a portfolio that includes Shopify, Airbnb, Discord, DraftKings, Brooklinen and Upwork. The firm has $1.6 billion under its management, and is known across the NYC ecosystem for its many events that bring startup founders and tech communities together.

The team at FirstMark includes Rick Heitzmann, Matt Turck, Amish Jani and Beth Ferreira. Nelson said that, predominantly, the team was a big part of what attracted him to FirstMark:

Their reputation speaks for itself, not only as early investors in some of the most transformational companies of the last decade and the returns that come with it, but most notably as true partners to the entrepreneurs leading those companies. That sentiment was overwhelming in my conversations across their portfolio and was also reinforced as I’ve gotten to know the team over these last few months. Ultimately, the venture business all comes down people, and the team at FirstMark is the group I want to come to work with everyday to help advance the meaningful companies of the next decade.

So what is Nelson looking for?

Coming from private equity, Nelson has a particular curiosity when it comes to the disruption of more traditional industries such as logistics, education and construction.

“I still think we’re in early innings,” said Nelson. “We’re seeing a lot of investment in finance, real estate, logistics, construction and the labor markets that support those huge multi-trillion dollar revenue markets. But we’re still in the early stages of that.”

At his core, however, Nelson is still a software investor and has experience in building out an operational playbook and a go-to-market playbook that can be applied to larger industries.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Adam Nelson joins FirstMark Capital

Cann, a Los Angeles-based purveyor of CBD and THC-infused intoxicants, is rolling out its first major distribution through the venture-backed delivery service Eaze as it begins to hit the streets in California.

The company, founded by two former Bain consultants, is the latest to take on the growing market for non-alcoholic intoxicants that use a combination of chemicals traditionally found in the marijuana plant to make their drinks.

First dreamed up by Jake Bullock while attending business school at Stanford, Cann launched earlier this month at MedMen and is now selling its $30 multi-flavor six-packs both in stores and through Eaze .

The beverages come with a 2 milligram dose of THC and 5 milligrams of CBD per can.

Bullock and his partner Luke Anderson met while both men were at Bain Consulting — and both have a background in consumer retail businesses. Bullock initially worked at the investment bank Allen & Co. before moving over to Bain for consulting and finally settling in to a job at Bain Capital investing in the firm’s San Francisco-based private equity shop.

Anderson remained at Bain Consulting until Bullock pulled him away to start Cann.

Combining low doses of THC and CBD isn’t a new concept. K-Zen Beverages has raised $5 million from the investment firm DCM to roll out its line of intoxicants and California Dreamin’ is a Y Combinator-backed intoxicant containing a whopping 10 milligrams of THC.

Bullock graduated from Stanford in 2018 and convinced Anderson to quit his job; the company raised cash through the fall and collected a cool $1.5 million for their venture.

Unlike other brands that are going for more fruity flavored beverages, Bullock and Anderson chose more herbaceous and floral flavors for their drinks — grapefuit and rosemary, lemon and lavender and blood orange and cardamom (honestly, it seems they’d go well with alcohol rather than replace it).

“We’re really proud of it being an innovative flavor profile and really interesting with the microdose on THC,” says Anderson.  

Cash came in from Navy Capital, a cannabis-focused hedge fund, and strategic angel investors like Bonobos co-founder Brian Spaly and Elizabeth Spaulding, the head of Bain & Co.’s digital practice.

For Eaze, which has stayed away from cannabis beverages, Cann seems to be a literal gateway for consumers who have been unwilling to try higher-dosage drinks.

Cann co-founders Luke Anderson and Jake Bullock (Image courtesy of Cann)

“They see this big blue ocean of future cannabis users that they haven’t accessed yet,” says Bullock. 

Younger consumers seem more willing to experiment with intoxicants other than traditional spirits these days, and venture capital firms are buzzed by the possibility of returns like the ones reaped by the George Clooney-founded spirit company Casamigos (which sold for $1 billion).

Kin Euphorics, backed by KBW Ventures, Canaan and Fifty Years is using chemicals other than cannabis to get that buzz, but most investors are looking at cannabis for the high and euphoria of intoxicating returns.

Cann, did a soft launch in June with a limited release across four MedMen stores in Los Angeles. “You start really small and notice what people are purchasing and what’s driving repurchasing,” says Anderson. “We had this fortunate problem of it flying off of the shelf with its packaging and flavor differentiation.”

And the company’s founders are also aware of the blatant injustice inherent in their ability to launch a drug distribution and delivery business in 2019 in Los Angeles when the city’s minority communities have been ravaged by the criminal justice system for doing the same thing.

So far, the company has taken the step of reaching out to 4thMVMT, the organization founded by Karim Webb to bring entrepreneurialism and investment to communities that have been damaged by the “War on Drugs.”

“We talk to them pretty frequently,” says Bullock. “We’re hoping that their first class will take over all their dispensaries… But we have a standing offer for anyone who they send over to us.”

For both Bullock and Anderson, their involvement in the cannabis industry also ties in to their own identities as gay men. “The role that cannabis played in the AIDS crisis, when the process to decriminalize was driven by the real need for that medicine,” says Anderson. “We’re early and it’s young, but part of the reason we launched the business was to make an impact in communities with our company.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | New THC and CBD-infused beverage company, Cann, joins the race to replace booze

One of the major problems that technology companies working to find a cure for cancer need to solve is finding a safe, minimally invasive way to detect cancers early.

Almost all cancer screening will eventually require a biopsy, but determining whether that’s necessary in the early stages of cancer can mean the difference between life and death.

It’s one of the reasons why investors have spent hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to find a reliable way to detect cancer from simple procedures like a blood draw. And it’s why they’re investing more than $160 million in the South San Francisco-based startup, Freenome. 

“If I could do it with less money and do it responsibly, I would,” says Gabriel Otte, Freenome’s founder and chief executive officer.

Since the company launched in 2014, it has been developing a test that combines machine learning with the development of proprietary assays to test for different types of cancer. The company’s research started in prostate cancer, but it has since turned its focus to colorectal cancer.

It’s a strain of the disease that has already been proven to respond well to early diagnosis and treatment, whereas other types of cancer are less well understood in their earliest stages, according to Otte.

By drawing samples of cell-free DNA from the blood, and treating it with methylation and protein biomarkers, the company is able to apply machine learning techniques to identify additive signatures that can increase the accuracy of early cancer detection tests.

Cancer of the colon, x-ray, sigmoid colon cancer, frontal abdominal x-ray (Photo By BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

By using multiple inputs rather than looking for just genetic material coming off of tumors, the company says that its tests can detect cancer earlier than traditional tests that are more invasive and can miss early signs of the disease.

Colorectal cancer, which is the second most lethal cancer in the U.S., has a 90% five-year relative survival rate when it’s detected early, according to data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program, cited by the company.

“We get this image in our head of a magical drug or using the immune system to kill a tumor. While drugs are an important part and will continue to play an important part… the difference between early detection and late-stage detection is life or death,” says Otte. 

Freenome has data on several types of cancers and has looked at tests for over seven different targets — including colorectal and prostate cancer. But the company decided not to pursue a test for multiple cancer types because if they launched one, it would not get used, Otte said.

“For the vast majority of cancer types today you wouldn’t do anything differently if you detected it early,” says Otte. “We haven’t developed what is the medical standard that we would apply to such an incident.”

Competitors in the diagnostics market disagree. Grail, a startup also working in the diagnostics, space has raised $1.5 billion for its technology that screens for multiple cancers. The company even announced results earlier this year that showed promising advances for its technology. According to the company, data showed Grail’s still-in-development multi-cancer blood test detected strong signals for 12 deadly cancer types at early stages with a very high specificity of at least 99% (or a false positive rate of 1% or less). And the test identified where the cancer originated in the body (the tissue of origin) with high accuracy.

Thrive Earlier Detection, which raised over $100 million in May, is another company taking the approach of looking at multiple cancer screens.

For Otte the results may be impressive, but without a standard of care to follow, the test results are fairly meaningless.

“It’s not to say that I’m not a fan of people going after multi-stage cancer,” says Otte. “It’s a long road to see that that works and that helps.”

Institute of Nuclear Medicine, University Hospital of Lille, France. Pet Scan Positron Emission Tomography. Colorectal Carcinoma. Hepatic Lesions. (Photo By BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)

The new financing for Freenome comes from RA Capital Management and Polaris Partners. The two investors were joined by funds advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Perceptive Advisors, Roche Venture Fund, Kaiser Permanente Ventures and the American Cancer Society’s own impact investment arm, BrightEdge Ventures.

Previous investors, who put in an initial $78 million to fund Freenome’s work, also participated in the round. They included: Andreessen Horowitz, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Data Collective Venture Capital, Section 32 and Verily Life Sciences (a subsidiary of Alphabet focused on life sciences and healthcare).

Freenome said the money would be used for a validation study and would then submit an application for its colorectal cancer screening test to both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Parallel Review Program.

“The biggest hurdle [to a company’s success] is reimbursement,” says Otte. “We’re talking about Medicare coverage is going to be no more than $500… so a test needs to be significantly under $500 mark to make a significant business. [That means it] has to have clinical utility. That’s why colorectal cancer is the right move for us… payers are going to be amenable to a test like ours. It’s a big hurdle to generate enough data over enough time to show that your test results in a better patient outcome.”

Again and again, the company’s investors come back to the need for early detection to be a component of a cure for the world’s deadliest diseases and it’s something that Freenome’s chief executive also stresses.

“The most affordable and effective treatment for metastatic cancer is to detect it early, when the tumor is still small and local, and we can cure it with surgery. It’s with that vision that we have invested in Freenome,” said Peter Kolchinsky, managing partner of RA Capital.

The company differentiates itself not just in its approach to target single cancers with a test, but also in its use of multiple inputs beyond the genetic material given off by the cancer cell itself, according to Otte.

He sees one of the limiting factors to the success of other approaches as their inability to collect enough genetic material to produce accurate enough samples — even when those samples are enhanced by machine learning.

“We don’t believe that CT DNA is actually going to solve this problem,” says Otte. “It comes down to physics… In early disease there are very few fragments of DNA that will come from the tumor. At that low concentration [roughly] .01%… To take the appropriate amount of blood. If you were to collect 80 ML it would be… To get to 90% you would have to collect 300MLs.”

Once you have identified a disease, then you can begin to treat it, but you have to have a correct diagnosis. The best drugs, which can bring someone with Stage 4 lung cancer who is at the brink of death back to perfect health, only work in a small percentage of patients. The best approach is to treat the patient before they ever need a miracle cure, says Otte.

“When I talk about curing cancer, the cure comes from early detection followed by early prevention and treatment,” he says.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | With 0 million in new funding, Freenome looks to commercialize its blood test to detect colorectal cancer