Homebuilding is not for the faint of heart, particularly those who want to build something custom. Selecting the right architect and designer, the myriad contractors, the complexity of building codes and siting, the regulatory approvals from local authorities. It’s a full-time job — and you don’t even have a roof built over your head.

Atmos wants to massively simplify homebuilding, and in the process, democratize customization to more and more homeowners.

The startup, which is in the current Y Combinator batch, wants to take both the big decisions and the sundries of construction and combine them onto one platform where selecting a design and moving forward is as simple as clicking through a Shopify shopping cart.

It’s a vision that has already piqued the attention of investors. The company disclosed that it has already raised $2 million, according to CEO and co-founder Nick Donahue, from Sam Altman, former YC president and now head of OpenAI, and Adam Nash, former president and CEO of Wealthfront, along with a bunch of other angels.

It’s also a vision that is a radical turn from where Atmos was before, which was centered in virtual reality.

Donahue comes from a line of homebuilders — his father built home subdivisions as a profession — but his interests initially turned toward the virtual. He dropped out of college after realizing process engineering wasn’t all that exciting (who can blame him?) and headed out to the Valley, where he built projects like “a Burning Man art installation and [an] open-source VR headset.” That headset attracted the attention of angels, who funded its development.

The concept at the heart of the headset was around what the team dubbed the “spatial web.” Donahue explained that the idea was that “the concept of the web would one day flow from the 2D into the 3D and that physical spaces would function more like websites.” The headset he was developing would act as a sort of “browser” to navigate these spaces.

Of course, the limitations around VR hit his company as much as the rest of the industry, including limits on computation performance to build these 3D environments and the lack of scaling in the sector so far.

The thinking around changing physical spaces though got Donahue pondering about what the future of the home would look like. “We think the next kind of wave of this is going to be an introduction to compute,” he said, arguing that “every home will have like a brain to it.” Homes will be digital, controllable and customizable, and that will revolutionize the definition of the home that has remained stagnant for generations.

The big vision for Atmos going forward then is to capture that trend, but for today at least, the company is focused on making housing customization easier.

To use the platform, a user inputs the location for a new home and a floor plan for the site, and Atmos will find builders that best match the plan and coordinate the rest of the tasks to get the home built. It’s targeting homes in the $400,000-$800,000 range, and its focus cities are Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Atlanta, Denver and Austin.

It’s very much early stages for the company — Donahue says that the company has its first few projects underway in the Raleigh-Durham area and is working to partner and scale up with larger homebuilders.

Image Credits: KentWeakley / Getty Images

Will it work? That’s the big question with anything that touches construction. Customization is great — everyone loves to have their own pad — but the traditional challenge for construction is that the only way to bring down the cost of housing is to make it as uniform as possible. That’s why you get “cookie-cutter” subdivisions and rows of identical apartment buildings. The sameness allows a builder to find scale. Work crews can move from one lot to the next in synchronicity saving labor costs and time while building materials can be bought in bulk to save costs.

With better technology and some controls, Atmos might be able to find synergies between its customers, particularly if it gets market penetration in individual cities. Yet, I find the longer-term vision ultimately more compelling for the company. Redefining the home may not have made much sense three months ago, but as more people work from home and connect with virtual worlds, how should our homes be redesigned to accommodate these activities? If Atmos can find an answer, it is sitting on a gold mine.

Atmos team pic (minus two). Image Credits: Atmos

In addition to Altman and Nash, Mark Goldberg, JLL Spark, Shrug Capital, Daniel Gross’ Pioneer, Venture Hacks, Yuri Sagalov, Brian Norgard and others participated in the company’s angel/seed round.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Atmos wants to make building a house a one-click effort

In the first few minutes of pitching his new company, Candidate Labs, Jonathan Downey admitted that he’s operating in a market that is “done to death”: recruitment technology. But Downey, whose previous startup Airware shut down after burning $118 million, remains optimistic because of a little company named Zoom.

“There were lots and lots of videoconferencing companies and yet everybody’s experience was really bad,” he said. “It just took [Zoom] coming along and getting just a few more things right that totally transformed” videoconferencing.

Zoom lesson in mind, Candidate Labs launched today as a modern talent agency, after operating in stealth for the past seven months. The company also announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include SignalFire, Leah Solivan of Fuel Capital, BoxGroup, Lattice CEO Jack Altman and the founders of Opendoor, Eric Wu and Ian Wong.

Candidate Labs connects a data platform with 100 million professionals to its database of 60,000 jobs. Then it creates short lists of talent recommendations that clients can then screen and interview.

Jonathan Downey, CEO and co-founder of Candidate Labs (Image Credits: Candidate Labs)

Its competitive edge is not in its access to data, but rather the technology it lays atop it. Downey said that Candidate Labs uses “human in the loop” machine learning, similar to Stitch Fix, which combines data and human judgement to better recommend style guides.

Candidate Labs leverages a big data set to get a product that is quality, not quantity. Using machine learning, Candidate Labs might extract a 25-person candidate list to help companies fill a singular role. Then a seasoned recruiter will look over the list to see the quality of the candidates, pull in personal judgement and create a final list. Once a client sees the list, Candidate Labs will see who it chooses to interview and then digest that feedback. Over time, humans and machines will get better at recommendations.

In an industry like recruitment, which has a lot of messy and unstructured data, human in the loop machine learning makes sense. There needs to be a two-pronged approach to hiring people, one that speeds up the bits that are purely logistical, but gives room for humans to make a correction if needed.

Candidate Labs’ big sell is that it connects sales and marketing professionals to jobs at a fraction of the time of normal recruitment tools. In over half of cases to date, Candidate Labs has introduced employers to candidates that are eventually hired within seven days. More than 50% of the talent it has placed has been diverse talent, according to Downey.

Leah Solivan, a general partner of Fuel Capital, invested in Candidate Labs in mid-2019 and said Candidate Labs’ launch compass is at a “critical inflection point for talent within the startup ecosystem.”

“During the best of times, candidates tend to rely largely on limited insights and a handful of network referrals to make a critical life decision with long-term consequences,” she said. “Their next role.”

Downey is a customer of his COO and co-founder, Michael Zhang, who founded custom menswear service Trumaker .

“Candidate Labs is a recruiting firm that we wish we had been able to work with in building our own companies,” Downey said.

Along with the financing, Candidate Labs is announcing a job search tool. Sales and marketing professionals, among the most impacted by pandemic-related job losses, can use search filters to look for job openings. In early April, a ton of new tools were launched to help support those without jobs secure their next gig.

According to Downey, the tool will help Candidate Labs work directly with people within what is now a saturated job market.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Candidate Labs wants to be a modern talent agency for techies

Restaurants, hotels and other public venues where we spend leisure and business time have started to reopen in many parts of the world after a period of going dark to try to slow down the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, a startup called SevenRooms, which builds software to help those venues with their guest management, is announcing a growth round of $50 million — to double down on providing tools for venues that now have to handle a whole new layer of management to implement social distancing and more.

The funding, a Series B, is coming from a single investor, Providence Strategic Growth, the company tells me. SevenRooms has some notable backers on its cap table already: Amazon (which invested via its Alexa Fund and directly), Comcast (via Comcast Ventures) and BoxGroup, along with a number of individuals.

The company has now raised about $75 million in total and it’s not disclosing its valuation, but CEO Joel Montaniel (who co-founded the company with Allison Page, CPO; and Kinesh Patel, CTO) said in an interview that it’s a significant up round. (PitchBook estimates that its previous valuation was a modest $28 million.)

SevenRooms serves restaurants, hotels and other venues, although food service establishments account for about 95% of its business in terms of customers and revenues. Another new opportunity has emerged out of the need for a lot of other in-person venues, like shops, needing to consider how to implement reservations to help with social distancing.

Today, it counts a number of large chains, including 70% of the restaurants along the Las Vegas Strip (because MGM is a customer), among its users. In all some 500 million bookings globally have been made through its software since it was founded in 2011, and other customers include Bloomin’ Brands, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Wolfgang Puck, Michael Mina, D&D London, Corbin & King, Jumeirah Group, Black Sheep Restaurants, Zuma and Topgolf.

Montaniel described the last three months of business as something like a “tale of two cities” — a reference to the Charles Dickens novel, which starts out with the famous line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

In the context of SevenRooms, that has played out as a big drop in its mainstay business, which was focused around reservations, customer loyalty and other services sold as white-label services directly to the venues (or the operators, as Montaniel calls them), which in turn customised them for their customers, and created experiences across multiple platforms, including their own sites and apps, as well as Google Maps.

“It’s been really tough to see the industry go through the pandemic,” he said. “A lot of operators closed doors overnight. It created a lot of challenges for businesses.”

On the other side of the issue, necessity has been the mother of invention for SevenRooms and its customers. The company has built out a new tool for letting its customers take online orders for delivery — something it had been planning to launch later in the year but decided to launch earlier, given the state of things. It’s sold with a licensing fee, with no commission to SevenRooms, and links in with SevenRooms’ marketing and loyalty tools; it has done well, so much so that Montaniel said it and the longer-term customer relationships it’s building offset the drop in its other business.

“Delivery and pickup grew like crazy,” Montaniel said. And like some of the other “digital transformation” we’ve seen where retailers have accelerated their e-commerce strategies simply to stay in business, he believes that the switches and packages generated tens of thousands per month of savings. 

There are a lot of companies that have built out tools to serve the hospitality industry, and specifically to help with bookings, with some of the bigger names including OpenTable and Yelp. Montaniel believes that SevenRooms stands out because of its focus primarily on its operators, rather than providing a business in being the interface between operators and their customers, and on how it views its role in not just helping perform functions but expanding the wider business, by way of data that it can use to help grow customer loyalty and help people who are regulars feel like it.

There remain a lot of potential competitors who are also sometimes partners. Google, and Google Maps, is perhaps the most obvious, although these days Montaniel says Google Maps and the entry point it gives to discovering restaurants is a great boost to its business.

“Google is a company that every company in the world thinks about and talks about in their strategy sessions,” he said. “But there are others too. Big companies always can be competition: they do so many things so well, and they are a team away and a cash infusion away from competing with you, and those who don’t think they are are rivals are not thinking big enough.”

All the same, there are also two potential allies in SevenRooms’ corner that make this bet a little more interesting.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund is about strategic investments: SevenRooms used the backing to build out an Alexa integration into its white-label tools. But there are other ways in which that connection might potentially develop. The company has dabbled in travel services (including bookings) in the past, via Amazon Destinations, and although that was short-lived, the company continues to serve a number of hospitality and travel businesses via AWS, and frankly you can’t really count Amazon out of any vertical with an online component, which is to say, you can’t really count Amazon out of any vertical at all.

Meanwhile, Comcast has been making a number of investments into the kinds of services that it could potentially resell as part of larger business connectivity packages, which includes a focus on local businesses, spelling out another opportunity for how SevenRooms might expand.

Interestingly, SevenRooms is already close to profitability, and it didn’t need this funding — in contrast to a lot of other startups that have found it hard to make ends meet in these difficult months. Montaniel said that it raised because it had a list of “seven things we wanted to do, and without the extra cash we could only do three of them,” without elaborating on what those product features will be.

It’s a big area, though, and now that so much activity has been cut off for so many of us, we’re only now starting to realise how critical it can be, one reason why investors were interested.

“SevenRooms is a category-defining company that provides a vital solution to hospitality operators worldwide,” said Adam Marcus, managing director at PSG. “Joel and the talented SevenRooms management team have built the only vertically integrated solution in the hospitality industry, which has enabled them to scale into a global powerhouse. SevenRooms is uniquely positioned, and we are excited to partner with the team to support their next phase of growth.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SevenRooms raises M to double down on reservations, ordering and other tools for hospitality businesses

The coronavirus pandemic has bruised and battered many technology startups, but it has also boosted a small few. One such company is Zoom, which has shouldered the task of keeping us connected to one another in the midst of remote work and social distancing.

So, of course, we’re absolutely thrilled to have the chance to chat with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan at Disrupt 2020 online.

Yuan moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 after being rejected for a work visa nine times. He got a job at WebEx and, upon the company’s acquisition by Cisco, became VP of Engineering at the company. He pitched an idea for a mobile-friendly video conferencing system that was rejected by his higher-ups.

And thus, Zoom was born.

Zoom launched in 2011 and quickly became one of the biggest teleconferencing platforms in the world, competing with the likes of Google and Cisco. The company has investors like Emergence, Horizon Ventures and Sequoia, and ultimately filed to go public in 2019.

With some of the most reliable video conferencing software on the market, a tiered pricing structure that’s friendly to average users and massive enterprises alike, and a lively ecosystem of apps and bots on the Zoom App Marketplace, Zoom was well poised to be a public company. In fact, Zoom popped 81% in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, garnering a valuation of $16 billion at the time.

But few could have prepared the company for the explosive growth it would see in 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic necessitated access to reliable and user-friendly video conferencing software for everyone, not just companies moving to remote work. People used Zoom for family dinners, cocktail hours with friends, first dates and religious gatherings.

In fact, Zoom reported 300 million daily active participants in April.

But that growth led to increased scrutiny of the business and the product. The company was beset by security issues and had to pause product innovation to focus its energy on resolving those issues.

We’ll talk to Yuan about the growing pains the company went through, his plans for Zoom’s future, the acceleration in changing user behavior and more.

It’ll be a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14 to September 18, and the show will be completely virtual. That means it’s easier than ever to attend and engage with the show. There are just a few Digital Pro Passes left at the $245 price — once they are gone, prices will increase. Discounts are available for current students and nonprofit/government employees. Or if you are a founder, you can exhibit at your virtual booth for $445 and be able to generate leads even before the event kicks off. Get your tickets today.

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Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan will speak at Disrupt 2020

Picture the drive to work you used to make every day before the COVID-19 pandemic struck — the same route, the same time and the same old billboards on the side of the freeway. Your drive to work isn’t about discovering new products or services, so in theory, you wouldn’t care about the dental offices, lawyers or whatever else that billboard is promoting.

But when there comes a day when your tooth aches and your insurance no longer covers your old provider, you might end up calling the number on that billboard after seeing it hundreds of times. That’s the billboard effect.

Digital marketing has largely left billboards in the dust, making it far easier to reach any of the billions of people online. But that doesn’t mean brands should be ignoring the principles that made billboards work in the first place.

Over the last five years, I’ve helped clients implement those principles by running video ads and have, for instance, helped a family lawyer in Joliet, Illinois book 130 phone calls with $1,000 in advertising spend with the strategy. Here’s how it works from start to finish.

The key to optimizing phone calls: Don’t link your website

While many brands already see the value in video marketing, most still don’t know how to go about making an effective video without having to hire an expensive video production company. Remember, the video doesn’t have to be a high-production project; it just has to get the message across to the right audience and give people a way to learn more.

Videos generally have three components:

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Breaking down the specs of a successful video ad

Entrepreneurs-turned-investors are in a truly unique position in the tech world, with experience on both sides of the table and unique insights into how businesses should operate and grow.

Alexa von Tobel takes that breadth of experience and those unique insights to a new level, as a founder who has pretty much exclusively started her ventures in the midst of a recession. So it should come as no surprise that we’re absolutely amped to be sitting down (virtually, of course) with von Tobel for an episode of Extra Crunch Live today at 11am PT/2pm ET. (Full details after the jump.)

LearnVest was founded by von Tobel in 2006, just before the crash of ’08, and was poised to grow voraciously due to the economic landscape of the time. The personal finance platform raised a total of $72 million over the following years and was ultimately acquired by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance in 2015.

In 2019, von Tobel launched Inspired Capital, a $200 million early-stage firm that has invested in Chief, Finix, SnackPass and Rho Business Banking.

And here we are, in the midst of yet another recession with some 30 million people out of a job due primarily to the coronavirus pandemic.

Von Tobel says that, in times of economic uncertainty like these, startups have a real opportunity to disrupt and accelerate.

We’ll chat with von Tobel about how she’s advising her portfolio companies right now, the biggest lessons she’s learned throughout her career, her thoughts on how tech can improve diversity and inclusion efforts in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and which trends and sectors she’s most interested in pursuing right now.

Extra Crunch members will be able to ask their own questions during the conversation, so if you’re not already an Extra Crunch member, make sure you do that before we go live.

von Tobel joins a stellar group of speakers on Extra Crunch Live, including Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz, BLCK VC’s Sydney Sykes, Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra, Cowboy VC’s Aileen Lee and Ted Wang, and Plaid’s Zach Perret.

You can check out the complete library of episodes here.

We look forward to seeing you in the chat!

Details:

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Extra Crunch Live: Join Alexa von Tobel for a live Q&A now

This morning, Hopin, a London-based startup building virtual events technology, announced that it has raised a $40 million Series A led by IVP. According to the company, Salesforce’s corporate venture arm Salesforce Ventures also took part in the round, as did a number of its prior investors, including Slack’s venture capital group the Slack Fund, European venture groups Seedcamp and Northzone, and U.S.-based Accel.

The round comes after Hopin had raised relatively modest capital, including a $6.5 million round in February of this year.

Hopin is busy scaling. The company has seen its employee base grow from eight to 60 this year, and targets 200 by the end of 2020, according to CEO Johnny Boufarhat. The firm is staffing up as usage of its technology expands, with the “number of monthly attendees of events” hosted using its technology growing from 16,000 in March — when COVID-19 lockdowns were accelerating — to 175,000 in May, according to the company.

That’s the sort of growth that venture capitalists flock to, checkbooks in hand. Even better, Hopin’s current marketing costs are around zero, as there’s simply more groups that want to host events on the company’s platform than it can handle.

Why does a virtual event technology provider have a bottleneck? “Hopin is a venue,” Boufarhat told TechCrunch in an interview, meaning that its customers need support to make sure things go well when they use the software. If a piece of business technology hiccups for a few minutes, Boufarhat explained, citing CRM as an example, it’s not the end of the world. If a Hopin instance has issues, he explained, 1,000 people could be impacted, causing them to judge both the hosting group and his company.

Hopin’s technology allows events to recreate the traditional in-person conference, online. This includes features that allow hosts to have digital equivalents of real-world event locations and activities, like expo centers, various stages and networking capabilities. This mirroring of an IRL get-together, online, could make digital events more attractive to attendees who have become accustomed to a certain method of congregating.

A history of growth

Hopin first raised money in October of 2019, during a period of rapid expansion. According to Boufarhat, his startup was seeing about 60% growth, month-to-month. At that time the company was operating with reduced entry, only accepting a portion of market demand. After the October round was complete, the business kept growing, allowing it to collect more data on its product and how it was used.

That information led to its February, 2020 seed round. Back then the company was seeing revenue scale roughly along with expenses, allowing it to be “nearly profitable” during the period, according to its CEO. For venture capitalists, seeing a company with more demand than it can handle grow, while also not losing much — if any — money, is attractive.

Hopin’s quick round in early 2020 then was not a surprise. The same confluence of factors, including usage growth and revenue expansion, are also what came together for its most-recent Series A.

COVID-19 was an accelerant for Hopin, it appears. As the pandemic spread, the company realized that companies were going to switch from in-person events to webinars, which, in its view, aren’t great. So, it moved to make Hopin more available, earlier, than planned.

Now with more money than it has had to-date, Hopin can likely accelerate its hiring, and onboard more clients than before. That means more virtual events, and more revenue for the company. It will be interesting to see how the company’s gross margins shape up over time, and what percentage of the events that it helps host recur. If the margins are good, and events periodic, the firm could argue for a SaaS multiple long-term.

Ahead

Looking toward the future, it will be interesting to see how the company approaches the realm of digital worlds, and if there’s space in its current model for more VR-style experiences. And there are other questions in the distance, including what happens when a vaccine is eventually found for COVID-19? Do events go back to normal, or do they wind up splitting the IRL-online divide, giving Hopin and similar companies a place in conferences for good?

Firms like Teeoh and even Eventbrite also want a piece of the virtual event market, so Hopin won’t have a walkover. That said, there’s little indication yet that virtual event hosting will be a single-winner category. Given the sheer TAM of the events world, there’s probably room for several.

How quickly Hopin raises again should give us our next signal regarding the pace of its growth. More when we have it.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Hopin raises M Series A as its virtual events business accelerates

Storyblocks, the subscription-based stock media service, today announced that it has been acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners. The firm previously backed companies like Wayfair (and then exited that specific investment in 2017) and Custom Ink. Great Hill also acquired Gizmodo Media Group in 2019. Storyblocks and Great Hill did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

Storyblocks was founded in 2009 and raised about $18.5 million since its launch. Over the years, it went through a few changes. Its early focus was on video content, and until 2017, it operated under the VideoBlocks moniker (before that, it was FootageFirm). The company’s focus was always on its buffet-style subscription service, though it also offered an “à la carte” marketplace for one-time purchases. Only a small fraction of users actually bought from the marketplace, so last year, it doubled down on its subscription library.

“Our mission was really all about this idea of affordability and access,” Storyblocks CEO TJ Leonard told me ahead of today’s announcement. “That’s core to our DNA. It always will be. But as we look to the future, we see ourselves supporting our customers across their entire workflow as they work to keep up with the content demand of their audience. You wrap all that together and it felt like the moment was right to take the next step. Updata, North Atlantic Capital, QED [Investors] — all of our early investors — have done an awesome job supporting the business over the last eight years to help us get to this point. But Great Hill brings a track record — and I think an expertise — that is perfect for this next stage for us.”

Leonard, who just like the rest of the team is staying on, noted that Storyblocks is profitable and wasn’t actively trying to raise any capital to sustain its business or looking for an exit. Instead, he argued, this sale was simply a logical progression.

“We’ve long felt that even though the business is more than 10 years old, there’s still a lot of chapters left in our story. We’re really excited to continue to chase them down,” he said. “And we’ve said all along that if we were going to find a new partner, our first criteria was that they needed to believe in the same mission and vision that we had, they needed to believe the same market opportunity that we saw — and they needed to feel like we had the right model and the right team to go take advantage of that opportunity. As we got to know Great Hill better, it was clear that we were really well aligned across all those important points.”

He also noted that he tends to think of Great Hill as “a growth-oriented private equity investor, almost a growth equity investor masquerading with a private equity structure,” given that the firm tends to acquire companies but then also often spins them out again. “All of our conversations have been oriented around how do we change what’s working today and accelerate it. How do we take our long-term strategic growth plan that sets certain goals over the next five years and accomplish them in three,” he said.

Storyblocks will continue to operate as usual and continue to invest in its content libraries, Leonard told me. COVID-19 only made the demand for stock footage go up (Storyblocks now sees twice as many downloads per week compared to the start of 2020), but the company was already seeing a growing demand for its service before the pandemic, in large parts because the demand for video content only continues to increase.

“This doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like we have a lot of good work to do,” said Leonard. “It feels like in a lot of ways, the market is just kind of catching up to what we’ve believed since our founding, which is that if you can help people create more high-quality video content, do it at an affordable price, do it in a way that saves them time, then there’s a huge opportunity out there.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Private equity firm Great Hill Partners acquires stock media service Storyblocks

They include:

• AarogyaAI Innovations Pvt. LTD, a diagnostics company whose technology quickly diagnoses drug-resistance.
• MEDIC Life Sciences Inc., which is developing a pre-clinical testbed of millions of tumor samples based on CRISPR and cancer organoids to enable personalized targeted therapies for cancer.
• Pluton Biosciences, LLC, a developer of herbicides and pesticides derived from bacteria, fungi and viruses looking to replace chemical treatments.
• WellSIM Biomedical Technologies, Inc., a tools company developing a high-throughput microfluidics-based automated processor to isolate and analyze exosomes.
• Alchemab Therapeutics LTD, a developer of antibody therapeutics using patient antibodies.
• Neurolytic Healthcare LTD, a diagnostics company providing genomics-driven diagnostics and personalized treatment recommendations for neurological conditions.
• Tailor Bio LTD, a cancer diagnostics company developing a precision oncology platform to identify patterns in the genetics of tumors to predict how patients will respond to different therapies.

“As we navigate the current global pandemic, there is an even stronger urgency to create breakthrough genomics startups that will transform human health and beyond,” said Amanda Cashin, co-founder and Global Head of Illumina Accelerator, in a statement. “By opening our second location and partnering with seed stage capital investors, we are proud to invest in these transformative startups to push the boundaries of where genomics can go.”

The accelerator program has partnered with First In Ventures, an investment organization backed in part by the family office DBM Invest, in both the U.S. and the U.K. Wing Venture Capital will also continue to provide convertible notes in the U.S. while government entities through the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority will support companies in the U.K.

Illumina has also opened up applications for its next batch of companies. 

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Illumina’s accelerator has an impressive 93 percent follow-on funding rate — here’re its latest picks