附近上门

A warm hello to you! Welcome back to Last Week In Venture, a weekly highlight reel of startup funding deals which may have flown under your radar.

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Before we get to those, though, a bit about what the 附近上门 News crew covered this week. Oh gosh, so much. We also covered supergiant (>$100 million) venture capital rounds raised by the likes of plant protein powerhouse Impossible Foods, neighborly social networking site Nextdoor, Indian delivery startup Grofers, vacuum , travel planning platform GetYourGuide, and food delivery giant Deliveroo.

On the public side, we reflected on Uber鈥檚 lackluster IPO and why it might be misguided to compare it to the early trading days of Google and Facebook, which had historically humdrum public debuts of their own. The weather on the other side of the IPO window isn鈥檛 all dreary though. Chinese coffee brand and edge CDN provider priced their IPOs and subsequently popped on opening day. We rounded out public-market coverage with a retrospective on the ups and downs of recent unicorn IPOs.

Of course, this is just a portion of what we covered this week, which, in turn, is a tiny fraction of all that happened in the news. The thing is, there are companies outside the unicorn and public-market limelight, and we believe there are trends and lessons found in their stories.

So, let鈥檚 hear 鈥榚m. Here are some of the other deals announced during the week that was in venture-land.

Sofas As A Service

The internet facilitates delivery of software as a service. Media companies are spinning up subscription services left and right. As long as you pay for it, it鈥檚 yours to use. But when you stop, it goes away. Applied to the physical world, you get something like rent-to-own furniture, which has been a thing for awhile. is a New York-based company that offers contemporary, higher-end furniture on a subscription basis. The company raised led by . Prior seed investors , , , , and followed on in the round, .

On its website, the company bills itself as 鈥渁 sustainable alternative to fast furniture.鈥� Its for people who move around a lot or don鈥檛 have the cash on hand to buy quality furniture up-front. I鈥檓 kind-of-sort-of in the market for something like this (but I don鈥檛 live in Feather鈥檚 current service area of NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Orange County) so I checked out the site.

If I wanted, say, , I could get one delivered and assembled at my place. If I just wanted the couch, I might opt out of Feather鈥檚 $19/month membership fee (on top of the furniture cost); I鈥檇 end up paying more per month, and pay for the delivery, but that couch would be mine in seven months. If I wanted more furniture and joined as a member, I鈥檇 pay less and fully own the couch in two years. If I want to switch it out, it costs $100 for Feather to pick it up, buff out the scuffs, and send it out to someone else. If I鈥檓 moving and want rented furniture moved, Feather facilitates that transfer for $198.

附近上门 News mentioned Feather in our analysis of furniture industry startups back in July 2018.

Other Interesting Deals

• is no regular merchant of undies. The Seattle-based company caters its wares (鈥榳ears?) to folks who don鈥檛 want, or don鈥檛 identify with gendered or overtly sexual underwear which might not fit their bodies. Married pair and co-founded TomboyX in 2013 to make apparell for 鈥減lus-sized, gender non-conforming and specialized tradespeople.鈥� The company picked up from , a London-based firm 鈥渇ocused exclusively on amplifying the world鈥檚 boldest challenger brands.鈥� According to , The Craftory is now TomboyX鈥檚 majority shareholder.
• Machine learning isn鈥檛 magic; it鈥檚 math. Sourcing training data, extracting useful features, implementing a neural network, and ultimately generating a predictive model is a multi-step process. , also based in Seattle, is building infrastructure for the final step of the machine learning workflow: integrating a predictive model into a production code environment. Basically, what the company calls its 鈥淎I Layer鈥� is a software environment that automatically produces a model-specific API the data scientist can call. Algorithmia鈥檚 integration system then handles containerization, deployment, and management using Docker and Kubernetes. Algorithmia raised led by . Google-backed , which led the , was among the participants in this week鈥檚 deal.
• In the world of AI-powered systems that integrate with restaurant menus and let folks order by phone鈥攚ithout human involvement on the part of restaurants鈥攑layer two has entered the game. A few weeks ago in Last Week In Venture, we covered a $2 million seed round raised by . Well, this week, San Jose-based voice commerce company did one (million) more. Kea . The doesn鈥檛 designate a lead investor, but it says that , , , and several angel investors . Breaking the fourth wall for a second: I鈥檓 familiar with both sides of this. My first job was in high school, taking phone orders at a pizza franchise owned by a family member. On the one hand, the job taught me how to listen and how to be nice on the phone, two skills I employ nearly every day. On the other hand, I was only seriously busy for a couple hours of my shift and spent the rest goofing off and sneaking food from the buffet. I was basically just a natural language parser and API manifest in human form, fueled by grifted pizza. I鈥檓 not exactly cheering on the replacement of humans with AI bots, but I can see the appeal for restaurants, many of which are having margins squeezed by rising food and labor costs.

And with that we鈥檙e done for the week! Have a great weekend. See you back 鈥榬ound these parts in a jiffy.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by聽 Photo by Jakob Owens, via Unsplash.