WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann revealed details of his new venture, Flow, which would include a "mechanism that's going to take some of the value and share it with the value creators." The other segments would involve building management, real estate ownership, and financial services. More: - Neumann described Flow as providing an "elevated experience" to renters.
- Flow plans to own and operate residential apartment buildings in Atlanta, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Nashville.
- Flow raised $350M from Andreessen Horowitz in Aug. 2022, with Marc Andreessen joining the board.
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Australian employee management tool startup Deputy hired Silvija Martincevic as CEO to lead the firm's expansion in the U.S. and oversee the growth strategy. Martincevic succeeded former CEO Ashik Ahmed, who is also the co-founder of Deputy. She said, "Building two-sided networks businesses, like Deputy, Affirm, and Kiva, is really hard, but once that business model is built, and both sides of the network reinforce each other, these are lasting businesses." More: - Martincevic was formerly the chief commercial officer at Affirm and was instrumental in growing the number of merchants from 5,000 to over 200,000. Additionally, she helped establish partnerships with Walmart, Shopify, and Amazon.
- Deputy provides employee scheduling, time tracking, and labor compliance tools through its Capterra platform.
- The firm has raised $72M (A$104M) in venture funding to date from VCs such as Square Peg and IVP.
- Deputy counts Nike, Five Guys, and Everlane as one of its most prominent customers.
- According to Deputy, annual recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed $69.5M (A$100M).
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Pharmacy store chain operator Walgreens acquired bankrupt startup Medly's core business, including its intellectual property, pharmacy inventory, prescription files, trademark, and logo, for $19.35M. The acquisition will give Walgreens access to Medly's customer base. As of mid-2022, the firm served 32,000 customers across the U.S. More: - A Delaware judge approved the acquisition on Tuesday.
- New York-based digital pharmacy startup Medly operated specialty pharmacies and provided free delivery of medicines across the U.S.
- The startup had raised $110M in venture funding.
- Medly's monthly losses amounted to between $9M to $11M.
- The firm laid off 1,100 of its 1,900 employees in Aug. 2022 and closed stores in a bid to curb losses.
- It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Dec. 2022.
- In February, an auction was held to sell Medly's assets.
- Walgreens did not bid on leases on its stores in the auction.
- According to the bankruptcy filing, the company currently has 22 stores, down from 51 at its peak.
- Besides Walgreens, CVS Health also placed bids for Medly's core business assets.
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Zypp Electric, an Indian startup that builds electric vehicles, raised $25M. The capital was part of a Series B round led by Gogoro, a Taiwanese battery-swapping service provider. More: - Zypp provides electric vehicles for online stores to use for last-mile delivery operations.
- With the funding, the startup wants to begin operations in new cities and increase its fleet size.
- Currently, Zypp has 10,000 electric vehicles, and it wants to increase that number to 200,000 by 2025.
- Gogoro is planning to have a stronger presence in India. The company recently partnered with Hero MotoCorps, the country's leading bikemaker.
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Macro, a startup that uses AI to make PDF files more interactive, raised $9.3M in a seed funding round. Through AI, the startup provides a PDF editor that pulls out key terms, sections, and equations so documents are more interactive. More: - Jacob Beckerman, a former investment logic engineer, built Macro's product after being frustrated with how difficult it was to print out and markup PDFs on Acrobat and Microsoft Office.
- Andreessen Horowitz led the funding round, and Craft and BoxGroup participated too.
- Macro plans to release a word-processing tool and grow its workforce of eight staff members.
- The startup plans to improve user experience on formats like PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, and email, which are standards. Nobody owns them, so they can easily be modified.
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Sesame Labs, a startup focusing on Web3 marketing tools, announced it raised a $4.5M Seed round. The company intends to use the funds to scale engineering and grow its user base. More: - Sesame Labs works on a marketing stack that includes an advertising network, a campaign management platform, and CRM.
- The startup launched its private beta in Sept. 2022 and has been working with Ethermon, Decentral Games, and League of Kingdoms.
- The round was led by Wing Venture Capital and Patron, with participation from Samsung, former CTO at Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan, and Twin Ventures, among others.
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- IBM acquired GraphQL startup StepZen for an undisclosed sum. The startup had raised $8M in funding since its establishment in 2020.
- Melinda Gates' venture studio Pivotal Ventures partnered with Y-Combinator to establish an accelerator, dubbed Future of Longevity Accelerator, that aims to mentor startups working on solutions to address the unmet needs of seniors.
- Seed-stage VC firm Kickstart secured $230M in capital commitments for its sixth fund that will invest in startups across Utah and Colorado.
- Chinese electric VTOL startup TCab Tech secured $15M in pre-Series A funding led by Grand Flight Investment.
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 |  | Karan Chafekar is a Management Consultant, Business enthusiast, and Licensed Pilot.
Nicolas is a Sr. Analyst at Inside, covering startups and transportation trends. He is an avid map maker and data nerd. Nicolas has worked in the shared-scooter space, as well as advised e-bike and moped start-ups.
Martin Ruiz-Cantu is a Business Researcher at Inside.com. He has a Master's in Global Business and Finance from Georgetown University. He previously worked at HSBC and the World Bank. He is passionate about finance, startups, and tech.
| | | | Editor | Vibha Chapparike is a Freelance Writer & Editor at Inside.com. With her post-graduation in Management and Finance completed, Vibha is expanding her knowledge in venture capital, business, startups, and technology. She has had a career in public relations and communications. An ardent reader and writer currently residing in Singapore, you can follow Vibha on Twitter @VChapparike. | |
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