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| Hey Insiders, Today we are taking a look at Amber Bio's $26M funding round, why Vesttoo's board put the CEO on paid leave, and EventMobi's acquisition of Run The World. We have also rounded up the top early-stage funding rounds of this week. I hope you enjoy today's edition! Karan
p/karan-chafekar | |
| 1 | | Amber Bio, a startup working on multi-kilobase gene editing platforms, raised a $26M Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Bio + Health fund and Playground Global. The company plans to utilize the funds to advance its RNA editing platform to enable a single drug to treat diseases with high allelic diversity. More: - The startup argues that current gene editing technologies rely on creating solutions to treat one mutation at a time, whereas in cases where there may be hundreds to thousands of mutations, its Cas-based systems for durable RNA editing can create advantages over DNA editing.
- Amber Bio was founded by Basem Al-Shayeb, an advisee of Nobel Laureate Dr. Jennifer Doudna, and Jacob Borrajo, a 2x biotech founder and Y Combinator alumnus.
- Other participants in the round included Eli Lilly, Hummingbird Ventures, Retinal Degeneration Fund, and Pillar VC.
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| 2 | |  VCs deployed $705M in early-stage North American startups this week between Jul. 29 to Aug. 4, per Crunchbase data. The biotech sector raked in 28% of the funding this week. Developer tools, cybersecurity, and healthcare sectors nabbed 10%, 9%, and 7% of the financing, respectively.
Here are the top five largest rounds announced this week: - Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech startup Tisento Therapeutics raised $81M in Series A funding.
- Palo Alto, Calif.-based code and pipeline governance startup Endor Labs raised $70M in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Coatue, Dell Technologies Capital, Section 32, and others.
- Kyverna Therapeutics, a cell therapy company working on therapies for autoimmune diseases, secured a $60M Series B extension funding, bringing the total raised through the round to $145M. Bain Capital Life Sciences and GordonMD Global Investments participated in the funding round.
- Serverless Postgres provider Neon announced it raised a $46M Series B led by Menlo Ventures.
- Risk management, claims management, policy administration, and insurance coverage startup Lula secured $35.5M in Series B funding co-led by NextView Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
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| 3 | | Vesttoo's board put CEO Yaniv Bertele and chief financial engineer Alon Lifshitz on paid leave after the Israeli fintech allegedly used fake letters of credit as collateral. The firm is evaluating "multiple options" for interim replacements. Earlier this week, the firm laid off 75% of its staff or 150 employees and shut down offices in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul. More: - The firm was in the middle of raising a $200M late-stage round at a $2B valuation, with Goldman Sachs and UBS reportedly leading the round.
- The fundraiser has since been shelved.
- Goldman Sachs had previously participated in Vesttoo's $80M round led by Banco Santander's VC arm Mouro Capital at a $1B valuation.
- Goldman Sachs has since liquidated its holdings and no longer has an equity stake in the business.
- The FBI Financial Crimes Unit is investigating the fraud allegations.
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| 4 | | Canadian events management platform EventMobi has acquired digital event startup Run The World for an undisclosed sum. Run The World will integrate its platform with EventMobi's product, allowing its customers to sign up to join the latter's platform. EventMobi's founder and CEO said the acquisition will help it increase its event formats, expand its reach, and cement its market position. More: - Former Meta executives Xiaoyin Qu and Xuan Jiang established Run The World in 2019.
- The startup provides event ticketing, online conferencing, and streaming infrastructure to customers.
- The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup has raised $14.8M to date from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Pear VC, GGV Capital, and Founders Fund.
- The firm claims to have hosted 50,000 virtual events to date.
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| 5 | | Lightup, a startup that works on data quality solutions, raised a $9M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Newlands. The startup was co-founded by Manu Bansal, whose first company, Uhana, was acquired by VMWare in 2019. More: - "We leverage the compute fabric of those scalable data warehouses and data lakehouses instead of moving data. So the big difference for us is that traditional systems would take out data from where it lives, and we leave it in place," said Bansal.
- Other participants in the new round included Vela Partners, Shasta Ventures, S28 Capital, and Incubate Fund.
- The startup last raised a $6.9M Seed round in July 2021 and previously received $4.8M in pre-Seed funding in April 2019.
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| 6 | | Orbital, a London-based financial platform for enterprise, raised a €5.8M (~$6.34M) growth round led by Golden Record Ventures. This marks the startup's first institutional round, having been bootstrapped since 2017. More: - The startup says it processes $250M per month from 80 clients.
- The company holds licenses as an authorized payment institution in the U.K. and a virtual currency service provider in Estonia.
- Orbital currently has 95 employees and offices in London, Manila, Estonia, and Gibraltar.
- Other participants in the round include Psalion, New Form Capital, GSRV, and Luminous Futures.
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| 7 | | Quick Hits: - The AWS Cookbook — packed with practical insights and hands-on examples — is a must-have for your cloud toolkit.*
- British fintech startup Revolut stopped providing crypto services to its U.S.-based customers citing regulatory headwinds.
- Cultivated meat startup Aleph Farms is seeking approval from regulatory bodies in the U.K. and Switzerland to sell its products in the two European markets.
- Crow Industries emerged from Techstars Industries of the Future accelerator program to build autonomous robots for the mining and defense sectors. The robotics startup bagged $120,000 from Techstars and is planning to raise a pre-seed round in the coming months.
- Functional Finance, a data automation and reporting platform for Insurance companies, raised $8M in seed funding led by New Enterprise Associates. The funding includes an additional $2M in SAFE notes.
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INSIDE STARTUPS LEADERBOARD (7 DAYS) |
 | Analyst | | 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. | | This newsletter was edited by Vibha Chapparike | |
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