Seattle-based Syndio announced a $17.1 million Series B round Thursday, adding to a $7.5 million Series A the company raised in May. The 4-year-old startup is looking to build out its technology that helps companies quickly identify pay disparities across gender, ethnicity and race.
Seattle News
King 5: Verizon Brings Next Generation 5G Technology To Seattle
ou’ve heard the phrase 5G when it comes to smartphones – but what does it really mean? We talked with Verizon tech expert David Weissmann to learn about Verizon’s growing 5G network and why we should be interested in this next generation technology.
GeekWire: Omnivor Raises $2.7M As Pandemic Spurs Interest In Holographic Media From Nike, T-Mobile, Others
Investors are putting more fuel behind Omnivor, a Seattle startup gaining traction with its 3D holographic content media production platform.
Sway Ventures led a $2.7 million seed round, which included participation from Kernel Labs, the Seattle startup studio that spun out Omnivor, along with other angel investors. Total funding in the 4-year-old company is $5.5 million.
Associated Press: WA Notify App Is Alerting Users Of Virus Exposures
About 1.6 million people have activated or downloaded the WA Notify smartphone app created to notify people if they may have been exposed to the coronavirus, the state Department of Health said this week.
The app is sending notifications to people who may have been exposed, but the state does not have reliable data on how many times the app has been used to alert people or on how many people have been alerted, The Seattle Times reported.
GeekWire: A List Of Good Things That Happened This Year In The World Of Tech, Science, Education, And More
Have you heard that 2020 was a tough year? Well, it’s true … but people also did some amazing things, too.
For a dose of inspiration and optimism as we head into 2021, here’s a list of stories highlighting people and organizations using tech and innovation for good. This is one trend we hope will continue next year.
TechCrunch: Seattle-Based Madrona Raises $345M For Its Eighth Early-Stage Fund
Madrona Venture Group has been a mainstay of the Seattle and northwest United States startup ecosystem for years now, and it looks like it is going to continue that legacy going forward.
In four separate filings with the SEC, the firm announced its eighth venture capital fund, raising $345 million. That’s up slightly from the firm’s past three funds, which were $300 million vehicles. The filing comes roughly two and a half years after the firm’s last fundraise for its seventh fund. That slight increase in size is a different choice from many other VC firms these days, which have ballooned their fund sizes in pursuit of larger and later-stage deals.
GeekWire: Seattle-Area Startup Group14 Raises $17M To Charge Up Battery-Enhancing Tech
Woodinville, Wash.-based Group14 Technologies has raised $17 million to expand development and sales of its silicon-carbon composite material that can replace the graphite anodes in lithium-ion batteries, dramatically improving their performance.
The new funding will allow the company to ramp up manufacturing at its pilot production facility and will help with next year’s groundbreaking of a large-scale plant in Moses Lake in Eastern Washington.
The Seattle Times: ‘Telepresence’ Robots Are Making Virtual School Feel A Little More Like Real School
It has been a year full of the unexpected for families who have had to quickly adjust to masks, quarantines and virtual and hybrid learning, all thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. For Eliza Engel and her son Thomas McKnight, one of the surprises 2020 has brought is that the sixth grader at Burgundy Farm Country Day School in Alexandria, Virginia, now attends class with the help of a robot.
“It’s really, truly amazing, because it looks like something out of ‘Star Wars,’ really,” Thomas says. “It’s like techno wizardry.”
A robot is also helping Amy Kleine’s 7-year-old son, Zach, stay connected to teachers and other students at St. Rose School in Longview, Washington, while he attends remotely to minimize the virus risk to his family members.
GeekWire: Seattle Startup Symbl Raises $4.7M From Amazon And Other For ‘Conversational AI’ Enterprise Tech
Symbl has raised more cash to fuel growth of its enterprise software that helps companies transcribe real-time conversations and pull more insights from internal meetings, customer care interactions, sales calls, and more.
Crosscut Ventures led the $4.7 million round, which included participation from Alexa Fund, Amazon’s voice-focused investment arm. Other backers include Jump Capital, Third Kind VC, Technexus Ventures, and Flying Fish, in addition to angel investors such as Capio founder Tony Chen and Tom Williams, founder of BetterCompany.
Puget Sound Business Journal: RealNetworks Launches Mask Compliance App
RealNetworks, the Seattle-based streaming-turned-computer-vision company, has partnered with the Covid-19 International Research Team (COV-IRT) to launch a free mask compliance app Tuesday.
MaskCheck doesn’t upload faces but instead recognizes if a user isn’t wearing a mask or is wearing a mask improperly. In addition to reminding people not in compliance to properly wear a mask, RealNetworks is offering the data from MaskCheck to officials and the general public.