MeliBio’s honey production, minus the bee, will have you buzzing

MeliBio is turning the 9,000-year-old method of honey production on its head, taking out the bee and injecting precision fermentation and plant science.

Darko Mandich, a former bee-honey industry executive, and Aaron Schaller, a scientist and amateur chef, started the San Francisco-based company in 2020 with the goal of bringing sustainability to the $10 billion global honey market, which Mandich described as “one of the most unsustainable agricultural sectors with broken supply chain and quality issues.”

Mandich explained that his epiphany came while reading a Wired article that reported on how keeping honey bees in bee hives was actually killing the 20,000 wild and native bee species due to the loss of a diversity in the bee population.

“We want to change the food industry in a way that we make food sustainable, nutritious and deliver it at no cost to our dearest animals, in our case, the bees,” he told TechCrunch.

There are some companies already working in the bee space, like Beewise, which is doing automated beehives using precision robotics, and BeeHero, which is tracking the health of bees.

Israeli company Bee-io is also working on a bee-free honey using patent-pending bio processes. However, Mandich touts MeliBio as being the first company to make real honey without bees. The product has been tested in four restaurants in New York with a successful outcome.

MeliBio came up with two ways to make the honey without bees: the first is using plant science to understand how bees access the plants, and what they get from them in order to make the honey.

Second, how to improve upon the molecular composition to scale and make the product. That is where precision fermentation comes in — by identifying the organisms that are good in this application so that it can be used widely, meaning in different ways from drizzling on food to baking with it.

The company has now raised $5.7 million in seed funding to help it expand into foodservice and business-to-business applications. In fact, MeliBio is already collaborating with 30 companies that have signed letters of intent to do validation studies, Mandich said.

Astanor Ventures led the round and was joined by Skyview Capital, XRC Labs, Collaborative Fund, Midnight Venture Partners, Alumni Ventures and Big Idea Ventures.

MeliBio, Mattie Ellis, Aaron Schaller, Darko Mandich, Benjamin Mason

MeliBio team, from left, Mattie Ellis, Aaron Schaller, Darko Mandich and Benjamin Mason. Image Credits: MeliBio

“We are excited about MeliBio’s approach in building a next generation food technology that connects plant science and precision fermentation,” said Christina Ulardic, partner at Astanor Ventures, via email. “Darko and Aaron are passionate about taking pressure off the commercial honey bee supply chain and consequently improving pollinator diversity. We are quite impressed by their first product.”

The new funding will be deployed into further R&D and scale-up of its microbial fermentation process and into the product’s official launch in April. Mandich also wants to increase the number of full-time employees from four to 10 by the end of the year, which is in addition to 14 contractors.

Though the company is pre-revenue, he believes that will change once the product comes out and MeliBio can focus on fulfilling the letters of intent from multibillion-dollar food companies and restaurants eager to work with them.

Next, Mandich plans to look into the $500 billion ingredients market and how to leverage the company’s precision fermentation technology to share the future of that market.

“By using science as an alternative way, we reduce the pressure on wild and native bees,” he added. “There is a rising demand for honey, but by making it our way, we help bee biodiversity. American companies import honey from all regions of the world, and that process is getting more complicated and the quality is not always guaranteed, meaning it might not be real honey. By making it here, we simplify the supply chain, and with a domestic supplier, there are no late deliveries or quality issues. MeliBio will produce honey in three shifts, 365 days per year and make it a price parody with honey on the market.”

Pesto spices up digital workplaces so remote work isn’t so … remote

As our working world sees more shifts to the metaverse, Pesto, formerly known as Pragli, is jumping in with its avatar approach to making remote work a little less lonely.

“Zoom fatigue” was real for Doug Safreno and his co-founder, Vivek Nair, who started batting around the idea for a company in 2019 and made it official a year later. Their idea is a digitally native human workplace where employees can customize an avatar in the workplace, with the idea that the avatar would take the place of video and be less fatiguing and more personable, CEO Safreno explained via email.

The “workplace” would have a variety of rooms created by the employees that would be organized spaces for audio-first collaboration that include screenshare, video, games or spatial features.

“We founded Pesto because we were tired of being stuck between text chat tools and video conferencing,” Safreno added. “Text chat was frustrating because there was so much back-and-forth and it took a long time for anything to happen, and video conferencing felt too formal and involved too much work to schedule. It’s also just not fun — it’s soul-sucking and demoralizing. Pesto is a more human way of working remotely.”

Nearly two years in, the company’s early work is paying off as it now works with more than 10,000 teams at companies like Enhatch, Sortify.tm, HiHello, FullStory, aiPass and Tidal Migrations, as users logged over 100 million voice and video minutes.

Today, the company announced $5 million in seed funding, led by Headline, with participation from K9 Ventures, Rucker Park Capital, NextView Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Correlation Ventures, Garrett Lord, Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau.

Safreno says the world has “undergone the biggest change in the way people work since the Industrial Revolution.” With offices remaining at less than 20% occupied, he believes most employees are unlikely to return to in-person work, but are having to use tools created for that purpose. In contrast, Pesto was designed to fit into the future of work, one in which people are collaborating and interacting more digitally than in-person, he added.

He was not willing to disclose profitability or revenue figures, but did say the company has eight employees, up from just the two founders a year ago.

The new funding gives Pesto a total of $6 million in investments. It will be used to hire for product design and engineering teams and on product development, particularly by building features that deepen the experience of a workplace metaverse and targeting larger companies that have more complex collaboration needs.

Pesto is free for users currently, but later this year, it will introduce a paid tier.

Jett Fein, partner at Headline, is often looking for companies that have “obsessed user bases,” and saw that in Pesto.

It doesn’t look like remote work is going anywhere, so there is a need “for more authentic and collaborative tools,” he added. He was attracted to Pesto because he believes it solves the video conferencing fatigue and lack of collaboration spaces pain points affecting many companies and employees.

As such, he feels the company’s metaverse features stand out in its ability to bring some of that “natural, free-flowing human interaction back into work,” which is what will be expected as more companies invest in this type of interaction between employees in the coming years.

“Doug, Vivek, and Daniel [Liem, founder/head of product] have created a platform that is truly built for the future of work,” Fein said. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen the benefits and pitfalls of working with distributed teams. While we’ve gained freedom and flexibility, we’ve lost the sense of camaraderie and unplanned conversation typically found in the workplace. Pesto is an answer to those challenges, and is creating a future in which collaborating and working together remotely can feel the same as, if not more effective than, being in-person.”

A rind is a terrible thing to waste: Spoiler Alert leaps to the rescue

We spend such a tremendous amount of our resources growing, processing, transporting and selling food items. In a world where not everyone has enough to eat, it’s a disgrace that in the US, 30%-40% of food that is produced is never consumed. That’s the problem Spoiler Alert has set its crosshairs on. The company just raised $11 million to really start scaling its operations and save more food from meeting an end more bitter than a karela jilted at the altar.

“When we look at food waste, it’s not just a major drain on business profitability, but it’s also one of the largest contributors to the climate crisis at a global level. What our vision and hypothesis from the very beginning has been, is ‘how do we better provide major food manufacturers with the tools, intelligence insights and network connectivity to keep good product from going to waste?,'” explains Spoiler Alert co-founder and CEO Richard Ashenfelter. “We are getting that to as many consumers as possible, prior to resorting to dumping or organics recycling.”

The Spoiler Alert platform is in use by a growing list of global consumer packaged goods (CPG) leaders to digitize their B2B liquidation processes. Customers include Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Campbell Soup Company and Danone North America — four of the largest food and beverage manufacturers in the world.

“One of our core beliefs is that waste is no longer a necessary or acceptable cost of doing business,” said Spoiler Alert co-founder and CPO Emily Malina. “Everything we do is geared toward moving perishable inventory faster to benefit brands, retailers, consumers and the planet.”

“Roughly 30% to 40% of the world’s food supply is never ultimately consumed. Project Drawdown has since identified food waste as the number one initiative and opportunity for addressing the global climate crisis,” says Ashenfelter and explains how that has become part of the company’s mission. “For us, the more food we can keep out of landfills, the less emissions and resource resources that go into growing, harvesting, distributing that product, the better. It ultimately has a financial benefit for businesses, too, because they’re selling more product, they’re writing off less product, they’re not spending money on disposal fees.”

Ricky Ashenfelter and Emily Malina, the Spoiler Alert founding team. Image Credits: Liz Linder Photography

Brands use Spoiler Alert’s flexible and private liquidation platform to seamlessly sell their excess, short-dated and obsolete inventory. This results in increased profitability for brands and a stronger supply of opportunistic inventory for retailers and other closeout channels. And not a minute too late, either. What’s particularly encouraging about Spoiler Alert is that the company is operating within the confines of capitalism to try to put a dent in this issue.

“My father was an environmental lawyer, and I’ve dedicated my entire academic pursuits to how the private sector can solve some of the world’s biggest energy and environmental challenges,” says Ashenfelter. “I’m sort of a tree hugger, born and raised, trying to wear more of a commercial hat. All of this is providing easy, tangible solutions for businesses and consumers to do the right thing for the environment. We feel strongly that the best approaches to sustainable climate focus investments have to be rooted in a true business case in order for them to scale.”

This investment is led by Collaborative Fund with participation from existing investors, including Acre Venture Partners, The Betsy & Jesse Fink Family Foundation, Maersk Growth, Spring Point Partners and Valley Oak Investments.

Loyal raises $27M, aims to give dog owners more time with their pets

San Francisco startup Loyal is rethinking the concept of longevity and starting with man’s best friend.

The company raised $27 million in Series A funding in a round, led by Khosla Ventures and including First Round Capital, Box Group, Collaborative Fund, The Longevity Fund and Lachy Groom — all companies involved in Loyal’s $11 million seed round raised in 2020, as well as a group of angel investors. To date, the company has raised $38 million since being founded in 2019 by founder and CEO Celine Halioua.

She touts her choice of investor makeup, 50% female, as a way of elevating more women in the areas of deep tech and longevity. Halioua herself comes from a background of both. She began in neuroscience at The University of Texas and from there briefly studied gene therapy at the University of Oxford before leaving to join The Longevity Fund as its chief of staff and an entrepreneur-in-residence.

The global anti-aging drugs market was valued at nearly $8 billion in 2020 and is projected to double by 2027. Though Botox is well known in this space for its ability to smooth out wrinkles, Halioua told TechCrunch that by addressing aging it could be preventative medicine for age-related diseases affecting humans, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

The company’s thesis is that by intending to improve the healthspan and lifespan in dogs, that research will uncover more about how to do the same in humans. Halioua explained that a dog’s lifespan is similar to a human’s due to proximity — dogs have shared environmental factors, sometimes share the same diet and can develop the same aging diseases as humans like cardiac problems and cancer.

Loyal is building an animal pharmaceutical company that is developing therapeutics aimed at extending both lifespan and healthspan for dogs, utilizing companion dog citizen science studies of over 500 dogs to better understand dog aging and eventually parlay that R&D into products intended for humans.

Over the past year, Loyal grew from a team of three to 30 people. The new funding will enable the company to build out a bigger computation biology team to continue focusing on its products: one aimed at expanding the life of large breed animals, which are known to have shorter lifespans than their small breed counterparts, and one for improving cognitive function.

Both of these will go into clinical studies next year, working toward U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, Halioua said. After the company can show that its drugs are doing what it says they can do — help dogs to live longer, healthier lives —Loyal will then focus on building a consumer brand that is direct-to-consumer selling directly to both veterinarians and pet parents.

“Our next steps are to build out our biology team and data over time so we can take on the gnarly problem of quantifying the aging process,” she added. “There is an opportunity to build a pharmaceutical brand that people love versus being confused by it. These are drugs meant for something happy — giving more years to a dog.”

Pets are a big industry with American spending on pets reaching nearly $100 billion in 2020, up from $95.7 billion in 2019, according to the American Pet Products Association. Venture capital investment into the space is also growing, for example Embark Veterinary announced a $75 million round from SoftBank in July. The company offers DNA testing with the goal of curbing preventable diseases and increasing the lifespan of dogs by three years within the next decade.

Alexander Morgan, M.D. Ph.D., partner at Khosla Ventures, said that the pet space is an active one and is a large enough opportunity that if Loyal just wanted to focus its energy there, it could build a large, profitable business.

Due to dogs being a good model for human health, many studies on human diseases are done on dogs. However, there is a challenge in knowing if the drug is actually beneficial, he added.

“Loyal is approaching longevity with a narrow mechanism,” Morgan said. “They are differentiated by focusing on overall lifespan and healthspan. Healthspan is important because you don’t want to tack on years of unhealthy life.”

Immi takes in $3.8M to cook up plant-based instant ramen

Immi is putting a healthy spin on instant ramen by going plant-based and offering more bold tastes. The company announced Tuesday that it raised $3.8 million in seed funding.

Co-founders Kevin Lee and Kevin Chanthasiriphan both grew up in food families from Taiwan and Thailand, respectively, and met a decade ago while working at the same tech company. They bonded over getting noodles every day.

Fast-forward to today, and they both saw family members stricken with diabetes and high blood pressure and started thinking about what a better-for-you food and beverage brand would look like.

Taking the love of the Asian food they grew up with, they wanted to develop one of those brands for the U.S.

“We immediately agreed on instant ramen,” Chanthasiriphan told TechCrunch. “My dad still eats instant ramen each night, and it is such a massive market: 4 billion packets are sold per year, but it is also a product that has been dominated by the same three incumbents for years.”

The global instant noodle space is projected to be a $32 billion industry by 2027, with $7.7 billion of value in the U.S. However, the ramen most people buy in the grocery store includes noodles made of refined carbohydrates that get cooked in oil, while the soup packets are high in sodium and preservatives, he said.

Their take on it is Immi, which is plant-based, low carb and low sodium, high fiber and has 22 grams of protein on average. The product comes in three flavors — Black Garlic “Chicken,” Tom Yum “Shrimp” and Spicy “Beef.”

The pair went into the company full-time in 2019 and have spent the better part of the last few years heads down in R&D, but the finished product didn’t come easy. In fact, when speaking with people in the industry, they were told that creating a healthier version of ramen would be “kind of impossible,” Lee said. They had to start from the ground up and make it themselves, formulating the first recipes in their own kitchens.

Immi’s variety pack includes Black Garlic “Chicken,” Tom Yum “Shrimp” and Spicy “Beef.” Image Credits: Immi

The funding raise comes as Immi releases a reformulation of their product this year aimed at replicating traditional instant ramen in broth taste, mouthfeel, texture and slurpability.

Siddhi Capital led the round and was joined by Palm Tree Crew, Constellation Capital, Animal Capital, Pear Ventures, Collaborative Fund and a group of individuals, including Patrick Schwarzenegger, Kat Cole and Nik Sharma, as well as executives from Thrive Market, Caviar, Daring Foods, Madhappy, Twitch, Kettle & Fire, MUD\WTR, Native, Amity Supply, Visionary Music Group, Italic, Tatcha and Casper.

Melissa Facchina, co-founder and general partner at Siddhi Capital, said her firm invests in food and beverage brands and its investment arm is a mentor to the Immi team.

“We were blown away by them,” she said. “It costs a lot of money to innovate in this industry, and it is exciting for myself and family to have something that we can grab and go. The second version launching looks exactly like the traditional brick pack and now has adult flavors that attach to a different culinary pallet.”

The natural or better-for-you foods industry has changed “dramatically” in the last decade,  Facchina said. Most of it is driven by consumers that want transparency in the supply chain, cleaner ingredients and authentic brands.

Consumer packaged goods brands that are reinventing themselves already have successful product lines, but few brands are taking a look at certain categories she said are ripe for reinvention, like cereal. Her firm is an investor in Magic Spoon, and she sees Immi reinventing ramen and Asian cuisine, saying “the Kevins as a founder group are highly moldable, high-achieving and want to surround themselves with best-in-class people.”

Meanwhile, the new funding will be split between R&D, hiring and marketing, Lee said. The company is taking in customer feedback to enhance the flavors, and would like to optimize its supply chain, hire for key executive roles and put spending toward testing new marketing channels. Immi sells its product via its own online store, but would like to expand into wholesale channels and online grocers.

Immi’s products were launched in January and saw inventory sell out in the first month without any marketing. They have since sold over 10,000 orders across the U.S. and are even looking to go international.

Going forward, the company will be working on two initiatives: The first is to develop an infrastructure to expand its product offerings, like more flavors and noodle types, so it can launch a new flavor every few months. Lee and Chanthasiriphan also aim to develop additional Asian food products that have cleaner ingredients, like snacks and confections, that they loved eating when they were children.

The second is marketing and distribution. The company has amassed a community of 4,000 members that help Immi with rapid taste testing.

“We are figuring out how to bring our products to a more mainstream audience, especially those that may not be following a certain diet, but want to bring in food and beverages that are healthier,” Lee said. “We are also bringing in taste makers of culture, celebrities and TikTok influencers to broaden consumer interest and bring Immi into the mainstream cluster.”

 

Compounds Foods brews up $4.5M to make coffee without beans

Maricel Saenz, founder and CEO of Compound Foods, is among the over 80% of Americans who love a cup of coffee daily. And she also loves the environment.

However, when the Costa Rican-born entrepreneur, now living in the Bay Area, saw how climate change was affecting coffee growers around the world — coffee is the fifth-most polluting crop in the value chain — she wanted to create a coffee product that tasted good, but was also sustainable.

“Temperatures are rising and combined with erratic rains are leading to lower crop yield,” Saenz told TechCrunch. “The same crop can’t grow in the same place anymore, or it will be a lower quality product. Farmers in Costa Rica are having to sell their land or go higher up the mountain. Experts predict that 50% of farmland will be unsuitable in the next couple of decades.”

Founded in 2020, Compound Foods uses synthetic biology to create coffee without coffee beans by extracting molecules. Saenz said the company spent a lot of time examining what makes coffee, well coffee, and then trying to correlate flavors and aromas in certain ways.

And yes, the company can still call it “coffee” even if it doesn’t contain coffee beans because there is no official regulatory definition, she said.

They use food science to recreate a base formula using sustainable ingredients that also don’t use a lot of water — she said it takes 140 liters of water along the coffee growth chain to make one cup of coffee. The company is also working toward a goal of being able to recreate coffee inspired by flavors that you would get from different areas of the world, like Costa Rica, but also the chocolate notes from a cup of Brazilian coffee.

Compound Foods announced $4.5 million in seed funding to give it total funding of $5.3 million to date. Backers of the company include Chris Sacca’s climate fund Lowercarbon Capital, SVLC, Humboldt Fund, Collaborative Fund, Maple VC, Petri Bio and angel investors like Nick Green, CEO of Thrive Market.

Saenz intends to use the new funding to improve the formulation and scale up the brand as the company works toward a soft launch by the end of the year.

There are a few competitors in the space doing different technology, including Seattle-based Atomo, which said it makes its coffee from “other fruits and plants that had seeds similar to coffee beans.”

Compound Foods is hiring coffee lovers to help build out its technology and to expand its marketing, product and business teams.

Saenz is clear that the company is not competing with coffee.

“We love coffee and know the farmers, and we are providing an alternative solution,” she added. “We want to recreate it, and even drink it on Mars one day, and we want to bring the coffee farmers and the industry with us on the journey.”

 

Meet Mighty, an online platform where kid CEOs run their own storefronts; a “digital lemonade stand”

For kids of a certain age — think 9 to 15 — options for enrichment are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while the ability to make money is largely non-existent.

A new startup called Mighty wants to provide them with a new alternative through a platform it’s building that, like a kind of Shopify for kids, enables younger kids to open their own store online and hopefully learn a bit in the process. In fact, Mighty — led by founders Ben Goldhirsh, who previously founded GOOD magazine, and Dana Mauriello, who spent nearly five years with Etsy and was most recently an advisor to Sidewalk Labs — sees itself as smack dab in the center of fintech, ed tech, and entertainment.

As often happens, the concept derived from the founders’ own experience. In this case, Goldhirsh, who has been living in Costa Rica, began worrying about his two daughters, who attend a small school and he feared might fall behind their stateside peers so began tutoring them after school. He says he was using Khan Academy and every other software platform that he thought might be helpful to the cause, but their reaction wasn’t exactly positive.

“They were like, “F*ck you, dad. We just finished school and now you’re going to make us do more school?'”

Unsure of what to do, he encouraged them to sell the bracelets they’d been making online, figuring it would teach them needed math skills, as well as teach them about startup capital, business plans (he made them write one), and marketing. It worked, he says, and as he told friends about this successful “project-based learning effort,” they began to ask if he could help their kids get up and running.

Fast forward and Goldhirsh and Mauriello — who ran a crowdfunding platform that Goldhirsh invested in before she joined Etsy — say they’re now steering a still-in-beta startup that has become home to 3,000 “CEOs” as Mighty calls them.

The interest isn’t surprising. Kids are spending more of their time online than at any point in history. Many of the real-world type businesses that might have once employed young kids are shrinking in size. Aside from babysitting or selling cookies on the corner, it’s also challenging to find a job before high school, given the Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets 14 years old as the minimum age for employment. (Even then, many employers worry that their young employees might be more work than is worth it.)

Investor think it’s a pretty solid idea. Mighty recently closed on $6.5 million in seed funding led by Animo Ventures, with participation from Maveron, Humbition, Sesame Workshop, Collaborative Fund and NaHCO3, a family office.

Still, building out a platform for kids is tricky. For starters, not a lot of 11-year-olds have the tenacity required to sustain their own business over time. While Goldhirsh likens the business to a “21st century lemonade stand,” running a business that doesn’t go away is a very different proposition.

Goldhirsh acknowledges that no kid wants to hear they have to “grind” on their business or to follow a certain trajectory, and he says that Mighty is certainly seeing kids who show up for a weekend to make some money. Still, he insists, many others have an undeniably entrepreneurial spirit and tend to stick around.  In fact, says Goldhirsh, the company — aided by its new seed funding — has much to do in order to keep its hungriest young CEOs happy.

Many are frustrated, for example, that they currently can’t sell their own homemade items through Mighty. Instead, they are invited to sell items like hats, totes, and stickers that they customize and which are made by Mighty’s current manufacturing partner, Printful, which then ships out the item to the end customer. (The Mighty CEO gets a percentage of the sale, as does Mighty.)

They can also sell items made by global artisans through a partnership that Mighty has struck with Novica, an impact marketplace that also sells through National Geographic.

The idea was to introduce as little friction into the process as possible at the outset, but “our customers are pissed — they want more from us,” says Goldhirsh, explaining that Mighty intends to enable its smaller entrepreneurs to sell their own items over time, as well as services, which the platform also does not support currently.

As for how it makes money, Mighty plans to layer in subscription services eventually, as well as collect transaction-based revenue.

As intriguing as it is, the startup, which launched last year, could need to fend off established players like Shopify to get there. Should Mighty begin to gain traction, such stalwarts might pay closer attention.

It’s also conceivable that parents — if not children’s advocates —  could push back on what Mighty is trying to do. Entrepreneurship can be alternately exhilarating and demoralizing, after all.

Mauriello insists they haven’t had that kind of feedback to date. For one thing, she says, Mighty recently launched an online community where its young CEOs can encourage one another and trade sales tips, and she says they are actively engaging there.

She also argues that, like sports or learning a musical instrument, there are lessons to be learned by creating a store on Mighty. Storytelling and how to sell are among them, but as critically, she says, the company’s young customers are learning that “you can fail and pick yourself back up and try again.”

Adds Goldhirsch, “There are definitely kids who are like, ‘Oh, this is harder than I thought it was going to be. I can’t just launch the site and watch money roll in.’ But I think they like the fact that the success they are seeing they are earning, because we’re not doing it for them.”

A new video platform offering classes about skilled trades begins to build momentum

Trade schools are nothing new, but a new startup called Copeland thinks it can build a big business by bringing education about plumbing, drywall, cabinetry and more to the masses through high-quality pre-filmed classes online that feature industry pros and professional educators.

If it sounds like a kind of MasterClass for all things construction, that’s not an accident. Copeland sprung from the mind of renowned investor Michael Dearing, who wrote the first check to MasterClass (now reportedly valued at $2.5 billion) and spied an opportunity in pairing underemployed Americans with homebuilders who can’t find enough people to hire. Meanwhile, Copeland’s cofounder and CEO, Gabe Jewell, previously spent nearly four years as a creative producer with MasterClass.

Of course, in addition to trade schools, Copeland, which charges for its content, is competing with an endless — and free — number of YouTube videos about how to both build and dismantle things. Still, the year-old, six-person, Bay Area-based company, which has produced nine distinct pieces of content so far, has investors excited about its prospects. Indeed, in addition to early backing from Dearing, the company just raised $5 million in seed funding from Defy.vc and Collaborative Fund in a round that brings its total funding to date to $7 million.

This afternoon, we talked with Jewell to learn more about what Copeland — named after an educator — is assembling, and whether homeowners, as well as aspiring tradespeople, are target customers, too. Some of that conversation follows, below:

TC: You’re trying to educate trade workers and those aspiring to work in construction — an industry that’s in the midst of a years-long labor shortage and needs people with know-how. Do you envision awarding credentials so employers know your customers have gone through training?

GJ: That’s on the table — proof of aptitude or certificates of completion after you’ve successfully passed an assessment. On the licensing side, that would be complicated because [general contractor] licenses are offered regionally, and you need to be a licensed electrical contractor so you don’t burn someone’s house down, and that’s a four-year process typically. So we’re right now focused more on general education and support rather than [anything more tangible than that].

TC: Out of curiosity, how would you test users, given this is a one-to-many platform?

GJ: Some of it could involve testing construction math — putting you through an assessment to ensure you know how to calculate angles and area and so forth. Other tests cold be more around general knowledge. We can’t, with an online test, ensure that you’ll build a great cabinet, but it’s easy to imagine [other testing] opportunities.

TC: MasterClass relies on celebrities and stars in their respective fields. To generate more buzz, might you pull in celebrity homebuilders and tradespeople from do-it-yourself-type shows as teachers?

GJ: We’re talking about that, too. There’s a healthy online community of professional builders who share what they do and they’ve given us a warm welcome. What’s most important to us is ensuring that the quality of instruction is really high really.

TC: I spent part of yesterday watching videos about how to dismantle a brick wall; it makes me wonder whether there will be content on your platform that’s accessible to, and even targeting, homeowners.

GJ: We are hopefully going to see a DIY halo audience for this stuff. For example, deck building is an employable skill and one that we’ll teach you such that you can learn to do it as a professional would. At the same time, if you’re serious about building your own deck, who else would you rather learn it from than pros who know how to teach it?

We’re also thinking of ways to bring those audiences together. You could learn how to dismantle that wall, but you could also come to Copeland to find a professional remodeler who you come to see as a trusted resource.

TC: How long does it take to create each piece of programming for the site?

GJ: It takes us a couple of months to put the courses together, which mostly fall right now between an hour and two hours, though well see more variability in that down the road.

TC: Do you have partnerships with homebuilders or commercial real estate developers that are desperate right now for help?

GJ: We are establishing partnerships with real estate builders. A few are [coming together now] and we’re really excited about growing that side of the business as we develop and film more stuff and add to our current library.

TC: Will subscriptions be part of the picture as you build out that content?

GJ: Yes, right now we charge $75 per course, and you have access to it forever, or a business can purchase a number or seats. As we grow the library, though, you’ll see see flexibility regarding the pricing structure.

TC: What type of content is coming?

GJ: Right now, we’re really focused on residential construction, both hands-on trade skills, like carpentry and cabinet making, but also blueprint reading, and we’ll continue to grow that by adding in plumbing, and drywall and general contractor skills, like reading contracts and risk management. But we’re also building a commercial construction management library that’s taught by university professors largely centered around skills between the field and the office. Maybe you’re an experienced craftsman and you need to learn skills like estimating or leadership, or you come to construction from retail and you’re working in an office capacity and need to learn how to connect the dots.

NFT art marketplace SuperRare closes $9 million Series A

The NFT ecosystem is having an explosive moment and the startups that were ready to run with it are getting lots of cash to continue capturing that momentum.

SuperRare, an NFT art platform that has garnered tens of millions in new sales in recent weeks, has just raised millions from investors. The $9 million Series A round was led by Velvet Sea Ventures and 1confirmation. Other investors participating in the round include Collaborative Fund, Shrug Capital, Third Kind, SamsungNext, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Naval Ravikant, and Chamath Palihapitiya, among others.

In an announcement of the raise, the team called the crypto art scene a “global phenomenon.”

SuperRare launched its art platform in 2018, since then it has differentiated by maintaining a closed early access platform that more closely curates the art they sell. Everything on the platform is a single-edition 1/1 sale. The team has said they plan to launch the site widely next year. The company earns a 3% transaction fee on art sales on the platform in addition to a 15% gallery fee for primary sales. One unique facet of the platform is that creators can continue to earn on a piece’s appreciating value following with 10% commissions on secondary sales.

While NFT art sales have taken off in recent weeks, there are still many structural issues facing their mainstream adoption largely due to scalability issues with Ethereum’s mainnet, which SuperRare operates on. Plenty of firms are building layer-two infrastructure that improves speed, and cuts down on energy usage and transaction fees. Today, ConsenSys launched a platform called Palm featuring artists Damien Hirst as the platform’s first artist drop.

After a lengthy crypto winter, blockchain startups are coming back with a vengeance amid a surge in startup investing, a surge in enthusiasm around NFTs and a surge in bitcoin prices. Today, NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs announced in had raised $305 million in venture funding.

 

“People are in the fights of their lives ” with alcohol use disorders, and Monument wants to help

Over 14.4 million adults over the age of 18 in the United States exhibited some kind of alcohol use disorder and only about 7.9 percent of those people received treatment. Alcohol-related deaths kill roughly 88,000 people in the U.S. — making it the third leading preventable cause of death in the country. And alcohol-related illnesses cost the U.S. $249 billion.

For Monument founder Mike Russell, those numbers aren’t just statistics, but a window into his own life. The co-founder of Monument, a tele-health service that provides access to prescription medication and therapies to combat alcohol use disorders started the business after seeking treatment himself.

As Russell laid out in a Medium post announcing his company’s launch earlier this year, Monument was formed from the realization that Russell had about the availability of alternative treatment options which weren’t receiving the same attention as the rehab clinics and referrals to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that represent the most common treatment options in the U.S.

Russell, a former nightlife promoter, used to be a professional drinker (the club promotion business demanded it) and even after he left the nightlife world to become an entrepreneur, he remained a binge drinker. That behavior carried through his first failed startup, VenueTap, to his second, more successful foray into the world of tech business creation with MyClean, an on-demand cleaning marketplace.

By the time his third, and most successful startup, Paintzen was acquired Russell said he recognized two things — the first was that his drinking was, in fact, a problem, and the second was that there were alternatives to AA and rehab that he could explore.

Those twin realizations led him to launch Monument, with $7.5 million in seed financing from the same group of investors that had backed him in Paintzen. Those investors, including Collaborative Fund, Lehrer Hippeau Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, Datapoint Capital, Corigin Ventures, and NextView Capital all bought into a thesis that’s captured the attention (and capital) of venture capitalists on both coasts — that treatments for drug and alcohol dependence are investable businesses. 

And while private equity investors are also financing networks of rehabilitation facilities as part of their push into healthcare — venture investors believe that the remote delivery of healthcare services can provide meaningful results without the same expenses that operating a network of locations can incur. It’s not the place, so much as the treatments that are available and the people offering them.

Unlike Tempest, another New York-based startup with venture backing focused on curbing alcohol abuse, Monument is working to connect people with therapists, using the platform as a gateway. Tempest’s approach is built around giving a host of tools as part of a subscription service to get people to stop drinking.

Funding for Monument closed in December 2019 and by January, Russell had penned his blog post and the company began creating its community of users looking for information about ways to overcome their disorders and connecting would-be patients with therapists and physicians who could prescribe medication to treat their conditions or offer cognitive behavioral therapy to try and do the same.

There are four facets of the Monument business.

There’s the free-to-access community of people looking for information and support around their decision to stop drinking and there’s also free group therapy sessions available for community members feeling increased urges to use substances because of added pressure from quarantine restrictions. This is similar to the kinds of therapy sessions that companies like Ro, Hims and others are bringing to market in the time of COVID-19. For community members who want to take the next step with their treatment, Monument there’s the one-time fee to see a doctor who can prescribe medication to suppress the need or desire to drink; and finally, Monument offers two tiers of therapy services for those who want either bi-weekly or weekly sessions.

“We connect members to physicians that understand the medication options or they could opt not to take medication,” said Russell. “[Members are] connected to a licensed therapist that focus specifically on co-morbidities.”

The medication only plan costs $19. A bi-weekly consultation with a therapist and an initial consultation for a prescription costs $149 per month and a medication management plus a weekly therapy sessions costs $249 per month.

So far, Monument has around 700 people on its network and expects to see more members come on board for the free community membership as it launches in California today.

“The treatement plans were available through New York, New Jersey, and Florida for our beta,” says Russell. “For launch it will be those three states plus California and Connecticut.”

While telemedicine providers are able to operate in all fifty states without licenses — thanks to changes in regulations made as a result of the pressures that have been put on the healthcare system from the COVID-19 outbreak — mental health providers still need to be licensed in the states where they operate. “We’re still required to build a supply of physicians, clinicians and therapists that are licensed in each state,” said Russell.

To get the new company off the ground, Russell turned to his co-founder at MyClean and Paintzen, Justin Geller and added Amit Klein, a data scientist as the company’s co-founder and chief product officer.

“The crux of this is data,” says Russell, of the importance of Klein’s role in the company. “As members go into treatment — we’re understanding health outcomes… Someone goes into a plan. Their diagnosis. We understand age, gender, drinking patterns, and then we can see if the treatment that they’re on is working or not.”

And Russell stresses that the company won’t use anonymized data or sell of its insights to third parties.

“It’s a binary outcome,” Russell said of the company’s decision to monitor the process. “We can track success… over time as we treat we build a data set and eventually it becomes personalized.”

The timing for Monument couldn’t be more critical, says Russell, given the increased stressors that the social response to COVID-19 is putting on people’s mental health.

People are in the fights of their lives with their struggles with alcohol,” right now, Russell said.