Global Startup Report, powered by Founder Institute

Welcome to this global startup news report powered by Founder Institute. Today we're gonna be highlighting some top startup news stories and media features from across the globe. We have some freshly announced fundraising rounds to talk about, at least one company acquisition to share with you. And sometimes we'll just be sharing here like high-profile media features or general impressive milestones that companies are hitting. So let's get right to it. First, my name is Dustin Betts. I'm a community and content manager at Founder Institute. And here with me today is Martin Martinez. He is the executive director of FI Texas statewide, and he's an entrepreneur in residence at Founder Institute HQ. Welcome, Martin.

Thank you, Dustin. Welcome everybody in the FI family, whether you're joining us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, we're on Facebook too, right, Dustin? Yeah, we're hitting everything. We're hitting everything. I think we got what, 300,000 followers across this whole place. So if you're joining us, forgive us, this is like a technical rehearsal check, but we're doing it live because hey, that's what we do here in FI land. Leave comments. I think we can see all of it. We're using Restream. It's helping us be able to broadcast across a whole different variety of channels. So we'll see these things in real time. We're going to try and do this pretty regularly, but forgive us for the first run. It's a pilot. We're trying to make this work for all of you. Hopefully you'll get— you'll learn a little bit more about what we do at Founder Institute at large. And really, as we champion some of these amazing startups that aren't just getting out of the core program in recent memory, but they are building, they've been building, and they're raising monster rounds, they're growing tremendously, and they're affecting great change, whatever it is they're doing throughout the world. So otherwise, please sit back for a minute. We're going to run through this real quick, learn a little bit on the ropes, kick the tires on the restream, otherwise bear with us. Back to you, Dustin.

Yeah, yeah, perfect. So yeah, really quick, like, for anybody who's not familiar with Founder Institute, which would be odd because you're presumably watching this livestream on one of our social channels, but we're the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. So we're operating across more than 200 cities and 90 countries worldwide. You can learn more all about the Founder Institute at our website, it's fi.co. So without further ado, Here we go. We're gonna dive into some of these top startup news stories of the past month, and we're gonna share links to all the stories that we're talking about right now here on Restream. We're gonna live tweet them out. So yeah, if you're— you can go find us on Twitter. Our account handle is @founding if you wanna see links to any of the stories that we're talking about today. So yeah, take it away with the first story, Martin.

All right, yeah, our first one is coming out of FI London, Oddbox. Oddbox just landed a £16 million Series B investment. Funds coming from Berta Principal Investments are going to help enhance customer experience, expand the UK footprint in general, increase sharing options for their staff. We'll be dropping things in the feed on our Twitter, so be sure to go check out what's going on at Oddbox. In short, you know, they're a veggie box delivery service. They're making an impact reducing food waste in general. That's a big deal right now. I mean, it's always been a big deal. Developing worlds. We waste too much food, Dustin. So that's what Oddbox is trying to do and help us off a little bit of that. Um, so they're really working, you know, with a little odd-shaped fruit, hence the name, um, working with local farms throughout the UK area. Otherwise, that would go straight to the bin. So Oddbox are doing some amazing things. BPI is joining Oddbox's existing investors, Mersha Asset Management and Seedrs, which led their previous £3 million excuse me, it's UK money, funding round back in March of 2020. Dustin, what's going on on the other side of the world?

Yeah, so the next company we're gonna talk about is called Henioly. This is an FI Andalucía company, so like from Southern Spain. They've raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by 645 Ventures and Owl Ventures to make interactive content more of a global standard. So $20 million is a round that's pretty sizable anywhere, but especially in Spain. This company Henially was founded in Spain in 2015. More recently they've opened a US office that's based in New York, but this is really a big global market that Henially is going after. The tool basically allows you to create like presentations, infographics, other like animated content, and you can do it sort of all by yourself, you know, or with your team with little to no design knowledge. So a bit like Canva, I guess. I don't know if they would like that direct comparison, but that's certainly like a similar You don't need to have a whole lot of design chops to use the tool. And there's a really cool quote in here from the round that we want to share. It's from Juan Rubio. He's the co-founder and CEO. And he says that Kenyally is really ready for the next stage of growth. So making Kenyally a global and iconic company has always been part of their vision. They wanted to create a new standard around communication with interactive content. And they believe that this round is an important step towards realizing that vision, not so much for the capital received, but especially for the new valued partners that they're bringing on board. So yeah, really cool round from a company that's based in southern Spain.

That's rad. Going— all right, we're going to bounce across the pond, ladies and gentlemen. We're going back to Orange County, California, in the US for Kaelin. Kaelin's announced a $16 million growth equity investment to fuel cloud-native solutions on AWS. For those of you that may not be in the it technical space, They're focused on containerization. It's basically software moved to cloud and ways in which databases are managed in super critical ways. I came from— I used to work for an IT monitoring software company, so this isn't too much of a foreign language to me. But through their relationship with AWS, Kailit is able to tap into the world's most complete set of infrastructure, data, development tech, and designing solutions for their customers. This is coming from JP Latorre. Founder and CEO of KALENT. They've moved all in to AWS as the platform of choice for cloud computing needs. I don't know about you, Dustin, but so many of our FI grads choose AWS as well. They're not a sponsor yet, but hey, AWS, keep shouting you out. We'll make this presented by AWS. So again, absolute opportunity for branding on them, but I won't drive too much down onto that rabbit hole just yet. Let's kick it back up to Canada. What's going on with our next grad?

Yeah, so the next company I want to talk about is called JITBASE, J-I-T-BASE. This company is an FI Montreal portfolio company, and they just raised $650,000 in seed funding to basically accelerate smart manufacturing software. So the company JITBASE, it was founded in 2016 by the current CEO, Frederic Scherer, and they offer like smart manufacturing software, two main products. The first is this optimal path system that calculates an optimal sequence for machinist activities actually happening on the shop floor. Then they also have a CNC machine monitoring product where users are able to track key performance indicators happening on CNC machines. Yeah, the round was led by a whole bunch of different investors. There's Canadian investment firm Bluesky Equity, is an aerospace manufacturer called Lista, Quebec tech investor Boreal Ventures, and yet several angels from the US and Canada also joined the round. There's a cool quote from the CEO who says that the idea for the machine monitoring solution actually came from one of their customers in the aerospace industry. So they had asked Gitbase if it was possible to leverage their software to help the machinists manage more machines, and then they realized that this solution could help address the shortage of manufacturing workers, which is something that we hear about occasionally. So Yeah, cool story how like the second product sort of emerged from the first one through a customer relationship. Yeah, how about you take us down now to the southern hemisphere to talk about the next one?

All right, we're going straight to Brazil, ladies and gentlemen. If you don't know, we have a strong, strong presence of Founder Institute programs in Brazil, possibly the most outside of the United States in terms of all our chapters. So this company, Contractor, coming out of one of those chapters, Curitiba, They just raised 2 million in Brazilian real from KPTL, and it's a document scanning and project and management tech, you know, similar to DocuSign here in the US market. They started in 2017, and their mission was to just reduce that crazy bottleneck of paperwork management for companies in South America, with specifically the Brazilian market. This is true in many Latin American countries, so it's a massive opportunity. For them to really take, uh, some great market share in that space. You know, their goal is to basically digitize every type of process capable of generating some kind of document with workflows designed to accelerate companies and to close new deals. So really think about that sales management process, think about all that account management process on the back end. You know, they're a SaaS company focused right now on small, medium enterprise level companies that also serve clients, uh, like at the large scale such as Unimed and Banco do Brasil. I think that's the biggest bank in that country, which is a pretty, pretty big country. So starting, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, they made clear that the potential for digitization was even more real. They started this and they've been growing pretty quickly, you know. So straight from our founder that came out of that program, I quote, "We decided to be a protagonist of this change. The pandemic boosted Contractor." And they've had a growth, get this, of over 260% over the past year. Very impressive. So really excited for them to be making some big impacts down in LATAM. Yeah, let's kick it back over the pond, Dustin.

Yeah, well, that 260% growth, yeah, that's really just shows how many companies are digitizing online throughout the pandemic. So yeah, that's cool to see that. Okay, the next one we wanna talk about is called GameStake. As you mentioned, we're now back across the pond. GameStake is also an FI London portfolio company. They announced en initial investment totaling £340,000 to fuel the growth that they're seeing in the mobile esports space. GameStake is really mobile-based gaming, but it's players who are actually competing for real prizes. Gaming is already the biggest entertainment industry in the world. For those who aren't that into gaming, that's been that way for a while now, but that still strikes some people who aren't into gaming as a surprise. Yeah, gaming is already the biggest entertainment industry by revenue. And, you know, the likes of Netflix are looking to enter into it now, but specifically this is true for this fast-paced kind of genre of esports, which is where GameStick really provides a platform. So yeah, pretty big angel investment round for GameStick.

That's fantastic. I'm not much of a gamer, but my little brother is, and this is something right up his alley. If only he lived in London. So we're gonna, we're gonna head to the other side of the world. We're going to our FI Sydney chapter with Gameface.ai. Just been acquired by US-based Slinger, adding sports data and analytics software to the company ahead of their burgeoning NASDAQ listing. You know, you know, they perform— right, basically what they're up to is that they perform instant video footage analysis that brings key events and insights from the the match that you're watching, be it a soccer match or football over there in Australia, uh, our traditional American football, basketball, etc. They track every, every aspect of that match for any sport, including player tracking, ball tracking, match events such as goals, assists, shots— you name it, they cover it. So it's a great, great acquisition, great win for Gameface.ai, and we congratulate them as they join the Slinger company as they, as they get and go public on the NASDAQ. But I think that might be it for our September roundup. And I do want to give a shout out to Kate Campbell, our inaugural commenter, who it looks like she came in on the LinkedIn chat. All she said was stream. So thank you, Kate.

That's how we can do that. So if you have things, if you have questions, you know, put them in the chat and we'll bring them on screen for next time.

Oh yeah, we're gonna try and do this all the time, trying to do this all the time. So hopefully we'll have some featured guests after we go through those news, uh, maybe one of these amazing founders that are coming in. Let us know who you want to see, we'd love to have them. And, uh, we're here for you. Uh, Dustin, how you feeling? I think I'm feeling good. This is actually pretty fun for a test.

I'm feeling good about it. Yeah, for a test run, this went really smoothly. As you said, yeah, we got some other like big things planned for broadcasting here on Restream. So yeah, stay tuned as we kind of gear up to announce our first featured guest and sort of put this streaming into a whole show. But yeah, this is— that's sort of it for the dry run here. Again, like, you can learn if you don't know about Founder Institute, we're the world's largest pre-seed accelerator. You can learn a lot more on our website, it is fi.co. You can see a bigger list if you like these news stories. We've got tons of FI portfolio company news at fi.co/news. Yeah, and you can read a lot more stories and see videos on our blog at edvai.co/insights. Yeah, but successful dry run here, Martin.

I think so, Dustin. Right on. We will catch you all next time, whenever that is, but it'll be very soon. So just be on the lookout. Make sure to hit subscribe and all those fun things that you say on YouTube videos. But we'll catch you all next time.

I'll play us out here with the animation. So, all right. Thanks, everyone.