August 2020 PNW Venture Deals

Here are the PNW startups that announced new fundraising rounds in the month of August. These 23 companies raised more than $350M last month!

Series B and Later Rounds 🚀

• Chinook Therapeutics - Precision medicines for kidney diseases - $106M round
• Kymeta - Hybrid satellite-cellular broadband networks - $85M round led by Bill Gates
• Dutchie - Ecommerce platform for dispensaries - $35M Series B
• Dapper Labs - Platform to build games on the blockchain - $23M round
• AppDetex - Brand protection platform - $12M round

Series A Rounds 🛫

• Prescryptive - Prescription intelligence platform - $26M Series A led by Morningside Group
• Optimize.health - Remote patient monitoring software and services - $15M round
• Barn2Door - Platform to help farms sell direct online - $6M Series A led by Bullpen Capital
• Xealth - Digital content and services for healthcare teams - $6M round from Cerner and LRVHealth

Seed Rounds 🌱

• Atomo Coffee - Molecular coffee created without coffee beans - $9M Seed led by Horizons and S2G Ventures
• Stratify - Intelligent budgeting tools for finance teams - $4.9M Seed led by Madrona
• Copper - Digital banking solution for teens - $4.3M Seed led by PSL
• Starform - Game development studio - $4.15M round
• PANDA AI - Natural language processing to help teams communicate - $3.46M Seed led by PSL
• HerdDogg - Livestock data and insights platform - $3.16M round
• KitoTech - At home wound closure kit - $3M round
• Resonance AI - AI platform to analyze video content - $2.28M round
• Special Project - Subscription video platform for creators - $2.26M Seed led by Next Frontier Capital
• Minnow - Contact-free food pickup pod - $2.2M Seed led by Elevate Capital
• Alpha Ledger - Direct marketplace for municipal bonds - $1.61M round led by Ten Eighty Capital
• Genemod - Inventory and project management software for life sciences - $1.5M Seed led by Defy
• Reflective - Platform for automating and managing recurring processes - $1.32M Seed led by Founders’ Co-op
• Candidate - Personal referrals for startup jobs - $1M Seed

M&A and IPOs 💥

• Napster - MelodyVR is purchasing Napster from RealNetworks for $26M in cash and stock, and taking on $44M in payment obligations
• Brandfolder - Smartsheet is acquiring Brandfolder, a digital asset management solution for $155M in cash and stock
• High Attendance - Banzai is acquiring High Attendance, an enterprise event management platform

Thoughts and Observations 🧐

• Napster is still worth $70M! Equally as surprising… a VR company has enough cash to acquire it!
• Between Barn2Door, MilkRun, Crowd Cow, and Canlis selling out of their $200 grocery box every week, seems like the PNW loves “direct from farm” ecommerce
• Seed deals have been slowing down for a few months, but this month we saw a ton of them! And they were mostly led by local investors - Madrona, PSL, Next Frontier, Elevate, and Founders’ Co-op!
• Many of the seed deals spun out of local startup groups like MVL, AI2, UW, and VentureOut, or were incubated within another company

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