If you’re new here, I’m Abigail — a mechanical-engineer-turned-investor at Hyperplane, an AI/ML-focused seed-stage venture capital firm in Boston. Every two weeks, this newsletter rounds up Boston’s latest financings and highlights both local and macro news.
If you were forwarded this email, join the community of thousands of Boston’s tech and finance folks reading along.
🍂 🍃 🍂🍃 Happy Sunday from the airport. There won’t be an issue of Boston Tech Deals covering the end of December, but I’ll be back in mid-January.
In the meantime, the newsletter this week is packed. Over the last two weeks, 33 Boston-based startups raised more than $1B in private financings. Highlights include Verve Motion and German Bionic both raising for human exoskeleton suits, the former CMO of PillPack surfacing with a new stealth venture, several specialty digital health rounds, and a wave of climate tech financings from companies like Quaise Energy, Fourth Power, and Tetra.
I keep a running “To Google” list that grows faster than I can keep up, so I’m sharing a few things I’m digging into this week. If any of these spark a thought, reach out — I love comparing notes. You can find findings from last issue’s topics at the bottom of this email.
Boston news: Congruent Ventures — a pre-seed deep tech and climate tech VC firm based in SF, now with a growing presence in Boston (welcome, Christina!) — raised $275M for its third fund. Macy’s won’t have a tree in Downtown Crossing this year, but the Comm Ave Mall lights will extend through Kenmore. The Boston Tea Party celebrated its 250th anniversary with fireworks and reenactments. Harvard President Claudine Gay was recently backed by the Harvard Corporation and will remain in her role, following the congressional hearing that preceded UPenn President Liz Magill’s resignation over comments on antisemitism policies.
Other stuff: PitchBook estimates that roughly 3,200 private, venture-backed U.S. startups that raised a collective $27.2B have gone out of business in 2023. That excludes high-profile public failures like WeWork and likely undercounts quiet shutdowns. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced the Instinct MI300X, a chip designed to run AI models faster than Nvidia’s equivalents. Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft have all said they’ll use it. Intel, light on details but not on ambition, announced its own new chip, Gaudi3, meant to compete with AMD’s new offering and Nvidia’s H100. General Atlantic has filed confidentially for an IPO, according to Bloomberg, and may list as soon as next year, market conditions permitting. Also, a Gen-AI digest from S&P to recap the latest from this past hyped year.
And with that, let’s get into it.
Financings are listed from smallest to largest. Biotech financings over $80M+ are usually not covered.
The total amount of disclosed funding over the last two weeks hit over $1 Billion. Yup.
Drink Celly | $100K | Food & Bev
Canned vodka soda brand Celly raised $100K from one investor via a SAFE. Founded by Kevin Dooley and his sons John and Tyler, Celly offers a 5% hard seltzer without added sugar or artificial ingredients, drawing on lessons from John’s energy drink company, Wake Up Water.
Mainstem Media | $325K | Media Tech
Mainstem, a stealth company making podcasts and documentaries designed to facilitate productive disagreement, raised $325K from nine investors toward a $500K offering. The founder is Alex Grodd, co-founder of BetterLesson. Public details are sparse beyond that.
Diametryx | $1.1M | Stealth
Diametryx, a stealth venture co-founded by Michael Natan — Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard’s Office of Technology Development and a seasoned life sciences/nanomaterials executive — raised $1.1M in convertible notes from five investors.
Envoya Bio | $2M | Biotech
Envoya Bio, a drug delivery platform using AI and biocompatible nanoparticles to target mutated genes, launched with a $2M pre-seed. Founded by former Harvard Medical School postdoc Shira Orr, Envoya’s platform aims to design ideal nanoparticles for specific targets by incorporating payload features, target characteristics, and polymer properties.
PredictAP | $3.5M | PropTech
PredictAP, which provides AI-powered invoice capture for real estate accounts payable, raised $3.53M in convertible notes from three investors. The platform uses historical invoice data to automate coding and reduce manual processing. PredictAP previously raised a $3.4M Seed in 2021.
Ohai.ai | $4M | Stealth
Formerly known as Proof of Learn (covered here in March after a $15M Seed led by NEA), Ohai.ai has raised $4M of a $6M convertible note offering from 12 investors. Founded by Care.com founder Sheila Marcelo, Ohai.ai now appears focused on AI tools for families and “Chief Household Officers,” a pivot from Proof of Learn’s Web3 education concept.
Minerva Biotechnologies | $4.5M | Biotech
Minerva Biotechnologies, which develops cancer immunotherapies for solid tumors and stem cell therapeutics, raised $4.51M from nine investors toward an $8M offering. Founded in 1999, Minerva’s key insight is that cancer and stem cell growth are mediated by the same two molecules: growth factor NME-p and receptor MUC1.
Ray Fitness Systems | $4.5M | Stealth
Ray Fitness Systems, a stealth startup founded by former PillPack CMO and ex-Amazon Director of Pharmacy and Clinic, Colin Raney, raised $4.5M from nine investors. About a year ago, Raney announced his departure from Amazon without sharing a next step. This is likely it — one to watch.
WriteWise | $5M | InsurTech
WriteWise is building a platform to reduce the total cost of health insurance by targeting drug-related spend. The startup raised a $5M Seed from Virtue and Altai Ventures. Founders Matt Levinson and Hariharan Sundram use unique underwriting and insurance tools to connect insurers and reinsurers with pharmacy stakeholders and distributors, aiming to contain pharmacy costs and generate savings for both employers and employees.
Droplet Biosciences | $7.6M | Biotech
Droplet Biosciences, which developed a non-invasive method for accessing lymphatic fluid after surgery, raised $7.6M in equity, options, and other securities from 21 investors toward a $14M offering. This appears to be a late/expanded filing on its $8M Seed led by The Engine, announced in March. Droplet’s platform analyzes lymphatic fluid — rich in T cells, proteins, and other biomarkers — to detect residual disease, starting with head and neck cancer.
DataCebo | $8.5M | Data Infra
DataCebo, creator of the open-source Synthetic Data Vault (SDV) library, raised an $8.5M Seed led by Link Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners. Spun out of MIT’s Data-to-AI Lab, DataCebo generates synthetic data from relational and tabular databases, helping enterprises build custom models on-prem while reducing bias and privacy risk.
CloudZero | $9.5M | Enterprise SaaS
CloudZero, a cloud cost intelligence platform, raised $9.5M from five investors following a $32M Series B in June led by Innovius and Threshold Ventures with Matrix, Underscore, and G20 participating. Co-founded by Erik Peterson and Matt Manger, CloudZero ties cloud architecture decisions to cost, offering granular, provider-agnostic cost visibility and automated analysis.
CallMiner | $10M | Business Intelligence
CallMiner, a long-standing player in customer conversation analytics, raised $10M from 11 investors toward an $11M offering. Founded in 2002, its core product, Eureka, analyzes over 2 trillion words annually across calls, chats, emails, surveys, and texts. CallMiner raised a $75M Series E from Goldman Sachs in 2019 and an additional $20M in 2022.
Tetra | $10.5M | Climate Tech
Tetra helps homeowners transition from fossil fuels to clean heating and cooling systems. The company raised a $10.5M Seed led by Greycroft, Gutter Capital, Lerer Hippeau, and 1Sharpe Capital. Founded by former HomeWorks Energy CEO Max Veggeberg, Tetra lets homeowners enter an address for an instant price, then matches them with vetted installers, promising up to 30% cost savings.
Marigold Health | $10.9M | Digital Health
Marigold Health, a substance use care platform built around an anonymous social network and 24/7 text-based peer support, raised $10.9M from 20 investors, including $3M in convertible notes, per its Form D. It serves both payers and providers across several states. Marigold raised a $6M Seed in February 2022, co-led by KdT Ventures and Felicis, with participation from Flare and SpringTide.
Machinery Partner | $11M | Construction Tech
Machinery Partner, a B2B marketplace supporting procurement and financing of heavy machinery, raised an $8M Series A co-led by Armory Square Ventures and Pritzker Group, plus $3M in debt. The marketplace helps manufacturers and dealers sell specialized heavy machinery online and pass savings on to buyers. The company previously raised a $4.5M Seed led by One Way Ventures in 2021.
Sharpen | $11M | EdTech
Sharpen, a literacy platform focused on early intervention assessments and digital reading programs, raised an $11M Series A led by Learn Capital with Reach Capital participating. Based on the “science of reading,” Sharpen helps parents assess their child’s risk of reading challenges as early as age two and offers programs to help kindergarteners improve by a full grade level in as little as three months with 15–30 minutes a day. Sharpen participated in the Illumina Accelerator in 2018.
Quaise Energy | $13M | Climate Tech
Quaise Energy, a geothermal startup building ultra-deep drilling technology, closed $13M of a $25M offering from nine investors (TechCrunch also picked this up). Founded by mechanical engineer Carlos Araque, Quaise uses millimeter-wave drilling via a gyrotron-powered platform to vaporize rock and enable deep geothermal energy. It last raised a $52M Series A led by TechEnergy Ventures in 2022.
Ketryx | $14M | Healthcare IT
Ketryx, a lifecycle management platform for FDA-regulated software and AI applications, raised a $14M Series A led by Lightspeed, with MIT’s E14 Fund participating. Ketryx automates documentation and enforces SOPs to help life sciences companies accelerate development while staying compliant. It previously raised a Seed round from E14 and 10X Capital.
Manifold AI | $15M | Life Sciences
Manifold AI, an AI platform for life sciences that unifies multimodal biomedical data, raised $15M from 16 investors, including TQ Ventures. Founded in 2017 as an AI research lab at MIT, its core product — the Manifold Science Cloud — helps biomedical scientists, computational scientists, and data stewards collaborate using synthetic and real data.
German Bionic | $16M | Wearables
German Bionic, a developer of powered exoskeletons and other wearable robotics, raised a $16M Series A extension led by Mubea. The company focuses on exoskeletons for industrial, logistics, and healthcare settings, with hardware that collects data from both device and environment. HQ is split between Boston and Germany. It previously raised $16M in venture debt from the European Investment Bank and a Series A extension in late 2022.
Fourth Power | $19M | Climate Tech
Fourth Power, which develops utility-scale thermal batteries designed to be 10x cheaper than lithium-ion, raised a $19M Series A led by DCVC with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Black Venture Capital Consortium. Co-founded by an MIT professor and Apple’s former Head of Global Energy and Environmental Policy, Fourth Power’s system converts renewable energy into heat stored in carbon blocks, then discharges it as electricity. A prototype facility is slated for 2026.
knownwell | $20M Filing | Digital Health
knownwell Health, a “weight-inclusive” virtual and in-person care company focused on metabolic health, primary care, obesity treatment, nutrition, and behavioral health, has filed for a $20M round but has not yet reported a close. The company launched from stealth with a $4.5M Seed led by Flare Capital in January. Founder Brooke Pratt is an HBS MBA and former COO of Production at Berkadia.
Verve Motion | $20M | Wearables
Verve Motion, which manufactures robotic exosuits to protect workers in factories and other high-risk environments, raised a $20M Series B led by Safar Partners with participation from Construct Capital, Pillar, and others. A spin-out from Harvard’s Wyss Institute and SEAS, Verve originated through a DARPA-funded initiative with a military focus and later pivoted to industrial applications. The company raised a $15M Series A led by Construct in 2021.
Sensorium Therapeutics | $24.7M | Biotech
Sensorium Therapeutics, which develops nature-inspired psychoactive medicines for mental health, raised $24.7M in a round first filed in August 2022. Founded by researchers and clinicians from Mass General and Harvard, Sensorium uses its Biodynamic Discovery Platform — combining neuroscience and machine learning — to identify and refine molecules inspired by plants and fungi. The funding coincides with Alexandra (Sandra) Glucksmann joining as CEO.
Liquid AI | $37.5M | AI Infra
Liquid AI, an MIT spin-out building AI infrastructure based on “liquid neural networks,” raised a $37.5M two-stage Seed round from Samsung Next, Bold Capital, and others. Co-founded by Daniela Rus, head of MIT CSAIL, Liquid AI’s models are smaller and more compute-efficient than traditional architectures. The company aims to build new “liquid” foundation models that compete with GPT-style models.
Freya Biosciences | $38M | Biotech
Freya Biosciences, focused on women’s reproductive health, raised a $38M Series A co-led by Sofinnova and OMX. Co-founded by two PhDs between Copenhagen and Boston, Freya is building a multi-omics data science platform (microbiome sequencing + biomarker profiling) and a lead vaginal microbial immunotherapeutic candidate for infertility.
Dust Identity | $40M | Security
Dust Identity, an MIT spin-out that authenticates products using invisible diamond dust, raised a $40M Series B led by Castle Island Ventures with participation from 8VC, Kleiner Perkins, and others. Dust embeds engineered diamond-dust markers on physical objects, tying them to a digital record that grows over time. Oxygen Esports partnered with Dust to authenticate physical items in esports. Dust previously raised a $10M Series A led by Kleiner in 2019.
Nth Cycle | $37M | Industrials
Nth Cycle, which partners with scrap recyclers and OEMs to recover critical metals from feedstocks, raised a $37M Series B plus $7M in non-dilutive financing led by VoLo Earth Ventures. Its Electro-Extraction technology replaces energy-intensive smelting with a modular refining system to help build a domestic critical metals supply. Nth Cycle last raised a $12.5M Series A in early 2022.
Intrinsic Therapeutics | $55.5M | Medical Devices
Intrinsic Therapeutics, maker of Barricaid — an FDA-approved permanent implant used in herniated disc surgeries — raised $55.5M toward a $68.5M round led by Questa Capital. Founded in 1999 by a former Stryker VP, Intrinsic targets patients at higher risk for repeat surgeries following lumbar discectomy. Barricaid uses a flexible polymer barrier to prevent reherniation.
ARTBIO | $90M | Healthcare
ARTBIO, a clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company, raised a $90M Series A led by Third Rock Ventures with F-Prime participating. An F-Prime incubation, ARTBIO launched six months ago with a $23M Seed from F-Prime and Omega Funds. It’s advancing lead candidate AB001 for prostate cancer, plus two additional solid tumor programs.
Odyssey Therapeutics | $101M | Biotech
Odyssey Therapeutics, which develops next-generation precision immunomodulators and oncology medicines, raised a $101M Series C led by Ascenta Capital with General Catalyst, Foresite, and others participating.
Bicara Therapeutics | $165M | Biotech
Bicara Therapeutics, developing tumor-targeting antibodies, raised a $165M Series C co-led by Braidwell and TPG. The round will advance its lead fusion protein BCA101, designed to boost antitumor activity via increased activation of natural killer cells.
Tome Biosciences | $213M | Biotech
Tome Biosciences, developing “programmable genomic integration,” a new gene-editing platform licensed from MIT, raised $213M in combined Series A and B rounds from a16z, ARCH, GV, and others. The tech aims to overcome limitations of tools like CRISPR. Tome is led by Rahul Kakkar, former CEO of Pandion Therapeutics, which Merck acquired for $2B.
Congruent Ventures — pre-seed deep tech / climate tech firm with a new Boston foothold — raised $275M for its third fund.
All for now!
Covering the upcoming numbers to watch for (🔜) , the relevant numbers of last week (🔙), and the tech headlines of the last two weeks (🆕).
🏦 On the Hill:
The Fed’s latest forecasts signal plans to lower rates in 2024 while the economy continues to grow, reinforcing their approach: dampen demand, wait for supply-side normalization, and bring inflation down without breaking everything.💼 Jobs:
The November jobs report showed U.S. employers adding 199,000 jobs, beating expectations. Unemployment fell from 3.9% to 3.7%, aided by roughly 41,000 autoworkers and actors returning from strikes.🛍 Consumer activity:
November CPI rose 0.1% month-over-month and 3.1% year-over-year. Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf summed up the backdrop: “The consumer is still very, very strong.”🏡 Real estate:
Pending home sales hit a record low — worse than during the financial crisis. Meanwhile, the 30-year mortgage rate pulled back to ~7% after briefly touching 8%, triggering a 14% weekly jump in refinance applications.🌍 International:
The Bank of Canada held rates at 5% as GDP contracted 1.1% in Q3. The Bank of England and ECB also held rates steady.📈 Business activity:
Early PMI data suggest the U.S. economy picked up some momentum in December, ending the year with its fastest growth since July. Manufacturing orders in October were down ~4%, largely due to auto strikes; ex-autos and aircraft, orders were down ~1%. Roughly 40% of Russell 2000 companies now have negative earnings, up 200% since 2006.
🆕 Headlines
👊 Breakthroughs:
The FDA approved Casgevy and Lyfgenia, the first cell-based gene therapies for sickle cell disease. Casgevy is the first approved therapy using CRISPR, eliminating the need for a bone marrow donor.🔋 China’s fourth-gen nuclear:
China began operating the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, using gas for cooling instead of pressurized water. Construction started in 2012; its first reactor connected to the grid in 2021.🇺🇦 Ukraine update:
Day 662 of the war. Ukraine is heading into its second brutal winter as Russia loads a new intercontinental ballistic missile into a silo southwest of Moscow. The missile can deliver multiple nuclear warheads. Vladimir Putin will run again for president as an independent candidate after two decades in power.💪 Model wars:
Google launched Gemini, the model it hopes will seriously challenge GPT-4.🤖 Optimus 2.0:
Tesla unveiled the second generation of its Optimus humanoid robot. It’s still not for sale, but the demo video is very on-brand: glossy, futuristic, slightly uncanny.🐦 A modest acquisition:
David Rubenstein, Carlyle Group co-founder, is reportedly in talks to buy MLB’s Baltimore Orioles.✈️ Airlines are back:
IATA now projects $23.3B in industry profits for 2023 — nearly 5x its initial outlook. Reopening of the Chinese market is a big contributor.💾 HP, but make it less:
Berkshire Hathaway cut its HP stake to 5.2%. It bought in back in April 2022 and remains underwater on that position.🧪 Pipeline gap-filling:
AbbVie plans to acquire Cerevel Therapeutics to deepen its neurology and psychiatry portfolio. Cerevel, founded by Pfizer and Bain in 2018, focuses on Parkinson’s and schizophrenia but has yet to bring a drug to market.🤔 Campaign season:
Fact-checking the December 6th Republican primary debate continues to roll in, with both mainstream and conservative-leaning outlets weighing in.🔬 CosMc’s:
McDonald’s is testing a new spinoff brand, CosMc’s, aimed at fast coffee and snacks, especially for afternoon traffic. The concept will lean on smaller real estate footprints and experimental layouts, including multiple drive-thrus.🌌 Extremely Large Telescope, extremely literal name:
The ELT (Extremely Large Telescope), the future flagship project of the European Southern Observatory, is under construction on Mount Armazones in Chile with first light scheduled for 2028. It will detect visible and infrared light, map stellar orbits in 3D, and enable more precise models of distant systems.
Seasonally quiet as we roll into peak “out of office” territory.
Dec 23, 11–4PM: Small Mart Holiday Market pop-up at the Crystal Ballroom in Davis Square.
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