Grafana, Tilt, Reliant AI, and Optiml

Welcome to another edition of the Who Got Funded newsletter. 🚀 

My name is Onofre, and I'm an entrepreneur living in Aarhus, Denmark. Every week, I dedicate 3 to 4 hours of my free time to reading startup news, which I then summarize in this newsletter.

I hope you enjoy this content. Thank you so much for reading. ✌️ 

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by deepsense.

Estimated reading time: ⌛️ 6 min 20 sec.

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SERIES B AND LATER
Grafana Labs, a NYC-based company behind open, and composable operational dashboards, raises €241.5 million

🇺🇸 Grafana Labs, a NYC-based company behind open, and composable operational dashboards, completed a primary and secondary transaction totaling approximately €241.5 million.

This startup, which began in 2014 as an open-source side project by co-founder Torkel Ödegaard, offers an open-source observability platform that helps companies of all sizes visualize all types of data.

According to the funding press release, this startup has now surpassed $250 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has more than 5.000 paying customers, up from 2.000 in 2022.

Grafana is now valued at over $6 billion, up from $3 billion in 2021.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series B (and later) interesting stories:

🇮🇳 Eruditus, an Indian edtech startup, is in advanced talks to secure about €134 million.

🇺🇸 TickPick, a NYC-based event ticket marketplace, raises €223.6 million.

🇺🇸 Arch Lending, a NYC-based crypto-backed loan provider, secures €67 million in funding.

🇺🇸 Openwater raises €48.3 million for open-source medical research technology.

🇺🇸 Opkey, a provider of an AI continuous test automation platform for enterprise systems, raised €42 million.

🇺🇸 Human Longevity, a longevity focused technology startup, secures €35.6 million in funding.

🇬🇧 London-based Fresha gets €27.8 million in debt to add machine learning to its beauty marketplace.

SERIES A
London-based Tilt secures €16.1 million to reshape the way we buy and sell online

🇬🇧 London-based Tilt, a startup revolutionizing the fashion ecommerce space, has raised €16.1 million.

Founded in 2021 by two early ex-Revolut employees Neil Shah and Abhi Thanendran, this startup offers buyers engage directly with sellers through real-time streams, providing instant, synchronous communication.

Similar to in-store shopping, deals and offers are available only while users are actively engaged on the app, driving purchases by creating a dynamic, time-sensitive shopping environment.

Tilt has quickly become a popular app in the UK, surpassing Depop and eBay. With features like auctions and boosts, it's attracted over 500.000 users in just one year. Impressive!

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series A interesting stories:

🇨🇭 Lausanne-based Vandria raises €27.4 million for mitochondrial therapeutics development.

🇷🇴 Creatopy, which automates ad creation using AI, secures €9.4 million to expand its network of over 5.000 customers.

🇩🇪 Munich-based XO Life nabs €7 million to expand meta platform for patients.

🇬🇧 London-based deeptech VividQ raises €6.7 million for spatial computing.

🇨🇿 Prague-based Bookbot secures €4 million to expand its second-hand online bookstore into the DACH market (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland).

🇫🇮 Finnish biotech NADMED raises €3.5 million for vitamin B3 deficiencies testing.

SEED
Berlin-based Reliant AI launches out of stealth with €10.1 million to bring AI-analytics to biopharma

🇩🇪 Reliant AI, a provider of generative AI-powered data analytics software, emerged from stealth with an impressive €10.1 million seed funding round.

This startup was founded by scientists and researchers with extensive experience in the AI industry, having previously worked at DeepMind, Google Brain, and EY Parthenon.

Reliant is focusing on the intersection of AI and biotechnology, a fast-growing market projected to reach $13.1 billion by 2034, according to reports.

Their first product, Reliant Tabular, is an “AI workbench” that helps life science analysts find scientific evidence for their decisions through automated systematic reviews, asset scans, comprehensive analyses, and a customisable data platform.

In summary, it looks like this startup is targeting an interesting market, has a very compelling team, and is also well-financed. We’ll see how far they can go!

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Seed interesting stories:

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Root Global raises €8 million to build the climate OS of the food industry.

🇬🇧 London-based BeyondMath secures €7.6 million for multiphysics simulation platform.

🇨🇭 Zurich-based HR tech FLOWIT raises €4.2 million for frontline employees AI coach.

🇪🇪 Tallinn-based UP Catalyst bags extra €2.3 million to offer a sustainable solution for the battery value chain.

🇧🇪 Ghent-based Uman snaps €1.9 million to disrupt sales enablement market with AI agent.

🇳🇴 Oslo-based SportAI raises €1.6 million to harness computer vision for sports technique coaching.

PRE-SEED
Zurich-based proptech Optiml secures €3.5 million to decarbonise the real estate sector

🇨🇭 Optiml, a Swiss proptech offering a software solution for sustainable real estate investments and renovation strategies, secured €3.5 million in a pre-seed extension.

This startup, which is an a spin-off of ETH Zurich, offers asset managers, investors and their consultants decarbonisation and renovation software for individual properties and entire portfolios.

I think I understand what this startup is doing, and I find it interesting. However, the main challenge I see with proposals like Optiml's is determining what percentage of tasks in decarbonization and renovation processes can be automated.

I believe that this startup might be tackling a problem that involves too many tailored, manual tasks, making it challenging to scale operations through just a software solution.

Optiml has secured over 30 successful pilot projects, and the VC firm of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Innovation Endeavors, participated in this round. Nice! 🚀 

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More pre-Seed interesting stories:

🇨🇭 Zurich-based Apheros secures €1.65 million to cool down data centers via metal foams.

🇱🇹 Vilnius-based Tingit secures €500k to make repairs easy and convenient.