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A new startup is emerging from stealth today with the goal of helping solve that problem.

, which manages bathroom remodeling projects on behalf of homeowners, has raised $9 million in a seed round led by ., and some angel investors also participated in the financing.

Serial entrepreneurs (who previously co-founded ) and Sagar Shah (who previously founded ) founded San Francisco-based Made Renovation last year with the Bay Area鈥檚 construction talent shortage in mind. It鈥檚 been operating in 鈥渟tealthy beta鈥� since June. It’s up to now selling more than 10 projects a month with an average project price of around $30,000, according to Dickey.听

How it works

Made Renovation essentially handles a bathroom remodel project on behalf of a homeowner from start to finish. Eventually, the startup will expand to other markets with a supply-demand imbalance, but for now it鈥檚 only focused on the Bay Area.

鈥淣ot only do we handle everything for customers from design and architecture to procuring materials and pulling permits, we also match them with a contractor and then oversee the project to make sure it goes smoothly,鈥� Dickey said in a phone interview.

Made Renovation also claims to perform a bathroom remodel more affordably than if a homeowner worked directly with a general contractor. Many contractors might be reluctant to take on a smaller project due to the lower profit margin.

Dickey himself said he called 30 to 40 contractors when working on a small bathroom remodel. But it was tough to find anyone considering that a higher cost of living has pushed out many contractors.

鈥淧eople wouldn’t return my calls, or said they only would take projects with a $100,000 to $200,000 minimum,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e鈥檝e also had customers who were quoted $75,000 for a 40-square-foot bathroom, which amounts to nearly $2,000 a square foot. We offer a guaranteed fixed price, which customers appreciate because they don鈥檛 have to worry about project overruns.鈥�

Niche focus

Eventually, the 15-person startup may branch out, but for now it is 鈥渉appy being bathroom experts.鈥�

鈥淐ustomers like knowing that we specialize in bathrooms,鈥� Dickey told SA国际传媒 News.

In conjunction with the seed funding, Made Renovation also unveiled today a bathroom design showroom听at听2108 Chestnut Street听in San Francisco where 鈥減eople can visualize their bathrooms with virtual reality.鈥�

The company plans to use its new capital to grow its delivery and technology teams.

鈥淔or us, it鈥檚 mostly process automation,鈥� Dickey said. 鈥淵ou can think of us a construction firm that churns out a high volume of relatively similar projects. Since the bathrooms we鈥檙e doing have similarities, our customers can save money.鈥�

For Nahigan, co-founder and managing director of Base10 Partners, Made Renovation 鈥渋s creating a 10 times better solution to the status quo鈥� in the multibillion-dollar renovation industry. He claims much of the industry is made up of “DIYers,” or homeowners doing the work themselves.

, managing director at Felicis Ventures, previously worked with Dickey when his firm invested in Gigster.

鈥淎t this stage, a high percentage of conviction is usually about the team. We鈥檙e huge believers in Roger,鈥� he wrote via email. Plus, 鈥渢he renovation market in the US is 7 times larger than the ride-hailing market. A large portion of that is smaller renovation projects that Made is making more efficient.鈥�

We’ve written plenty about startups focused on improving efficiencies and processes within the construction industry raising money, but they have mostly focused on larger projects. More recently, though, we also covered Homebound, which essentially serves as a tech-enabled general contractor. That startup has developed tools to track and manage 370 unique tasks associated with building a home, and recently raised $35 million in a round led by .

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Tempo is the latest company to join the pack, announcing it raised $17.5 million for its Series A round and will start taking pre-orders for its system, which will start shipping this summer.

Providing live and on-demand strength and high intensity interval training classes, Tempo uses artificial intelligence to make home workouts more like personal training sessions.

The system鈥檚 sensors scan users movements and uses machine learning to prepare workouts for users based on their progress, according to a statement from the company. Tempo counts a user鈥檚 reps, recommends weights and gives real-time corrections for a user鈥檚 technique–key benefits of having a personal trainer without the steep hourly cost.

鈥淭he real groundbreaking thing is helping people work out effectively and safely at home,鈥� Tempo CEO Moawia Eldeeb said in an interview with SA国际传媒 News.听 鈥淎nd to be able to do that you need to train.鈥�

The Tempo system鈥檚 predecessor, , was essentially the data collection process for the whole product, Eldeeb said. SmartSpot was in gyms for about three years, capturing more than 1 million sessions to feed Tempo鈥檚 AI.

Tempo鈥檚 system, like most other tech-enabled home fitness equipment, doesn鈥檛 come cheap. The price for the full station is $1,995 and the monthly content subscription is $39.

Connected fitness is a popular space that has received more than a billion dollars in VC funding overall. leads the pack, as it raised more than $994 million as a private company.

But what sets Tempo apart, Eldeeb said, is the personal training aspect. It鈥檚 not just watching a workout on a screen and mirroring the motions–Tempo will correct users if their form is wrong so they perform the moves safely and effectively.

鈥淲hat鈥檚 the difference between having a VHS and dumbbells at home?鈥� Eldeeb said of other connected fitness systems. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e packaging it in a nicer-looking design. But it鈥檚 the 21st century, it should be groundbreaking.鈥�

During live classes, trainers also have dashboards where they can see how users are performing moves. If, say, 20 percent of the class is doing a move incorrectly, the trainer can alert the whole class.

Tempo pitched 10 investors for the Series A, and many actually came into the company鈥檚 office to try out the product, Eldeeb said. The company ended up with eight term sheets, and the investors Tempo ultimately picked were those the company felt were 鈥渋n it for the long-haul鈥� and had a passion for fitness.

,, and are among the company鈥檚 investors.

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Rumors swirled over the weekend that was on the verge of closing on a buy of personal finance company . for about $7 billion in cash and stock. ( .)

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As the WSJ reported, such an acquisition would help propel Intuit further into the consumer finance space.

By Monday afternoon, Intuit had confirmed the news , saying it plans to buy Credit Karma for about $7.1 billion in cash and stock.

We thought this would be a good time to take a look at Credit Karma鈥檚 funding history. The San Francisco-based company has raised since its 2007 founding by , according to SA国际传媒 data.

Most recently, in March 2018, Credit Karma skipped an IPO and cashed out for some of its existing investors via from at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. With that deal, Silver Lake acquired a significant minority stake in the company from existing equity holders through an organized secondary process.

Credit Karma does a whole slew of things like help people keep up with, and improve, their credit ratings. It also helps people prepare and file their taxes, monitor their identities and track and manage vehicle information. It also uses advanced data modeling to analyze and identify the best financial products available for its members. As of 2018, it had originated more than $40 billion in credit products including credit cards, personal loans, mortgages, automotive financing and student loan refinancing.

And as of this month, Credit Karma says it has more than 100 million members in the United States, U.K. and Canada, including almost half of all U.S. millennials. Part of the company鈥檚 growth goes back to the fact that it offers all these things for free, making it easy for people to become members. The company makes its money when members take an offer through its site (such as for a credit card or a loan). In the case of a credit card, it gets a cut from the bank issuing that card, and in the instance of a loan, the company gets a cut from the lender who funds it.

In 2017 TechCrunch reported that the company earned the previous year and was profitable. In its statement today, Intuit noted that Credit Karma had “nearly $1 billion in unaudited revenue in calendar year 2019, up 20% from the previous year.”

Funding rewind

In 2008, put $500,000 in Credit Karma in an . The startup went on to raise $2.5 million in a (back when Series As were actually this small) financing that was led by and included participation from 听 and , among others.

It took Credit Karma three and a half years to raise its next round: a March 2013 $30 million Series B investment led by . also put money in that round.

By the following year, the company had raised $155 million across two tranches of a Series C round, more than five times the round of its Series B the previous year. The second tranche of that Series C, led by SV Angel in September 2014, gave Credit Karma a $1 billion valuation.

In June 2015, the company raised a $175 million Series D financing at a pre-money valuation of $3.3 billion.

The deal going through is a validation for the fintech space, which only saw one IPO last year in 鈥檚 public debut.

As put it, (thanks to Axios for calling out this nice excerpt):

“Intuit could try to match all the tax data its TurboTax customers provide with the credit-scoring data that Credit Karma holds. That could let Intuit serve up better customer prospects to credit card issuers鈥攁nd eventually let Intuit charge lenders more for access to its hoard of data.”

In confirming the deal, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said the company’s听mission is “to power prosperity around the world with a bold goal of doubling the household savings rate for customers on our platform.

鈥淲e wake up every day trying to help consumers make ends meet,” Goodarzi continued. “By joining forces with Credit Karma, we can create a personalized financial assistant that will help consumers find the right financial products, put more money in their pockets and provide insights and advice, enabling them to buy the home they鈥檝e always dreamed about, pay for education and take the vacation they鈥檝e always wanted.”

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The Series B financing brings the company鈥檚 total funding since its inception in late 2015 to $58 million. Other backers include , , , Thirty5 Venturers, and .

Because digital health platform is such a broad term, let鈥檚 break down what it means in this case. The Redwood City California-based startup claims it can give 鈥渕embers鈥� a web-based in 鈥�75 minutes or less.鈥�

The premise behind the company is to help identify health issues before they become worse, or as it claims: 鈥淭o give individuals a deeper understanding of their own body and how it鈥檚 changing over time so they have more control over their own health.鈥�

Indeed, most of us don鈥檛 even know we鈥檙e sick until symptoms start popping up to alert us. In some cases such as certain forms of cancer–it can already be too late. Q Bio says its platform can actually identify signs of disease at the earliest stages, before symptoms arise. If this is true, I鈥檇 say it鈥檚 revolutionary.

The way it works seems straightforward. Members register online and the company begins aggregating and digitizing their medical history. On exam day, members anonymously check in for a 75- to 90-minute exam. Two weeks later, a Q 鈥渆xpert鈥� will review the results over a 鈥渟ecure鈥� video chat in which members鈥� physicians are welcome to join.

With each additional visit, Q claims, its HIPAA-compliant platform gets more sensitive to surfacing anomalous changes in your body, then tailors the set of measurements gathered based on these anomalies and changing risk factors.

In summary, membership includes a fully comprehensive exam including a full body MRI, saliva, blood and urine analysis, a summary and a 30-minute telemedicine review of the health of each of your body鈥檚 systems. Health data is continuously updated for one year and stored in the company’s BioVault with lifetime access to review and share.

co-founder serves as Q Bio鈥檚 CEO. As part of this new round of funding, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner joins Q Bio鈥檚 board, along with from Khosla Ventures.

Background

Kaditz co-founded the company with his own misdiagnoses from over a decade ago in mind.

Since then, he said, he鈥檚 鈥渋magined a day when everything about a person鈥檚 body could be quickly measured, shared and analyzed.鈥�

“It听took some time to figure out some of the scaling issues and to wait for certain technologies to be cheap enough and mature enough,” Kaditz told SA国际传媒 News.听“Our technology allows us to gather more clinical information, more quantitatively, faster and cheaper than anything else and it will only get faster and less expensive over time. We allow for a separation of where you go to get your body measured and where your doctor actually is.”

Over the past few years, the company has stealthily worked on fine-tuning its imaging protocols to determine the 鈥渕ost clinically relevant set of biomarkers鈥� to include in its platform. It has 25 employees, up from 17 a year ago.

a16z’s Pande in a written statement said that鈥淨 Bio makes true preventive medicine possible today.鈥�

鈥淏y measuring everything from blood to imaging and more in a longitudinal way, patients can have personalized baselines and physicians the data and power to understand, interpret and utilize this data to personalize care,” he added.

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, a freight forwarding and logistics platform, announced yesterday led by (surprise, surprise) , which is backed by government capital from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, among other sources. The deal reportedly Flexport at $3.2 billion, post-money.

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Existing investors , , , and Chinese express delivery firm also participated in the round. San Francisco-based Flexport was founded in 2013 and has been on a mission to digitally transform the multi-trillion dollar global logistics and freight forwarding sectors, both of which are notoriously fraught with inefficiencies and delays. Prior to this round, the company had raised a total of around .

With this deal, global logistics, supply chain management, and shipping funding (as defined by SA国际传媒 categories) is on the rise. Including this round from Flexport, over $2.5 billion has been invested in venture rounds raised by logistics, supply chain management, and shipping companies so far in 2019.

In 2018, over $13.38 billion was invested in the space, mostly concentrated in supergiant rounds raised by China-based and , as well as Indonesia-based .

Growth At Flexport

Last year was a good one for the startup.

, Flexport鈥檚 CEO and founder, wrote in a yesterday that in 2018 Flexport doubled its top-line revenue to nearly $500 million, upped its headcount to nearly 1,000 employees, and broadened its geographic footprint to 11 offices and warehouses globally. The company has 10,000 customers, according to Petersen.

Flexport, he wrote, is building what he described as an 鈥淥perating System for Global Trade,鈥� or 鈥渁 strategic operating model for global freight forwarding that combines technology and analytics, logistics infrastructure, and hands-on supply chain expertise.鈥� As part of that, it鈥檚 looking to hire across the company and not just out of its San Francisco headquarters apparently.

Flexport is a alum and the accelerator is a fan. , Y Combinator co-founder and partner, is quoted on the company鈥檚 website as saying that Flexport 鈥渋s one of those rare companies that will not merely satisfy its market, but grow it. There will be more international trade because of Flexport, and international trade is a very big thing for there to be more of.鈥�

Petersen is not just a funding recipient, he is an investor himself. According to his SA国际传媒 profile, Petersen has personally invested in more than a dozen including delivery startup and fintech firm, .

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