SA国际传媒

Hello and welcome back to Last Week In Venture, the weekly roundup of startup funding deals which may have flown under your radar.

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Before getting into that, though, here鈥檚 a bit of what the SA国际传媒 News team did this week. VC investor confidence is down, and we followed up with an investor to hear their thoughts on the market. We covered Amazon鈥檚 acquisition of home WiFi company Eero and supergiant funding rounds raised by Rivian, DriveNets, Flow Kana, and Nuro. We covered reports that Doordash is inking a big new funding deal. And, in other news, Lyft鈥檚 founders move to concentrate power, Peloton is prepping for an IPO, and dating apps aren鈥檛 getting a lot of love from VCs.

Of course, this is just a small piece of a bigger picture. There are plenty of companies outside the unicorn spotlight, and their contributions to the broader startup ecosystem are definitely worth sharing.

So, without further ado, let鈥檚 dive into the week that was in venture-land!

Haute Hijab

Aiming to deliver 鈥渢he world鈥檚 best hijabs for the world鈥檚 most powerful women,鈥� NYC-based designs and sells a selection of hijabs and underscarves in an array of luxury and performance fabrics. On Monday, the company it raised led by . , , , , , and participated in the deal.

The ecommerce company was launched back in 2010 by (CEO) with her husband (COO). Last year, when Haute Hijab launched a luxury collection of crystal-laced hijabs, Elturk that, growing up in Detroit in the 90s, she owned two hijabs that she would rotate every other day. 鈥淭hey were dark and drab and didn鈥檛 fit into my American style鈥� the idea of hijab and fashion couldn鈥檛 even be said together. It was the ultimate oxymoron,鈥� she told the fashion magazine.

Today, the company is a leading brand in the hijab market and says it plans to use its new capital to scale up domestically and 鈥渆xtend its competitive lead worldwide.鈥� In a statement about the funding round, the company says that 鈥淸t]he average Muslim woman wears up to four hijabs per day and owns over 100 hijabs in total,鈥� and it鈥檚 a rapidly-growing market. Citing , the company said that the Muslim middle class is expected to triple to 900 million people by 2030. According to , $254 billion was spent on Muslim attire in 2016. The report indicates the market could grow to $373 billion by 2022.

Professional Network Data Mining

The likes of Facebook and Google are busy mining your social data for ethically dubious (but phenomenally profitable) advertising businesses. Well, teams can now collectively mine their own professional network for more useful stuff, like introductions to new customers and business partners.

is a San Francisco-based maker of a relationship intelligence platform, which 鈥渟tructures the world鈥檚 communication data to harness the power of professional relationships.鈥�1 The company raised co-led by and . , , and (investing individually) participated in the round.

How does it work? Affinity鈥檚 patented technology siphons metadata out of your calendars and email, reconciles it with available social information and communications from other people on your team, and helps visualize a professional network and identify folks who are best-positioned to make warm introductions. It鈥檚 like the contemporary digital surveillance state, but for corporations!

The on the company鈥檚 website says that a person using the software is 鈥渁ble to view email subjects, email recipients, calendar event titles, and calendar participants across [their] entire firm.鈥� The company advises to use the default-open privacy settings, but it says it offers more granular privacy controls, including ways to hide messages between certain people from the platform. In a business setting, it makes sense to keep some executive communication off the record, as it were, but it highlights another divide between haves and have-nots. If , the workers themselves can be wells, too. Sounds like a greasy business to me.

Storing Time Makes Money

Stop for a moment and think about the countless sensors and chips, logging and computing away, recording moment-to-moment happenings all day, every day. Where does all that data go?

Well, to be most useful, time-dependent data should be stored in a , which are purpose-built to slice and dice data by datetime tags. Time-series databases are among the fastest-growing category of databases infrastructure. According to industry monitoring authority , the most popular time-series database system is .

This week, InfluxDB announced it raised $60 million in a Series D round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Several , including and , participated in the round.2 In conjunction with the financing, CEO joined InfluxData鈥檚 board of directors.

More Interesting Deals From The Week

• isn鈥檛 the only Midwestern upstart automaker to close funding this week. Ann Arbor, MI-based raised co-led by and . The company is developing self-driving vehicles that will be available through an on-demand shuttle service in urban centers. and backed in February 2018. May Mobility went through 鈥檚 Summer 2017 batch.
• , developers of an 鈥渋ncredibly intuitive, precise and flexible 3D pen for sketching, modelling, review and animation inside and outside of XR鈥� raised led by . of individual angel investors, seed fund and London-based deep tech investor participated in the round.
• And finally: one of bitcoin鈥檚 technological selling points is its open, publicly auditable ledger of transactions. It turns out there鈥檚 money to make by mining this data for secrets and statistics. Blockchain analytics and research firm raised led by . , which led the company鈥檚 in April 2018, participated in the deal announced this week.

And with that, we鈥檙e done! Here鈥檚 to hoping that some of our U.S. readers can enjoy a three-day weekend. Everyone else should rest easy, too. The POTUS probably isn鈥檛 going to do anything else while he鈥檚 golfing.

Image Credits: Last Week In Venture graphic created by聽聽Photo by Ferdinand Stohr, via Unsplash.