Tag: Khosla Ventures

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One-click housing startup Atmos raises another $4M from Khosla, real estate strategics, and TikTok star Josh Richards

Atmos wants to make designing a house as simple as a single click. Well, that vision is now getting a double click from VCs.

The company, which we profiled back in July, announced today that it raised another $4 million, this time from Evan Moore at Khosla Ventures, real estate strategic investors like David Gerster at JLL Spark and Lennar board member Scott Stowell as well as individuals like Adam Nash of Dropbox and TikTok star Josh Richards, who I guess has turned that whole concept of hype houses into a real estate investment thesis. Or something.

That’s on top of the company’s earlier $2 million seed round, bringing the total fundraised to $6 million if this desk calculator is functioning.

Atmos has made even more progress since they graduated from YC earlier this year. According to CEO Nick Donahue, users have started designing the “first dozen homes” on the platform, and the first home designed through Atmos has now broken ground on construction.

The company has also done an acquihire to expand its team, and it is growing its technology to allow users to more easily visualize their housing designs within the context of specific property lots.

If you’re curious about the company’s founding story and more of what they are doing, definitely read more from our story just a few weeks ago.

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Khosla Ventures seeks $1.1 billion for its latest fund

Khosla Ventures, the eponymous venture firm helmed by longtime Silicon Valley rainmaker, Vinod Khosla, is raising  $1.1 billion for its latest venture fund, according to documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filing was first spotted by Ari Levy over at CNBC.

Khosla, whose investing career began at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (back when it was still called Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) is rightly famous for a number of bets on enterprise software companies and was a richly rewarded co-founder of Sun Microsystems before venturing into the world of venture capital.

Like his former partner, John Doerr, Khosla also went all-in on renewable energy and sustainability both at Kleiner Perkins and then later at his own fund, which he reportedly launched with several hundreds of millions of dollars from his personal fortune.

Over the years Khosla Ventures has placed bets and scored big wins across a wide range of industries including cybersecurity (with the over $1 billion acquisition of portfolio company Cylance), sustainability (with the Climate Corp. acquisition), and healthcare (through the public offering of Editas).

And the current portfolio should also have some big exits with a roster that includes: the unicorn lending company, Affirm; the nuclear fusion technology developer, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (maybe not a winner, but so so so cool); delivery company, DoorDash; the meat replacement maker, Impossible Foods; grocery delivery service, Instacart; security technology developer, Okta; the health insurance provider, Oscar; and the payment companies Square and Stripe .

That’s quite a string of unicorn (and would-be unicorn) investments. And it speaks to the breadth of the firm’s interests that run the gamut from healthcare to fintech to sustainability and the future of food.

Khosla will likely benefit from the surge of interest in investments that adhere to new environmental, social responsibility and corporate governance standards.

There are billions of dollars that are looking for a home that can invest along those criteria, and for the last 16 years or so, that’s exactly what Khosla Ventures has been doing.

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Impossible Foods Continues Growth Trajectory With $500M Series F

Impossible Foods raised $500 million in a Series F round, bringing its total funding to nearly $1.3 billion.
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Mirae Asset Global Investments, a new backer, led the round, according to a statement from the company. Existing investors, including Khosla Ventures and Temasek Holdings, also participated. The last …

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Impossible Foods confirms $500 million fundraising, has raised $1.3 billion in total

Impossible Foods, the privately held meat replacement challenger to publicly traded Beyond Meat, said it has raised roughly $500 million in its latest round of funding.
The new investment brings the company’s total haul to $1.3 billion since it was founded nearly nine years ago.
The new financing led by Mirae …

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RealityEngines launches its autonomous AI service

RealityEngines.AI, an AI and machine learning startup founded by a number of former Google executives and engineers, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its first set of products.

When the company first announced its $5.25 million seed round last year, CEO Bindu Reddy wasn’t quite ready to disclose RealityEngines’ mission beyond saying that it planned to make machine learning easier for enterprises. With today’s launch, the team is putting this into practice by launching a set of tools that specifically tackle a number of standard enterprise use cases for ML, including user churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection and cloud spend optimization. For use cases that don’t fit neatly into these buckets, the service also offers a more general predictive modeling service.

Before co-founding RealiyEngines, Reddy was the head of product for Google Apps and general manager for AI verticals at AWS. Her co-founders are Arvind Sundararajan (formerly at Google and Uber) and Siddartha Naidu (who founded BigQuery at Google). Investors in the company include Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Khosla Ventures and Paul Buchheit.

As Reddy noted, the idea behind this first set of products from RealityEngines is to give businesses an easy entry into machine learning, even if they don’t have data scientists on staff.

Besides talent, another issue that businesses often face is that they don’t always have massive amounts of data to train their networks effectively. That has long been a roadblock for many companies that want to see what AI can do for them but that didn’t have the right resources to do so. RealityEngines overcomes this by creating realistic synthetic data that it can then use to augment a company’s existing data. In its tests, this creates models that are up to 15 percent more accurate than models that were trained without the synthetic data.

“The most prominent use of generative adversarial networks  — GANS — has been to create deep fakes,” said Reddy. “Deepfakes have captured the public’s imagination by highlighting how easy it to spread misinformation with these doctored videos and images. However, GANS can also be applied to productive and good use. They can be used to create synthetic datasets which when then be combined with the original data, to produce robust AI models even when a business doesn’t have much training data.”

RealityEngines currently has about 20 employees, most of whom have a deep background in ML/AI, both as researchers and practitioners.

Source: TechCrunch