5 Interesting Startup Deals You May Have Missed In March: Robot Massages, Renting With Pets And Diagnosing Strokes

This is a monthly column that runs down five interesting startup funding deals every month that may have flown under the radar. Check out our February entry here.

Spring has sprung and so have a list of interesting startups that raised cash.

In March, that includes a startup focused on robotic massages, one helping people with pets find rentals, and some health- and climate-related firms. Let’s take a look at those funded companies that caught our eye.

Robotic relaxation

We normally don’t include big rounds in this space — the column is dedicated to rounds you may have missed.

However, sometimes a big round goes to a company doing different things.

While we all know robotics is hot right now with investors, the big rounds usually go to startups building robots to work in warehouses or to take on dangerous jobs.

New York-based Aescape is a little different. The “lifestyle robotics company” is creating robots to help you relax — or, more specifically, AI-enhanced robots for massages.

This month, the startup locked up an $83 million round led by Valor Equity Partners. The round even saw participation from NBA Champion and All-Star Kevin Love.

The company launched last year with fitness and luxury-living company Equinox Fitness at select NYC locations. Equinox is now expanding the partnership to 60 locations nationwide, using the robotics offering as a way to help people recover from a workout.

Founded in 2017, Aescape has raised $128 million, per the company.

Pet-friendly solution

People love their pets, and property owners also have to do what is best for their asset and the rest of the tenants.

That is where PetScreening comes in. The startup says it offers the rental housing industry’s first pet policy management software. This month the Mooresville, North Carolina-based startup raised an $80 million Series B led by Guidepost Growth Equity and Volition Capital.

PetScreening’s platform allows renters to share information about their pets, while also helping property owners apply pet policies fairly and consistently. Rental applicants can enter information about their pets into PetScreening’s centralized pet-screening database to analyze rental housing-related risk — weighing various factors such as breed, weight and age.

Property owners then can assess a specific pet and pet owner who wants to live at a rental property — allowing them to create guidelines based on pet data instead of one-size-fits-all rules.

The startup says it now serves more than 7 million rental units in the multifamily, single-family, student, affordable, manufactured and military base sectors, and the platform just launched a no-cost, “Amber Alert” service for lost dogs — FidoAlert — and cats — TabbyAlert.

Identifying a stroke

In the United States, approximately 795,000 people experience a stroke each year.

So it’s obviously very important to diagnose the medical episode correctly.

Brainomix, a spinoff from the University of Oxford, raised an $18 million Series C co-led by Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund and Parkwalk Advisors to do just that.

The company — which now operates in more than 20 countries globally, including the U.S. — has created the Brainomix 360 Stroke, which automates validated imaging biomarkers to improve both diagnosis and treatment decisions.

The company says its technology has been deployed to over 300 hospitals and is used on more than 1.5 million patients. Brainomix says the platform was associated with an additional 50% increase in the number of patients receiving mechanical thrombectomy, a stroke treatment reducing disability.

The company also has used its AI knowledge in the field of lung fibrosis, creating the Brainomix 360 e-Lung platform to predict the progression of the disease.

Brainomix will use the new cash to accelerate its commercial expansion into the U.S.

Two-for-one

There are a lot of startups that remove carbon from the atmosphere or that create fresh water from industrial waste water.

But Capture6 does both, and this month the Berkeley, California-based startup raised a $27.5 million Series A led by private equity firm Tetrad Corp.

Capture6’s system aims to transform waste brine — a highly concentrated salt solution byproduct of various industries and often quite expensive to get rid of — into a solvent that mineralizes carbon dioxide in one step while also recovering additional freshwater that would otherwise be wasted.

That may be necessary, as the World Economic Forum projects freshwater demand to exceed supply by 40% by 2030.

The company has recently partnered with the Palmdale Water District in Southern California to eliminate up to 100 acres of brine ponds.

The new cash raise will allow the startup to move forward with core water recovery and carbon removal projects in its pipeline.

Eliminating waste in the kitchen

We all know how fast the trash fills up in our own kitchen — now imagine what it must be like at a restaurant.

A Los Angeles-based startup is attempting to help eliminate some of that waste. Topanga.io raised an $8 million Series A led by Blue Bear Capital as it looks to scale its AI-powered platform to cut waste across the enterprise foodservice, healthcare and hospitality industries.

The platform includes an AI-driven smart scale that automatically measures food waste and helps kitchens reduce overproduction by 70%, waste insight features for menu planning, and a tech-powered reusable packaging system.

The platform already is in use by more than 430 kitchens.

There is a lot that can be saved. The company claims between packaging and overproduction, U.S. foodservice operators are losing more than $27 billion annually.

Illustration: Dom Guzman