Bonfire Ventures closes new fund
Bonfire Ventures, an LA-based early stage and seed stage fund, recently closed a new $60 million fund. Founded by former Rincon Venture Partners investor and Jim Andelman and Mark Mullen of Double M Partners, the fund recently recruited former Google sales and product professional Leah Volger to make the trek down to Southern California as the fund's vice president. According to TechCrunch, the partners plan to contribute to roughly eight Seed or Series A rounds with investments up to $1 million. The trio also mentioned that they plan on focusing on Southern California. Last year, Bonfire Ventures led a Seed round for LA-based Shippabo. [TechCrunch]
Smart water tech developer Phyn adds $10 million
As the company gets ready to release it smart water device Phyn Plus this spring, Torrance-based Phyn added a $10 million round of funding from Minnesota-based plumbing supplier Uponor. With the funding, Uponor became an equal owner with Playa Vista-based Belkin International. Founded in 2015, Phyn's products use machine learning and high-definition pressure sensing to react to potentially catastrophic leaks. [Built In LA]
Private equity investor Accel-KKR buys a chunk of FastSpring
e-commerce software developer FastSpring received another sizable investment from Accel-KKR this week, giving private equity investor the majority in the Santa Barbara-based company. Accel-KKR will continue to offer capital and resources to the company. [Press Release]
Leaf Group adds $23.3 million in secondary public offering
Santa Monica-based Leaf Group, a digital media company that operates a number of popular e-commerce and digital publications, sold more than 3.3 million shares of its common stock this week in a secondary public offering, raising $23.3 million in the process. The funds will go towards working capital and potential acquisitions. [LA Business Journal]
Ordermark selected to join Techstars
Ordermark, the LA-based recently named to Built In LA's 50 Startups to Watch in 2018, is headed east to join the latest Techstars cohort in Boulder. Founded last year out of the famous Canter's Deli on Fairfax, the company develops a hardware-software platform to help restaurants around the country streamline their online orders, bringing many such establishments into the 21st Century in the process. [Press Release]
inVia Robotics raises $9 million Series A to deploy its robots to e-commerce warehouses
Westlake Village-based inVia Robotics, a company that produces AI-powered robots that help e-commerce businesses more efficiently run their warehouses, closed a $9 million Series A this week. The company plans to use the funding to produce more robots to fulfill a growing backorder list. The company also announced that it would be deploying 100 robots to LA-based e-commerce startup Hollar. [Built In LA]
