Milk & Eggs brings home the bacon — $6M worth of bacon
The online farm-to-table food delivery platform announced $6 million in new funding on Halloween — to counter all that candy we had crammed in our faces all day. Milk & Eggs has been serving the Los Angeles region since 2016 and operates on a single order (‘I need milk’) and subscription (‘I need milk every other Thursday’) basis. The funding will be used to improve the company’s operations, customer service and associated technology according to their press release.
“There is great momentum in the grocery sector, and Milk & Eggs’ successful seed funding is another example of the resources and innovation currently pouring into this burgeoning market,” said Kenneth Wu, the company’s founder and CEO. [Email press release]
Uber launches Ride Pass, an antidote to surge pricing
No stranger to specialty passes (puppy delivery, anyone?) Uber announced their latest offering this week. That program, labelled “Ride Pass,” allows riders in Los Angeles (and five other cities) to skirt surge pricing by paying a monthly subscription fee.
The rollout comes just two weeks after Lyft launched a monthly subscription program of its own, which offers users up to 30 rides a month (so long as each ride is less than $15) for just under $300. With Ride Pass going live this week, the competition is on. Buckle up. [Business Insider]
PatientPop announces their $75M war chest
Not a bad week for the healthtech startup. On Wednesday, Santa Monica-based PatientPop announced that it reached $75 million in funding and would be adding a board member in veteran healthcare investor Todd Cozzens, whose company led PatientPop’s most recent round. Where’s that money going? According to the company’s two CEOs, they’re investing heavily in product innovation and market expansion — otherwise known as good ol’ fashioned growth. [Built In LA]
eHarmony bought by German media company for undisclosed amount
There’s nothing like an international love affair. Plane flights. Long distance gifts. Early morning virtual board meetings that cross time zones and languages. If that’s not exactly what you had in mind, you probably weren’t expecting eHarmony to be purchased by ProSiebenSat.1, the German media group behind Deutschland’s top dating app.
Combined, their dating empire now stretches from the U.S. to the U.K., across mainland Europe, and into Australia. Back home in the States, eHarmony is keeping its name, and CEO Grant Langston will continue on as matchmaker-in-chief. [Built In LA]
Data and analytics company EDO closes a $12M Series A
This week, we give you a data science success story straight out of a Hollywood picture — and with a cameo by Edward Norton. Well, more than a cameo. The Golden Globe recipient actually co-founded the company, along with Harvard Ph.D and data whiz Daniel Nadler.
The two EDO co-founders are both serial entrepreneurs (Norton sold his first company, CrowdRise, to GoFundMe in 2016) and artists (beyond crunching numbers and teaching things to machines, Nadler is an award-winning poet), who entered the space to “bring unprecedented sophistication to the measurement of advertising efficacy in ways that incumbent measurement players lacked the technological capabilities to address,” according to a press release from the company.
With a fresh $12 million round — led by Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital — and a client list that includes Turner, Lionsgate and Paramount, EDO’s future looks pretty bright. Then again, they’re the ones being paid to forecast that kind of thing. [Built In LA]
