Chicago VC Firm OCA Ventures Opens Silicon Valley Office

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By Jim Dallke -February 27, 2019

OCA Ventures, a 20-year-old Chicago-based venture capital firm, is heading west with the opening of an office in Silicon Valley.

OCA announced that it has hired Kevin McQuillan, a longtime venture investor and co-founder of Focus Ventures, to lead the firm’s West Coast operations. McQuillan, a five-time member of Forbes’ “Midas List,” a ranking of the top venture capital investors, previously led investments in startups such as Sensity (acquired by Verizon) and Paydiant (acquired by PayPal). More than 20 of McQuillan’s startup investments have gone public.

Focus Ventures, based in Palo Alto, has invested $850 million in technology companies across three funds since launching in 1996.

The addition of McQuillan and the opening of an office in the Valley have less to do with increasing OCA’s investments in West Coast startups, and more about adding value to the firm’s existing portfolio companies, OCA CEO Jim Dugan explained. Having a physical presence in Silicon Valley will help the firm strengthen its relationships with larger venture firms who can provide expansion capital to OCA’s portfolio companies as they grow.

“We’ve been doing business now in venture for 20 years. The heartbeat of the ecosystem is in the Valley,” Dugan said. “This expansion for us is a continuation of us being able to add value to our portfolio companies, particularly for those later-stage rounds.”

OCA, which is investing out of its fourth fund, invests in Seed, Series A and Series B rounds. Its notable exits include Cleversafe (acquired by IBM), Tenor (acquired by Google) and TradeKing (acquired by Ally Financial). It also scored a win last year after DocuSign’s IPO. OCA invested in Cartavi, a Chicago-area software startup, which was acquired by DocuSign in 2013.

The Mom Project, a job site for moms returning to work, nabs $8M from Initialized and more

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If you are a mother who has taken a break from full-time employment to raise kids, you may have also experienced the challenge that is jumping back into the working world after your break.

You may find you need more time flexibility; you have been out of the job market for years and so your confidence is knocked; your skills are no longer as relevant as they were before; or you just want to rethink your career; plus many employers — whether they say it or not — seem less interested in you because of all of the above, and no level of burnishing your resume on LinkedIn will help. It can be tough (and I say that from first-hand experience).

Now, Chicago-based startup The Mom Project, a platform specifically built to help female knowledge workers find jobs after pausing to raise kids, has raised a little egg of its own to take on this challenge. It’s picked up a Series A of $8 million that it plans to use to bring its job marketplace to more cities — it’s currently in Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco — and to expand the kinds of services it offers to make the challenge of juggling work and parenthood easier.

The funding is being led by Grotech Ventures and Initialized Capital, with another new investor, Aspect Ventures, and previous backers Atlanta Seed Company, Engage Ventures, OCA Ventures, BBG Ventures, IrishAngels and Wintrust Financial also participating.

This brings the total raised by The Mom Project to $11 million, and with 75,000 registered moms and 1,000 companies, including Procter & Gamble, BP, Miller Coors and AT&T, the startup claims it’s now the largest platform of its kind in the U.S.

From selling diapers to changing diapers

Allison Robinson, the founder and CEO of The Mom Project, said she came up with the idea for the startup in 2016, when she was on maternity leave from a strategy role at Pampers.

“I started realising a lot about moms before I became one,” she says about her last role before striking out as an entrepreneur. “But what I hadn’t understood until I was on maternity leave myself was that your priorities can change after having a child.” (She’s pictured up above with her son.)

Citing a study she’d seen in the Harvard Business Review that estimated 43 percent of skilled women exit the workforce after having children, Robinson realised there was a gap in the market for those among them who had timed out from returning to their previous roles, but still wanted to make the leap back into working at some point.

And she has a point: Not only do people who decide they want to return to work face all of the usual issues of newly needing more time flexibility, wondering whether their skills are still current enough, general confidence and so on, but the average recruitment process, and job sites overall, do not really have ways to account for any of that very well.

And the gap exists on the employer side of the marketplace, too. Businesses — both large corporates very much in the public eye as well as smaller businesses that are not — are rethinking how they hire and keep good people in the overall competition for talent. (Just this week, the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics said that the number of unfilled positions in the information and communication technology sector rose by 24.3 percent compared to last year in the country, a shortage that’s reflected in other markets.)

Having a diverse workforce — including more women and women from different walks of life — is key not only to helping counteract that, but to contribute to better overall work culture. That’s a fact that many employers have realised independently or have simply been thrown into the spotlight unwittingly and now are trying to repair.

And yet, there haven’t been many opportunities for them to pursue more diverse hiring practices.

LinkedIn recently made a tiny move into exploring diversity in hiring by at least allowing recruiters to search their job candidate results by gender, but this is a far cry from actually addressing the specific predicaments that particular segments of the working population have, and how to help them connect better with employers who might be keen to bring more of them on through recruitment.

In fact, the idea of providing improved job search for knowledge workers in specific cases is actually a very interesting one that shows there is definitely still room for innovation in the world of recruitment: Handshake earlier this year raised $40 million for its own take on this, which is providing a better LinkedIn-style platform to connect minority university graduates with interesting job opportunities at companies keen to make their workforces more diverse.

“Companies have started to realize the value in building a diverse workforce, but we still have a long way to go in achieving equal representation and opportunities,” said Julia Taxin, a partner at Grotech and new Mom Project board member. “Allison and her team have built an incredible marketplace of diverse talent for companies and I look forward to working with The Mom Project to execute on their vision of helping to close the gender gap in the workplace.”

The Mom Project, Robinson said, is tackling the challenges at both ends of the spectrum.

On the employer side, she said there is a lot of educating going on, talking to HR people and getting them to understand the opportunity they could unlock by hiring more parents — which tend to be almost entirely all-women, but sometimes men, too.

“We want to provide more data to these companies,” she said, pointing out that it’s not just a matter of providing a job opportunity, but also giving parents options in areas like childcare, or flexible working schedules. “We want to show them ‘here is where you are doing well, and here is where you are not. Fixes don’t cost a lot of money, but a lot of companies are just not aware.”

“We’ve got 75,000 women on our platform, and currently around 1,000 companies posting jobs,” she said. “The goal is to have 75,000-plus jobs. We want to make sure that all the moms signing up on the platform are getting work.”

“The Mom Project is determined to create a future where women aren’t forced to choose between their families and their careers,” said Alda Leu Dennis, partner at Initialized Capital and new Mom Project board member, in a statement. “There is a huge pool of experienced talent, parents and non-parents, that is sometimes overlooked because companies haven’t created the kind of diverse, flexible workplace culture that attracts and retains them. Initialized wants to be part of making this cultural shift happen.”

On the parent side, not only is it also about making the platform known to people who are considering a return to work, but it’s also about some fundamental, but very important basics, such as giving would-be jobseekers the flexibility to go to interviews. Robinson said that one campaign it’s about to launch, in partnership with Urban Sitter, is to provide free childcare credits to Mom Project jobseekers so that they can get to their interview.

“Sometimes you have to go to an interview with 24 hours’ notice, and lining up a sitter can be stressful,” she said. “We want to alleviate that.”

Parents also know that this isn’t just an issue for the interview: Many towns and regions have what Robinson called “childcare deserts,” where there is a scarcity of affordable options to replace the parent on a more daily basis.

Contract work is king (and queen)

For now, Robinson said that the majority of jobs on the platform are focused on fixed-term employment — that is, not permanent, full-time work.

This is due to a number of reasons. For example, parents coming back to working after a break may be more inclined to ease in with shorter roles and less long-term commitment. And employers are still testing out how this demographic of workers will work out, so to speak. Equally, though, we have seen a huge swing in more general employment trends, where businesses are hiring fixed-term workers rather than full-time employees to account for seasonality and to give themselves more flexibility (not to mention less liability on the benefits front).

While Robinson said that the aim is definitely to bring more full-time job opportunities to the platform over time, this has nonetheless presented an interesting business opportunity to The Mom Project. The startup acts like Airbnb, Amazon and a number of other marketplaces, where it not only connects job-seekers and employers, but also then handles all the transactions around the job. When the job is fixed-term, the Mom Project essentially becomes like the job agency paying the employee, and that is how it makes a cut. And it also becomes the provider of benefits and more.

In other words, while there is an immediate opportunity for The Mom Project to compete against (or at least win some business from) the likes of LinkedIn to target the specific opportunity of providing jobs for women returning to work, there is a potentially and equally big one in becoming a one-stop employment shop to handle customers’ other needs as employers or workers, providing a range of other services, from payroll through to childcare listings and more.

WhiteFox Defense lands $12 million as the demand for drone defense technologies intensifies

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Jonathan Shieber@jshieber

Four months ago, when two commercial DJI-made drones loaded with 1 kilogram each of plastic explosive detonated during a speech from Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro at a military event in Caracas, the world at large was introduced to the newest threat from our automated, dystopian present — cheap weaponized drone technology.

For Luke Fox, the founder and chief executive of WhiteFox Defense Technologies, it was simply the latest in a string of events proving the need for the kinds of services his company is developing. Something he calls “a highway patrol for the sky.”

From drug smuggling to reconnaissance and information gathering to terror attacks, unmanned aerial drones are no longer the provenance of state military and police actors, and are increasingly being used by criminal organizations to open new, aerial fronts in their operations.

“Drones are by far the biggest asymmetric threat that the U.S. faces,” says Fox. “Countries that don’t have a state-sponsored drone program are using them [and] it’s where you see people like ISIS are going.”

In the battle for Mosul in Iraq, ISIS flew more than 300 drone missions in one month, according to a talk given last year at CyCon by Peter Singer, a senior fellow and strategist at the New America Foundation. One-third of those were strike missions, representing the first time U.S. military faced an aerial attack since the Korean War.

The 24-year-old Fox began thinking seriously about the weaponization of commercial and consumer drone technology six years ago, when he founded WhiteFox Defense.

Creating the company was an extension of the way that Fox had been taught to think about the world as a child, he’s said. Fox grew up in an abusive foster home, raised by a mentally ill foster mother (who was, herself, a child protective service employee) who had adopted him and a number of mentally and physically challenged children.

“The reality I grew up in had my mind constantly looking for vulnerabilities. And instead of seeing these vulnerabilities as opportunities for crime I now had a whole color palette to choose from,” said Fox. “For example, when the world started going crazy over drones as recreational toys I saw that they could be used as weapons or for crime, and this insight into the criminal mind inspired a company that defends the country from drones.”

Fox was adopted from foster care by the librarian of his local Sacramento-area high school, tested out of college and went on to a community college before enrolling in California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo.

He began working with drones while in school and credits that introduction to the technology as the inspiration for starting WhiteFox.

“We previously started out in drone manufacturing, starting out in high-performance drones for specialty clients and research organizations. We needed affordable drones that were highly capable,” said Fox. “Making a highly capable drone that was very affordable attracted some very shady people. And, realizing that there was only so much we could control, it brought us to ask what is out there? At the time, the only thing to counter drone-related attacks was large missiles shooting down large Iranian drones.”

WhiteFox currently has three products either in development or on the market. Two have already been released to a select group of customers in different industries and the entire suite will be launched at the beginning of next year, according to Fox.

Without going into specific details of how the technology works, Fox said that WhiteFox Defense systems can detect, identify and mitigate unauthorized drones flying in a particular airspace.

“It’s not jamming or blocking drones or catching them out of the sky,” says Fox. Rather the idea is to provide situational awareness and identify the type of threat that an errant drone represents — whether the operator is, in Fox’s words, “clueless, careless or criminal.”

What Fox would say is that his company has developed a technology that’s based on identifying and differentiating between drones based on their unique radio frequency signatures. That product for identifying drones operating in a space is complemented by a second technology offering that allows WhiteFox to take control of the unauthorized drones in an airspace.

“One of the technologies that was started at Drones For Change [the company that would become WhiteFox] was a universal controller,” said Fox. “That technology really formed the basis. We asked what if this universal controller could become a master controller to take over any drone that was in your airspace? That solved the problem that got us out of drone manufacturing.”

WhiteFox isn’t alone in its attempts to create anti-drone technology. According to some industry statistics there are at least 70 companies working on drone defense technologies, with solutions ranging from deploying other drones to capture unauthorized UAVs to jamming technologies that will block a drone’s signal.

Earlier this year, Airspace Systems raised $20 million for its kinetic (drone versus drone) approach to drone defense, while Citadel Defense raised $12 million and Dedrone pulled in $15 million for their drone-jamming technologies.  And last year, SkySafe raised $11.5 million for a radio-jamming approach similar to WhiteFox, which forces unauthorized drones out of restricted airspace while permitting authorized drones to still fly.

“As​ ​the​ ​adoption​ ​of​ ​consumer​ ​drones increases,​ ​we​ ​believe​ ​it​ ​is​ ​vital​ ​for​ ​an​ ​ambitious​ ​and​ ​effective​ ​defense​ ​platform​ ​to​ ​emerge,” said Alex Rubacalva, a partner at Stage Venture Partners and an early investor in WhiteFox Defense. 

In all, drone-related startups have raised nearly $2 billion in the last eight years, according to data from Crunchbase, pulled at the beginning of 2018. Roughly $600 million of that investment total has come in 2017 and the early part of 2018 alone, the Crunchbase data indicated.

Technologies like SkySafe and WhiteFox are about more than just defending airspace from malicious actors.

“Counter-drone technology is not just about securing spaces from drones and preventing bad things from happening,” says Fox. “It’s about enabling drones to be used in the right way.”

The applications extend far beyond military uses. In fact, Fox’s technology is already being adopted by prisons around the U.S. and, indeed, anywhere airspace usage can be considered sensitive.

“Someone described as the largest delivery operations in the world is happening at prisons,” said Fox. “You have a lot of money behind buying a DJI at Best Buy and loading it up with heroin, with drugs, with weapons, with even Chinese food that was smuggled in. We found that there were drones smuggling in contraband every single day.”

WhiteFox recently conducted a survey with an undisclosed large public prison system in the United States to study just how pervasive a problem drone-smuggling was among its prison population. What the prison saw as one drone a week flying into restricted airspace became a realization that multiple drone flights per day were occurring in attempts to smuggle contraband onto prison grounds.

Operations extend far beyond police and military applications though, according to Fox.

During the California wildfires, rescue operations were halted thanks to unauthorized usage of drones by civilian operators who wanted to capture footage of the disaster. Their actions potentially risked the lives of not only rescue workers but of the citizens they were trying to save and the fire crews attempting to control the worst wildfire in the state’s history.

“This is one of the fascinating things about this industry as a whole,” says Fox. “It’s not that drones are bad and scary and we need to do something about them. If we’re going to embrace this technology as a society we need to be able to safely integrate it into society.”

From its initial deployments, WhiteFox was able to convince investors to funnel $12 million into the company to finance its expansion plans.

The extension of the company’s seed round included investors like JAM Capital, Stage Venture Partners, Okapi Venture Capital, Serra Ventures and OCA Ventures. 

“WhiteFox’s customers are armed with a highly robust and scalable-for-deployment technology​ ​platform​ ​that​ ​addresses​ ​the​ ​increased​ ​threat​ ​of​ ​hostile​ ​drones​ ​and enables​ ​greater​ ​control​ ​of​ ​their​ ​airspace,” said Jeff Bocan, a partner at OKapi Venture Capital, in a statement.​ “Crucially, WhiteFox’s technology also offers customers the ability to protect against reckless drone use, while enabling “friendly” drones to fly freely — all without any human intervention.”

Luke Fox featured in Forbes 30 Under 30: Manufacturing & Industry 2019

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Luke Fox

Founder, WhiteFox
Luke Fox created WhiteFox Defense Technologies, which detects and intercepts hostile drones to protect people and property. Fox, who grew up in foster care, is also a children’s rights advocate.
STATS
AGE 23
RESIDENCE San Luis Obispo, California
EDUCATION Drop Out, California Polytechnic State University

WhiteFox Impresses U.S. DoD At World’s Largest Counter-drone Testing Event

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WhiteFox Defense Technologies, Inc., a drone airspace defense and security company, had their flagship product, DroneFox, participate as selected equipment by the U.S. Government for the prestigious Black Dart counter-UAS and Red Teaming exercise last month. It was the first time WhiteFox had performed testing at Black Dart, the largest counter-drone testing exercise in the world. After only a brief training, military personnel were able to operate DroneFox to effortlessly detect, identify and mitigate drone threats that were sent by a contracted Red Team. WhiteFox participated alongside several Department of Defense organizations and civilian companies after passing the rigorous nine-month down-selection process. As UAS pose a unique and complex threat that requires multiple layers of defense to comprehensively protect, public and private entities were encouraged to work together.

Representatives of the U.S. Government saw how WhiteFox engaged with the entities and helped evolve security modeling along with techniques, tactics and procedures. Through the DroneFox user interface, operators were able to perform threat assessments of individual unknown or hostile drones and “whitelist” their own “friendly” drones. The military personnel operating DroneFox then relayed this information to remote personnel performing various ground operations at the exercise.

The Department of Defense has hosted the invitation-only exercise since 2004 to test the capabilities of Department of Defense and civilian companies as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have become easier to own and use. More than 70 countries now use UAS for government or military applications, according to the Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization.

FBI director Christopher Wray recently told a U.S. Senate panel that the threat from commercial drones “is steadily escalating” even as Congress gives agencies new tools to address these threats. The comments came just days after President Trump signed into law legislation that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice new powers to detect and mitigate drones that pose a threat to government and other sensitive assets.[2]

Luke Fox, CEO of WhiteFox Defense Technologies, said: “Drones are becoming an integral part of military forces worldwide. They are being used for research and development, in combat missions, as target decoys and reconnaissance. They are also playing a key role in security, search and rescue missions, communications and munitions.

“The demonstrations at Black Dark showed how our technology can support the military in field operations, protect their sensitive assets, and become a pillar of defense against drone threats, enabling soldiers to focus on their missions.”

About WhiteFox Defense Technologies 
WhiteFox Defense Technologies, Inc. is a drone airspace security company headquartered in California. WhiteFox builds proprietary software and hardware that enables users and institutions to secure their airspace from drone threats. Pioneering the safe integration of drones into society, WhiteFox develops products that save lives, protect property, and safeguard privacy. WhiteFox’s mission is to keep the sky open for responsible pilots, advancing drone technology for the benefit of society. In a constantly changing industry, WhiteFox is pushing the boundaries of what security means. 

To learn more about WhiteFox or schedule a demo, email info@whitefoxdefense.com or visit www.whitefoxdefense.com.

About DroneFox

DroneFox is a SWaP-C optimized, portable solution which uses a novel method for tracking and taking temporary control of drones: a “master signal” which allows its operator to choose from a dynamic set of responses including land, return to launch, confiscate, and reroute.

Unlike jammers and other non-kinetic products, the DroneFox can select the exact signal it wants to manipulate, without interfering with any others signals—even other drones.

The core WhiteFox technology offers critical infrastructure and personnel the ability to protect against reckless drone use, while enabling “friendly” drones to fly freely and continue the work they’re doing to positively impact society.

About Black Dart 2018

Black Dart 2018 is an annual Department of Defense field demonstration of current and emergent counter-UAS technologies. The event is coordinated and overseen by the Joint Staff J8; Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization. The training event brings industry personnel, observers from allied nations and military participants from across the Department of Defense.

Progentec Gains Additional Funding for Lupus Detection and Management Platforms

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BY MARY CHAPMAN

Completion of a second round of funding could help bring closer to market Progentec Diagnostics‘ new tool for predicting lupus flares and a biomarker-based index that monitors underlying disease activity.

Funding for Progentec’s biomarker-based diagnostic testing was led by venture capital outfits i2E and OCA Ventures, with participation by global healthcare provider NMC Lifesciences. Using technology created by the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, the platform is touted as being able to detect impending flares and track underlying disease movement.

“Today’s funding round is the next step on our journey to making this and other advanced tools commercially available to patients with lupus, a disease that afflicts more than one million Americans, many of whom are women,” Mohan Purushothaman, PhD, Progentec’s CEO, said in a press release. “The Progentec tests will become powerful tools to help patients and healthcare providers stay ahead of lupus.”

NMC Lifesciences brings an integrated multivertical and multibrand private healthcare network that includes 2,000 physicians and 8.5 million patients globally.

“NMC is looking forward to a strong symbiotic partnership with Progentec, delivering value all across the healthcare delivery ecosystem,” said Prasanth Manghat, CEO and executive director of NMC Health, parent company of NMC Lifesciences.

Oklahoma-based Progentec has also acquired LupusCorner, a patient-centered platform for individuals with lupus nephritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. The company hopes to use the LupusCorner infrastructure to create an innovative and comprehensive lupus management platform.

According to Puroshothaman, the addition of LupusCorner and its users will ensure patient participation in the process of creating this platform. LupusCorner uses an array of smartphone-geared tools to help track patient-generated data and health literacy.

“We look forward to advancing the platform and fulfilling the unmet need for lupus diagnostics and management tools,” he said.

Launched two years ago, LupusCorner was designed to help patients better understand their health and medications by providing clear and accurate information via an online platform shared monthly by roughly 45,000 people living with lupus, a disease that causes the immune system to attack the body’s own tissues.

LupusCorner founders Arif Sorathia and Brett Adelman will join Progentec and help direct its efforts.

“Our goal is to empower our users to be active participants in their healthcare and we are excited to be part of Progentec,” Adelman said. “This is a giant step towards uniting patient-generated data with clinical measures to improve patient outcomes.”

Progentec’s mission is to create and commercialize state-of-the-art diagnostic interventions in therapeutic areas with high levels of unmet need. The company used $1.25 million in earlier financing from OCA Ventures, i2E, and Mayo Clinic Ventures to improve algorithms behind the lupus tools.

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Progentec Diagnostics, Inc. Raises Funds to Support Advances in Lupus Detection and Management

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— New funding brings lupus-detection tools closer to commercialization

— Acquisition of LupusCorner marks a step forward in developing a first-in-class lupus-management platform

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oct. 31, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Progentec Diagnostics, Inc. (“Progentec”), a leader in the development of technological innovations in the field of diagnostics, today announced the completion of a second round of funding led by i2E, along with Chicago-based OCA Ventures and NMC Lifesciences, a leading global healthcare provider. The funding will help bring Progentec’s tool for identifying Lupus flare ups and a biomarker-based disease-activity index closer to commercialization. Technology created by the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) is at the core of the platform being developed by Progentec.

Progentec today also announced the acquisition of LupusCorner, a leading patient-empowerment platform for people with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and lupus nephritis. By integrating LupusCorner’s technology platform and data insights, Progentec is positioned to develop a first-in-class lupus-management platform. The founders of LupusCorner, Arif Sorathia and Brett Adelman, have joined Progentec and will help lead technology, outreach and growth initiatives.

Progentec’s technologies include highly accurate bio-marker based tests to diagnose disease before symptoms begin to show, as well as tests to monitor and predict disease activity levels in Lupus.

“We’ve made tremendous progress in developing a tool for the identification of lupus flare-ups before they occur,” said Mohan Purushothaman, CEO of Progentec. “Today’s funding round is the next step on our journey to making this and other advanced tools commercially available to patients with lupus, a disease that afflicts more than one million Americans, many of whom are women. The Progentec tests will become powerful tools to help patients and healthcare providers stay ahead of lupus.”

“NMC Lifesciences is excited to partner with Progentec,” said Prasanth Manghat, CEO and Executive Director NMC Health Plc. “As a leading global healthcare provider that has put key components in place to build a strong, inter-dependent, integrated, multi-vertical and multi-brand private healthcare network of a team of over 2,000 doctors serving 8.5 million patients in over 17 countries, NMC is looking forward to a strong symbiotic partnership with Progentec delivering value all across the healthcare delivery ecosystem.”

LupusCorner was founded in 2016 with the mission of transforming the lupus patient experience by creating easy-to-use and powerful technologies. Today, nearly 45,000 people with lupus interact with the LupusCorner platform each month.

“LupusCorner is a powerful platform that connects people battling lupus in an online patient community to share information and better manage the disease,” said Brett Adelman, a LupusCorner founder. “Our goal is to empower our users to be active participants in their healthcare and we are excited to be part of Progentec. This is a giant step towards uniting patient-generated data with clinical measures to improve patient outcomes.”

“The addition of LupusCorner and its users furthers our vision of creating a comprehensive disease-management platform and ensures that the patient voice will be a valued part of our process,” said Mohan Purushothaman, CEO of Progentec. “We look forward to advancing the platform and fulfilling the unmet need for lupus diagnostics and management tools.”

The Lupus Foundation of America estimates that there are as many as 1.5 million lupus (systemic lupus erythematosus or SLE) patients in the U.S. alone. Seen mostly in women between the ages of 15 and 44, lupus causes the immune system to recognize and attack the body’s own tissues. Lupus sufferers have periods of flares and remission with organs typically affected including the skin, kidneys, lungs and reproductive organs, as well as the cardiovascular system.

About Progentec Diagnostics, Inc.Progentec Diagnostics, Inc. (“Progentec”) is committed to exploring and commercializing state of the art diagnostic interventions along with digital and social infrastructure to improve access and outcomes for patients in therapeutic areas with a high level of unmet need. By collaborating with research institutions and individuals around the world, Progentec works towards bringing the latest technological innovations to the field of diagnostics. Progentec’s work is rooted in the belief that better diagnostics would not only help in ensuring cost-effective management of diseases, but also help tremendously in reducing the mortality and morbidity associated with these diseases.

About LupusCorner LupusCorner is a health management platform for people living with lupus systemic erythematosus and lupus nephritis. With an assortment of smartphone-optimized tools, LupusCorner supports the tracking of patient-generated data, health literacy, and community.

Pitch Perfect Winner Spotlight: The startup tackling cardiac rehab with technology

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Moving Analytics is a startup trying to address socio-economic factors that make it difficult to complete rehab in a traditional brick-and-mortar facility through a tech-enabled home rehab system.

By KEVIN TRUONG

Oct 21, 2018 at 3:39 PM
From L to R: Medical Alley Association CEO Shaye Mandle, MedCity News Editor in Chief Arundhati Parmar and Moving Analytics CEO Harsh Vathsangam.

Every year, millions of people suffer from a cardiac health event, and even though rehabilitation programs have been shown to double a patient’s chances of living another five years, they suffer from high attrition and low participation rates.

Moving Analytics is a startup trying to address socio-economic factors that make it difficult to complete rehab in a traditional brick-and-mortar facility through a tech-enabled home rehab system.

“The sorry fact is that only 15 percent of patients today participate in rehab because to do so they would have to visit a hospital 36 times,” Moving Analytics CEO  Harsh Vathsangam said.

“There are two implications for this, one is that even with reimbursements hospitals lose money on rehab and these patients are those that represent the highest rates of readmission.”

The company has developed Movn, a digital cardiac rehab and secondary prevention program that they claim is able to triple participation rates at one-fifth the cost of the the existing standard of care.

The Los Angeles, California-based company won the MedCity INVEST Twin Cities Pitch Perfect competition earlier this month and in a phone interview Vathsangam expanded on the origins of the company and where it hopes to go in the future.

The startup’s technology has its roots in research conducted at the Stanford University School of Medicine that developed a series of treatment plans and algorithms laying how best to manage patients at home with different cardiac symptoms.

Where Moving Analytics comes in is by updating that largely paper-based system with modern and adaptive technology including a mobile application, blood pressure cuff and a wireless scale.

“What we’ve done since is create a 2.0 version, with a tech platform meant to make delivery of the program seamless,” Vathsangam said.

That digital health program includes five major segments: exercise, diet adjustment, medication adherence and customization, stress management an smoking cessation.

“The trick is that for each patient it’s not a standard menu, it changes based on how they feel and how well they stick to their care plan,”  Vathsangam said.

For now the company is focused on working with risk-bearing health systems and hospitals looking to lower costs and transition to value based care contracts.

Still, as a small 8-person startup in healthcare, the company has to deal with extended sales cycles that can be difficult to work around. However, Vathsangam said adoption is growing and he hopes to be in 20 hospitals by the end of the year.

Part of the reason the company decided to participate in Pitch Perfect was to create a level of validation with top notch investors that can used to create buzz and momentum ahead of a planned Series A fundraise next year.

“We want to get at least 1 million patients in the U.S. every year through rehab and every decision we make is guided by that North Star metric,” Vathsangam said. “Cardiac rehab is like a lifesaving drug that’s not being used because of issues like costs and distance.”

Balto Software raises $1.2 million and is ‘aggressively hiring’

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Balto Software of St. Louis, which uses artificial intelligence to make call-center representatives more effective, announced Thursday that it has raised $1.2 million in capital.

Chris Kontes, president and founder, said that with the money in hand, Balto is “aggressively hiring” for sales and engineering positions. The firm currently employs 13 people.

The investment round was led by Stage Venture Partners of Los Angeles and includes money from seven early-stage funds and two individuals.

The other funds are TIA Ventures and Venture for America Seed Fund, both based in New York, SaaS Ventures of Bethesda, Md., and three Chicago funds: Harbor Street Ventures, Sandalphon Capital and OCA Ventures.  The individual investors are William Murphy, chief technology officer at New York-based Blackstone Group, and San Francisco entrepreneur Miles Laster.

Balto was founded in 2017 by entrepreneurs with experience at TopOpps, another St. Louis software firm. Balto’s artificial intelligence software analyzes sales representatives’ conversations in real time to help them avoid mistakes and close more sales.

Zendesk expands into CRM with Base acquisition

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Zendesk has mostly confined itself to customer service scenarios, but it seems that’s not enough anymore. If you want to truly know the customer behind the interaction, you need a customer system of record to go with the customer service component. To fill that need, Zendesk  announced it was acquiring Base, a startup that has raised over $50 million.

The companies did not share the purchase price, but Zendesk did report that the acquisition should not have a significant impact on revenue.

While Base  might not be as well known as Salesforce, Microsoft or Oracle in the CRM game, it has created a sophisticated sales force automation platform, complete with its own artificial intelligence underpinnings. CEO Uzi Shmilovici claimed his company’s AI could compete with its more well-heeled competitors when it was released in 2016 to provide salespeople with meaningful prescriptive advice on how to be more successful.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane  certainly sees the value of adding a company like Base to his platform. “We want to do for sales what Zendesk has already done for customer service: give salespeople tools built around them and the customers they serve,” he said in a statement.

If the core of customer data includes customer service, CRM and marketing, Base gives Zendesk one more of those missing components, says Brent Leary, owner at CRM Essentials, a firm that keeps close watch on this market.

“Zendesk has a great position in customer service, but now to strengthen their position with midmarket/enterprise customers looking for integrated platforms, Base adds a strong mobile sales force automation piece to their puzzle,” Leary told TechCrunch.

As he points out, we have seen HubSpot make a similar move with HubSpot Apps, while SugarCRM, which was recently sold to Accel-KKR, could be shopping too, with its new owner’s deeper pockets. “This is almost like a CRM enterprise software Hunger Games going on,” he joked. But he indicates that we should be expecting more consolidation here as these companies try to acquire missing pieces of their platforms to offer more complete solutions.

Matt Price, who previously had the title of senior vice president for product portfolio at Zendesk will lead the Base team moving forward.

Base was founded in 2009 and boasts more than 5,000 customers. It’s worth pointing out that Base was already available for sale in the company app marketplace, so there was some overlap here, but the company intends to try to move existing customers to Base, of course.

Zendesk has indicated it will continue to support all Base customers. In addition, Base’s 125 employees have been invited to join Zendesk, so there will be no blood-letting here.