Data Future Lab this month: A $60M raise, 2 acquisitions, and jobs!
Announcements
Tune in to the Future Fountain
We’re excited to kick off the latest in the Future Labs x Orrick partnership: The Future Fountain, a podcast dedicated to conversations about the tech ecosystem, DEI, sustainability, and more. The first two guests: Charley Moore, founder & CEO of Rocket Lawyer, and Mario Ruiz, formerly at PayPal and now co-founder and partner at Infinity Ventures. LISTEN NOW
The next frontier of sales
Program manager Arjun Sahgal dives into the ‘Third Wave of Sales’, spotlighting Next Round co. BuyerSight among other next-gen startups in the space.
Office hours at the DFL
If you’re an NYC-based founder with questions about growing your startup, you’ve come to the right place. Book a 1x1 with Future Labs MD Steven Kuyan to get advice on fundraising, pitching, go-to-market strategy, and other big questions of life.
Startup Call-out
- Spruce, the real estate title and closing Next Round alum, just raised $60M led by Zigg Capital. This new round brings their total funding to $110M.
- Catalyst NYC grad Cherry Pick has been acquired by 100.co! The addition of Cherry Pick’s predictive intelligence for product dev will bolster 100.co’s AI capabilities in their shared mission to make the CPG industry more product-centric.
- Another day, another exit. Wade & Wendy is now part of PandoLogic, bringing together the Next Round grad’s conversational AI with programmatic job advertising.
- Boomy, the AI-powered music startup in Catalyst NYC, is officially live and out of beta. Boomy users have already created 2.5M+ songs — nearly 3% of the world’s total recorded music. “People are going from never having written a song in their lives to having something up on Spotify in 15 minutes, instead of weeks or months,” founder and CEO Alex Mitchell tells Axios.
- More firsts: Real estate fintech LEX, Catalyst NYC alum, just took a building public, alongside Apex Clearing, for $24M.
- Catalyst NYC’s echoAR has already been named a Top 10 Telecom Industry Innovation of 2021 by StartUs Insights, with emphasis on their cross-platform AR/VR tools and flexible cloud infrastructure.
- Data capture without surveillance — Numina showing how it’s done. The Next Round startup partnered with the City of Boston to study street-level activity without collecting datasets or images.
- Next Round’s Pryon founder Igor Jablokov shares insights with the MyTechDecisions podcast on Microsoft’s $19.7B AI acquisition and how intelligent voice tech will impact the workplace. TUNE IN
- Heavy-duty hiring going on in the DFL network: Wunderkind wants a sales strategy manager, Spruce is looking for many engineers, and OpenSponsorship has an opening for a full-stack engineer. Other openings on our jobs board.
Events
Women Tech Global Conference | June 7–11
Bringing together women in tech, minorities, and allies for panels, breakout rooms, technical workshops, and networking.
NYCML x Bloomberg’s Machines + Media 2021: Facing the Future | June 9
In the 5th annual edition, technologists, media professionals, and academics convene to discuss how to manage the impact of tech on the media ecosystem.
#ProductCon | June 24
The largest Product Management conference in the world, with speakers including Clara Liang (VP/GM, Airbnb), Laura Teclemariam (Director of Product, Netflix), Ebi Atawodi (ex Head of Product, Uber).
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