Friday "Fund" Day: Top Startup Headlines From The Week of May 6, 2024
Another work week in the books.
For Southeast startups, this week brought early-stage funding news and impressive acquisition headlines. As you catch up on work and prepare to wind down for the weekend, here is a round up of what happened across the region:
The BIG Stories on Hypepotamus
Atlanta-based zerodivide.ai is looking to use artificial intelligence to help students with autism and others in the I/DD community unlock their ideas through writing. More here.
Knoxville has a new VC firm. We have some of the details on Market Square Ventures.
Get to know the CEO of Gabriel Money, an Atlanta-based neobank focused on financial literacy and empowerment for the Latino community in the US.
Funding News
Charlotte-based Lucid Bots closed its $9.1 million Series A funding round, led by Cubit Capital, with participation from Idea Fund Partners, Danu Venture Group, and existing investors that include Y Combinator's Growth Fund and Gratus Capital. Previous Hypepotamus coverage of Lucid can be found here.
Birmingham-based Acclinate, a health equity startup focused on improving clinical trials, raised its $7 million Series A funding round. More on the funding round here.
Acquisition News
Flashtract, an Atlanta-based software startup for construction billing automation, announced it was acquired by California-based Trimble. Financial terms were not disclosed, but details of the acquisition can be found here.
In Other News
Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering has established an artificial intelligence supercomputer hub dedicated exclusively to teaching students. The initiative — the AI Makerspace — was launched in collaboration with NVIDIA. College leaders call it a digital sandbox for students to understand and use AI in the classroom. More on the announcement from Georgia Tech here.
The Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA) announced the launch of the seventh edition of its ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator program (AP7), promoting community bank innovation. The companies have been chosen for AP7, which takes places in Atlanta, include:
Prelim Technologies (San Francisco): A no-code platform for customer onboarding processes, which helps banks digitize their services, streamline account opening, and enhance customer experiences.
Rego Payment Architectures (Blue Bell, Pennsylvania): A white-label family lifecycle platform tailored for financial institutions that helps kids to manage and spend money within a parent-controlled environment.
FINBOA (Houston, Texas): An analytics and process automation platform that simplifies and streamlines payment dispute processing, improving regulatory compliance and operational efficiency.
RiskScout (Austin, Texas): Offering cloud-based tools to help community banks grow and become more efficient, unlocking new markets and deposit streams while automating back-office workflows.
ScribeUp (Los Angeles, California): A best-in-class embedded subscription management solution allowing users to track, cancel, and lower their subscription bills from a single location.
Savvi AI (Chicago, Illinois): An AI platform that helps banks build, launch, and manage AI apps to help forecast charge-offs, predict loan volumes, forecast deposits, and increase loan offer uptake.
