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Playground Global
Playground Global is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in deep tech and assists startups with software, hardware, machine learning, marketing, talent and design. The company was founded in 2015 by Andy Rubin, Peter Barrett, Matt Hershenson and Bruce Leak. Playground offers startups support with engineering, distribution, manufacturing and financing in exchange for equity. In May 2019, Playground returned Rubin's investment and removed him from management, following reports of sexual misconduct alleged to have occurred in 2013 while Rubin was an executive at Google. His smartphone company, Essential Products, remained under the Playground umbrella. The next month, Laurie Yoler joined as Playground's first female general partner; she was already serving on the boards of Bose, Tesla and Church & Dwight, among others. Rubin's Essential Products company failed in February 2020, prompting a rebuild of Playground Global. Significant investments Playground Global has r ...
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Matt Hershenson
Playground Global is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in deep tech and assists startups with software, hardware, machine learning, marketing, talent and design. The company was founded in 2015 by Andy Rubin, Peter Barrett, Matt Hershenson and Bruce Leak. Playground offers startups support with engineering, distribution, manufacturing and financing in exchange for equity. In May 2019, Playground returned Rubin's investment and removed him from management, following reports of sexual misconduct alleged to have occurred in 2013 while Rubin was an executive at Google. His smartphone company, Essential Products, remained under the Playground umbrella. The next month, Laurie Yoler joined as Playground's first female general partner; she was already serving on the boards of Bose, Tesla and Church & Dwight, among others. Rubin's Essential Products company failed in February 2020, prompting a rebuild of Playground Global. Significant investments Playground Global has ra ...
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Privately Held Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is offered, owned, traded, exchanged privately, or Over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter. In the case of a closed corporation, there are a relatively small number of shareholders or company members. Related terms are closely-held corporation, unquoted company, and unlisted company. Though less visible than their public company, publicly traded counterparts, private companies have major importance in the world's economy. In 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for ($1.8 trillion) in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In 2005, using a substantially smaller pool size (22.7%) for comparison, the 339 companies on ...
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Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in seed, early and growth-stage companies. History The firm was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Beijing and Shanghai. The firm manages $3.8 billion of capital. The firm's partners include Allen Beasley, Jeff Brody, Jamie Davidson, Satish Dharmaraj, Tom Dyal, Tim Haley, Brad Jones, Chris Moore, Lars Pedersen, Scott Raney, Ryan Sarver, Tomasz Tunguz, John Walecka, Geoff Yang and David Yuan. The founders of Redpoint Ventures have been involved with successful investments including Foundry, Juniper Networks, Netflix and Right Media. Its partners have been involved in 136 IPOs and acquisitions. IPOs include Snowflake, Twilio, Pure Storage, 2u, Just Eat, Zendesk, HomeAway, Qihoo, Responsys, Fortinet and Calix. Acquisitions include Acompli, Caspida, Efficient Frontier, Heroku, RelateIQ, BlueKai, Posterous, Trip.com, LifeSize, Refres ...
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Financial Services Companies Established In 2015
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of financial economics bridges the two). Finance activities take place in financial systems at various scopes, thus the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance. In a financial system, assets are bought, sold, or traded as financial instruments, such as currencies, loans, bonds, shares, stocks, options, futures, etc. Assets can also be banked, invested, and insured to maximize value and minimize loss. In practice, risks are always present in any financial action and entities. A broad range of subfields within finance exist due to its wide scope. Asset, money, risk and investment management aim to maximize value and minimize volatility. Financial analysis is viability, stability, and profitability asse ...
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RapidSOS
RapidSOS is an intelligent safety platform that securely links data to 9-1-1 and first responders. It connects more than 500 million devices directly to 15,000+ first responder agencies. Founded in 2012 by Michael Martin and Nicholas Horelik, RapidSOS partners with IoT companies to improve caller data accuracy in 9-1-1 centers. RapidSOS’ first product was the Haven mobile application. Since its foundation, the company has sent emergency data to 9-1-1 telecommunicators without users needing to use an app. The company has introduced product offerings such as RapidSOS Safety, RapidSOS Portal, RapidSOS Premium, and RapidSOS Integrations. RapidSOS has working relations with companies like Apple, Axon, Uber, Google, Cove, Simplisafe, Sirius XM and MedicAlert to facilitate emergency response. History RapidSOS was founded in 2012 by Michael Martin and Nicholas Horelik to address the 911 data challenge. Martin had a personal experience with 9-1-1 connection difficulties when his father ...
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3D Printing
3D printing or additive manufacturing is the Manufacturing, construction of a three-dimensional object from a computer-aided design, CAD model or a digital 3D modeling, 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under Computer Numerical Control, computer control, with material being added together (such as plastics, liquids or powder grains being fused), typically layer by layer. In the 1980s, 3D printing techniques were considered suitable only for the production of functional or aesthetic prototypes, and a more appropriate term for it at the time was rapid prototyping. , the precision, repeatability, and material range of 3D printing have increased to the point that some 3D printing processes are considered viable as an industrial-production technology, whereby the term ''additive manufacturing'' can be used synonymously with ''3D printing''. One of the key advantages of 3D printing is the ability to produce very ...
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Relativity Space
Relativity Space is an American aerospace manufacturing company headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 2015 by Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone. Relativity Space is developing manufacturing technologies, launch vehicles and rocket engines for commercial orbital launch services. History Relativity Space was founded in 2015 by CEO Tim Ellis and CTO Jordan Noone on the idea that existing NewSpace companies were not tapping enough into the potential of additive manufacturing (3D printing). Relativity is aiming to be the first company to successfully launch a fully 3D-printed launch vehicle into orbit. In November 2020, Relativity Space announced its US$500 million Series D funding at a calculated US$2.3 billion valuation. In June 2021 Relativity announced another US$650 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments at a valuation of US$4.2 billion, bringing its total funding to US$1.335 billion. The funding will help the development of a fully reusable m ...
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FarmWise
FarmWise Labs, Inc. (established 2016) is an American agricultural technology and robotics company, based in California. Its first product is an automated mechanical weeder that uses a combination of AI, computer vision and robotics to pull out weeds in vegetable fields without using chemicals. It won several industry innovation awards related to agriculture and sustainability. History FarmWise was founded in 2016 in San Francisco by Sebastien Boyer, a graduate of École Polytechnique and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Thomas Palomares, a graduate of École Polytechnique and Stanford University. With a first prototype of weeding robot, the founders went through The Alchemist Accelerator program and the THRIVE by SVG Accelerator program in 2017. In December 2017, the firm closed a $5.7 million seed round from investors who included Playground Global, Felicis Ventures, Lemnos, Basis Set Ventures and Valley Oak Investments. Following the seed round, Playground's Bru ...
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Owl Labs
Owl Labs is a company that makes 360° video conferencing devices called the "Meeting Owl", the "Meeting Owl Pro" and the "Meeting Owl 3." It was founded in 2014 by robotics experts Max Makeev and Mark Schnittman. It raised a total of $7.3M in venture capital from seed and Series A rounds led by serial entrepreneur Andy Rubin (via his Playground Global fund), Antonio Rodriguez (general partner at Matrix Partners) and iRobot Ventures. In June 2017, it announced its Meeting Owl device. VentureBeat noted that unlike others Meeting Owl has "...a single 360-degree camera that can recognize and highlight the person speaking..." The device contains a Qualcomm Snapdragon Snapdragon is a suite of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon's central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM architecture. A single SoC may include mu .... In 2023, Owl Labs launched "Owl Bar", a front-of-room camera, mic ...
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Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets, the instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 ''Fortune'' 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years. Intel supplies microprocessors for computer system manufacturers such as Acer, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel (''int''egrated and ''el''ectronics) was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore's law) and Robert Noyce ( ...
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Nervana Systems
Nervana Systems was an artificial intelligence software company based in San Diego, California, and Palo Alto, California. The company provided a full-stack software-as-a-service platform called Nervana Cloud that enabled businesses to develop custom deep learning software. On August 9, 2016, it was acquired by Intel, for an estimated $408 million. Deep learning framework The company's (now discontinued) open source deep learning framework is calleneon Neon which the company said would outperform rival frameworks such as Caffe, Theano, Torch, and TensorFlow – would achieve its performance advantage through assembler-level optimization, multi-GPU support, and use of an algorithm called Winograd for computing convolutions, which are common mathematical operations in the deep learning process. Nervana Cloud Nervana Cloud, announced in February 2016, is based on Neon, and ran on Nvidia Titan X GPUs, but Nervana was also developing a custom application-specific integrated circui ...
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Series A Round
A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchange for their investment. It is usually the first series of stock after the common stock and common stock options issued to company founders, employees, friends and family and angel investors. Series A rounds are traditionally a critical stage in the funding of new companies. Series A investors typically purchase 10% to 30% of the company. The capital raised during a series A is usually intended to capitalize the company for 6 months to 2 years as it develops its products, performs initial marketing and branding, hires its initial employees, and otherwise undertakes early stage business operations. It may be followed by more rounds ( Series B, Series C, etc). Sources of capital Because there are no public exchanges listing their securi ...
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