The global startup community is currently enjoying a period of fundraising success that may be unprecedented in the history of technology and venture capital. While this is happening around the world, few startup hubs in the world are reveling in a greater boost to their ability to attract capital than Boston.

The well-known U.S. city is a traditional venture capital hub, but one that seemed to fall behind its domestic rivals Silicon Valley and New York City in recent years. However, data indicates that Boston’s startup activity in fundraising terms has reached a new, higher plateau, funneling record sums into the city’s upstart technology companies this year.

And, according to local investors, there could be room for further acceleration in capital disbursement.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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The Exchange wanted to better understand what’s driving Boston’s rapid-fire results, and discover if there is any particular need for caution or concern. Is the market overheated? According to local investors Rob Go from NextView, Jamie Goldstein from Pillar VC, Lily Lyman from Underscore and Sanjiv Kalevar from OpenView, things may be more than warm, but Boston’s accelerating venture capital totals in 2021 are not based on FOMO or other potentially ephemeral trends.

Instead, Boston is benefiting from larger structural changes to at least the U.S. venture capital market, helping close historical gaps in its startup funding market and access funds that previously might have skipped the region. And local university density isn’t hurting the city’s cause, either, boosting its ability to form new companies during a period of rich investment access.

Let’s talk data, and then hear from the investing crew about just what is going on over in Beantown.

A record year in the making

When discussing venture capital data, we often note that it is somewhat laggy, with rounds announced long after they are closed. In practice, this means that more recent data can undersell how a particular quarter has performed. With Boston’s 2021 thus far, all that we can say is that if this data includes normal venture capital lag, it will simply be all the more incredible.

“In order to become a better writer, read your written words out loud.”

That’s one of the first, and best, writing tips I ever received. I always found the advice ironic because it required me to change the medium of my writing to become a better writer. Still, all these years later, it’s true: Vocalizing your words helps identify typos and incomplete thoughts, but also notice more subtle things like awkward turns of phrases or a weird rhythm in your sentence structure. Best of all, if you find yourself bored of your own text while reading out loud, you know readers will be, too.

This is all to say that writing, even for those who love writing, is a deeply human art built on top of non-obvious rules. While those complications don’t exactly scream for a tech solution, NoRedInk, a San Francisco-based startup, has spent nearly a decade trying to help students get better at their writing through software.

NoRedInk announced today that its digital writing curriculum, which pairs adaptive learning with Mad Libs-style prompts, has helped it raise a $50 million Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with participation from True Ventures. Other investors in the company include GSV, Rethink Education and Kapor Capital.

The financing event comes nearly six years after its Series A, a signal that the company has ambition to scale meaningfully in the coming months and years. With millions more, though, NoRedInk has to address its biggest challenge: the intricacies of the subject matter that it wants to make simple.

Founder and CEO Jeff Scheur built NoRedInk in 2012 when he was an English teacher in Chicago. The site served as a way to help kids get more than “red ink” on their papers, a nod at how teachers often use red ink to mark corrections and suggestions on assignments.

“Kids get feedback on their paper and they have no idea what to do with it,” Scheur said. “They see the grade, but they tend to just throw it out … so I started building tools to figure out how to help [students] apply very difficult to learn skills that we expect kids to know, but don’t explicitly teach them.”

Since launch, NoRedInk’s goal is to help students with writing skills ranging from how to structure an essay to how to cut fluff from their arguments to how to cite correctly.

“One of the great challenges about teaching writing is that we want to demystify the process of becoming a great writer without reducing the art form of expression,” he said. “So that means providing kids with lots of targeted personalized practice, and helping them realize that there’s no one way to write.”

It thus makes sense that NoRedInk uses adaptive learning, an educational method that uses an algorithm to get inputs of learners, such as strength areas or preferences, to create an output that better meets them where they are. After asking students for their favorite characters and role models, NoRedInk creates personalized writing exercises targeting each student’s interests, then guides them through the writing process with light support.

Scheur described part of the goal of NoRedInk as “breaking down difficult to learn skills with various degrees of scaffolding.”

To date, more than 10 billion exercises have been completed on NoRedInk’s practice engine — which is data the company uses to underscore problem areas, shared struggles and potential blind spots of traditional curriculum for its districts.

NoRedInk has a free-but-limited version of its platform for teachers to try, but offers a full-fledged premium version that integrates with learning management systems and other classrooms to offer a school and district a view of progress.

As the business expands, NoRedInk might need to get deeper into drafts in order to win over market share. Will it ever play the role of suggesting tone the way that AI-based grammar and writing unicorn Grammarly does? For now, it appears not.

“Grammarly is a great consumer app, it’s a modern-day version of Grammar spellcheck that Microsoft Word did all those years ago,” Scheur said. “NoRedInk is very different; it’s what schools and districts use to teach skills.”

Aileen Lee is one of the most prestigious and successful venture capitalists of the past decade. Before starting her own firm in Cowboy Ventures, Lee was a partner at KPCB for more than 12 years. Her portfolio includes DocSend, Ironclad, Philz Coffee, StyleSeat and many, many more.

So it should come as no surprise that we’re absolutely thrilled to have Lee join us alongside one of her portfolio company founders, Guild Education’s Rachel Carlson, on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. Click to register for free!

Extra Crunch Live brings founders and their investors together to pop the lid off of the black box that is fundraising. How did they meet? Why did they choose each other? What got them to yes? How do they work together now?

These are the pieces of the fundraising process that often aren’t covered in your average “how to fundraise” blog posts and programming, and we’re here to get these questions answered.

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, which gives folks in the audience the chance to raise their hand and pitch their startup to our guests, who will give their live feedback.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get to know our guests.

Lee has been one of the most sought-after investors in Silicon Valley for as long as I’ve been in tech. A founding partner at All Raise, she is committed to diversity and inclusion and has an eye for talent, realizing that the former often precedes the latter.

She’s been on the Midas List a handful of times, and is also listed as one of Forbes’ most influential people.

Rachel Carlson founded Guild Education in 2015 and has led the company since. Guild has raised upwards of $370 million from investors that include General Catalyst, Felicis, Bessemer and more.

We’ll talk to these two about how to get to yes, what sings in a pitch deck and how they operate as partners to this day.

Extra Crunch Live is 100% free to folks who attend live, but only Extra Crunch members can access the content on-demand. If you’re not yet an Extra Crunch member, sign up here.

This episode of Extra Crunch Live goes down August 25 at 12pm PT/3pm ET. See you there!

Israel-based AI healthtech company, DiA Imaging Analysis, which is using deep learning and machine learning to automate analysis of ultrasound scans, has closed a $14 million Series B round of funding.

Backers in the growth round, which comes three years after DiA last raised, include new investors Alchimia Ventures, Downing Ventures, ICON Fund, Philips and XTX Ventures — with existing investors also participating, including CE Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Defta Partners, Mindset Ventures, and Dr Shmuel Cabilly. In total, it has taken in $25 million to date.

The latest financing will allow DiA to continue expanding its product range and go after new and expanded partnerships with ultrasound vendors, PACS/Healthcare IT companies, resellers and distributors while continuing to build out its presence across three regional markets.

The health tech company sells AI-powered support software to clinicians and healthcare professionals to help them capture and analyze ultrasound imagery — a process which, when done manually, requires human expertise to visually interpret scan data. So DiA touts its AI technology as “taking the subjectivity out of the manual and visual estimation processes being performed today”.

It has trained AIs to assess ultrasound imagery so as to automatically home in on key details or identify abnormalities — offering a range of products targeted at different clinical requirements associated with ultrasound analysis, including several focused on the heart (where its software can, for example, be used to measure and analyze aspects like ejection fraction; right ventricle size and function; plus perform detection assistance for coronary disease, among other offerings).

It also has a product that leverages ultrasound data to automate measurement of bladder volume.

DiA claims its AI software imitates the way the human eye detects borders and identifies motion — touting it as an advance over “subjective” human analysis that also brings speed and efficiency gains.

“Our software tools are supporting tool for clinicians needing to both acquiring the right image and interpreting ultrasound data,” says CEO and co-founder Hila Goldman-Aslan.

DiA’s AI-based analysis is being used in some 20 markets currently — including in North America and Europe (in China it also says a partner gained approval for use of its software as part of their own device) — with the company deploying a go-to-market strategy that involves working with channel partners (such as GE, Philips and Konica Minolta) which offer the software as an add on on their ultrasound or PACS systems.

Per Goldman-Aslan, some 3,000+ end-users have access to its software at this stage.

“Our technology is vendor neutral and cross-platform therefore runs on any ultrasound device or healthcare IT systems. That is why you can see we have more than 10 partnerships with both device companies as well as healthcare IT/PACS companies. There is no other startup in this space I know that has these capabilities, commercial traction or many FDA/CE AI-based solutions,” she says, adding: “Up to date we have 7 FDA/CE approved solutions for cardiac and abdominal areas and more are on the way.”

An AI’s performance is of course only as good as the data set it’s been trained on. And in the healthcare space efficacy is an especially crucial factor — given that any bias in training data could lead to a flawed model which misdiagnoses or under/over-estimates disease risks in patient groups who were not well represented in the training data.

Asked about how its AIs were trained to be able to spot key details in ultrasound imagery, Goldman-Aslan told TechCrunch: “We have access to hundreds of thousands ultrasound images through many medical facilities therefore have the ability to move fast from one automatic area to another.”

“We collect diverse population data with different pathology, as well as data from various devices,” she added.

“There is a Phrase ‘Garbage in Garbage out’. The key is not to bring garbage in,” she also told us. “Our data sets are tagged and classified by several physicians and technicians, each are experts with many years on experience.

“We also have a strong rejection system that rejects images that was taken incorrectly. This is how we overcome the subjectivity of how data was acquired.”

It’s worth noting that the FDA clearances obtained by DiA are 510(k) Class II approvals — and Goldman-Aslan confirmed to us that it has not (and does not intend) to apply for Premarket Approval (PMA) for its products from the FDA.

The 510(k) route is widely used for gaining approval for putting many types of medical devices into the U.S. market. However, it has been criticized as a light-touch regime — and certainly does not entail the same level of scrutiny as the more rigorous PMA process.

The wider point is that regulation of fast-developing AI technologies tends to lag behind developments in how they’re being applied — including as they push increasingly into the healthcare space where there’s certainly huge promise but also serious risks if they fail to live up to the glossy marketing — meaning there is still something of a gap between the promises made by device makers and how much regulatory oversight their tools actually get.

In the European Union, for example, the CE scheme — which sets out some health, safety and environmental standards for devices — can simply require a manufacturer to self declare conformity, without any independent verification they’re actually meeting the standards they claim, although some medical devices can require a degree of independent assessment of conformity under the CE scheme. But it’s not considered a rigorous regime for regulating the safety of novel technologies like AI.

Hence the EU is now working on introducing an additional layer of conformity assessments specifically for applications of AI deemed “high risk” — under the incoming Artificial Intelligence Act.

Healthcare use-cases, like DiA’s AI-based ultrasound analysis, would almost certainly fall under that classification so would face some additional regulatory requirements under the AIA. For now, though, the on-the-table proposal is being debated by EU co-legislators and a dedicated regulatory regime for risky applications of AI remains years out of coming into force in the region.

Greenfly’s latest funding round has a new face: Phoenix Suns point guard Chris Paul joined as a strategic investor and partner in the company, which developed digital media flow management software.

Paul’s investment is part of an $8.4 million strategic growth round that also includes Verance Capital, Higher Ground Labs, DD Venture Capital, SW19 Ventures, LinkinFirm and Allievo Capital, as well as existing investors Go4it Capital, Elysian Park Ventures, Alpha Edison and Iconica Partners.

The new round gives Los Angeles-based Greenfly over $23 million raised since the company was founded in 2014 by former Major League Baseball All-Star Shawn Green and his cousin Daniel Kirschner, who previously held senior roles at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Communications Commission and Activision Blizzard.

Green and Kirschner saw how social media was driving new sources of revenue for organizations like sports teams, politics and consumer brands, but needed a way for real-time distribution of media to be easily shared. Kirschner explained that when Green first started in his career, there were times when he needed to provide feedback for a public moment, like when his home run record was tied, and it occurred to Green that they could build a mini media studio.

Paul, an 11-time National Basketball Association All-Star, was one of Greenfly’s early adopters, using the platform to share content to his social media channels following his games. However, Paul realized he was also sitting on valuable content within his phone, like game or event photos, but without a good system for easily accessing them or matching them to events going on at that moment. He considers Greenfly “instant access to a media gallery” that he can share on his social media accounts.

One of the best features, he explained, was seeing a post on social media with only two photos of an event, but while searching Greenfly, he came across 12 to 15 other photos that he had never seen. He believes the company will continue to grow, and as a partner, will work with Greenfly to build awareness for the platform and get other players involved.

“I’m a big believer of creating memories and seeing photos,” Paul told TechCrunch. “You can go in and search for my name and Devin Booker’s and see photos of us playing together. The NBA uses Greenfly to automate the media and share with others. I love it because it makes it easy — you don’t want something hard and complicated.”

Instead of just repurposing materials, Greenfly will continue to build a workflow around events that provides sourcing, creation and automated distribution of photos and short-form videos created for social media.

Greenfly is also working on increased improvements to curate media most relevant to users, and is collecting data to provide more insights around that so that users can manage relationships with their community to amplify their messages. The new funding will go toward growth and expansion to build additional collaboration tools and content as more players sign on.

“With Chris, it is an opportunity to come at it from the athlete’s perspective,” Kirschner said. “Our deals are mainly with leagues and teams, so to be working with athletes, who are their own brands, enables us to be the system of record for all sides.”

The past year was a big growth period for the company, and it had been reaching a tipping point just prior to 2020, he added. Greenfly is now working with more than 30 sports leagues, including the NBA, Major League Baseball and World Surf League.

It also boasts over 500 organizations in sports, media and entertainment, political campaigns, social causes and consumer brands, and is experiencing over 100% growth so far in 2021, Kirschner said.

With social media evolving, the company is looking for more polished content because it learned that stories and intimate content performs better.

“We set out to build a content collaboration platform to provide content that athletes and others can share on social media and also manage that workflow around large, complex organizations,” he added. “Organizations have lots of content and we make that available through routing tools and curation, making it easy to find what you are looking for.”

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A substantial portion of the world’s trade is done in United States dollars, creating problems for businesses in countries with a dollar shortage. Blockchain startup XREX was launched to help cross-border businesses in emerging markets perform faster transactions with products like a payment escrow service and crypto-fiat exchange platform.

The Taipei-headquartered company announced today it has raised $17 million in pre-Series A funding led by CDIB Capital Group. The oversubscribed round also included participation from SBI Investment (a subsidiary of SBI Holdings), Global Founders Capital, ThreeD Capital, E.Sun Venture Capital, Systex Corporation, MetaPlanet Holdings, AppWorks, BlackMarble, New Economy Ventures and Seraph Group. XREX’s last funding was a $7 million seed round in 2019.

Part of the new round will be use to apply for financial licenses in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa, and partner with banks and financial institutions, like payment gateways.

“We specifically wanted to build a regulatory-friendly cap table,” XREX co-founder and chief executive officer Wayne Huang told TechCrunch. “It’s really hard for a startup like us to raise from banks and public companies, but as you can see, this round we deliberately to do that and we were successful.”

Huang sold his previous startup, anti-malware SaaS developer Armorize Technologies, to Proofpoint in 2013. Armorize analyzed source code to find vulnerabilities, and many of its clients were developers in Bangalore and Chennai, so Huang spent a lot of time traveling there.

“We ran into all sorts of cross-border money transfer issues. It seemed almost unstoppable,” Huang said. “Growing up in the U.S. and then in Taiwan, we were not exposed to those issues. So that planted a seed, and then when Satoshi [Nakamoto] published the bitcoin white paper, of course that was a big thing for all cybersecurity experts.”

He began thinking of how blockchain can support financial inclusion in emerging markets like India. The idea came to fruition Huang teamed up with XREX co-founder Winston Hsiao, the founder of BTCEx-TW, one of Taiwan’s first bitcoin exchanges. Hsiao grew up in India and founded Verico International, exporting Taiwan-manufactured semiconductors and electronics to other countries, so he was also familiar with cross-border trade issues.

XREX Crypto Services give merchants, especially those in countries with low U.S. dollar liquidity, tools to conduct trade in digital fiat currencies. “They have to get quick access to the U.S. dollar and be able to pay it out quick enough for them to secure important commodities that they want to import, and that’s the problem we want to solve,” said Huang.

To use the platform, merchants and their customers sign up for XREX’s wallet, which includes a commercial escrow service called Bitcheck. Huang said it is similar to having a standby letter of credit from a commercial bank, because buyers can use it to guarantee they will be able to make payments. Bitcheck uses digital currencies like USDT and USDC, stablecoins that are pegged to the U.S. dollar.

Merchants pay stablecoin to suppliers and XREX escrows the funds until the supplier provides proof of shipment, at which point it moves the payment to them. XREX’s crypto-fiat exchange allows users to convert USDT and USDC to U.S. dollars, which they can also withdraw and deposit through the platform.

Part of XREX’s funding will be used to expand its fiat currency platform, though Huang said it doesn’t plan to add too many cryptocurrencies “because we’re not built for crypto traders, we’re built for businesses and brand really matters to them. Brand and compliance, so whatever the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency says is a good stablecoin is what they’re going to use.”

Some of XREX’s partners include compliance and anti-money laundering providers like CipherTrace, Sum&Substance and TRISA. Part of XREX’s funding will be used to expand its security and compliance features, including Public Profiles, which are mandatory for customers, and user Reputation Index to increase transparency.

In a statement about the funding, CDIB Capital Innovation Fund head Ryan Kuo said, “CDIB was an early investor in XREX. After witnessing the company’s fast revenue growth and their commitment to compliance, we were determined to double our investment and lead this strategic round.”

Servicing one’s car personally is a time-consuming, expensive and painstaking process. It’s a cycle that can lead to more expensive repairs and safety issues down the line, and no car owner likes that.

Egypt and Dubai-based auto tech startup Odiggo is a platform addressing this problem. It allows car owners to get the help they need by finding car services and parts suppliers from providers around them. Then for the suppliers, it increases their sales and reaches more customers without necessarily spending on marketing.

Odiggo is part of the current YC Summer batch and has secured a $2.2 million seed round before Demo Day. The rosters of existing investors participating in the round are Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Plug and Play Ventures. Regional VCs like Seedra Ventures, LoftyInc Capital, and Essa Al-Saleh (CEO of Volta-Tucks) also took part.

Ahmed Omar and Ahmed Nasser launched Odiggo in December 2019. The company operates a marketplace that connects car owners with service providers who can solve their problems, from servicing and repair to washing and maintenance. A commission-based model is used and Odiggo charges the car suppliers 20% commission on every transaction.

Over 50,000 car owners across three markets — Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia — use Odiggo. The company also works directly with over 300 merchants. It claims merchant numbers have grown 40% month-on-month while its user base has increased 200% since the start of the pandemic.

“We believe we are at a watershed moment. It is incredible that since COVID hit, Odiggo has experienced over 10 times growth in the last year,” said co-founder Omar. 

CEO Omar said with this new round, Odiggo’s priority will be to attain consistent growth while expanding its team across the UEA, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

He adds that since Odiggo taps into a mix of data sources — including car metrics and internal software, it will use that same information to provide more product offerings.

Odiggo will use part of the funding to continue developing its tech and dashboard software, he said.

“For example, the platform would be hooked up to the car owner’s vehicle and link the vehicle to the marketplace and provide frequent updates of your vehicle condition so you’ll be informed if the tires are low, the oil needs changing, or if a service is required.”

The pandemic has upended the mobility and logistics sectors, especially in MENA, making players like Odiggo gain much visibility from investors. In an industry today worth over $61 billion in the Middle East and Africa alone, Odiggo is looking to become a market leader. It has even more lofty plans to go public in the next three years.

“We are also aiming to be fully focused on spending more on our product and technology, as building an ecosystem to monetize requires more capital. Our target is to go for IPO by 2024 and achieve one billion services booked, and this requires a lot of network effects, infrastructure and technology,” the CEO said.

“We aim to be the first $100 billion company coming out of the region,” added Nasser.

Some of its investors, Idris Ayodeji Bello, managing partner at LoftyInc, and Essa Al-Saleh, are onboard with the startup’s plan despite early days.

“We are excited to back Odiggo through our Afropreneurs Funds in its quest to transform the automotive parts market and provide superior service to clients, starting from MENA. The leadership team of Omar and Nasser, supported by the rest of the employees, have been a joy to work with and we are on a countdown to the IPO,” said Bello in a statement. 

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