There is magic in the air after this past weekend’s NFC Championship game, in which the Seahawks took us from the lowest lows to the highest highs in the course of about five minutes of game time. Meanwhile, some significant funding deals went down.
Porch continued on its fundraising tear. Avalara brought in late-stage investor Technology Crossover Ventures. Basho raised a Series G round, as in Georgetown Partners. The Alliance of Angels raised a seed fund. And Distelli raised a seed funding round. Here are the details:
—Porch is moving fast and fixing things. The Seattle home-improvement startup raised a Series B funding round that brings the two-year-old company’s bankroll to more than $100 million. This $65 million-plus round is led by Valor Equity Partners, with new investors Founders Fund, Battery Ventures, Panorama Point Partners, and Ty Pennington—the “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” star—among participating individual investors. Earlier backers Lowe’s and Capricorn Investment Group also participated.
The company will use the funding to continue hiring—it has more than 300 employees already—in support of national expansion of its service for hiring home improvement professionals. Some 3.2 million professionals are now part of Porch’s network. They pay for access to homeowners through Porch’s app and booking service, and through its partnership with Lowe’s.
—Avalara, maker of software to help businesses comply with taxes in different jurisdictions, has raised a net $6 million in a share repurchase transaction involving new investor Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) and existing backers, led by a Warburg Pincus affiliate. The Bainbridge Island, WA-based company says it issued shares of D-1 preferred stock worth more than $42 million to TCV and existing investors. It paid to repurchase shares from existing shareholders, resulting in a net of $6 million. The company has raised more than $200 million since 2004.
—Basho, which makes distributed NoSQL database software, has raised a $25 million Series G round from Georgetown Partners and relocated from Cambridge, MA, to Bellevue, WA. CEO Adam Wray, who took over leadership last March, moved the company to access Seattle’s pool of software developer talent, and because of his own roots in the region. He was CEO of Tier 3 and previously worked at Amazon.
—Seattle-based angel group Alliance of Angels (AoA) has raised $5.3 million for a seed fund to invest in Pacific Northwest companies. Investors include Madrona Venture Group, Trilogy Equity Partners, Voyager Capital, and individual investors including Geoff Entress (prolific angel investor), Linden Rhoads (general manager of the W Fund), Michael Schutzler (head of the Washington Technology Industry Association), and Steve Singh (co-founder and CEO of Concur, acquired by SAP).
AoA managing director Yi-Jian Ngo says the new fund “will invest alongside the Alliance of Angels group, increasing the check size that entrepreneurs can expect to raise, and adding to the $10 million that the group already invests into more than 20 companies each year.” The long-tenured angel investing group says it has an aggregate internal rate of return in excess of 20 percent over the last decade. AoA will continue accepting investors in the fund until it reaches a cap of $10 million.
—Distelli, a Seattle startup tackling the growing business of DevOps, has raised $2.8 million from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company, founded by Amazon Web Services veteran Rahul Singh, promises to make it easier for software developers to push their code to production servers in any computing environment, from on-premise to public clouds. Andreessen Horowitz general partner Scott Weiss is joining Distelli’s board.
