New funding for startups continues to flow—this week it’s early stage Seattle tech companies that are grabbing money, including a machine learning business and a service that picks up and stores your extra junk.
DefinedCrowd, which participated in the Microsoft Accelerator in 2016 before it raised a $1.1 million seed round, gathers data points from conversations, messages, videos, and various other forms of communication and visual mediums that can help train machine learning systems for enterprise customers. The company added almost $10.9 million in new funding, according to a document filed with securities regulators on July 23.
Founded in 2015, DefinedCrowd aims to give customers scalable, high-quality data that can be used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning programs that businesses use. The company processes an average of 10,000 data units a day, be that information text, speech, image, or other data points, according to its website.
Meanwhile, about $15.5 million went to a company that picks up, stores, and redelivers items that customers want to have put in a storage unit, according to two securities filings. Livible was founded in Seattle as Storrage in 2013 and has since expanded its service beyond Seattle to both Boston and Portland, OR.
Customers can schedule pickups through a mobile app, through Livible’s website, or by the phone. The company was started by Terry Drayton, who founded dot-com-era startup HomeGrocer.com, which went public for $264 million and later sold to Webvan for $1.2 billion in 2002.
Livible had plans in 2017 to expand to as many as 40 cities, according to a blog post on the website of SpareFoot, an Austin, TX-based company that also works in the storage unit business. (SpareFoot, an online marketplace for booking self-storage units, last raised a $33 million Series D round of funding in 2015.) Livible still plans to expand into more new cities, according to its website.
