Latest Venture Funding Deepens Independa’s Ties with LG Electronics

Independa, the San Diego startup developing Web-based services for the elderly, says today it has closed its Series A financing at $5 million. In a telephone interview this afternoon, Independa CEO Kian Saneii says the round is more of a round-up that includes all of the company’s prior equity funding, the conversion of $2.35 million in debt to preferred stock, and more recent venture investments.

Independa did not provide details on the amount of its latest venture investments, which came primarily from existing investor City Hill Ventures, the boutique San Diego firm created by former Halozyme Therapeutics CEO Jonathan Lim, and LG Electronics USA, a strategic partner that has been integrating Independa’s cloud-based technology in its commercial flat-panel TVs under an agreement disclosed a year ago. Other undisclosed investors also participated.

Saneii says the funding will be used to grow Independa’s customer base through an expansion of its network of distributors and channel partners, as well as increasing investments in R&D, sales, and marketing.

Independa’s evolving alliance with LG Electronics could prove to be the most significant development for the company that Saneii founded in April 2009. Last month, Independa’s software-as-a-service also was named as the most innovative new product in the software category for 2012 by Connect, the regional nonprofit for entrepreneurship and technology innovation. In June, Independa said it was integrating its software with Qualcomm Life’s 2net Platform to make its elderly health monitoring services more broadly available.

Yet Saneii describes Independa’s alliance with LG as “a huge deal” for the company, saying, “the disruptive technology that we’re bringing to the market, together with LG, doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.” LG was included in the $2.35 million convertible debt financing that Independa disclosed in April (and was converted to stock under today’s announcement), “and they’ve stepped up with an additional investment,” Saneii says. “We’re very tightly integrated with them now from a technology perspective, from a sales perspectyive, and from a distribution perspective.”

Saneii says LG is one of the largest providers of

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.