[Corrected 7/20/17, 1:31 p.m. See below.] Here’s a look at funding news for two interesting Seattle-area technology startups this week: LiveStories raised $10 million to grow its civic data analysis and visualization business and Tomorrow Ideas raised $2.6 million to support a new estate planning app.
—LiveStories, an online service for creating visualizations and analysis of civic data such as infant mortality rates and migration patterns, has raised $10 million. The Series A funding round was led by Ignition Partners with True Ventures and Founders’ Co-op also participating.
LiveStories, founded in 2012 by CEO Adnan Mahmud and picked for the 2014 Techstars Seattle class, has now raised $13.9 million.
The Seattle company counts more than 100 customers including public health agencies, local governments and federal government agencies, universities, and nonprofit organizations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided the company with a crucial early grant.
LiveStories plans to use the new funding for hiring, technology development, and a larger office.
—Tomorrow Ideas wants everyone to have a will and trust—and the appropriate amount of life insurance. The Seattle company unveiled its Tomorrow app, designed to ease the process of creating an estate plan and the legal documents to execute it, from a smartphone for free.
The app gathers data on family members, assets, belongings, and other financial information during the estate planning process. Tomorrow Ideas then offers term life insurance policies, based on an assessment of each family’s needs. The company is a licensed life insurer broker in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. [An earlier version of this paragraph mistakenly said that the company was also a licensed casualty insurer. We regret the error.]
Purchasing life insurance is not a requirement of using the app’s other features, including the will and trust creation tools, auto-generated text- and e-mail invitations to help people start conversations with family members to fill roles such as guardian and executor, and videos and other information to explain those roles and other aspects of the estate planning process.
“We’ve brought together all these things that everyone knows are important, but they just don’t get around to doing,” says CEO Dave Hanley, who co-founded the company in early 2016.
In addition to releasing the app, Tomorrow Ideas announced it has raised $2.6 million in seed funding from investors including Maveron, CFSI, Echelon Capital, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Allianz Life, Plug And Play, Flying Fish Partners, and angel investors.
