Rising Tide Newsletter: Summer 2019

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PORTFOLIO SPOTLIGHT

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Voicea

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced its intent to acquire privately-held Voicea, headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Voicea is the creator of a market-leading real-time solution that provides meeting transcription, voice search, and meeting highlights/action items, with robust data privacy. It helps teams have more productive and actionable meetings by turning talk into action. With Voicea technology, Cisco will enhance its Webex portfolio of products with a powerful transcription service that blends AI and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) to unlock the power of any collaboration, like meetings and calls. Cisco’s first focus with Voicea is to turn meetings into a treasure trove of digital meeting notes and insights. Attendees and non-attendees can quickly gather the most relevant information from these digital notes and insights, turning a block of text into actionable information. See Cisco Systems press release here

RBC Signals Enabling Flexible and Cost-Effective Space Communication Service

RBC Signals is a global space communications provider serving satellite operators with an improved model for the delivery and processing of data from spacecraft in orbit. The company’s worldwide communication network includes both company-owned and partner-owned antennas, capitalizing on the sharing economy model, for best-in-class services offering affordability, flexibility and low latency. RBC Signals’ rapidly expanding network now includes more than 65 antennas in over 40 locations across the globe. The firm’s communication capabilities span VHF, UHF, S, C, X, Ku and Ka-bands. RBC Signals supports satellites in GEO, MEO, and LEO, meeting a wide array of mission needs.

RBC Signals Announces Collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ground Statio n

RBC Signals Awarded SBIR Phase I by U.S. Air F orce

Exo Imaging Emerges from Stealth Mode with $35M Series B Financing Round to Advance Development of the Exo Ultrasound Platform

Exo Imaging, Inc., a company pioneering a high-performance ultrasound platform based on patented Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (pMUT) technology and artificial intelligence (AI) for imaging and therapeutic applications, announced a $35M Series B financing round. The company was founded in 2015 and has raised nearly $50M to date. Intel Capital led the Series B. The Exo ultrasound platform combines advances in nano-materials, novel sensor technologies, advanced signal processing and computation with the economies of scale of semiconductor manufacturing to dramatically reduce the cost of imaging.

RISING TIDE PORTFOLIO HEADLINES

Aspect Biosystem Enters Collaboration with McMaster University Aspect Biosystems, a Canadian biotech company pioneering microfluidic 3D bioprinting of human tissues, is pleased to announce a collaboration with the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health located at McMaster University. Through this program, the Hirota Lab will use the RX1™ 3D Bioprinter and a unique biobank of patient-derived samples, to develop pulmonary models that will be used to identify novel diseases mechanisms and discover therapeutic strategies in chronic lung diseases.

Armory Raises $28M in Series B Funding to Drive Enterprise Digital Transformation with Spinnaker, the De Facto Standard for Software Delivery At Scale Armory, the enterprise software company commercializing Spinnaker, the leading open source continuous delivery platform from Netflix and Google, announced that it has raised a $28 million Series B financing round led by Insight Partners. The funding will be used for increased research and development around Spinnaker as well as investments in sales, marketing, support, and training.

Ayar Labs Marks Continued Growth with New Financing from Silicon Valley Bank, DARPA Research Contract, and Strategic Technical Hire from UC Berkeley Ayar Labs announced that it has secured additional funding to fuel its growth as it drives to productize its TeraPHY™ optical I/O chiplets and SuperNova™ multi-wavelength lasers in 2019. The funding comes on the heels of the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC), where there was significant industry focus on the need for integrating silicon photonics based optical interconnect into semiconductor packages – a technique that promises to dramatically improve application performance, significantly reduce power consumption, and reduce overall datacenter platform costs for the Artificial Intelligence, High Performance Computing, Cloud, and Telecom markets.

Metawave Demonstrates Advanced Beamsteering Calibration System for Automotive Radar Metawave, revolutionizing the future of radar sensing for highly automated driving and wireless solutions for 5G, announced that it has successfully demonstrated the world’s first automated 77GHz electronically steerable antenna calibration system for realizing dependable and repeatable beam steering.

New Study by Qulab Indicates Near-Term Quantum Computers Have Potential to Broadly Impact Areas Such as Drug Design and CRISPR Research Qulab, a pharma-chemical company, released the results of new research focused on molecular dynamics simulations and quantum computing technology. The research is the first of its kind to propose that near-term quantum computers (~300 qubits) will be powerful enough to improve processes in areas such as computational drug discovery and CRISPR gene editing. The Qulab study, titled “High-Quality Protein Force Fields with Noisy Quantum Processors,” is available as a preprint on arXiv.org

Six Southern California Cities Tap SmartCSM Data Management Solutions To Digitize and Connect Government Building Records SmartCSM, a leader in cloud-based building and facilities management software that launched in 2018, announced that its digital mapping and data management solutions have been selected by six Southern California cities, including City of Manhattan Beach, City of Inglewood, City of Santa Monica, City of Carson, City of Torrance and City of Beverly Hills. The company’s commercial building data management platform is the ‘Google Maps’ for accessing and viewing a building’s electrical and mechanical infrastructure.

RISING TIDE BLOG & COMMUNITY

Founder Characteristics (aka The Chosen One(s)?)

Survival Guide for the Next Recessio n

A Little ‘Grillin’ and ‘Chillin’

Rising Tide’s recent get-together / barbeque for portfolio companies, investors, and other friends and partners from abroad and locally. Guests enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about the various companies building in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.