Portfolio company updates including commercial launches, new partnerships, and more
New Anzu team members in Finance and Capital Solutions
Hi everyone,
I’m Jimmy Kan, a Principal on Anzu’s investment team. You heard from me a few months ago, with an update on Niron Magnetics, but I am back alongside my colleague and fellow member of the Anzu investment team, Juliette Chevallier, to introduce a new Anzu portfolio company.
We are excited to announce Anzu’s investment in Arduino, an influential company that has been credited with the explosion of the DIY/maker community over the last decade. Since its inception, the company’s mission has been to “make technology accessible and easy to use for everyone” by creating an ecosystem of software and hardware developers around accessible and intuitive electronics. This has culminated in more than 30 million active developers on the Arduino platform with nearly universal name recognition around the world amongst engineers, scientists, STEM students, and makers.
Arduino is most well-known for its hardware and software around microcontroller (MCU) boards, and small integrated computers that are commonly used in electronic systems such as appliances, power tools, vehicles, robots, and more. What started out as an easy way for students and hobbyists without deep technical education to communicate with MCUs to rapidly prototype and design projects has expanded over the years to innovative use cases that are solving global problems. Here are a few examples of ways that everyday people have used Arduino to create innovative new solutions:
An entire generation of millions of engineers and product designers grew up using Arduino’s boards and software integrated development environment (IDE) throughout high school and university and entered the workforce over the last decade. This robust ecosystem of Arduino-trained developers has brought about an uptick of its products being used in thousands of companies around the world from Apple to Bosch to Coca-Cola for rapid prototyping, controlling manufacturing systems, and integration into products.
With its recent Series B financing of ~$32M, Arduino can strategically focus its growth beyond the maker and student community. With the broad support of semiconductor, cloud, industrial, and financial partners such as Bosch, Renesas, ARM, and Anzu Partners, Arduino is targeting an expansion towards enterprise and industrial applications.
For these environments, Arduino is developing new hardware, software, and connectivity offerings to enable users to quickly scale from prototyping-to-production without disruption through its Arduino Pro product lines. Companies can now also design feature rich IoT and connected products without having to staff up and develop an entire internal R&D team of electrical and computer engineers through its IoT Cloud Service.
Finally, Arduino is expanding its product offerings in integrated sensor solutions for vision, motion, sound, and environmental monitoring to enable developers to perform highly efficient, on-device AI known as TinyML. The Nicla family of products and partnerships with AI toolchain companies now make it possible for companies to easily deploy devices for performing image/video processing and signal analytics without highly specialized data science teams.
At Anzu Partners, one of our own missions is to find unique ways to blend hardware and software to bring rapid innovation to the industrial world. With this recent investment in Arduino, we believe that we are enthusiastically supporting that mission and our whole team is excited to see the new products and applications that creative people can now finally unlock. Alongside the investment, I will be joining the board of Arduino as an observer, and Juliette participated in my place during the first meeting when I was on paternity leave.
If you have a tinkerer at home, are intrigued by what you just read and want to join the millions of Arduino developers around the world, or just want to support the company… this kit has everything to get you started even if you have no prior experience.
Sincerely,
Jimmy Kan and Juliette Chevallier
PORTFOLIO COMPANY UPDATES
Anzu Joins Arduino’s $32M Series B Financing Round Alongside Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Renesas and Arm
Arduino, an open-source company used by tens of millions of developers around the world, announced its Series B round of $32 million led by deep tech investor Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Anzu Partners also joined the round alongside Renesas and Arm.
The new financing will allow Arduino to realize its vision of expanding its portfolio of hardware, software, connectivity, and developer tools for professionals further into enterprise. By expanding its enterprise-scale offerings, Arduino is charting a new strategic course, focusing on larger organizations, and empowering a new generation of engineers, while also maintaining its commitment to deliver the industry’s most innovative tools for developers.
Anzu Led $12M Series A Financing Round for XENDEE, a Microgrid Decision and Operation Software Provider
Anzu Partners led San Diego-based XENDEE’s $12M Series A financing, with additional financing from TravelCenters of America Inc., the nation’s largest publicly traded full-service travel center network, Evergy Ventures, and Surlamer Investments.
The financing will help increase XENDEE’s market presence and accelerate the global adoption of alternative energy systems managed by the XENDEE platform that can help achieve a net-zero carbon future.
InterVenn Biosciences Announces New Data Validating the Clinical Performance of DAWN™ IO Melanoma and Joins the WIN and FNIH Biomarker Consortiums to Introduce a Glycoproteomic Option for Liquid Biopsies
InterVenn, a clinical technology company leveraging glycoproteomics to transform the future of healthcare, announced new data showing that its new DAWN IO Melanoma test accurately assesses and classifies advanced melanoma patients as likely or unlikely to benefit from immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies: either pembrolizumab alone or ipilimumab in combination with nivolumab. This test was developed on InterVenn’s perspectIV™ platform, which can directly interrogate the blood glycoproteome, for its own development or on behalf of partners.
The news was covered in 360Dx. You can learn more about the research in the press release here.
e-Zinc, the company enabling sustainable, long-duration energy storage with its zinc-air battery, announced it has entered into a collaboration for a pilot project with Toyota Tsusho Canada Inc. (TTCI) to test and validate how commercial scale e-Zinc energy storage systems can reliably provide long-duration energy storage. Specifically, this project will validate e-Zinc’s capability to store 24 hours of energy, which is approximately 10x longer than traditional batteries.
The project is slated to kick off in Spring 2023 at Eurus Energy America Corporation’s (EEAC) Bull Creek wind facility in Borden County, Texas. The pilot program will store excess wind-generated energy in the e-Zinc battery system at Bull Creek, which EEAC can then use to power buildings at the local facility. e-Zinc’s system is expected to store power for 24 hours, an order of magnitude longer than typical batteries, and is better suited to the intermittency of wind generation than typical batteries.
BioSkryb Genomics Launched its ResolveOME Early Access Program
BioSkryb Genomics, a biotech company developing advanced single-cell analysis tools, announced the launch of the Early Access Program (EAP) for ResolveOME, a unified, single-cell workflow that amplifies the complete genome and full-length mRNA transcripts of the entire transcriptome from the same cell. This unification eliminated the need to split source material or interpret across datasets. The EAP will provide first access to BioSkryb’s ResolveOME technology and BaseJumper, a bioinformatics platform to sort, analyze, and interpret very large single-cell analysis data sets.
Aspinity, the leader in analog machine learning processing, announced the commercial availability of the only glass break detection solution to produce a five-year battery life while also eliminating false alarms to common household sounds.
The Sensors Converge team also recently selected this first-of-its-kind chip as the winner of the AI/ML category in the 2022 Best of Sensors Awards.
NanoCellect and Fluent BioSciences are collaborating to improve resolution of single-cell RNA sequencing analysis of rare cell populations
NanoCellect, a leader in the development and manufacturing of innovative and affordable solutions for cell sorting, and Fluent BioSciences, a biotechnology company focused on making single-cell analysis simple and accessible to every researcher, announced a collaboration to improve the resolution and efficiency of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) analysis of rare cell populations. Single-cell researchers are increasingly requiring scalable, flexible, and accessible workflow solutions, and the combination of cell sorting on the NanoCellect platform followed by scRNA-seq on a novel, instrument-free platform for scRNA-seq based on Pre-templated Instant Partitions (PIPseq™) from Fluent can be a highly efficient solution for a wide range of single-cell applications across oncology, immunology, and neuroscience.
Latoya joins Anzu as an Accounting Manager to help manage finance and accounting for Anzu’s portfolio companies.
She brings nearly 20 years of experience in accounting, with 13 of those years spent in government contracting. She has performed and managed full-cycle accounting for shared services companies from payroll, accounts payable/receivable, month-end closing, bank reconciliations, journal entries, and financial audits. She also has a background in financial planning, systems implementation, contracts, and operations.
She received her BA in Business, specializing in Accounting, and her MAcc from St. Leo University.
Matt Hyde, Senior Accountant
Matt joins Anzu as a Senior Accountant based in Tampa.
He will be supporting several portfolio companies with finance and accounting.
He has worked in the accounting profession for over 13 years, with a mix of both public accounting as an auditor and more recently with pharmaceutical manufacturing and healthcare services companies such as AnazaoHealth Corporation and Intelident Solutions.
Ittie Rehani, Associate, Capital Solutions
Ittie joins Anzu as an Associate in Capital Solutions and Investor Relations.
Ittie comes to Anzu from Fannie Mae where she began her career in a two-year rotation program following her graduation from the University of Maryland.
She spent the last four years within capital markets managing lender and dealer relationships, deep-diving into industry trends, and trading mortgage-backed securities.
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
Anzu Partners and our portfolio companies are hiring!
Browse the open roles here and learn more about joining our amazing teams.
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ABOUT ANZU PARTNERS
Anzu Partners is an investment firm that focuses on industrial and life science technology companies with the potential to transform their industries. Anzu works with entrepreneurs to develop and commercialize technological innovations by providing capital alongside deep expertise in business development, market positioning, global connectivity, and operations. For more information, please visit https://anzupartners.com/.
The information contained in this newsletter is being provided by Anzu Partners for informational purposes only. The information was obtained from various sources, but Anzu Partners cannot assure its accuracy. This is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation for an offer to buy an interest in any fund managed by Anzu Partners. Any such offer or solicitation will only be made to qualified potential investors pursuant to a private placement memorandum. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss.
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