Alastair Goldfisher
San Francisco-based Virtual Kitchen Co, a food tech and logistics company focused on building delivery-optimized kitchens, has formally launched and announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Base10 Partners. As part of the funding, Andrew Chen from a16z and Adeyemi Ajao from Base10 will join the board. The company, founded in 2018 by Ken Chong, Matt Sawchuck and Andro Radonich, has now raised $17 million in total funding.
Natalie Sandman has joined Boston firm Spark Capital as an investor focused on early-stage software startups. Sandman will work out of the firm's San Francisco office. Sandman was most recently an investor at Shasta Ventures, where she focused on such SaaS startups as AppSheet and Lattice. Before that, she led the product team at London payment fraud detection startup Ravelin, and she was a product manager during the early days at HR management platform company Zenefits.
Lightspeed Venture Partners announced it has hired five people. Joining the team are COO David Baga and Partners Mercedes Bent, James Ephrati, Anoushka Vaswani and Rytis Vitkauskas. Bent will focus on consumer deals, while Ephrati and Vaswani will work on the growth team and Vitkauskas will be based in the U.K. and build out the firm's European practice.
San Francisco seed-stage fund Refactor Capital, founded David Lee of SV Angel and Zal Bilimoria of Andreessen Horowitz, announced earlier this week the close of its second fund at $30 million, according to a regulatory filing, which said the funding was raised by 37 backers.
Jackson Square Ventures, which backed DocuSign, UpWork and Strava, announced it raised $193 million for its third and largest fund. The San Francisco-based firm was targeted $150 million, according to a regulatory filing in May. The latest fund is 60 percent more than the $120 million it raised for Fund II in 2016. As part of the new fund, Victor Echevarria was promoted to partner. The firm is led by Managing Directors Pete Solvik, Greg Gretsch and Josh Breinlinger.
Seattle-based Shujinko, a provider of cloud compliance software, announced it has raised a $7.5 million in Series A funding. Unusual Ventures led the round with participation from returning investor Defy as well as angel investors. Shujinko, originally incubated and spun out from Pioneer Square Labs, has raised $10.3 million in funding to date.
San Francisco-based Contentstack, provider of headless CMS technology for use by marketers, announced it has raised $31.5 million in Series A funding. Insight Partners led the round, which included participation from existing backers Illuminate Ventures and GingerBread Capital. As part of the round, Teddie Wardi, managing director at Insight, will join the board. The company was launched last year.
Greylock Partners announced that it has hired David Wadhwani as a venture partner. Wadhwani was most recently CEO of AppDynamics, which Greylock backed. Cisco purchased AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion days prior to its scheduled IPO. Prior to AppDynamics, Wadhwani was with Adobe.
Last week, Scale Venture Partners announced it has hired Chris Yin as the firm's newest principal. Yin joins from Rainforest QA, where he worked on product. At Foster City, California-based Scale, Yin will focused on investments in intelligent business software, vertical AI companies and data-first businesses.
Berkeley, California-based Gatsby, which operates a platform for building websites, announced it raised $15 million in Series A funding. CRV led the round, with previous seed investors Trinity Ventures, Mango Capital, Fathom Capital and Dig Ventures also participating. In addition, Kong CEO Aghi Marietti and Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and CPO at Adobe, also invested. As part of the funding round, CRV General Partner Devdutt Yellurkar has joined the board.