Venture Capital

Natural Products Expo West, the industry’s largest trade show, hosted more than 3,000 exhibiting companies and top retailers as well as 65,000 attendees at this year’s event. The show featured new food, beverage, and consumer goods products and innovations. Here’s a closer look at top trends that we expect to…

KO client Wave Life, a science-backed mental health platform aimed at supporting Gen Z, recently announced that it has closed on a $6 million seed investment. Sarah Adler, founder/CEO of Wave Life and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University, said, “We understand that the major challenges Gen Z…

Women remain underrepresented in the venture capital ecosystem. While female decision makers at venture capital firms and female-founded companies are on the rise, there is still significant progress to be made for underrepresented investors and founders. KO partner Jennifer Rosenthal recently co-founded a women in venture capital group that aims…

After record highs in 2021, recent reports show a global pullback in venture capital funding with a 33 percent drop from Q2 to Q3 2022. However, as founders prepare to weather a tougher fundraising environment, there is still some positive news. Nationally, dry powder, which is the amount of capital…

KO client MadKudu recently announced that it has raised $18 million in Series A funding. MadKudu is the Product-Led-Growth (PLG) pioneer disrupting the software industry, working with clients like Miro, Dropbox, Cloudera, Amplitude, Plaid, Unity and Mapbox. The Series A round was led by Felicis with participation from BGV, Alven,…

KO client Fermyon recently announced that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding. Fermyon is pioneering the next wave of cloud computing with the first cloud-native WebAssembly platform as a service (PaaS) that lets developers build better microservices faster. The funding will be used to productize Fermyon and…

KO client Watchmaker Genomics, a life sciences company specializing in the development of high-stringency applications focused on the reading, writing and editing of DNA and RNA, has raised $40M to expand its clinical sequencing product offerings.   The KO team, led by partner Jon Taylor, of counsel Melissa Mellen and attorney…

Next to building products and making important early hires, securing and understanding funding options is a significant checklist item for founders that can make or break the sustainability of their company. In fact, a recent study examining startup post-mortems found that running out of cash or failing to raise new…