Published: 12/3/2020
Good morning, it's Thursday and damn do we have a bunch of funding announcements this week (partially because all the Surge companies are announcing their rounds). Today is also a cool day for me because its the first time a company I invested in is in the press announcing their seed round (so safe to assume I'm a huge fan of the co and thus probably biased towards them).
➡️ Tech-driven health insurance co Loop Health has raised a $2.3M seed round led by Sierra Ventures along with participation from Y Combinator & Soma Capital. Several angels also invested in the round including former Google Ventures partner Daniel Burka, Twitch ex-CTO Kevin Lin, and former WeWork CTO Shiva Rajaraman (and me!)
➡️ If you have been following the newsletter for a while, you'd know Loop Health was one of the companies I was a huge fan of coming out of the W20 YC batch (the others being Deepsource and Able Jobs). The company was founded in 2018 and offers companies group health insurance plans from various insurers bundled with a virtual primary care experience with their in-house medical team.
➡️ In the summer of 2016, I was interning in NY and wasn't covered under my college's health insurance plan and came across Oscar which was super simple to use and talk to a doctor virtually and I really think the Loop Health team can build a similar massively successful company in India.
➡️ The company is currently based out of Pune and is growing quite rapidly onboarding companies in Pune and Mumbai. They plan to spend the capital to build out a sales team to grow the distribution of its insurance plans along with expanding to other geographies.
➡️ Loop is also expanding the healthcare categories it serves- dermatology, gynecology & more and also plans to bundle in mental health and fitness into its healthcare membership. Also plugging a couple of roles for the company since they're hiring quite aggressively in Sales, Operations and Engineering so checkout https://angel.co/company/loophealthindia/jobs and DM me if you'd like a connect to the company.
2. https://bit.ly/3obZTAS: LambdaTest raises $6M from Sequoia & Blume
➡️ Cloud-based testing platform LambdaTest has raised a $6M round (seed? Series A?) from Sequoia (as a part of its Surge program), Blume & Leo Capital. A couple of angel investors including DoorDash exec Gokul Rajaram also participated in the round.
➡️ LambdaTest is a cross-border startup (based in the US and India) and has built a cross-browser testing platform to let developers automate tests=ing across thousands of browsers and devices- as a frontend engineer it's honestly such a hassle when some things don't work on particular browsers or environments so I can see why a bunch of companies and devs use LamdaTest.
➡️ It is worth noting though that LambdaTest isn't necessarily first to the game as BrowserStack has been doing this & more for several years. But LamdaTest's growth is still quite impressive as over 350k users across 132 countries have used its products.
➡️ The company also has customers of all sizes from self-serve plans for individuals to large enterprises like Xerox and Cisco using its software as well. The company's founder, Asad Khan, has an impressive history in the space and has built, scaled and exited a testing service company prior to LambdaTest.
➡️ As software is continually eating the world & enterprises are spending more and more money on cloud-based services, it's been exciting to see these massive companies grow out of India and hopefully we'll even see an IPO or two in the coming years.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/anmolm_/status/1333990825861124098
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