Stale Good News! (Good COVID News #2)

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Companies Which Raised Money During Covid Times

Run The World

Based in Mountain View, California, Run The World is a startup founded in July 2019 which builds software tools to help conference organizers produce virtual conferences. It provides event templates, streaming video, real-time chat and other features which help structure interactions between conference speakers and attendees, as well as community features to help attendees network with one another.

At time of recording, the company has raised $14.8 million to date. Run The World closed $10.8 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz.

Articles:

• Connecting the next Nobel Prize Winner and Billboard artist, one idea at a time (Run The World's funding announcement, from the company's Substack-hosted blog)
• With High-Profile And Celebrity Backers, Run The World Closes $11M Series A For Its Event Platform (Christine Hall for Crunchbase News)
• Virtual events startup Run The World just nabbed $10.8 million from a16z and Founders Fund (Connie Loizos for TechCrunch)
• Investing in Run The World (Andreessen Horowitz partner Connie Chan on the a16z blog)

Tock

Tock is a Chicago-based company behind restaurant and winery booking software of the same name. The company's business user base consists of nearly 3,000 restaurants, wineries, and pop-ups across 28 countries, as of February 2020, according to the company. Many of those businesses were forced to close due to the public health response to COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. In response, Tock built out Tock To Go, which aims to help restaurants with pickup and delivery booking. Tock has onboarded 1,000 businesses in April onto the new platform. Tock's take rate is 3% as opposed to the 25% or more charged by bigger platform providers like Uber Eats and DoorDash. It looks like mostly high-end restaurants use the platform.

Tock raised $10 million in an "oversubscribed" funding round led by Valor Siren Ventures with participation from prior investor Origin Ventures. The round was announced on May 12.

Articles:

• Tock Announces $10M in Funding (Press release)
• Tock raises $10 million to help fancy restaurants do takeout (Ari Levy for CNBC)

QuillBot

Founded by alumni (and one dropout) from the University of Illinois system, Chicago-based QuillBot is a company which uses natural language processing technology to summarize and paraphrase text. It identifies and suggests synonyms to replace words and phrases contained within text. The company offers its service through its website and offers extensions for Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Google's Chrome web browser. QuillBot's service is free to try with limited functionality, but the company sells premium subscriptions for as little as $80 per year, depending on billing frequency.

In late April, QuillBot announced that it raised $4.25 million in a seed funding round co-led by Sierra Ventures and GSV Ventures, which saw participation from Service Provider Capital.

Articles:

• Announcing QuillBot’s $4.25M Seed Round (QuillBot's official announcement)
• QuillBot Raises $4M to Help You Become a Better Writer Using AI (Gordon Gottsegen for Built In Chicago)

About The Co-Hosts

• Jason D. Rowley is a researcher and writer at Golden.com. He volunteers with startup outreach for the open-source community and sends occasional newsletters from Rowley.Report.
• Graham C. Peck is a Venture Partner with Cultivation Capital and additionally helps companies build technology development teams in partnership with Brightgrove and other technology development organizations.