Dollar Shave Club, the online seller of razors and other grooming products, has raised $75 million in funding, landing a valuation of more than $500 million pre-funding, Re/code reports. The company last raised funds nine months ago, securing a $50 million round, and is now approaching total funding of $150 million. Existing backers Venrock, TCV and Forerunner Ventures joined new investor Dragoneer in the round. Dollar Shave Club plans to launch more men’s products in the future.
CropX, an agricultural analytics company, has raised $9 million in Series A financing led by Finistere Ventures, Innovation Endeavors and GreenSoil Investments. OurCrowd, a previous investor, also participated in this round. CropX offers an adaptive irrigation service. “As a pioneer in the AgTech sector, we are always looking for promising technologies with the potential to make a meaningful difference to farmers’ profitability and sustainability,” said Arama Kukutai, co-founder and partner, Finistere Ventures. “CropX is the first retail-priced solution allowing farmers to control irrigation to minimize water use, save on farm energy, augment yield, and control fertilizer runoff, thereby improving environmental compliance.”
Portworx, a storage software for hosting applications in Linux containers, has emerged from stealth mode with an $8.5 million funding round led by the Mayfield Fund. “The container wave is the latest example of a disruptive paradigm that will create a new stack of platform companies, much like virtualization did,” said Navin Chaddha, Mayfield managing director and Portworx board member. “We are champions of the Portworx team and believe their unique software-defined storage solution has the potential to replace traditional SAN and NAS architectures.”
Digital Genius, a provider of artificially intelligent communication solutions, has secured $3 million in funding led by Metamorphic Ventures. Lerer-Hippeau Ventures, Lowercase Capital, RRE Ventures, Lumia Capital, and strategic angel investors also participated. The company will use the cash injection to productize its AI offerings. “With the proliferation of NLP and AI, more and more applications will be built that solve consumer pain points,” said David Hirsch, Co-Founder and General Partner of Metamorphic Ventures. “The DigitalGenius team has built an amazing platform that enterprise customers and brands can leverage to increase customer satisfaction and reduce labor costs. I can’t wait to live in a world where interacting with the cable company is actually a pleasurable experience.”