Participated · Seed · Sep 2021

StormSensor develops rugged sensors that monitor stormwater flow and temperature and a software platform that ingests sensor data plus rainfall, wind and tide information to provide real-time alerts and insights. The company focused on engineering hardware that can survive underground metal and concrete vaults with contaminated water and on software that makes sense of that data. Its platform is being enhanced with more sophisticated analysis to show infrastructure performance across varied weather events and timescales. StormSensor also offers a risk index to highlight flood-prone and equity‑vulnerable neighborhoods. The startup serves municipalities ranging from 5,000 to 1,000,000 residents across the U.S., with many customers on the East Coast, the Southeast and around the Great Lakes. The company has 37 employees and has raised about $16 million in total investments to date. StormSensor develops compact, 3D-printed sensors and climate-intelligence systems that monitor water flow, temperature, and precipitation in municipal storm drains to help cities manage floods, storm surges, and sea-level rise. The company began as a prototype effort and has streamlined a formerly 3-foot epoxy prototype into a palm-sized device intended for large-scale manufacturing and wider deployment. Founder Erin Rothman launched the company in 2015 and bootstrapped it through $1.2M from friends and angel investors plus $155,000 from 9Mile Labs and Techstars accelerators. After losing expected Series A funding in March 2020, the team raised an emergency $2M seed round in two weeks to keep the business alive and retain staff. StormSensor is deployed in 12 U.S. cities and aims to expand beyond those municipalities and to work with developing countries. The company plans to scale manufacturing, expand deployments, and hire additional staff to support product development and operations. StormSensor, a Seattle startup founded in 2015, sells wireless sensors paired with software to replace manual stormwater quality reporting with a fully digital solution. Its system uses predictive algorithms to track stormwater data and identify high-risk locations for flooding and sewer overflows. Customers include municipalities such as Jersey City, which uses the technology to pinpoint problem sites and inform interventions. The company competes with Teledyne/ISCO, Campbell Scientific, YSI, and ADS. StormSensor graduated from the 9MileLabs accelerator (which closed in 2016), appeared on GeekWire’s Elevator Pitch show, and is led by CEO and co-founder Erin Rothman; co-founder Anya Stettler left in late 2018. The nine-person company recently raised $585,000 and has total funding to date of $2.6 million, and it plans to raise additional investment later this year.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2021

Stack Moxie builds a monitoring and testing automation platform for enterprise tech stacks. The company was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Seattle. It has leaned on multiple startup support programs, including SaaS Launch Lab (a joint project of M12 and Project W), Seattle Techstars 2019, Women in Cloud and the WTIA Founders program. The startup reported significant revenue growth and doubled its number of customers in the first half of 2021, with existing customers expanding usage. Stack Moxie’s team includes CEO and founder M.H. Lines and 12 other employees, and leadership roles in sales, product engineering and customer success. The company has early enterprise customers and continued product development following initial onboarding and feature expansion.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2018

Strix Leviathan builds an enterprise trading and management platform to simplify cryptocurrency trading and asset management for institutional investors and enterprises. The company is developing three core features: a data ingestion engine to pull relevant data from varied sources, algorithmic trading strategies that can be licensed, and an order gateway to execute trades across multiple popular crypto exchanges. Strix emphasizes an institutional approach to address the complexity of thousands of trading pairs, many exchanges, and immature markets. Founder Jesse Proudman, who previously founded Blue Box (acquired by IBM in 2015), positions the product as a solution for institutions struggling to enter crypto markets. The company recently raised a seed round to fund these efforts and go-to-market execution. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article.