FINANCING
Affordable medical waste disposal startup OnSite Waste Technologies recently closed a $3.5 million seed round led by Mark IV Capital, a Newport Beach-based real estate investment and development firm that counts a number of medical offices in its portfolio, with contribution from The Cove Fund II.
The UCI Applied Innovation company launched in 2016 and plans to expand its team to nationally market its TE-5000, a desktop unit that converts regulated medical waste into sterile garbage for small-scale processing.
OnSite recently added a chief marketing officer, and a vice president of sales.
Chief Executive Brad Barnes said the usual medical waste disposal process is cost-intensive and highly regulated. The company estimates it can save doctor’s offices 75% in annual costs via a more convenient and sanitary solution for medical waste disposal.
OnSite recently moved from UCI’s The Cove to a 600-square-foot space in Newport Beach at 4343 Von Karman Ave., an office next to Mark IV’s headquarters, near John Wayne Airport.
Deep Lens, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to improve workflows for pathology cancer diagnosis, raised a $14 million Series A round led by Maryland-based Northpond Ventures.
Company co-founder and President Simon Arkell, an OC resident who previously founded analytics company Predixion Software in Aliso Viejo, said the company’s Viper cloud platform can facilitate collaboration, telemedicine, remote confirmation of diagnoses, and speed up pathologists’ work flow by doing things like counting cells automatically and helping classify tumor types.
The platform is free to pathologists, and Arkell said it’s being used by more than 60 medical institutions in nine countries. Deep Lens works with pharmaceutical companies to use data collected from the service to help match patients to available cancer clinical trials.
The funding will be used to invest in further platform development and for sales and marketing.
The company is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio and closed a $3.5 million seed round in December that included OC investors Matt Hayden of San Clemente-based Seapurity Investments and John Walsh of Laguna Niguel.
PRODUCTS
Irvine-based ink and toner supplier Driven Office Solutions has begun marketing its consumer-focused Unlimited Ink Club. Its technology monitors printer ink levels and automatically sends refills before the customer runs out, for $10 per month.
Executive Vice President Ryan Simmons previously worked for Xerox and felt consumers were being preyed upon by large markups industrywide. He and cofounder Scott Forsyth started the company last year and have raised nearly $90,000 in friends and family investment.
They’re testing and perfecting the concept in OC and plan to roll the product out nationally this year.
“We’ve had some great feedback so far and we’ve had a lot of sign-ups in the area with our limited advertising budget, so it’s been pretty exciting,” said Simmons.
Irvine-based animal health testing startup MiDog LLC recently introduced a microbial test to identify hundreds of different types of bacteria in dogs to determine what is causing an illness or infection.
Current testing methods usually include a stool sample being cultured by a veterinarian. MiDog company Director Dr. Janina Krumbeck said only about 1% of organisms show up in a culture test; MiDog uses DNA sequencing. This identifies all types of bacteria, fungi and other organisms to find what’s causing the problem.
Krumbeck said more accurate analysis can reduce the number of unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions, which give rise to antibiotic resistant bacteria.
MiDog works with about 70 vet offices, mainly in Southern California, but is looking to expand throughout the U.S. and Canada this year; it plans to introduce a urine analysis product within a month.
The company launched late last year and is privately held.
FestFriends, an online marketplace for music festival tickets, has begun a pilot for its service—in time for this month’s Coachella music festival in Indio.
The Irvine-based company matches buyers and sellers of festival tickets. The company is the middleman, collecting the buyer’s payment, and transferring it to the seller once buyers get a festival’s wristbands.
Company co-founder Shaf Huq said music festival tickets can sell out within a few minutes of going on sale—so the resale market is big—but existing services like StubHub deal mainly with digital tickets, not physical ones as with many music festivals.
Huq said people previously would meet up with someone over a service like Craigslist to hand over wristbands, or mail their wristbands to a stranger and hope that they got payment.
The company started last year with a small friends and family round.
It is now looking to raise an angel round of $500,000 to increase marketing and plans to launch its smartphone app this month.
Language translation platform Globechat this week debuted an app to facilitate real-time communication between multiple people in up to 62 languages and 200 countries.
The text-based platform lets users select their preferred language and any messages sent within the group chat will be automatically translated into that language.
Founder Kevin Strom said he wanted to allow anyone to communicate with anyone else on the planet instantly. Strom said Globechat is targeting large companies with customers and employees in multiple countries and is in talks with a large social media company, and a worldwide television provider to pilot the technology.
The service is being used by an OC-based luxury travel provider, and a Los Angeles plastic surgeon with many international patients to facilitate communication with staff, Strom said.
The San Juan Capistrano-based company was founded in 2016 and has received $400,000 from several investors including Steve Pfrenzinger and Ora Zoe Villalobos from local investor network Tech Coast Angels, and actor and comedian Jamie Kennedy.
