Press

This is an article about portfolio company, Bloomscape.

Bloomscape Founder and CEO Justin Mast joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down how Bloomscape is upending traditional garden centers.

Video Transcript

- Demand for home plants, they certainly have exploded since the start of the pandemic. Now Bloomscape, it’s one company that’s benefited from this. They’re expanding as a result of what we’ve seen over the past year. We want to bring in Justin Mast. He’s Bloomscape’s founder and CEO. Justin, it’s great to have you on the program.

View source version on yahoo.com: https://finance.yahoo.com/video/bloomscape-upending-traditional-garden-centers-220219350.html

This is an article about portfolio company, Bloomscape.

Bloom Kits: If you’re an avid gardener getting ready for spring, Bloomscape has just the thing. The brand has created outdoor bloom kits, complete with everything you need to grow a beautiful array of flowers outdoors. Best of all, they won’t ship to you until the last frost passes in your area. Choose between Yellow Begonias, Red Geraniums, and plenty more.

View source version on yahoo.com: https://news.yahoo.com/best-launches-bloomscape-everlane-more-170000881.html

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Movellus, Inc. today announced that Syntiant Corp. has adopted Movellus’ Maestro platform for its Syntiant® NDP120™ Neural Decision Processor™ (NDP), the edge AI chip company’s latest generation of special purpose semiconductors for always-on audio and sensor processing in battery-powered devices.

Movellus’ Maestro clock distribution network platform delivers chip-level architectural innovations to improve SoC performance while dramatically reducing power consumption.”Movellus’ Maestro platform has enabled us to dramatically shorten our development time so we could deliver the NDP120 to customers at record pace.” Kurt Busch, CEO of Syntiant

System architects developing SOCs for edge AI, data center, cryptocurrencies, space applications, or near-threshold and power-sensitive semiconductor designs face daunting clocking challenges. Maestro’s Intelligent Clock Network uses the company’s third-generation TrueDigital™ technology to achieve unrivaled power saving. Movellus’ all-digital implementations solve SoC-level clock distribution challenges for high-performance and ultra low power chips—including on-chip variation, jitter, clock skews, setup and hold violations, peak current, switching noise—all of which have been increasing with process node scaling. TrueDigital solutions are application-optimized and can provide impressive chip-wide benefits including up to 30% dynamic power reduction, 25x peak power savings, 30% performance gains, and 4-5x faster

This is an article about portfolio company, Michigan Capital Network.

A restructuring for Grand Angels in 2021 aims to create understanding about angel investing and greater diversity among investors and their deals.

The Grand Rapids-based angel investing network umbrella organization Michigan Capital Network has transitioned into a nonprofit trade association. Under Michigan Capital Network, led by Interim Executive Director Janet Wylie, Grand Angels and its affiliates in Kalamazoo, Detroit and Flint now work to “educate, grow, and diversify early-stage investors in communities across Michigan.”

A new subsidiary, MCN Ventures, manages Grand Angels’ three venture capital funds and plans to launch a fourth later this year. The venture capital funds maintain a focus on investing primarily in the Great Lakes region. 

View source version on mibiz.com: https://mibiz.com/sections/finance/grand-angels-and-affiliates-reorganize-to-accommodate-growth-promote-diversity

Experiencing unprecedented year-over-year product and solutions growth, company aims to lead O&M digital asset management in the year ahead

ANN ARBOR, Michigan, Jan. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — SkySpecs, leading provider of digital asset management solutions for the wind energy industry, releases its 2020 “year-in-review” business overview. With a global team nearing 100 full-time employees and over 50 field professionals, the company rapidly progresses toward their founding mission to automate renewable energy operations & maintenance using robotics, software, and internal solutions expertise.  Lowering costs and using data to drive profitability in the long-term is one of the company’s key drivers.

SkySpecs is playing a pivotal role in an industry that seeks to adopt a more data-driven approach to maintaining their assets, which now require closer attention and more predictive maintenance as they age.

“While we were initially cautious about how the pandemic would affect our business and our customers’ operations, we feel incredibly grateful that we safely and systematically provided the same level of service this year as customers have been used to receiving from us in the past. We worked together to find new ways of accomplishing our goals, while continuing to focus on our team’s expansion as well as the growth of our products and services,” reflects Danny Ellis, CEO of SkySpecs. “And our customers were doing the same, so we were able to achieve some pretty incredible things in 2020 despite the remote nature of

This article was originally published in Marketwatch at: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/learning-from-big-techs-missteps-is-putting-these-startups-on-a-stronger-growth-path-11610951617?mod=investing

Over the past several decades, Silicon Valley has produced some of the most innovative and successful companies, investors, products and entrepreneurs. Yet this wild success has not come without its share of well-publicized problems. 

As investors in startups in the Midwestern U.S., we tell our entrepreneurs to learn from the mistakes of others. Doing so will help Midwestern startups and entrepreneurial communities grow faster and more efficiently. Here are three ways that Midwestern startups are building upon lessons learned from Silicon Valley:

Be deliberate about diversity and inclusion

For every story you read about a tech company’s explosive growth, it seems that there is another about a company’s culture of discrimination, abuse, negligence, or all of the above.

In order to promote a culture of diversity and inclusion within a startup, it has to be ingrained. This starts with the founders establishing clear cultural values and direction. For example, Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Duo Security has been successful in its employee-first culture. From the

PADUCAH, Ky.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—To empower financial institutions with the tools they need to help their small business customers more effectively manage their finances, Computer Services, Inc. (CSI) (OTCQX: CSVI), a provider of end-to-end fintech and regtech solutions, has partnered with Autobooks, a fully integrated payments and accounting platform for small businesses, delivered through financial institutions.

Autobooks directly integrates with CSI Digital Banking and NuPoint®—CSI’s cloud-based core banking platform—enabling small and micro businesses to send

This is an article about portfolio company, SkySpecs.

SkySpecs, Ann Arbor, equipment provider for the wind energy industry, has an agreement with TEPCO Ventures, Tokyo, Japan, subsidiary of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., an electrical utility, to deliver autonomous drone inspections, blade asset management software and predictive maintenance planning to the Japanese wind energy market. Websites: skyspecs.com, tepcoventures.co.jp

View source version on crainsdetroit.com: https://www.crainsdetroit.com/mergers-acquisitions/mergers-acquisitions-and-new-contracts-across-metro-detroit-41

ANN ARBOR, MICH. (PRWEB) JANUARY 26, 2021

Genomenon, Inc., an AI-driven genomics company that connects the world’s genomic knowledge with patient DNA, announced that a seminal paper written by its team of scientists has been published in the Computational Genomics section of Frontiers in Genetics. Frontiers in Genetics is an open-access journal that publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research on genes and genomes relating to all domains of life.

The paper, entitled “Mastermind: A Comprehensive Genomic Association Search Engine for Empirical Evidence Curation and Genetic Variant Interpretation”, demonstrates how this widely used bioinformatic platform has automatically identified and annotated over 6.8 million unique genetic variants across the published genetic evidence, a more than 22-fold increase compared to the largest manually curated alternative. The paper shows how a computationally intelligent approach to building a search engine for genetic evidence has quickly surpassed two decades of manual effort in building static genetic databases.

The study shows how the Mastermind Genomic Search Engine benefits clinical diagnostic laboratories by significantly improving the sensitivity and reproducibility of clinical variant interpretation. Mastermind data is also used to produce comprehensive genomic landscapes of genetic variants, which drive

This is an article about portfolio company, SkySpecs.

ANN ARBOR–Officials of SkySpecs, the provider of asset management for the wind energy industry, now has almost 100 full-time employees engaged in automating renewable energy operations and maintenance using unmanned aerial vehicles, software, and operational expertise.

“While we were initially cautious about how the pandemic would affect our business and our customers’ operations, we feel incredibly grateful that we safely and systematically provided the same level of service this year as customers have been used to receiving from us in the past,” said SkySpecs CEO Danny Ellis. “We worked together to find new ways of accomplishing our goals, while continuing to focus on our team’s expansion as well as the growth of our products and services. And our customers were doing the same, so we were able to achieve some pretty incredible things in 2020 despite the remote nature of our interactions.”

View source version on mitechnews.com: https://mitechnews.com/update/skyspecs-expands-wind-energy-asset-management-portfolio-full-time-employment/