General Catalyst
Canvas Category Consultancy : Company : Venture Capital
General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that makes early-stage and transformational investments.
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Collaborative Robotics Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding
Collaborative Robotics, (or Cobot), a leader in the development of practical collaborative robots (cobots), today announced it has raised $100 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst and joined by Bison Ventures, Industry Ventures and Lux Capital. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Mayo Clinic, Neo, 1984 Ventures, MVP Ventures and Calibrate Ventures participated as well, bringing the total funding raised to over $140 million in less than two years.
Alsym Energy Announces $78M Funding Round Led by Tata Limited and General Catalyst
Alsym™ Energy, a developer of next-generation non-flammable rechargeable batteries for stationary storage, marine and mobility applications, announced a $78 million funding round jointly led by Tata Limited (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons) and General Catalyst, a global venture capital firm. New York-based Thrive Capital and Toronto-based Thomvest also joined in the round, as well as existing investor Drads Capital. Alsym will use the funds to grow its Boston-area team and expand its prototyping and pilot lines to address increasing demand for customer samples. This commitment from leading strategic investors and venture capital firms highlights the growing interest in high-performance, inexpensive non-flammable battery technologies.
Orchard Robotics Raises $3.8M led by General Catalyst to Build Robots & AI that Power Precision Crop Management
Orchard Robotics, the company enabling precision crop management with robots and AI, announced their $3.8M raise, across a seed round led by General Catalyst, and a pre-seed led by Contrary. In this oversubscribed round, they are joined by Humba Ventures, Soma Capital, Correlation Ventures, and VU Venture Partners, Ben Taft’s Genius Ventures, along with notable angel investors Howard Lerman, Joshua Browder, Rory and Kieran O’Reilly, and many others.
The company has engineered AI-driven camera systems designed to be affixed onto any farm vehicle, collecting precise data (including fruit count, size, color, growth rate, and more) pertaining to the fruit on each individual tree. Currently, the company’s technology is used by many of the largest fruit growers in the nation to maximize yield and quality in the field, and make strategic supply chain decisions post-harvest.
London’s EV courier startup Packfleet raises €9.1M from General Catalyst, Creandum, others
London-based Packfleet, a logistics startup, announced that it has secured $10M (approximately €9.1M) in a Series A round of funding, co-led by General Catalyst and Voyager. Other existing investors, including Creandum, Entree Capital, and Founder Collective, participated in the round.
The UK company will use the funds to expand its operations within the city and to other British cities later this year, reports Reuters. Additionally, the capital will be used to develop the company’s proprietary routing software called Pathfinder.
Fever Raises €10m from General Catalyst to Expand Its Platform for Virtual Power Plants
Fever, the Swedish powertech company building an API-centric platform for virtual power plants, raised €10m in a seed funding round led by General Catalyst, with participation from previous investors, including La Famiglia and Norrsken VC. The funding will accelerate Fever’s expansion plans, deepen product development, and expand collaborations across Europe.
Fever’s innovative API-centric platform further empowers energy asset installers and operators, including leading utility companies, EV fleets, and Battery Energy Storage Operators, to run and monetize their own virtual power plants by unlocking the full potential of market participation, capacity modelling, orchestration, reporting and settlements.
PhysicsX raises €29.2M to reinvent AI and simulation engineering technologies
London-based PhysicsX, a deep-tech startup building artificial intelligence(s) to power engineering, has secured $32M (approximately €29.2M) in a Series A round of funding. The investment was led by General Catalyst. The round also saw participation from Standard Investment, NGP, Radius Capital, and KKR co-founder and co-executive chairman, Henry Kravis. PhysicsX plans to expedite its growth in customer delivery, product development, and fundamental research.
The startup uses generative AI to facilitate groundbreaking engineering solutions across various advanced industries such as automotive, aerospace, renewables, and materials production.
Helsing raises €209m Series B to bolster Defence AI Capabilities for Democracies
Defence AI company Helsing today announced that it has raised €209m in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst. Swedish group Saab is joining the round as a strategic investor, deepening the existing partnership.
Founded in 2021, Helsing is a new type of defence company, developing AI-based capabilities to protect our democracies. Helsing’s software-only approach and deep partnerships with industry have led to rapid market adoption across Europe. In June 2023, the German government selected Helsing and its partner Saab to provide the new AI-enabled electronic warfare capabilities for the upcoming update of the Eurofighter. In August 2023, Helsing and its consortium partners won the contract to provide the AI backbone for the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) programme.
Tractian's new $45M Series B Funding Boosts AI-driven Maintenance Operations
Tractian, a leader in industrial IoT and enterprise asset management software, today announced $45 million in growth capital led by General Catalyst with participation from existing investor Next47 and strategic angels – including Ronan de Hooge, VP of Cloud Platform of AVEVA, Ron Gill, former SAP and Netsuite CFO, and Andy McCall, former Samsara CRO – to revolutionize the lives of maintenance professionals with its hardware-software solution. The new funding comes as Tractian’s asset monitoring system reaches over 1,000 industrial plants, and positions the company to rapidly scale customer enablement while investing in new technology innovation for its maintenance operators.
Tractian’s solutions are used in environments that address a combined total of 5% of global industrial output. The company’s broad market reach is evidenced in its customer base from various industries, such as John Deere, Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar, Goodyear, Carrier, Johnson Controls, and Bimbo, the owner of the brands Little Bites and Thomas Bagels. Tractian’s customers see a 6-12x ROI with savings of $6,000 per monitored machine annually on average.
🫧 Accelerating Carbon Removal with our $100m Series B
Our new funding was led by General Catalyst. The firm is deeply committed to investing in ‘responsible innovation’ companies that can deliver outsized financial and societal returns. General Catalyst’s CEO and Managing Director Hemant Taneja will join our board alongside Ryan Panchadsaram from John Doerr’s office (also, authors of Speed and Scale). We’re proud that Lowercarbon, Exor Ventures, Kinnevik, Thrive Capital and Elad Gil also invested as part of the round.
We’ll be using the new funding to accelerate our carbon removal deliveries. After deploying increasingly advanced pilot processes in 2021 and 2022, we began ramping up in 2023. Our primary focus is expanding bio-oil production and transport capacity, and since the beginning of the year we’ve increased tons of carbon removal delivered per week 5x.