Morpheus Newsletter: We’re building good.

Welcome back to another edition of the Morpheus Ventures Newsletter, where we share updates from our portfolio companies, investors, founders and the broader technology community. 

New Deal Announcement

Global fintech-for-good innovator Percent raises $5 Million to expand into the US. – We are excited to announce that we have led an investment into global, fintech-for-good innovator Percent, with participation from existing investors Nationwide Building Society and Atlassian. This investment is being used to expand Percent’s Purpose-as-a-Service offering to commerce, big-tech and fintech markets in the US, building on its existing presence in the UK and Australia.  

Kristian Blaszczynski said: “With the events of the last several years, it has become more apparent that aligning brands with purpose is driving consumer behaviour and spend. However, today the process of donating to non-profits is incredibly archaic, manual and inefficient. Validation and vetting of non-profits to security and compliance of disbursing funds, it’s an incredibly time-consuming, resource-intensive and costly process for any business. Percent’s API-first platform abstracts away all of these complexities and automates the processes, allowing businesses to align closer to stakeholders and focus on their core business.” Read more

Portfolio Company News

💰 OnStar Enhanced With RapidDeploy Expands With New GM Investment. RapidDeploy has received new investment from General Motors’ Venture capital to expand the Onstar Partnership. Onstar is an in-vehicle safety and security system and will provide improved public safety with greater situational awareness for first responders. This is an exciting partnership for RapidDeploy. Read more

🏆 Sidecar Health and Betow Life Insurance named in Real Simple in Smart Money Awards: The Best Financial Apps and Services of 2021. Check out the full list here

💽  Rigetti Computing introduces the world’s first scalable multi-chip quantum processor. Rigetti Computing, a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing, announced it is launching its first multi-chip quantum processor. The processor incorporates a proprietary modular architecture that accelerates the path to commercialization and solves key scaling challenges toward fault-tolerant quantum computers. Rigetti expects to make an 80-qubit system powered by the breakthrough multi-chip technology available on its Quantum Cloud Services platform later this year. Read more 

💥 My robot legion will dethrone Deliveroo, says ‘Starship’ CEO. Starship Technologies has a new CEO, Alastair Westgarth. Alistair officially joined the autonomous delivery company in June this year. Alistair previously spearheaded Loon, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which created a network of stratospheric balloons designed to bring Internet connectivity to be rural and remote communities. The new CEO says Starship’s delivery drones may give Deliveroo and Uber Eats a run for their money, revealing why its robot legion won’t show up in big city centres any time soon. Read more

💥 SafetyCulture has announced they’ll be teaming up with Brentford Football Club as their official Workplace Operations Partner as they prepare for their season in The Premier League. Brentford FC will use SafetyCultures flagship products, iAuditor and EdApp, as an integral part of their operations to score a ‘SafetyCulture’. The tools will train staff, carry out inspections, report issues and automate tasks to improve safety, quality and training.

Morpheus Musings

The Demise Of Robotics Companies: Learning From Past Mistakes – Bernard D. Casse, CEO of Rios Corporation and Forbes Business Council member, published a fascinating article in Forbes. “The real promise of applying machine learning to robotics is not teaching a single robot to learn for itself, but to aggregate experience from a vast network of robots so that they can improve at scale.”  Read more

If you enjoy listening to podcasts, this is an interesting discussion led by Senator Bill First, M.D., on policy and innovation in price transparency in the U.S. healthcare system. Sidecar Health CEO Patrick Quigley is joined by economist Larry Van Horn & MDSave CEO Paul Ketchel. Listen here

Embedded finance will help solve the life insurance coverage gap – Melbourne O’Banion, CEO and co-founder of Bestow Life Insurance, wrote an article for Techcrunch highlighting the latent demand for life insurance currently unaddressed by much of the financial services industry, and embedded finance can be the solution. An estimated 41 million Americans say they need life insurance but have yet to purchase coverage. Despite this awareness among consumers, the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association estimates a $12 trillion coverage gap, with about 50% of Millennials planning to purchase coverage within the next year. Read more

The Morpheus Team