San Francisco-based private air travel company BlackBird has secured $10 million in Series A funding, according to company database Crunchbase, topping the city’s recent funding headlines. The cash infusion was announced March 12 and financed by New Enterprise Associates.
According to its Crunchbase profile, "BlackBird is an online platform that matches travelers to private, hassle-free and direct flights. The company partners with charter companies with good safety records to fly high-demand routes and enables customers to purchase seats at an affordable price."
The three-year-old startup also raised a $5 million seed round in 2017.
The round brings total funding raised by San Francisco companies in science and engineering over the past month to $359 million, an increase of $221 million from the month before. The local science and engineering industry has seen 246 funding rounds over the past year, securing a total of $7 billion in venture funding.
In other local funding news, language learning company Elsa announced a $7 million Series A funding round on Feb. 26, led by Gradient Ventures.
According to Crunchbase, "English Language Speech Assistant (is) a mobile application for pronunciation training and accent reduction using speech recognition. ELSA strives to improve your English pronunciation."
Founded in 2015, the company has raised six previous rounds, including a $3.2 million seed round in 2018.
Meanwhile, authentication services company Scytale.io raised $5 million in Series A funding, announced on March 4. The round's investors were led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
From the company's Crunchbase profile, "Scytale was started in 2017 by seasoned engineers from Amazon Web Services, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, Splunk, and Duo Security who want to help enterprise engineers securely and easily build identity-driven, large-scale distributed software systems. They are breathing life into some select ideas we saw that unlocked innovation and speed at not only these companies, but also at other large-scale, global Internet companies."
Scytale.io last raised $3 million in seed funding in 2018.
Also of note, AI transportation company Populus raised $3.1 million in seed funding, announced on March 11 and led by Relay Ventures.
From Crunchbase, "Populus is a platform that helps cities and private mobility operators deliver safe, equitable and efficient streets through better data and analytics. Trusted by leading cities and the world's largest mobility operators, the Populus data platform integrates data on shared services (carsharing, ride-hailing, bikeshare and scooters) to plan for the future of transportation. Founded by the world's leading experts on shared mobility and advanced transportation modeling, Populus builds an essential bridge for cities and private mobility operators to work seamlessly together."
The company previously raised $750,000 in angel funding in 2018.
Rounding out the city's recent top local funding events, AI and 3D technology company Allure Systems raised $150,000 in seed funding, announced on March 18 and financed by Y Combinator.
From Crunchbase, "Allure Systems is a visionary SaaS based solution that enables automatic production of high-end visual experience for apparel e-retailers."
The company previously raised $3 million in seed funding in 2017.
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