Top tech startup news for today, Thursday, June 20, 2019

Below are some of the top tech startup news for today, Thursday, June 20, 2019.

Singapore-based genetic testing startup Nalagenetics joins fight against ancient disease. Nalagenetics, a genetic testing startup founded in 2016 by a team of scientists from Indonesia and Singapore has joined forces with the Genome Institute of Singapore to develop pharmacogenomic testing and combat like leprosy in remote villages in Papua and West Papua province. In 2018, Nalagenetics won its first major contract from the Indonesian health ministry to distribute 1,000 genetic test kits in five villages in Papua and West Papua. To date, Nalagenetics has raised a total of $1M in funding over 1 round.

Ockam secures $3.2 million in seed funding to expand operations. Ockam, a San Francisco, California-based severless platform for IoT developers, has raised $3.2 million in seed funding to expand operations and continue to develop its solution. Investors include Core Ventures, Future Ventures, Okta, and SGH Capital. Founded in 2017 by Logan Jager, Matthew Gregory, and Mrinal Wadhwa, Ockam makes it easy for builders to create IoT systems they can trust. Ockam is advancing a severless platform for secure IoT development, making it simple to interconnect secure hardware with software services to facilitate exchange of information within connected systems.

Qumu joined forces with London AI startup CaptionHub to deliver AI-powered video transcription, translation and subtitling to global customer base. Qumu, video technology for the enterprise, has partnered with CaptionHub to make automated captioning technology immediately available to all Qumu customers across all deployment types—including Cloud, Cloud-Hybrid and On Premise. CaptionHub is the market-leading video and audio captioning platform using the latest technologies in machine learning, automatic speech recognition, machine translation and team collaboration.

Construction startup Rhumbix raises $14.3M Series B to disrupt the multi-trillion dollar construction industry. California-based Rhumbix announced it has closed a $14.3 million Series B round of funding led by Blackhorn Ventures and Tenfore Holdings, with participation from Greylock Partners, S28 Capital, South Park Ventures, and Glynn Capital. The San Francisco-based construction tech company, launched by two U.S. Navy veterans in 2014, modernizes construction field operations, helping builders go paperless in the field and improve how they measure and manage labor productivity.

TrueFort raises $13.7 million to provide data breach protection within business applications. TrueFort, the application behavior security analytics company, today announced it has raised $13.7 million in Series A funding to expand sales, marketing, R&D, customer support and go-to-market activities. The round was led by Evolution Equity Partners, with the participation of Lytical Ventures and Emerald Development Managers. In conjunction with the funding, TrueForth also announced that Karthik Subramanian, a partner at Evolution Equity Partners, is joining its board of directors.

Druva secures $130 million to accelerate growth and global expansion. Druva, a cloud data protection and management startup, has raised $130 million investment to enable rapid global expansion and continued innovation of the industry’s first and most complete data protection technology built for the cloud. The financing, which was led by Viking Global Investors, brings the total capital raised to $328 million. The round also included participation from new investors including certain funds advised by Neuberger Berman and Atreides Management, as well as existing investors including Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. The investment will be used to fuel growth and global expansion, as well as drive new product innovations.

Naspers Foundry makes first investment $2 million in gig economy startup SweepSouth. SweepSouth, a South African-based cleaning services platform has received R30 million ($2.1 million) from Naspers Foundry, the R1.4 billion start-up fund owned by Africa’s largest company, Naspers. Founded in 2014 by Aisha Pandor and Alen Ribec, SweepSouth, which connects clients to pre-vetted cleaners across major cities in South Africa, has seen exceptional growth of the business, creating jobs for more than 10,000 people, according to Naspers.