A few startups pulled in fresh capital last week, and Amazon is hoping to help make a positive impact on the country. This is the Built In Seattle weekly refresh.
Amazon reached out a hand to Biden’s vaccine distribution efforts. Dave Clark, the CEO of Amazon’s consumer business, offered to assist the new president with distributing the COVID-19 vaccine across the country. Clark said the company stands ready to leverage its scale and resources to help make an impactful difference. The move would aid the president’s goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans within the first 100 days of his administration. [NBC News]
Fusebit pulled in $3.3M. The seed funding round was led by investor Four Rivers. The startup’s SaaS platform aims to help vendors deliver helpful integrations to their customers with time to spare as it abstracts third-party APIs and runs infrastructure at a fast scale. The money will fund product development and the company infrastructure needed to support a growing customer base. [Fusebit]
Seattle Tech Quote of the Week
Flexe raised $10M. The sum brings additional funding to the company’s Series C, bringing the round to a total of $80 million. Flexe’s platform offers enterprises on-demand warehouse solutions to those in need of a physical warehouse space, a business that’s been booming since more people turned to e-commerce during the pandemic. The company is currently hiring for several roles based out of its Seattle headquarters. [Built In Seattle]
inSided and Skilljar are partnering up. The integration of their tech connects inSided’s community software to Skilljar’s customer training platform in an effort to help companies unify their customer learning environment and streamline the exchange of content. The move can specifically benefit customer success teams in SaaS and subscription-based companies to help customers achieve product value faster. [Skilljar]
Cruise raised $2B. The San Francisco-based autonomous car company received the investment from Microsoft, Honda, GM and other contributors. It announced a partnership with Microsoft and GM formed to achieve its goal of bringing its fleet of self-driving vehicles to the commercial market. In teaming up with Redmond-headquartered Microsoft, Cruise will be able to use the Azure platform to give its AVs access to the data and AI they need to function. [Built In Seattle]
