January 19, 2018 | Blockchain/AI/IoT

Diligent Robotics snags $2.1 million for hospital bot

The team at

ImpactAlpha

Impact Tech

Seed funding came from True Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures and others

States face significant shortages of skilled nurses.

Austin-based Diligent is building robots to handle menial hospital tasks and “help nurses make full use of their specialized skills,” says Diligent Robotics’s Andrea Thomaz.

A pilot project will focus on acute care patients. Seed funding came from True Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Boom Capital, and Next Coast Ventures.

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The team at

ImpactAlpha

March 31, 2023

The Brief

The Week’s Impact Briefing

🎧 On this week’s podcast. From Austin, ImpactAlpha’s Dennis Price joins host Brian Walsh to discuss Texas’s surprising role as the U.S. leader in clean energy – and how the oil-pumping state might yet wrest defeat from the jaws of victory. Plus, the headlines.

The Week’s Call

Metrics Madness: Wealth, ownership and ‘quality adjusted life years’ (video). The search for a universal metric to guide investments in racial justice and equitable wealth-building was… aspirational. “We are still a little ways away from the winner, but we have found a pool of possible winners that could all make sense,” Southern Reconstruction Fund’s Napoleon Wallace said, summing up ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact Call No. 50 (see, “Chasing the holy grail of a universal metric for racial equity and wealth-building”). The weight of sentiment landed on wealth, and specifically the increase in wealth as measured by assets for BIPOC clients. The metric was proposed by Caitlin Rosser of Calvert Impact, which is using the metric in its new Mission Driven Bank Fund. “That is going to be our North Star,” she said. “Increase in assets, increase in wealth.”

The Week’s Dealflow

Deal spotlight: Climate tech in Europe. Climate tech is the fastest-growing venture capital sector in Europe. Of the $70.1 billion in funding deployed to global climate tech ventures last year, close to $18 billion went to startups in Europe, according to analytics firm HolonIQ. Climate tech ventures in Europe raised only a half-billion dollars in 2017. The European Commission last month set out its Green Deal Industrial Plan, an answer to the Biden administration’s industrial policy that is supercharging clean tech investment in the U.S. This week, Copenhagen-based Agreena raised €46 million ($50 million) to help farmers in Europe transition to more regenerative practices and generate revenues from soil carbon credits. Separately, Finland’s Carbonaide secured €1.8 million to ramp up production of its carbon-negative concrete. Off the mainland, U.K.-based Mixergy landed £9.2 million ($11.4 million) for its energy-efficient and renewables-compatible hot water tanks.

The Week’s Talent

LeapFrog Investments named Rob Leary, ex- of Nuveen and Olayan Group, as senior advisor to Leapfrog’s leadership team… Alex Bell, formerly with Tikehau Capital, became a partner at J.P. Morgan Private Capital to focus on sustainable growth equity… Jen Sullo, former global head of sustainable investing solutions at Goldman Sachs, joined Earth Finance as managing director of asset management and investing solutions.