Technology

D.C.-based Framebridge today announced the close of a $30 million Series C financing round led by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. with participation from existing investors SWaN - Legend Venture Partners, Revolution Ventures, and NEA.

Launched in 2014, Framebridge offers affordable and convenient custom framing via its website and mobile app. The idea for the company started when founder and CEO Susan Tynan went to get four National Parks posters framed. After a multi-hour consultation, she ended up spending $1,600.

&I left thinking ‘What did I just do'& said Tynan. &The framing cost more than my couch, and that experience just really stuck with me.&

She poured herself into understanding how the framing industry works, and soon after, Framebridge was born.

On the consumer side, the process is really simple. Users can either upload a picture to be framed, or request shipping materials from Framebridge to send in an existing photo, poster, or piece of art. Users can then ship in their art and choose the framing style on the website or app, with the finished product returning back at their house within seven to ten days.

Because Framebridge does all its own production, the company has been able to implement some automation and refine the production process to lower cost. The highest price a user will pay on Framebridge is $199, with the lowest price at $39 for a framed 10×10 Instagram.

Unlike some other direct-to-consumer, custom-framing startups that outsource their products, Framebridge handles all of its own production. This means that, as the company grows, its margins get healthier and the business gets stronger.

Another benefit of in-house production is that Framebridge gets to see what its users are framing, which has turned out to be much more than your average poster or picture. Tynan recalled seeing baseball tickets, hand-written vows, and other sentimental items come through the facility, and said that up to 65 percent of the items Framebridge customers framed with the startup are things they wouldn&t have taken to a traditional custom framer.

Tynan says that balancing supply and demand is one of the biggest challenges of the company.

&Every time we sell something, we have to produce it,& said Tynan. &We&re getting more sophisticated as we grow, but we&re not a SaaS company. Unlike a lot of other startups, we had to get a lot of disciplines right from the very beginning.&

The new funding will go toward expanding manufacturing capabilities, refining the delivery process, marketing and brand awareness, as well innovation in the product itself.

Reali, a real estate platform that replaces traditional real estate transaction fees with a flat fee model, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Signia Venture Partners and other investors. This round brings Reali total funding to $30 million.

The basic idea behind Reali is to do away with the current agent-centric commission model and replace it was a technology platform and agents that are paid a flat fee per transaction. To do this more efficiently in the future, Reali is looking to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

&We are fusing AI with human intelligence and optimized workflows around buyer and seller journeys — all towards a superior customer experience for real estate transactions that also result in significant savings for buyers and sellers,& Reali CEO and founder Amit Haller told me.

Itno suprise then that much of the new funding will go toward expanding the companyexpertise in this area. In addition, the service is also looking at expanding its service geographically. Currently, itonly available in the Bay Area and Sacramento. Reali now wants to add Southern California to this list. &We are in the process of recruiting and training a team of Reali Experts and on-the-ground Brand Ambassadors, and we expect to begin servicing buyers and sellers later this summer,& said Haller. &We will be covering all of California this year, followed by out-of-state markets.&

So far, Reali says, the platform has processed &hundreds of millions of dollars in homes bought and sold.& The company boasts that its agents are far more efficient than other brokers on a per-transaction basis and that they have a Net Promotor Score of 85.2. The companyapp has only been downloaded 30,000 times since January 2017, though that number doesn&t mean much given that the service is only available in a very limited area.

Cloud Launcher has long been Google marketplace for cloud-based application from third-party vendors that lets you deploy them in Googlecloud with just a few clicks. That name never quite highlighted that Cloud Launcher also included commercial applications and that Google cloud handle the billing for those and combine it with a userregular GCP bill, so the company has now decided to rebrand the services as the GCP Marketplace.

Thatnot all, though. With todayupdate, Google is also adding both commercial and open source container-based applications to the service that users can easily deploy to the Google Kubernetes Engine (or any other Kubernetes service). Until today, the marketplace only featured traditionalvirtual machines, but a lot of customers were surely looking for container support, too.

As Google rightly argues, Kubernetes Engine can take a lot of the hassle out of managing containers, but deploying them to a Kubernetes cluster is still often a manual process. Google promises that it&ll only take a click to deploy an application from the marketplace to the Kubernetes engine or any other Kubernetes deployment.

As Google Cloud product manager Brian Singer told me, his team worked closely with the Kubernetes Engine team to make this integration as seamless as possible. The solutions that are in the marketplace today include developer tools like GitLab, graph database Neo4j, the Kasten data management service, as well as open source projects like WordPress, Spark, Elasticsearch, Nginx and Cassandra.