Baltimore VC investments jump to $158M in 2024's final quarter
In line with Maryland's industry trends, one of the state's leading technology sectors landed its primary city's biggest venture capital deals last quarter.
Following a languid Q3, Baltimore saw $158.1 million in venture capital funding across 13 deals in 2024's final three months, according to the latest quarterly Venture Monitor report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. By comparison, the late summer and early fall comprised $69.2 million in funding across 10 deals.
It's not the highest valuation of 2024 — the year's second quarter saw $359.4 million across 14 deals, and a much lower $89.7 across 19 deals in Q1. The last quarter of 2023 was even more sluggish at a mere $45.8 million through 22 deals, meaning the transactions were more frequent and lower in valuation.
E-commerce firm SamCart, whose website lists offices in Fulton, Maryland and Austin, Texas, brought in half of the most recent quarter's venture funds, trailed by other largely later-stage companies.
This company stage trend reflects VC dynamics throughout the country. Funders still look for more mature companies in which to invest, per Mike Ravenscroft, the managing director of the University System of Maryland Momentum Fund. That was the case for most of 2023 and 2024, so he doesn't find this continuation surprising.
The uptick in cash is promising, but nowhere near as robust as 2021's highs, he explained.
Caution is still the name of the game.
Mike Ravenscroft
'I do not think that the average startup is, or should be, throwing caution to the wind,' Ravenscroft told Technical.ly, 'and thinking that the environment is picked up and that everything's turned around.'
Raising at the seed stage remains a challenge, he said. Venture firms, many of which are struggling to raise money themselves, now look to companies with a high return potential and little risk.
In some ways, this sobering reality for early-stage companies can be positive, Ravenscroft said.
'The shortage of funding has compelled founders to be a lot more precise and measured in the growth targets that they're projecting,' he said. 'That ultimately will prove a lot more valuable to founders that are trying to grow the companies not just quickly, but also responsibly.'
Justin Amoyal, the founder and CEO of the digital health company Impruvon Health, recently reported a second seed round despite the tough investing environment. The startup, which developed medication management software to avoid medication errors, previously raised capital every subsequent year since its founding in 2020, per Amoyal.
He declined to disclose the value of this round, but did note it was oversubscribed. It was led by San Francisco's Ford Street Ventures, with participants including the State of Maryland -founded TEDCO, the Maryland Momentum Fund and TCP Venture Capital. The tech is being used in intermediate care and assisted living facilities across 20 states, and the company is close to being profitable.
'We're building our technology fast,' Amoyal told Technical.ly. 'The technology works really, really well, and investors are excited to see that. And they see that we're dedicated to solving the problem.'
Healthcare tech dominates top raises in Baltimore — for now
Many life sciences-related founders also rely on government funding and other nondilutive capital in their sector, especially in the early stages of development, per Ravenscroft. Venture capitalists do not invest in very early-stage, high-risk science startups because of the volatility, he explained.
The federal funding freeze scare was not a good sign for local companies in life sciences.
'If all that research stops getting funded, if all those companies at the early stages stop getting funded, then we don't have a pipeline anymore of innovation,' Ravenscroft said prior to President Donald Trump rescinding the decision to freeze funding following a judge blocking the order.
Below are the Baltimore region's largest deals of Q4. As always, it's important to note that these figures may vary slightly after publication: Some deals aren't accounted for until weeks after quarterly VC reports are published, and PitchBook may find errors in its data.
E-commerce startup SamCart raised a Series B valued at $87.6 million, according to the Venture Monitor report. In a Dec. 30 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company logged that amount to cover its Series B Preferred Stock and Warrants — terms referencing equity investments that give certain funders priority for buying common stock later on — and convert that into common stock. SamCart reported a Series B of $82 million in 2022.
Formerly known as NeoProgen, the University of Maryland, Baltimore spinout Secretome Therapeutics raised a later-stage round valued at $20.4 million and announced on Nov. 25. The firm develops cell therapy for patients suffering from heart attacks and advanced heart failure. It's also a Maryland Momentum Fund portfolio company whose website lists offices in Baltimore's Inner Harbor area, Chicago, Illinois and the Dallas, Texas metro area.
Sonavex, a Johns Hopkins University spinout in Baltimore's Canton neighborhood, which developed a device to detect at-risk blood vessels, announced a second Series A valued at $15.0 million on Nov. 19.
Biotech company Gliknik, headquartered at the University of Maryland BioPark, raised a later-stage VC of $11.2 million. The company is building biomolecules for autoimmune diseases and cancer and is a tenant at the University of Maryland BioPark.
The Venture Monitor flagged that the Baltimore AI software startup EcoMap Technologies raised $6.9 million. That funding was not entirely new, per company sources.
How Baltimore fits in with national trends
Venture capital flow slightly increased across the country compared to 2023, per PitchBook's lead VC analyst Kyle Stanford.
The report noted that Baltimore's deal count decreased dramatically from 93 in 2023 to 56 in 2024. This translated to annual totals of $792.3 million and $676.3 million, respectively.
Later-stage companies dominated throughout the country, as well. For instance, 30 firms accounted for more than 68% of the United States' total VC investments in 2024, per the Venture Monitor report.
Fewer funds are comfortable leading rounds, so there's been an uptick in co-leading because individual investors struggle to raise capital themselves, said Maryland Momentum Fund's Ravenscroft.
'Nobody wants to go to the dance alone,' he said.
This then makes founders' lives harder because there's a need to meet with more investors than usual. Founders typically meet with two to three times more investors compared to a couple of years ago, he explained.
Overall, startups should be aware that fundraising at the early stages will stay difficult.
'Caution,' Ravenscroft said, 'is still the name of the game.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Technical.ly
30-05-2025
- Technical.ly
How Lithero is using AI to speed up pharma marketing compliance
Startup profile: Lithero Founded by: Nyron Burke Year founded: 2015 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Life sciences, AI Funding and valuation: $0.68 million raised as of May 2022, according to PitchBook Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Morgan Lewis, Drexel University, University City Science Center, Broad Street Angels, Ic@3401 In life sciences, everything takes longer. Nyron Burke, cofounder and CEO of the Philadelphia-based AI for life sciences company Lithero, learned that through years of working as a consultant with pharmaceutical companies that were always looking for ways to speed up the process of creating marketing materials. What may seem relatively simple, like a pharmaceutical pamphlet for a doctor's office, can take months to finalize due to compliance issues. The final draft, with its medical language and side effects disclosures, has to be just right, requiring multiple reviews by medical lawyers before it goes to print. It's a stark contrast to consumer marketing, where a marketing professional might be able to create a one-pager in a day. 'With life sciences, that just wasn't possible,' Burke told noting that the extra time it takes to make biotech marketing materials compliant also increases the cost tenfold. Burke founded Lithero in 2015, years before AI became a common part of everyday life. He knew that machine learning could make the process considerably faster by screening for compliance issues before a medical lawyer reviews it, cutting down on the number of reviews — and, crucially, time. 'Divine intervention' led to the development of the engine Before Lithero, Burke spent eight years working for the global professional services company Accenture, with a focus on pharma and biotech companies. 'The three things I spent my consulting career on were speed, cost and compliance in pharma marketing specifically,' he said. 'But with the aspirations that my clients had, I had to not just do a good job, but to fundamentally do something that was transformative.' The speed he wanted for his clients was impossible in the 2010s — each human review for compliance was necessary, but time-consuming. AI, Burke said, had no hype around it in 2015 when he had the idea to use it to help achieve the speed he was looking for. The one thing holding him back was that he didn't know enough about AI to build an engine that could do what he needed to do. Then he met Brandon Morton, an AI researcher at Drexel who was working on his doctorate at the time. 'We met at church randomly,' Burke said. 'It was like divine intervention … His research is really what powered our ability to actually do what we're doing.' Morton effectively became a cofounder of Lithero. Even with his leadership, Burke said, it was a challenge. 'AI is very, very difficult,' Burke said. 'People don't appreciate the beauty and the power of the human mind and how hard it is to get machines to simulate what we do.' An AI assistant that doesn't hallucinate The technology Lithero created is called LARA, Lithero Artificial Review Assistant. 'You could think of it sort of like an artificial lawyer,' Burke said. Once LARA has all of a client's necessary information, it essentially pre-screens the content. It's not meant to replace the client's human lawyer, just to make it so that the lawyer has less to do on each individual piece of marketing. Then, he said, LARA will understand the client-specific content well enough that the client can use the tool for other things as well, such as creating annotations and comparing content to customer behavioral data. While today people tend to think of large language model generative AI like ChatGPT when they think of AI, LARA still isn't generative — it doesn't generate content based on prompts, it is a screening and correlation tool that can be trained to know everything about a specific brand. As such, it is not susceptible to drawbacks like hallucinations, when an AI model randomly answers with false information presented as fact, often a result of insufficient data or bias. The public launch of generative AI did help the company, though, by making the concept of an AI tool less obscure. 'It has normalized what we're doing,' Burke said. 'We're in a very conservative, cautious, slow industry — it changed the conversations that I was having.' Now, he says, there is a lot of demand, and a lot of clients bringing them new ideas on how the company can continue to grow. 'Our future is not just compliance, it's also creative,' Burke said. 'We recently launched some creative assistants, and are seeing this amazing amount of excitement.' From one to ten To get to where Lithero is today, with a team of ten and a growing roster of clients, it spent years based at Ic@3401, a University City coworking and incubation space sponsored by Drexel University and the University City Science Center that closed in 2024. One of its earliest investors, apart from friends and family, was Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Burke also credits its law firm Morgan Lewis as a big supporter, as well as angel investment group Broad Street Angels.
Technical.ly
08-05-2025
- Technical.ly
GoWell Benefits aims to take the stress out of employee health plans
Startup profile: GoWell Founded by: Holly Adams Year founded: 2021 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Insurance Funding and valuation: $2.83 million, according to PitchBook Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Naples Technology Ventures, Chloe Capital When Holly Adams worked as a benefits consultant helping businesses navigate health insurance enrollment, she knew there had to be a better way. For more than a decade, she watched as employers and employees struggled with complicated enrollment processes, long questionnaires and tech that wasn't as accessible as she knew it could be. 'I tried different things, even sending iPads to stores to see if they made it easier, but it just was a little bit too complicated for the average consumer,' Adams told She took what she'd learned and came up with GoWell Benefits, a platform launched in 2021 that simplifies the enrollment process for employers with an easy and accessible way to insure employees. 'We work with brokers and we work with employers, insurance carriers, and employees,' Adams said. 'All those entities touch our system to make insurance more transparent and a little bit easier to understand.' From early adoption to tech startup Adams started her career at the end of the 1990s, when tech was just starting to enter the workplace. Working for GlaxoSmithKline, she helped the company get its compliance data warehouse set up. Her job back then was to meet with developers to make sure that prescription data could be analyzed. While she would shift away from a technical job when she went into benefits consulting, that experience would come in handy when she decided to create GoWell. 'I had the opportunity to work with programmers and work towards realizing a dream,' Adams said, 'then I took that experience and used it to build my own dream.' The biggest hurdle, she said, is getting the enrollment process started. An employee who feels overwhelmed by enrolling before it even starts isn't going to be focused on what matters, like which deductibles meet their needs, which prescriptions are covered, co-pays and whether their chosen doctors are covered. 'Until you get that piece in, it's hard to try to make insurance more transparent, because people are trying to figure out how to do it, as opposed to what they should be focusing on, which is what they're getting,' she said. It's a holistic approach, she said, that meets employees where they are, engaging them and ultimately making it easier for the employer to track benefits. One of the 2% of VC-funded ventures Today, GoWell has about 10,000 users on its platform, a staff of 10 employees and has reached profitability. In the beginning, Adams used her own funds to support the startup, but funding eventually started coming in, including from its lead investors Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Naples Technology Ventures, as well as Chloe Capital, a VC firm that focuses on investing in women. 'They've been very supportive in helping us build out the technology and make it as a startup,' Adams said. 'We're really lucky because we're one of 2% of women [owned startups] that are funded.' So far GoWell has raised $2.85 million, according to Pitchbook. There are more funding rounds to come for GoWell, she said, with plans to use future investments to add more components to the platform, including AI. 'That's what we're developing now,' Adams said. 'Making our software more intuitive.'
Technical.ly
30-04-2025
- Technical.ly
Baltimore hits $90.9M in VC activity to start 2025
The Baltimore region began this year with a slow trickle of venture capital activity, in stark contrast to its spike at the end of last year. This year's first quarter saw $90.9 million invested across 19 deals throughout the Baltimore metropolitan statistical area, according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association's latest quarterly Venture Monitor report. That's about 50% lower than the last quarter, which saw $179.2 million across 15 deals — meaning check sizes are typically lower across more deals. HarborLink, a late-stage telecommunications infrastructure company, nabbed approximately half of the total money in the region this quarter. These statistics are not surprising to Jeff Cherry, the founder of the Baltimore-based accelerator Conscious Venture Lab. In addition to leading the program's parent organization, the Novella Center for Entrepreneurship, Cherry also serves as the CEO and managing general partner of the early-stage investment firm Conscious Venture Partners, which has funded several alums of the accelerator. There's too much money 'on the sidelines,' he explained — in other words, there is wealth to be invested in companies, but limited partners aren't writing many checks to put money in funds. Investing in venture capital is risky, Cherry acknowledged. Liquidity has been lacking over the last decade, with few exits or IPOs. But more deals need to get done, and those funds should also be from the Baltimore region. 'There's not enough money, local money, coming into venture as there should be,' Cherry told 'in order to continue to catalyze the great things that are happening here.' He's about to start raising money for Conscious Venture Partners' third fund, and is bracing for difficulty. 'We know it's going to be a challenge,' Cherry said. 'It's going to be an uphill battle.' Baltimore's VC flow was also slow at the beginning of 2024. In that year's first quarter, the region's companies accrued $89.8 million across 20 deals — nearly identical figures to Q1 2025. 2023 and 2022 started with $78.3 million and $77.7 million, respectively. This isn't unique to Baltimore, though: Cherry noted that deal flow is down in other parts of the Mid-Atlantic. Philadelphia saw a dip in activity, and DC's numbers were lower this quarter compared to the end of last year. Contrarily, Pittsburgh saw historical numbers, though 90% of the total funds went to two companies. AI strength amid anti-DEI attacks David Asbery, founder of the direct-to-consumer platform independent musician platform Pedestal, has been going after capital for about two years. This year, he received $25,000 from Maryland's venture arm TEDCO. TEDCO initially rejected his funding appeal, but encouraged him to do a program through the organization to polish his pitch. He got to pitch for 10 minutes and got 10 minutes of feedback as well as connections to investors. 'Anytime I get rejected, and there's some type of, 'Hey, we didn't pick you for this, but click here and do this,'' Asbery told 'I always click here and do whatever they say … because I look at it as following the stream.' Now he's in talks with additional venture capitalists in Baltimore, but he's found that investors want to participate with fellow funders in a $1 million round — not necessarily write the checks for hundreds of thousands that he's seeking out. The process of finding additional investors is also time-consuming. Asbery is not looking for a round of that caliber at the moment, but found these investor conversations helpful for making the connections he can leverage when he reaches that point. That said, he's seen a stark difference in raising money for Pedestal versus Rush Roto, the AI photo editing platform developer he cofounded. 'Depending on the industry that your startup belongs to, that also is a big determining factor in the type of funding and attention you're going to get,' Asbery said. Rush Roto has collected $500,000, including some funds from an initiative for Black founders backed by Amazon Web Services. He predicts that accelerators and programs for underrepresented founders will continue to dwindle under the Trump administration due to attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programming. He speculated these attacks may explain why venture capital funding dropped this quarter. 'Now we're in a new environment where it's frowned upon,' he said. Founders: It's time to be capital efficient Cherry from Conscious Venture Partners believes it'll continue being difficult for startups to raise. He encourages founders to focus on profitability and becoming capital efficient. Those that follow this will grow slowly, but it'll work out in the long run, he said. Pedestal's founder Asbery is following that rule: He still has money in the bank from the TEDCO investment. Given the economic turmoil, startups will likely have to raise at lower valuations because of risk in the market, Cherry said. Tariffs will also negatively affect founders — some startups relying on products from abroad may fail, he said. Despite these difficulties, Cherry wants venture capitalists to write checks. Investors need to double down on investing in innovation and early-stage businesses, because that's where the returns exist. This quarter marks a downturn for Baltimore, but compared to when Cherry moved to the region in 2013, the ecosystem has grown exponentially. 'I think that we are getting much better as an ecosystem of being connected, but we're still not perfect,' Cherry said, adding: 'I still think that there's work to do in terms of turning this collection of assets we have into a stronger ecosystem. It is light years ahead of where it was.'
