TechCrunch
Filing Says Sleep- And Health-Tracking Startup Lark Is Raising Another $3.6M
Lark, which launched a wearable silent alarm on-stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference back in 2010, has raised $3.1 million of an intended $3.6 million round of funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
I’ve emailed the company and its CEO Julia Hu for confirmation, and I’ll update this post if I hear back. The filing doesn’t specify the investors in the new round, but intriguingly, it does identify Weili Dai, president and co-founder of Marvell, as as member of its board of directors.
Although Lark started out with a silent alarm, it expanded its product lineup to include a sleep coach product called Lark Pro and a more general device and app called Larklife. The company announced Larklife in October of 2012, and Hu described it to me as a way for folks who aren’t as serious about fitness or weight loss to track and get actionable recommendations about their diet, exercise, sleep, and more. Like Lark’s other devices, Larklife was sold in Apple’s retail stores (and elsewhere).
I actually tried the service out for a few months late last year and early this year. During that time, everyone kept asking me about the blue wristband (the look definitely wasn’t as subtle as, say the Nike+ Fuel Band). I thought it had potential, but eventually I decided that it wasn’t providing enough value to justify the (minor) inconvenience — and, perhaps more damningly, the ridicule that it prompted from my roommate. In the months since, while I’ve seen an increasing number of people around San Francisco wearing some sort of fitness device, it usually isn’t the Larklife wristband.
Lark previously raised $1 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, CrunchFund (which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington), and others.
Inside The Grace Hopper Celebration, Where Thousands Of Women Are United By Tech
“Life changing,” “amazing,” and “shockingly wonderful” are not often terms that are typically used to describe industry conferences. But that’s exactly how people talk about the Grace Hopper Celebration, an annual four-day event dedicated to bringing together women in computing to talk about technology and their careers.
It makes sense that Hopper is a unique kind of gathering, since it is dedicated to a very unique kind of person: Grace Murray Hopper was a pioneering technologist who was one of the first computer programmers, and she had a real knack for being able to explain computer science in an accessible and tactile way. Hopper passed away in 1992 at the age of 85, and two years later her first namesake conference took place. In the years since, it has grown to become the world’s largest gathering for women in computing.
Most anyone who has gone to Hopper will tell you that there’s just something very special about the event — and that the reasons for that go far beyond gender. So this week, TechCrunch TV producer/shooter/editor extraordinaire John Murillo and I headed out to Minneapolis where the 2013 Hopper Celebration was held to see what it’s all about.
Check out the video embedded above to see what the scene is like, and hear women like the Hopper celebration’s co-founder Telle Whitney, Harvey Mudd president Maria Klawe, Facebook engineering director Jocelyn Goldfein, and others talk about what exactly it is that keeps them coming back year after year.
And be sure to check back in, as we’ll have more videos and coverage of Hopper in the days ahead.
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