TechCrunch Startup News: Recent Episodes
TechCrunch
Listen to select TechCrunch articles on startups coverage – who's raising, who's exiting, who's changing the world.
Kolors, a Mexico City-based startup that connects intercity bus riders with bus drivers, is acquiring B2B van pooling provider Urbvan for $12 million cash. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
FunNow, the Taiwan-based app that lets users book activities on-demand in five Asian countries, is growing its reach in Southeast Asia through a merger with restaurant booking app Eatigo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Like in many industries, there’s an acute shortage of security guards. This means guards still on the job have to pull extra hours and are more likely to make mistakes because of fatigue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There’s a gold rush on in biotech as AI and other tools are used to find new drugs and treatments. With $5.5 million in new funding, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit underwriting solutions to banks and non-banking financial institutions, has raised $229 million in a new funding round as it looks deepen its expansion into North America and Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Certa, a compliance, governance and risk management platform for enterprises, today announced that it raised $35 million in a Series B round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It’s easy to start a startup. But it’s far more difficult to shut one down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Josys, a startup offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to automate corporate IT software application management, has raised a $93 million Series B round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The majority of Vietnam’s population live in rural areas and often lack access to financial services because banks and other institutions open most of their physical locations in cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Allseated, a platform that helps event organizers plan and showcase venues virtually, has raised $20 million in an equity round of funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
During the pandemic, almost all retailers in Asia established an e-commerce presence and adopted digital payments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kiki (formerly EasyRent), a subletting startup that matches listers with people looking to rent for up to six months, recently closed a $6 million seed round, its co-founder Toby Thomas-Smith exclusively told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Devolut enables merchants a returns option that doesn’t require boxes or labels. It also provides a network of “city points” where consumers can go to return merchandise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Treatments like botox are becoming more ubiquitous, spurring growth in the number of medspas, or centers that offer botox, IV hydration and laser treatments from certified providers like registered nurses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Instant grocery delivery startup Zepto has raised $200 million in a new funding round at a valuation of $1.4 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Job references are an important part of hiring the right person, especially for remote positions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What do a chef in Turkey, a pilot in Australia, a physical therapist in Oregon, a submarine operator in the military and a DJ in the Bay Area all have in common? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There’s a growing number of cybersecurity regulations designed to keep business and customer data protected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Following rumors that it was exploring the sale of its weather business as part of a move to streamline operations, IBM says that it’s found a buyer for The Weather Company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Despite the abundant venture capital available for startups in the current wave of generative AI breakthroughs, Relume has turned down investments and instead relied on bootstrapping since its launch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Before founding dipp, Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What happens when a maker of tiny electric vehicles dips its wheels into the military industrial complex? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the past year, the company grew its membership base to over 1,000 brands and retailers and saw its year over year gross merchandise value run rate grow over 10 times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Twiga will conduct another round of layoffs to keep its business afloat amid macroeconomic headwinds that have made capital harder to raise, and forced venture-backed companies to scale down their operations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Wonder Brands has since launched over 15 brands in the past 12 months and over 2,000 SKUs in the categories of home and garden, sports and fitness and beauty and personal care categories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Defense-focused space technology startup True Anomaly has received key permits from regulators that will allow it to demonstrate imaging and rendezvous capabilities on-orbit for the first time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The company brings the entire product testing process under one umbrella and automates it so customers can set up their testing and get the product results they need quickly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
DynamoFL, which offers software to bring large language models (LLMs) to enterprises and fine-tune those models on sensitive data, today announced that it raised $15.1 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Canapi Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The demand for conversational AI — mostly chatbots — has arguably never been higher, riding the publicity wave of systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Traditionally, companies looking to extract data from websites have had to create custom code to get at the data, an expensive and time-consuming process that is often out of reach of smaller businesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the spend management space continues to get more competitive, the various players seem to be constantly iterating to add new features to their products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The new investment, an extension of a previous Series A round, enabled the company to open a third location in the Miami area. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The company builds automated digital workers that can be used in lieu of human employees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We didn’t think we’d see the day. Digital mortgage lender Better.com’s proposal to combine with Aurora Acquisition Corp. via a SPAC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Many companies grapple with data challenges. In a 2019 survey, Deloitte reports that 67% of executives aren’t comfortable accessing or using the data at their organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Osano, an Austin, Texas-based startup developing a platform to help companies manage their data privacy, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series B funding round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The architecture, engineering and construction industries involve giant concrete molds that are expensive, slow to manufacture and often only used a few times before being disposed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Microplastics are everywhere — quite literall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As organizations embrace cloud services — and are forced to confront changing regulations and data use standards — their ability to maintain control of data security frequently becomes strained.
Atmosfy, an app that helps you discover restaurants and local businesses through short-form videos, has raised $12 million in seed funding led by Redpoint Ventures.
The new funding will help Meatable scale its processes and accelerate the launch of its first products — sausages and pork dumplings — in Singapore starting in 2024.
In its continued attempt to diversify its product offerings, Zoom today launched a new asynchronous video tool, Zoom Clips, that lets users record, edit and share video clips without having to hop on a meeting.
One Model, a platform that uses AI to help employers make decisions about recruiting, hiring, promotions, layoffs and general workplace planning, today announced that it’s raised $41 million in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital.
The appetite for hardware to train AI models is voracious. AI chips are forecast to account for up to 20% of the $450 billion total semiconductor market by 2025, according to McKinsey.
Several years ago, Zach Epstein was leading marketing measurement initiatives at Google, helping large corporate customers to build out measurement infrastructure.
Long before people were talking about ChatGPT and generative AI, companies like Datasaur were dealing with the nuts and bolts of building machine learning models, helping label things to train the model.
The platform offers tools and infrastructure so that visual artists can be discovered and sell their art.
If you ask Pankaj Patel, there’s too much complexity in networks today — particularly enterprise networks.
The U.S. index fund pioneer Vanguard has cut the worth of its holding in the Indian ride-hailing startup Ola by more than half since original investment.
The company added a social media hub for automated posts and ads as well as an AI-enabled “Super Assistant” to help with navigating through the application and digitizing customer interactions.
Meet Pollen, a new French startup that wants to provide a better way to learn new skills.
The company offers comprehensive women’s healthcare, either in-person or virtual, and one of its differentiators is that the average appointment is between 20 and 60 minutes.
The company has built up a base of employer clients, including Adobe, Ceridian and Rexford Industrial, eager to offer an employer-sponsored benefit for employees with pets.
Helpful's app brings insurance benefits, medical records and caregiving resources into one place.
The company seeks to digitize the rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) financial technique often used by ethnic communities.
Dioxycle is a carbon transformation startup that is working on a new process to produce ethylene at scale using recycled carbon emissions.
It would be fair to say there’s no global solution for instant 24/7 access to mental health support.
A key Byju’s investor has gone on record to express its disappointment in the edtech giant’s governance issue, just weeks after all the independent members quit the startup’s board.
Remote working and digital nomads became two very prominent aspects of the world of work during the pandemic, shedding a light on the millions of people who live in one country but earn money in another.
Cruise, the self-driving arm of General Motors, has begun initial testing and data collection in Miami, the company said in a tweet Wednesday.
Collectly customers have, on average, been able to increase patient collections for medical group partners by 75% and reduce the “days sales outstanding” to 12 days from between 60 and 90 days.
InDrive (formerly inDriver) is bringing a new type of ride-hailing app to South Florida. The startup operates a “bid-based” platform wherein passengers can name their own fare for a ride, and nearby drivers can accept, decline or counter the offer.
Gushwork.ai, a global platform that aims to advance business process outsourcing (BPO) using AI and human expertise, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lightspeed.
A recent report said that Indonesia’s electric vehicle (EV) market is projected to reach $20 billion by 2029, up from $533 million in 2022.
Another grim stage for VanMoof, the e-bike startup backed by venture capitalists to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Running a multi-cloud strategy where you use different cloud vendors for different workloads, helps companies avoid vendor lock-in and lets them use the best-of-breed tools across different platforms.
Polar Analytics gives each brand a so-called “knowledge worker,” that aggregates all of the different data sources so that users can then pose questions about the data.
Six months after raising a $7 million seed round, Herself Health is back with some additional venture capital to expand its clinic footprint.
Inngest, an open-source startup that helps developers build and manage serverless queues, background jobs and workflows.
Spline, a no-code design tool for creating 3D assets, today announced that it raised $15 million in a seed round led by Gradient Ventures.
There are a number of companies in the U.S. that offer revenue-based financing to SaaS companies including Capchase, Pipe, Founderpath and Arc.
In 2015, Pieter Danhieux and Matias Madou, both cybersecurity analysts, came to the realization that they wanted to provide a way to make software more secure by empowering developers with the skills and tools to enhance their speed of delivery.
With the Nature’s One acquisition, Bobbie becomes the third-largest fully integrated brand in the U.S. and will grow to a 15% non-WIC market share.
Pearpop, a marketplace for social collaborations, announced today that it’s launching a new product called “Boost Mode.”
San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Coalition is acquiring Jumbo, a mobile app that lets you control your privacy on the web.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps are an essential part of how many companies do business. But when the number of apps grows beyond a certain threshold, it can be difficult to secure them.
During the pandemic, the digitisation of the freight industry took off like a rocket, and stayed that way.
As email has becomes an increasingly clogged communication mechanism, businesses looking for more direct ways to communicate with their customers in a B2B context have been turning to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and other channels.
While working at Vetan, a startup helping small- and medium-sized (SMBs) businesses manage employee payroll, Jatin Mehta realized that SMBs often lack the tools to thrive online with organic sales.
Google’s venture capital arm Gradient Ventures has made another foray into Europe, investing as part of a $3.2 million seed round in two-year-old German startup Weflow.
The pandemic has damaged the entire manufacturing supply chain, which is not likely to return to normal until at least 2024 due to a few challenges, including the ongoing U.S.-China tech battle.
Brinc, the Hong Kong-based accelerator backed by investors like Animoca Brands, is launching a new program for fledgling climate tech startups.
DigitalOcean, the cloud hosting business, today announced that it’s agreed to acquire Paperspace, a New York-based cloud computing and AI development startup, for $111 million in cash.
New offerings include an on-demand pay solution where users can withdraw funds immediately for the money they've earned, but not yet received, and a lending program for employers.
Dougs, a French accounting startup, has been around since 2015. It already generates $16.4 million (€15 million) in annual recurring revenue. And it’s a bootstrapped company, meaning that it hasn’t opened its capital and raised any funding from VC firms.
Indian online pharmacy startup PharmEasy has informed its existing investors that it plans to raise a new round of funding via rights issue at a 90% markdown from the previous valuation, Indian newspaper Economic Times reported.
Secret sprawl, where companies store authentication credentials and similar sensitive data across multiple locations, is a real and growing problem for any company wanting to avert a security breach.
In 2023, funds of funds (FoFs) are on track to raise the smallest amount of money this year in more than a decade.
The Naked Market is relaunching Haus favorites, including Citrus Flower, Pomegranate Rosemary and Grapefruit Jalapeño.
B Garage, a San Jose-based startup building autonomous drones along with software to track warehouse inventory, said that it has picked up $20 million in a Series A round of funding.
Indian startups experienced a significant contraction in funding in the first half of 2023, revealing the knock-on effect of broader public market instability on young ventures in emerging regions.
Parabola, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to help expedite back-office processes, particularly in the logistics and ecommerce sectors, today announced that it raised $24 million in a Series B funding round.
Astrix Security, a platform that helps companies manage and secure third-party app integrations, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series A funding round led by CRV with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and F2 Venture Capital.
Amazon, keen to avoid being left behind in the hyper-competitive AI race, is launching a new program to invest in startups and organizations focused on generative AI.
The success of large language models like GPT has sparked a frenzy of developers eager to make AI-powered applications.
ThoughtSpot, an AI-powered analytics platform last valued at $4.5 billion, today announced that it’s entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Mode Analytics, a business intelligence startup, for $200 million in cash and stock.
Frst, the Paris-based VC firm with no vowel in its name, is in the process of raising its second fund.
The amount of plastic waste produced globally is on track to triple to over 1,000 million tonnes by 2060. The OECD report predicts that developed countries will continue to produce the most plastic waste per person, although emerging regions like Africa and Asia are expected to experience the fastest growth owing to rapid population growth.
Supercritical, the carbon removal marketplace aimed (at the moment) mainly at tech companies that want to hit ‘net zero’, has raised a $13 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round includes funding from RTP Global, Greencode Ventures, MMC Ventures and others.
In late 2022, BetterBrand found success on Whole Foods Market shelves, driving over $1 million in gross sales in the first five months.
Notarize, the world’s largest online notary network, is launching Proof, a new company and platform for digital identity verifications. Beginning in August, Notarize’s business tools will be rebranded to Proof, and it is also changing its company name to Proof. Notarize will continue serving its online notary network, which is used by companies like Adobe.
Seedstars Capital and Swiss philanthropic foundation Fondation Botnar have launched Seedstars Youth Wellbeing Ventures, a $20 million investment mandate targeting early-stage startups in Africa that are focused on improving the wellbeing of people below 30 years in low-and-middle-income countries.
Meet Gladia, a French AI startup that wants to change how companies interact with audio data. The company develops an audio transcription application programming interface (API) that you can integrate with other products and is supposed to work much better than what’s available out there. And this tech foundation unlocks new use cases around audio.
Luminoah has reinvented a tube feeding device that’s more portable, discreet, and easy to use, and it has raised $6 million dollars.
Glystn is a tool for content creators that allows them to engage with followers and read/answer comments from multiple social media platforms all in one place.
Competition appears to be alive and well in another (smaller) area of gaming: modding and analytics.
According to a new study from Sista and the Boston Consulting Group, women are still underrepresented in the European tech ecosystem.
ChrysCapital has invested $100 million in Lenskart, the two said Thursday, pushing the Asian eyewear startup’s raise to $850 million in the past year. The Indian venture firm is buying shares worth $100 million into the Bengaluru-headquartered startup through both primary and secondary transactions, the two said. The new investment follows Abu Dhabi Investment AuthoritY.
As companies increasingly rely on machine learning models, it’s imperative that they continuously check the models to make sure they are working as intended and that the data is valid, unbiased and not corrupted in any way. Deepchecks, an Israeli startup has come up with a solution to continuously test models from development through production.
Finfra, an Indonesian startup that provides the tech infrastructure for online businesses that want to offer embedded finance products, has raised $1 million in new funding. The round included participation from DSX Ventures, Seedstars International Ventures, Cento Ventures, Fintech Nation, FirstPick, BADideas Fund and Hustle Fund. The startup’s new funding will be used on product.
The Philippines’ startup ecosystem is poised for strong growth, thanks to the country’s rising GDP, fast adoption of online services and a new generation of founders. Launched by tech and investment veterans, Kaya Founders wants to back the most promising startups from the very beginning. The venture firm announced today that it has closed $12.
Oova's new membership offering is priced at $99 and includes The Oova Kit, personalized support from healthcare professionals and access to a community of peers.
Nordic VC firm Voima Ventures today announced its third fund with an initial closing of €90 million fund and a final target of €120 million, focusing on early-stage “deep tech” startups from across the science realm.
Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here. In recent years, a number of startups have made a business out of providing corporate credit cards to companies.
Acquired by HSBC in an emergency sale for just £1 in March as SVB was melting down, SVB UK is now getting a rebrand and expansion under its new owner.
U.K.-based cultivated meat startup Higher Steaks has raised $30 million in a Series A round of funding and revealed that it’s changing its name to Uncommon.
Green Coffee is a consolidated arabica coffee farming company, headquartered in the U.S., with operations in Colombia that span 9,000 acres across 14 farms.
Amsterdam-based insurtech startup Insify has completed its Series A funding round with another €10 million ($10.7 million at today’s exchange rate).
Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4 are powerful, paradigm-shifting tools that promise to upend industries.
With the new fund, Positive Ventures intends to invest in between 20 and 25 companies at the pre-seed and seed levels.
BOND's founders say their approach to livestream shopping is creator and content first so that the “creator in the driver's seat and at the forefront of the experience.”
OurX has seven products currently for tightly textured hair, and the average regimen of products offered is between $115 and $130.
French startup Escape has raised a $3.9 million (€3.6 million) funding round shortly after ending Y Combinator’s winter 2023 cohort.
As companies look to update their databases, especially in a cloud native context, with so many different databases out there, it’s a huge challenge for developers when migrating from one environment to another.
PropTech firm Aurum is acquiring NestAway, a once high-flying Indian startup operating in the same space, for up to $10.9 million, in a deal that marks a near complete erosion in value for the startup’s investors.
Working in customer support often means navigating disjointed tools to find data and solve issues. However, many of these actions are routine and repeatable, making them ideal candidates for automation.
Measurabl, a startup developing a platform for environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in the real estate space, today announced that it raised $93 million in a Series D funding tranche co-led by Energy Impact Partners and Sway Ventures.
The full-stack insurance carrier is targeting Latin America’s growing middle class that may have previously been unable to obtain financial protection.
Taxfix leaped to a $1 billion valuation in 2022 on the back of a popular mobile app used by consumers help with tax returns.
Strive Health works with local providers to form an integrated care delivery system that follows a patient from chronic kidney disease to end-stage kidney disease.
Wellplaece’s takes in a client’s ordering data and then enables the customer to make those specific purchasing behaviors across a large network of suppliers via one shopping cart.
Carrum Health CEO Sach Jain noted that 2022 “was a big year for us” that included nearly doubling its book of business.
As developers work with an increasing number of third-party APIs, they need a tool that mocks those APIs for testing purposes without actually firing the API gateway.
We’ve all been there. Shopping online and desperately searching for a promo code so that you can save some money on a purchase. Well, at least I’ve been there. Enter Checkmate.
Nymbus, a startup that partners with banks to migrate their legacy stack and launch neobanks to attract new customers, today announced that it raised $70 million in a Series D round led by Insight Partners.
Kapital's platform gives small and medium-sized businesses across Latin America a way to see their finances in one place.
Arc, the jobs platform created especially for software developers looking for remote positions, wants to make recruitment easier with the launch of HireAI.
Generation Prime, a startup that wants to make IVF and other fertility services more accessible to patients in Asia, is launching its first two clinics in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
Daylight, an LGBTQ+ banking platform, is shutting down. Its operations will cease on June 30, according to embattled co-founder and CEO Rob Curtis.
Episode Six, a global payments and banking infrastructure provider, today announced that it raised $48 million in a Series C funding round led by Avenir with participation from Anthos Capital.
It was only recently that we reported Buildier.ai had signed a strategic collaboration with and undisclosed investment from Microsoft.
The price of food continues to go up and up, but surprisingly that hasn’t (yet?) played out as pressure on the wider restaurant industry.
Yet another early-stage VC fund has closed in Europe this week, as Elkstone finalized a €100 million ($108 million) pot aimed at Irish startups.
The new fund hopes to deploy the $150 million within three years, and has appointed Paul Judge as its managing partner.
Stability AI, the AI startup behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, this week announced the release of StableStudio, an open source version of DreamStudio, Stability AI’s commercial AI-powered design suite.
Union AI, a Bellevue, Washington–based open source startup that helps businesses build and orchestrate their AI and data workflows with the help of a cloud-native automation platform, today announced that it has raised a $19.1 million Series A round from NEA and Nava Ventures.
India’s Swiggy said on Thursday that its food delivery business has become profitable, eclipsing its publicly-listed rival Zomato on another key metric a day before the firm is set to report its quarterly earnings.
Wefox, the German insurtech startup, has closed a new funding round from existing investors.
Embedded insurtech is still hot, as the $196 million in funding landed by bolttech proves.
In 1846, London surgeon John Hutchinson invented the spirometer, a thing you blow hard into, to measure the volume of air inspired and expired by the lungs.
Jenfi, a “growth-capital-as-a-service” platform, can provide online businesses with revenue-based financing in a little as a day.
In 2007, Alan O’Herlihy, who previously worked with large SAP installations as well as retail, set out to find a way to help retailers minimize “shrinkage,” or where a store has fewer items in stock than in its recorded inventory.
Sweden-based VC fund Pale Blue Dot bounced onto the scene in 2020 with a €53 million fund to help climate-focused startups.
AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that can automatically sort recyclable material, today announced that it extended its Series C round to $99 million, thanks to an investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund.
Millions of people use sign language, but methods of teaching this complex and subtle skill haven’t evolved as quickly those for written and spoken languages.
It used to be that having a corporate blog and some paid content was the gist of your marketing department’s content efforts, and that was enough.
Cable enables banks and fintechs to monitor all of their accounts — not just a fraction as before — to know, in real time, if failure controls are working as expected to combat breaches.
Despite the investor caution narrative permeating the startup world throughout the economic downturn, certain startup-types have been a little more impervious to market conditions.
Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) startups is the latest bandwagon VCs are piling onto.
Invesco, which led Swiggy’s previous round, has marked down the Indian food delivery giant’s valuation in its holding to about $5.5 billion, according to a filing.
PermitFlow has software for developers and general contractors to streamline the construction permit application and management processes.
One constant theme we’ve been hearing from the big cloud infrastructure vendors this year is helping customers increase the efficiency of their cloud spend.
After raising $100 million at a valuation of over $2 billion last year, the Australian ed-tech startup Go1 is making an acquisition and getting some investment to expand its reach and technology to serve the market of corporate online learning.
Around two years ago, Victor Cardenas and Kevin Bai built a fintech platform called Slash that lets users create shareable virtual cards to split recurring expenses.
Signaling that investments in the supply chain sector remain robust, Pando, a startup developing fulfillment management technologies, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing its total raised to $45 million.
French startup Green-Got is building an alternative to your traditional bank account with a focus on climate change.
Many employee engagement and retention tools were created with the assumption that workers spent most of their time at desks.
In 2021, gig marketplace Fiverr acquired Stoke Talent, a startup developing freelance management tools for employers, for $95 million.
Even today with all of the layoffs we have seen in the tech industry over the last year, there is still a shortage of technical talent.
Citymapper is lowering the paywall around its premium features and introducing a new subscription plan purely for removing ads.
Several years ago, entrepreneur Dhiraj Sharma’s first company, a software consultancy, was hired by an HR tech firm to develop an app to improve the employee onboarding experience.
In this increasingly AI-driven era, creative and media teams will probably need to employ the technology to up their game on analyzing their creative assets and A/B testing — or someone else will simply beat them to the punch.
Poparazzi, the once-hot photo-sharing app that hit the top of the App Store in 2021, is shutting down.
The company develops whole cuts of alternative proteins using fermentation technology and food-grade microorganisms.
Clubhouse, a once skyrocketing social audio app built by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, has laid off more than half of its staff.
Meet Bastion, a French startup that was created in October 2022 to help small companies tackle cybersecurity risks without too many complexities.
Containers and micro services may not be a new concept at this point, but lots of companies are struggling with the transition to cloud native applications, and the impact of that approach on their security.
Japanese shared micromobility startup Luup has raised $30 million in a Series D financing round, which consists of 3.8 billion yen in equity and 700 million yen in debt.
The energy-intensive process of separating and purifying chemicals and gases is a big reason why industries like plastic manufacturing cause so much pollution.
ZEBOX, an international accelerator network founded by shipping conglomerate CMA CGM to introduce more tech innovation into the supply chain industry, announced today the launch of its APAC headquarters.
Every time a member of their crew changes, maritime crew managers need to handle immigration regulations, COVID requirements and travel plans for each person.
Constrafor provides embedded financing and software to keep payments flowing between contractors and their subcontractors.
Super.com's super app is focused on helping “everyday Americans” find deals and savings across multiple categories, including travel and shopping.
Largely because of their age, houses in Europe can be notoriously hard to heat. Most were built for an era when the knowledge about energy consumption just wasn’t available in the way it is today.
Betterdata, a Singapore-based startup that uses programmable synthetic data to keep real data secure, announced today it has raised $1.55 million.
French startup Kate has raised a $7.6 million (€7 million) funding round from a bunch of business angels.
Primo, a French startup that recently raised a $3.4 million funding round to build a software-as-a-service product that handles the IT needs of small and medium companies.
While Generative AI is buzzy right now, what OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are doing may be only part of the story.
Rally provides one-click checkout and post-purchase offers that allow the merchant to inject offers after the checkout.
The global management consulting industry is worth billions of dollars but to this day it’s been tough to disrupt with technology.
Odeko has operations software for coffee shops to manage inventory, get data insights and order equipment and supplies from over 400 vendors.
There have been several startup attempts to measure staff morale, some more halting that others. We reported on Plasticity Labs back in 2014, though their web site seems no longer functioning.
French startup Fleet has been growing nicely over the past four years as the company has deployed nearly 10,000 devices with long-term leasing contracts.
Stability AI, the startup funding a range of generative AI experiments, has released a new version of Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI system that was among the first to rival OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.
Zoom today announced that it has acquired Workvivo, a six-year-old Irish startup focused on improving companies’ internal communications and culture. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Meet Thynk, a new company that wants to build the definite enterprise software solution for the hospitality industry.
Tomer Greenwald, Uri Sarid and Ori Shoshan, software developers by trade, found themselves building and configuring software authentication and authorization mechanisms repeatedly — each time with a different tech stack.
General Atlantic has poured another $100 million in PhonePe, three months after leading a $350 million investment in the Indian fintech startup that has so far raised $750 million in an ongoing financing round.
Clear Street, which says it is building “modern infrastructure” for capital markets, has raised $270 million in the second tranche of a Series B funding round at a $2 billion valuation.
French startup Graneet is building an all-in-one software-as-a-service product focused on small construction companies.
Reach Capital, one of the first venture firms to focus exclusively on edtech, closed its last investment vehicle during an unprecedented boom within tech.
Axle allows users to connect their insurance account to trusted companies in seconds and then automates insurance verification.
Honeycomb was founded in 2016 by two former Facebook engineers to create a new way of looking at application monitoring based on the internal tooling they had seen at Facebook.
AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch.
Aqua Cultured Foods is using proprietary mycoprotein (fungi) fermentation processes to create whole cuts of calamari, shrimp, scallops and filets of tuna and whitefish.
SetSail set out to build a new way to compensate sales people, where based on the data, companies could pay salespeople on where they were in the pipeline, not in just one big chunk when they landed the sale.
Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material.
The firm uses an in-house data algorithm it hopes will help it find startups that have teams designed to scale — beyond just the founders.
CarmaCare take over where traditional car insurance leaves off to provide an easier way to buy extended warranties for car repairs.
Generative AI is hot among venture capital firms now, with $4.5 billion invested in 2022. Narrato, a AI content creation and collaboration platform, announced today it has joined the ranks of other generative AI startups with VC funding.
Amazon’s first foray into the world of accelerator programs, designed to help early-stage startups build and launch, was focused on conversational AI back in 2016.
Quantum computers have the potential to carry out highly complicated calculations in minutes that would have taken classical computers thousands of years to work out.
When you play a game, how do you play it? Monopoly or Settlers of Catan around the dining table? Mario Kart on your Nintendo Switch? Assassin’s Creed on your Xbox? Among Us on your phone?
Online businesses are at risk of bad bot activity, certainly more now than they used to be.
Aravita's AI-powered solution for supermarkets looks at variables, including climate, seasonality and consumer behavior, to manage the purchasing of fresh food.
French startup Ledger has added more money to its Series C funding round. The company designs and manufactures so-called hardware wallets to secure crypto assets.
Green Labs, a Seoul-based agritech startup, has secured $38.4 million (50 billion won) in debt financing from existing investors BRV Capital Management and Skylake Incuvest.
Krisp got its start as an AI-powered noise cancellation service, but now the startup is moving beyond that with instant on-device transcription of all your calls and meetings — and of course it integrates ChatGPT now for quick summaries as well.
Indian insurtech Acko is in late-stage discussions to secure $120 million in a funding round at a time when weak global market conditions have subdued large financing deliberations in the South Asian market.
German launch startup Isar Aerospace has scored $165 million (€155 million) in new funding as it races toward the inaugural flight of its Spectrum small rocket later this year.
Last-mile robotics startup Neubility — which makes autonomous delivery robots that work without lidar — says that it plans bump its fleet up to 400 by the end of this year, up from the 50 it currently has in circulation.
OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now browse the internet — in certain cases.
Snap quietly acquired Amsterdam-based 3D scanning studio Th3rd in the second quarter of last year, at a time when the company was looking to bolster its AR-powered commerce ambitions.
Workera, an upskilling platform geared toward enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $23.5 million in a Series B round led by Jump Capital with participation from existing investors NEA, Owl Ventures, the AI Fund and Sozo Ventures.
Beam, a five-month-old startup out to more easily help general contractors pay subcontractors and get paid themselves, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Accel.
Proving that there’s still plenty of venture money in cybersecurity, cloud identity security platform Britive today announced that it raised $20.5 million in a Series B funding round.
The startup funding environment is more challenging right now, but some companies and industries still draw investors’ attention and money.
Developers building front-end Jamstack web applications often struggle to build identity with traditional API tools.
This means that Good Meat’s cultivated chicken was accepted as a product safe for humans to eat.
Duolingo, a language learning app with over 500 million users, is working on a music app, TechCrunch has learned. The Pittsburgh-based tech company currently has a small team working on a music product and is hiring a learning scientist who is an “expert in music education who combines both theoretical knowledge of relevant learning science […]Duolingo is working on a music app by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
Reebelo has added embedded financial services, including a buyback program and device upgrade options, while its warranty program, ReebeloCare, grew 330% year over year.Consumer electronics reseller Reebelo adds to Series A as it lays down roots in US by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
When Porsche partnered with venture studio Up.Labs, the mission was to create six startups over three years all designed to solve the German automaker’s biggest problems and be compelling enough as a standalone business it that can attract other customers.
Cloud costs remain a top concern for organizations. According to a recent Anodot survey, 50% of businesses are struggling to control them, in part because they lack visibility into their cloud usage.
Sidechat, the anonymous posting platform that began blowing up last year on college campuses, appears to have acquired a rival anonymous social platform, Yik Yak.
Code editors are complex and demanding pieces of software, but from a business standpoint, they’re notoriously difficult to monetize.
Lenskart has signed a definitive agreement to raise $500 million from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, they said Wednesday, at the height of the market slump as the Indian eyewear retailer bulks up its offerings and scales to international markets.
When Masaya Aso worked on autonomous driving technology at Bosch in Japan and Germany, he realized that “many tasks were still manual as over 85% of warehouses have almost no automation at all.”
Medwing, a European startup building a recruitment marketplace for healthcare workers, has raised €44 million ($47 million) in a Series C round of funding.
You’d think that an industry like manufacturing had its own software stack, but in a lot of cases, a huge amount of getting-things-made is managed through Excel spreadsheets.
Companies moved en masse to the cloud during the pandemic, under pressure to digitally transform. According to a 2021 survey from O’Reilly, cloud adoption steadily rose across industries, with 90% of organizations using cloud computing compared to 88% in 2020.
Global payroll provider Deel plans to provide $120 million of its own cash off its balance sheet to support startups’ payroll operations in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank shutting down.
Signature Bank is the second casualty of the ongoing banking crisis in the U.S. The New York-based financial institution stopped operating abruptly on Sunday — customers will be made whole.
Bach, an app for planning bachelorette trips and group travel experiences, has announced $9 million in Series A funding led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital.
Synctera, a banking-as-a-service startup, has raised an additional $15 million as it expands into Canada. NAventures, the corporate venture arm of National Bank of Canada, led the financing, which brings Synctera’s total raised to $60 million since its June 2020 inception.
For years, Phil George was the executive sponsor of a mentoring program at McMaster-Carr, an industrial hardware supplier, where he spent weeks trying to match program participants with only scant information about them to go on.
Brussels-based startup Cowboy has been in the news lately for its cash burn rate. But the company wants to control its narrative again with some product and business news.
Amazon rules the roost when it comes to e-commerce, with its marketplace outpacing everyone else when it comes to gross merchandise value, reach and market capitalization.
Garin Hess, a tech entrepreneur based in Utah, experienced what he calls the “demo bottleneck” at a previous software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup while pitching to potential customers.
Cash management — tracking who needs to pay an invoice and whether it’s been done — can make or break a business.
The company uses machine learning and predictive analytics along with science-of-aging and essential human support to offer retirement products and programs.
Wunderkind, a platform that enables brands to target web visitors through emails, texts and other digital advertising formats, today announced that it raised $76 million in a Series C round led by Neuberger Berman.
While a partner at a VC firm, Nicolas Sharp took on the project of finding customer relationship management (CRM) software for the firm.
Japanese marketing tech firm Geniee, part of the SoftBank Group, has paid about $70 million in cash to acquire the revenue optimization platform Zelto.
Hexa, a 3D asset visualization and management platform, today announced that it closed a $20.5 million Series A round from Point72 Ventures, Samurai Incubate, Sarona Partners and HTC.
Austin-based venture firm 8VC, led by controversial Palantir founder Jon Lonsdale, has raised $880 million in its fifth fund.
StudentFinance, a European fintech that funds educational programs for individuals through so-called income share agreements, has raised €39 million ($41 million) in a Series A round of funding.
Una Brands, a Singapore-based e-commerce aggregator, has raised $30 million in pre-Series C financing just five months after announcing its $30 million Series B funding that was raised in September of last year.
Meet Cycle, a French startup that is building a collaboration tool for product managers where they can collect data from various tools, work on the next product iterations and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers.
With global digital payments revenue expected to reach $14.79 trillion by 2027, payment infrastructure has arguably never been more critical.
It’s only human nature. If you tell a driver their insurance premium will go down if they drive more safely, then – it turns out – they will probably drive more safely.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery, aka CI/CD, is a modern development concept where code is being constantly updated and delivered to a central repository, rather than waiting for a set of features to be completed and releasing it all at once. It’s a fairly recent construct, but Earthly Technologies, an early stage startup, believes that […]Earthly wants to reinvent continuous integration to make it faster and cheaper by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Based in the Netherlands, blossoming agtech startup Source.ag has announced a $23 million Series A funding round to help grow its business, less than a year after its previous, $10 million round.
Merchants can use Rebuy to create personalized shopping experiences for their customers through upsells, cross-sells and post-purchase follow-ups.Rebuy is out to change the customer buying experience, one personalization at a time by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Drafting a will and planning for what happens to your estate once you pass away is well, not exactly fun.
Byju’s is weighing whether to wind down WhiteHat Jr, a coding platform that it acquired over two years ago at an enterprise value of $300 million, as the edtech group looks to cut expenses and eliminate a business unit that has drawn considerable criticism to the firm.
While much of the white-collar workforce has adjusted to the new norm of videoconferencing from home, that doesn’t mean that they — or their bosses — necessarily like it.
Finch, a platform that helps companies connect to various HR apps, services and systems, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B round co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with participation from QED Investors, Altman Capital and PruVen Capital.
Strive is an online learning platform that teaches kids to code, but it wants to do more than just that.
You would expect the co-founder of a startup that improves on traditional slide presentations to hate tools like PowerPoint.
With so many fintechs laying off staff, it can be easy to assume that the entire industry is in distress. But that’s not the case. In fact, some companies are finding opportunity in the masses of layoffs.
Meet Carbon Maps, a new French startup that raised $4.3 million (€4 million) just a few weeks after its inception.
Planetarians' plant-based whole cuts of protein have a umami-like flavor and are made with two ingredients: the oil cakes and brewer's yeast.Planetarians grabs $6M to get its plant-based protein into foodservice orbit by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Transcelestial is on a mission to make the internet more accessible by building a network of shoebox-sized devices that send lasers to one another, creating a fiber-like network.
CommandK, a startup offering a dedicated platform to manage enterprise security, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed.
After two years of seeking regulatory approval, Wefunder has officially received the green light to operate its investment crowdfunding services within the European Union.
Most merchants in South Korea keep track of their international shipping logistics via email until their cargo safely gets to its destination.
In 2024, a number of new EU regulations are expected to come into force, which will tighten the obligation of electric vehicle manufacturers and resellers to recycle batteries at the end of their natural lifespan.
Amine Skalli recruited teams for ten years, including four as a tech professional recruiter. In her last startup, he relied exclusively on outbound recruiting — in other words, proactively searching for and contacting potential candidates for open positions.
Aspire, the Singapore-based neobank that wants to become the financial operating system for SMEs, has raised an oversubscribed $100 million Series C round.
Qotto, a solar kits provider with operations in Burkina Faso and Benin, has raised $8 million in a Series A equity-debt round led by the IBL group, a billion-dollar conglomerate headquartered in Mauritius with business interests in a number of sectors including energy, financial services, logistics, distribution, and engineering.
Strava is on the hunt for a new CEO, after Michael Horvath revealed that he’s stepping down from the role for a second time.
Prior to starting Replo, the co-founders launched and sold Berkeleytime.com, a platform that digitized University of California, Berkeley’s course scheduling system. Replo gives businesses a low-code option for creating Shopify landing pages by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Meet Wikifarmer, an agriculture-focused startup based in Athens that has an interesting two-sided strategy.
Jacob Beckerman, a former investment logic engineer at Bridgewater Associates, grew frustrated using standard document apps like Acrobat and Microsoft Office to print out and mark up documents.
Fintech startup Atlantic Money is rolling out its international money transfer service to more markets and more platforms.
Zypp Electric, an Indian startup that offers an EV-as-a-service platform catering to e-commerce companies and gig workers, has received a $25 million investment led by Taiwan’s battery-swapping giant Gogoro.
Acceldata, the company behind a data observability platform used by multinational enterprises including Oracle and Verisk, today announced it has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding.
Meet Dotfile, a new startup backed by eFounders that just raised a $2.7 million funding round (€2.5 million) to help companies verify users and other companies with a single application programming interface (API).
The uptake of customer relationship management (CRM) tools has grown immensely over the last few years such that the market size is expected to experience a 12.5% compound annual growth rate, and to be worth $145.79 billion in the next six years.
Breef, a platform that allows brands to manage and service marketing agency projects, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A round (an undisclosed portion of which was debt) led by Greycroft with participation from BDMI, UTA.VC, Afterpay’s Touch Ventures and UC Berkeley’s The House Fund.
ShiftMed, a Virginia-based W-2 healthcare workforce management marketplace that focuses on nurses and aides, closed on $200 million in new funding.
Rebellyous, a startup that’s striving to build “a better chicken,” has raised at least $20 million in fresh funding,
Shopify powers a massive number of e-commerce sites, so it’s also no surprise that there is a vast ecosystem of tools around it that help these merchants manage all aspects of running their stores.
Years ago, Will Allred and William Ballance were developing a tech platform, Sorter, to apply personality and communication psychology to marketing campaigns.
New School Foods created a proprietary muscle fiber and scaffolding platform for making whole-cut salmon alternatives with the same colors, flavors, fats, texture and mouthfeel of traditional fish.
Countries worldwide have pledged to reduce their energy usage and reach net-zero energy targets by 2050.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI can help usher in “unbelievable abundance,” but he says he wants to ensure that such abundance is shared.
Finley helps companies taking out debt capital understand their loan agreements and better comply with terms and reporting requirements.Finley closes $17M to turn 100-page debt capital agreements into software-managed code by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Even if insects don’t sound appealing to you, black soldier flies could play an essential role in the food chain in the coming years. In particular, these flies’ larvae can become an important source of proteins for livestock and fish. That’s why Entocycle is raising another $5 million in a Series A funding round led […]Entocycle grabs $5 million for its insect breeding technology by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Hypernative, a crypto security-focused startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding as it emerges from stealth, co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie exclusively told TechCrunch.
Chroma, a startup working to build a new type of audiovisual entertainment specifically for mobile devices, is now adding a Twitter co-founder to its board.
Spatial Labs, a web3 infrastructure and hardware company, closes $10M seed round by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
Smart home energy startup Tado has raised €43 million ($46.9 million) in a round of funding led by Trill Impact Ventures, as the company pursues plans to become profitable in 2023.
Mega Ranch enables Meati Foods to grow, harvest and process its mycelium and then produce its products under one roof.Mushroom protein company Meati Foods opens ‘mega’ facility; closes $22M in new funding by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Sequoia Capital and Bain Ventures are among the high-profile investors that have backed the venture firm Kearny Jackson’s second fund, the early-stage focused firm said Wednesday as it gears up to invest in more startups.
Terra Drone said today it has raised $14 million in Series C funding from Wa’ed Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, marking the VC firm’s first investment in Asia.
Solar-powered electric vehicle maker Lightyear said it’s halting production on its flagship Lightyear 0, its premium EV with a sticker price of €250,000.
Scythe first hit our radar when it emerged from stealth in 2021 with a $13.8 million Series B.
Nourish connects users with a registered dietitian (RD) via telehealth and helps them get their consultations covered by health insurance.
Area 120, the Google in-house incubator responsible for products such as Checks, Tables, Stack and ThreadBite, has been significantly affected by broader layoffs at Google parent company Alphabet.
You know what it’s like — you’ve been on vacation and you’ve taken 28 million photos, and you just want to select the best 12 so you can make a calendar.
Swiggy plans to lay off 380 jobs as the Prosus Venture and SoftBank-backed Indian food delivery giant looks to navigate the market downturn that has forced firms to become leaner and more disciplined. In an email to employees on Friday, Swiggy co-founder and chief executive Sriharsha Majety said the startup has advanced its plans for […]Indian food delivery giant Swiggy to cut 380 jobs by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
The teenage market for apps is a tough nut to crack and stay relevant in. Just ask Snapchat.
Meet Kate, a French company that wants to create a tiny car that you can use for your daily commute and various errands.
PeopleFund, a South Korean marketplace that connects borrowers and investors to enable lending, has recently added $20 million to its $63.4 million Series C.
Good Meat announced today it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency to use serum-free media for the production of its cultivated meat.
Syky will serve as an incubator, marketplace and social community for the next generation of fashion designers and consumers.Luxury fashion meets blockchain on Syky, the Seven Seven Six-backed web3 platform by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Several years ago, co-founders Leena Joshi, Ben Cheung and Erik Buchanan experienced frustration with the amount of manual work they were putting into collecting information about sales and marketing accounts.
An increasing number of organizations are adopting microservices, the loosely-coupled, independently-deployable services that together make up an app.
ShareChat, the Indian social media startup backed by Twitter, Google, Tiger Global and Temasek, has laid off 20% of its workforce — or over 400 employees — just a month after eliminating more than 100 roles.
Kano Computing (“Kano”), the venture-backed company best known for its DIY computer kits and software for teaching coding and STEM skills to kids, is spinning out its creative software suite and online community platform as an independent business.
FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried launched his own Substack newsletter today, in a very unusual move for someone who was recently arrested and is facing eight counts of U.S. criminal charges.
Teams dedicated to boosting customer acquisition, retention and sales don’t necessarily have the time or tools to use data insights effectively.
Stripe, a richly-valued payments startup, has cut its internal valuation yet again, according to sources familiar with the manner.
Project Eaden produces edible plant-based protein fibers, similar to those already being used to create textiles, that mimic the texture and appearance of animal-based meats.
The need for data observability, or the ability to understand, diagnose and orchestrate data health across various IT tools, continues to grow as organizations adopt more apps and services.
Running a data center means that you have to find innovative ways to manage heat from the servers.
About a decade ago, Donghwan Kim helped his cousin, a ceramist, look for sales channels, like flea markets, to sell his ceramics.
Releaf, a Nigerian agritech startup that supplies ingredients (starting with the oil palm) to consumer goods manufacturers and their food factories, has received $3.3 million in an oversubscribed pre-Series A round.
Superscript, an insurance broker and tech platform targeting SMEs and “high-growth” tech firms, has raised £45 million ($54 million) in a Series B round of funding.
Microsoft plans to collaborate with the Indian space agency to give Indian space tech startups free access to cloud tools, the two said Thursday, the latest in the U.S. tech giant’s attempts to deepen its ties with young firms in the South Asian market.
Indian fintech Kreditbee has raised an additional $100 million in a funding round, it said, as the lender looks to scale its business in the South Asian market.
In the past year, OneRoof has transformed from a chat room app into a platform offering in-person events, a neighbor directory and a “grow” feature to help people create their own communities.
Not everyone believes that the metaverse — social, VR-centric worlds — has staying power. But MeetKai is among the steadfast optimists.
There’s plenty of vendors in the managed database services market — and plenty that are well-financed.
Food waste and food packaging take up a significant portion of the world’s landfills. AlterPacks is tackling both issues with technology that turns food waste into takeout boxes and other containers.
Uber and Airbnb have long been the poster children for the sharing economy. In other realms of society, entrepreneurs are also trying to match demand with untapped assets and services.
SpaceX is poised to launch 114 payloads to orbit on a Falcon 9 tomorrow morning, the sixth mission of its smallsat rideshare program.
Viva Republica, an operator of South Korean finance super app Toss, has finalized a $405 million Series G funding and it says it is now valued at 9.1 trillion won ( $7 billion), up from 8.5 trillion won in June 2021.
As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands.
Fintech startup Vint thinks everyone should invest in wine and spirits and is hoping to facilitate such investments with the help of fresh seed funding.Fintech Vint hopes to turn wine and spirits into a mainstream asset class by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
A few bright spots remain in the autonomous vehicle industry even amid macroeconomic headwinds that have nearly shut off the spigot of venture capital and led to further consolidation.
Galaxy plans to acquire Argo’s bitcoin mining facility Helios for $65 million and provide a $35 million loan amid the miner’s restructuring.
For organizations that do a good chunk of their work through virtual meetings, simply hitting record or taking notes isn’t enough to capture everything that’s said.
As generative AI like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 attract investor attention, startup entrepreneurs are looking to cash in with new business models built around them. One of the more interesting ventures to emerge from the space recently is Poly, which lets designers create video game and other virtual assets, including textures for 3D models, using […]Y Combinator-backed Poly uses AI to generate art assets by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Jakarta-based fintech Akulaku has raised $200 million from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), the largest bank in Japan.
Whether you’re singing “Take This Job and Shove It” while workin’ “9 to 5” or you’re a fledgling startup founder, TechCrunch Early Stage 2023 is the bootstrapping bootcamp designed just for you. The daylong founder-focused summit — on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts — covers the essential building blocks you need to build a solid foundation […]TechCrunch Early Stage focuses on fledgling founders by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Indian fintech Money View said on Monday it has raised $75 million in a new funding round, its second this year, despite the market slump as it looks to scale its core credit business and build more products in the South Asian market.
Meet Vianova, a French startup that is building a data platform for shared mobility companies as well as local governments.
Reliance has backed Philadelphia-based AI and robotics startup Exyn, the Indian conglomerate disclosed in a stock exchange filing on Thursday, making further inroads in startups globally.
Software spend is becoming a prime target for cuts as it grows into a larger line item in enterprises’ budgets.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park and various other media over the years, have raised $20 million to continue work on their professional deepfake studio for creators, Deep Voodoo.
ImagenAI, a startup using AI to help professional photographers edit photos and automate post-production work, today announced that it raised $30 million in an all-equity growth investment from Summit Partners.
Aviva uses AI and natural language processing to match customers’ spoken words with fields of a loan application. Within minutes, customers can qualify for up to $1,000.Early-stage Mexico fintech Aviva is making loans as easy as a video call by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Social collectibles platform Revel describes itself as 'a cross between Instagram and Robinhood, wrapped in social game economics.'
Ever needed to read your credit card information on the phone to make a massage appointment?
Wischoff Ventures closed a second fund of $20 million that will be 'leaning in heavily on B2B.'
Dropbox today announced that it’s acquired FormSwift, a cloud-based platform designed to help businesses build, edit, approve, share and print custom personalized and documents.
Seeking to bring greater security to AI systems, Protect AI today raised $13.5 million in a seed-funding round co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures with participation from Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures and Aviso Ventures.
Today, banks and fintech startups tend not to provide products dedicated to families, specifically, and this has appeared as something of a gap in the market.
Businesses often encounter challenges in configuring their customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, whether because of requirements specific to their organization or industry or a lack of institutional technical knowledge.
In countries where English is not a main language, listed companies not only have to deal with financial disclosure regulations, but make sure their investor materials are available in English for global backers.
AI is an imperfect technology, but one task at which it excels is identifying patterns in vast amounts of data.
Bondaval, the London-based B2B insurtech that gives credit teams assurance that customers will fulfill their financial obligations, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Talis Capital.
It doesn’t matter what kind of web site it is, the ‘customer journey’ has always been important, otherwise you lose that engagement and the end result can hit the bottom line.
Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested by The Royal Bahamas Police Force following reports that the United States had filed criminal charges against the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and is likely to request his extradition.
For companies aiming toward net zero, tracking scope 3 carbon emissions is a key challenge.
Brodmann17, an Israeli computer vision technology startup that developed a novel approach to take on a marketplace dominated by Mobileye, shut down this week.
After weeks of rumors, Getir has announced that it is acquiring Gorillas. This is a major consolidation deal for the instant grocery delivery space. The Financial Times first reported that Getir has closed the acquisition of its competitor.
WeWalk, a U.K.-based startup developing a “smart cane” for visually-impaired people, today announced it has raised £2 million ($2.4 million) in venture funding from several notable institutional and angel investors — this includes Manchester City and German international footballer İlkay Gündoğan.
Uolo, an Indian edtech platform that works with private K-12 schools to offer online learning programs to middle and low-income families, has raised $22.5 million in a funding round led by UAE-headquartered VC fund Winter Capital.
In 2018, appliance conglomerate Bosch created a startup, Security and Safety Things (or “SAST” for short), whose stated mission was to develop a platform to help developers create software for AI-equipped cameras.
Einride today announced a $500 million tranche of financing as it looks to expand its autonomous and electric trucks into new markets globally.
Rezonate, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based startup that offers an agent-less cloud identity protection platform that aims to help DevOps teams minimize attackers’ opportunities to breach cloud identity and access, is coming out of stealth today and announcing an $8.7 million seed funding round.
OneOrder, Egypt’s supply chain solutions provider for restaurants, has raised $3 million seed funding led by Nclude with participation from A15, and Delivery Hero Ventures.
Lora DiCarlo, a sextech startup that made headlines in 2019 after being blacklisted from the Consumer Electronics Show, seems to have shut down. The company’s website is offline and reportedly orders have gone unfulfilled for months. TechCrunch has reached out to the eponymous founder for confirmation, but it sure looks like the end of the […]Looks like sextech startup Lora DiCarlo is done for by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Africa’s beauty and personal care market is growing accelerated by its growing young and fashion conscious population, increasing spending power, and urbanization.
In 2016, Andrew Hoag, formerly a senior manager at Verisign and a web project lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center, founded Teampay, a platform that attempts to automate the software purchasing process for companies.
Two months ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it had fined 16 Wall Street firms more than $1.1 billion for “widespread recordkeeping failures” regarding maintaining electronic communications, contravening federal securities laws.
Airbnb really wants you to Airbnb an apartment. So its latest step is to find renters a place, which they can also list on the travel booking platform.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Black, Latina, and Native American women represent approximately 16 percent of the total US population, but make up only 4 percent of students obtaining bachelor’s degrees in computing.
Igloo, a Singapore-based insurtech focused on underserved communities in Southeast Asia, announced it has raised a Series B extension of $27 million, bringing the round’s total to $46 million.
CRED is acquiring CreditVidya, a SaaS startup that helps firms underwrite first-time borrowers, in the latest of a series of investments from the Bengaluru-headquartered fintech as it broadens its offerings. The firms did not disclose the terms of the deal. The 10-year-old CreditVidya — headquartered in Hyderabad and backed by Navroz Udwadia, Kalaari Capital and […] CRED acquires CreditVidya by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
When Female Invest launched in 2019, it did so with the goal of creating a community where women who wanted to invest in the stock market, but weren’t sure where to start, could gain the knowledge and confidence to take the plunge.
French startup Deepomatic has raised a $10.5 million (€10 million) Series B funding round. While the founding round is relatively small, the startup has managed to convince some large-scale clients to use its visual automation platform.
Google Cloud has partnered with SuperGaming to offer the Indian gaming startup’s proprietary gaming engine, SuperPlatform, to developers worldwide, the latest in a series of recent steps from the Android-maker to expand focus into the gaming industry.
Dat Bike is on a mission to put more electric bikes on Vietnam’s roads. The startup said today it has raised $8 million led by returning investor Singapore-based firm Jungle Ventures, just seven months after its first round of funding was announced.
Most companies have worked hard over the years to produce strong and secure internet connections in the office, but over the last several years in particular, as more employees have been working away from the office, it’s been difficult for IT pros to reproduce that speed and safety.
Healthtech startup RedBrick AI has raised $4.6 million in a funding round led by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge as it plans to expand the market for its medical imagery annotations solution.
Actor Noah Schnapp, who plays Will on Netflix’s hit original series Stranger Things, is passionate about tbh, a company he co-founded which aims to “reinvent” hazelnut cocoa spread Nutella.
All eyes are currently on the collapse of FTX in the crypto industry. That’s why today’s news from Bitpanda is an important signal for the Austrian unicorn company. Bitpanda has received a crypto license from Germany’s financial regulator (BaFin).
Sponsorships are a multibillion-dollar industry. But data on sponsorships, like who’s sponsoring who, can be tough to come by because of the various forms they take — and channels on which those sponsorships take place (think not only websites and social media posts but also physical signage and even sports team jerseys).
The funding winter for the startup ecosystem may continue for another 12 to 18 months and the industry might have to grapple with a “lot of turmoil and volatility,” e-commerce giant Flipkart chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy has warned executives.
Jon Zimmerman — the co-founder of ReadySpaces, a warehouse storage provider for small businesses — was working in the self-storage market when he had the idea for a product with the flexibility of self-storage but the capabilities of a traditional warehouse, aimed primarily at enterprise customers.
Narwhal, the company behind the popular monorepo-focused open source Nx build system for JavaScript code, today announced that it has raised an $8.6 million seed funding round co-led by Nexus Venture Partners and Andreesen Horowitz.
Printed circuit boards (PCB), which perform essential functions in electronic devices, including displays and sensors, need a lot of energy to create.
If you follow #beautytok, #beautytube or any beauty content on social media platforms, you know that popular product trends are hard to keep up with.
While e-commerce was on the rise before the pandemic, the massive shift to digital supercharged the online shopping industry — bringing entirely new categories of products (and shoppers) to the web.
The social commerce market is already worth more than $13 billion in Southeast Asia, but the checkout process is filled with friction.
Silkhaus, a Dubai-based platform for short-term rentals coming out of stealth, has raised $7.75 million in seed funding, money it plans to use for expansion across South Asia, Southeast Asia and the MENA region.
Walk through any public park these days and you will see a hell of a lot more dogs than you might have done three years ago.
Cleantech startup Airly wants to help communities around the world improve air quality with affordable sensors and software that provides actionable insights.
Perfekto's customers can personalize their subscription box of imperfect produce, of which the company says 1 million pounds have been rescued from landfills since 2021.
Adapty hopes to help developers earn more from their apps. So far, it has been doing this mostly by powering A/B testing for paywalls, but it has a broader road map. With new capital, Adapty is betting it can help app devs make more money by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
Equals, a New York-based startup ambitiously aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance with a supercharged spreadsheet, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife and Combine.
Kuda, the London-based and Nigerian-operating startup taking on incumbents in the country with a mobile-first and personalized set of banking services, is expanding to the U.K. by offering a remittance product to Nigerians in the diaspora.
Beekeeper, a platform for businesses to engage with frontline workers, has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding.
Increasingly, as Moore’s law rears its ugly head, computer chip developers are adopting “chiplet” architectures to scale their hardware’s processing power.
Veriti, a platform for unifying cybersecurity infrastructure, today emerged from stealth with $18.5 million in funding, a combination of $12 million from Insight Partners and a $6.5 million round led by NFX and Amiti.
Twitter is reportedly delaying the rollout of verification check marks to subscribers as the social network attempts to steer clear of possible impact to Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon is doubling down on a startup that is racing to bring solar modules to rooftops in India.
Danish startup Pleo has announced that it plans to lay off around 15% of the company’s workforce.
Dropit, a retail technology platform that bridges the digital divide by unifying merchants’ online and in-store inventories, has raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding.
Meet Bump, a French software-as-a-service startup that wants to help you maintain and use APIs across your organization.
Roam, which bills itself as a “cloud HQ” for distributed, remote companies, today emerged from stealth with $30 million in Series A funding led by IVP with participation from undisclosed angel investors.
Microsoft has backed Wemade, a popular video game developer that has made aggressive bets on blockchain in recent years, the latest sign of tech giants’ showing growing interest in web3.
Three years ago, Ben and Nicole Green were planning their wedding and decided to go digital with registries to save on money and materials.
Fringe, an HR tech startup enabling companies to offer customizable perks and benefits to employees, today announced that it raised $17 million in a funding round led by Origin Ventures and Felton Group.
Navina, a company developing AI-powered assistant software for physicians, today announced that it raised $22 million in Series B funding led by ALIVE with participation from Grove Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel and Schusterman Family Investments.
Twitter’s stock will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and become a private company on November 8, according to a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Cinchy, a startup that provides a data management service for enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $14.5 million in Series B funding led by Forgepoint Capital with participation from IVP, SUV, Techstars and Mars.
The daughter of divorced parents herself, Uber alum Jacklyn Rome founded Onward to help co-parents more easily manage their shared expenses.
Google, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines help you find information from the web. But it’s hard to find documents, messages, meetings, and emails from your own accounts. You need to go to different applications to find things that might be related to one project.
Valence Security, a company securing business app infrastructure, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round led by M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture arm, with participation from YL Ventures, Porsche Ventures, Akamai Technologies, Alumni Ventures and former Symantec CEO Michael Fey.
Duolingo is launching its math app to the public, and months after a beta version joined the app store.
WhatsApp is used by more than two billion around the world, and is an important tool for many small businesses.
Several years ago, Fabrizio Del Maffeo and a core team from Imec, a Belgium-based nanotechnology lab, teamed up with Evangelos Eleftheriou and a group of researchers at IBM Zurich Lab to develop a computer chip.
In the midst of the pandemic, Pantheon Design, a maker of industrial 3D printers from Vancouver, BC, suddenly found itself getting orders from factories in the Midwest, the center of heavy industries.
Maro has developed a platform that helps families and schools navigate tough conversations about mental health.
Sensat, a platform that helps physical infrastructure companies map and visualize all their data, has raised $20.5 million in a Series B round of funding.
Many qualified workers are failed by the current model of work in the United States, where jobs are either part-time or full-time.
Banyan, a platform for product purchase data that allows customers such as banks, fintechs, hotels and merchants to automate expense management and more, today announced that it raised $43 million in a Series A funding round.
Challenger bank N26 is launching a new trading feature in its app — N26 Crypto. Users will be able to easily trade crypto assets using money in their N26 account.
In 2018, Neil D’Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, came to the realization that his ten-plus-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk were having little impact.
When Quddus Pativada was 14, he wished that he had an app that could summarize his textbooks for him.
RisingWave Labs, a company developing a platform for data stream processing, today announced that it raised $36 million in a Series A funding round led by Yunqi Partners.
Businesses usually plot their growth strategies on spreadsheets, but Drivetrain wants to provide a faster alternative for financial planning and decision making.
Synonym is developing designs and underwriting for its fermentation farms so that companies can more easily utilize them for bioproduct production.
Beyond Meat expects the job cuts to be completed by the end of the year. Beyond Meat to cut 19% of its workforce amid sales slump by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Even the largest landfills in Indonesia are at (or nearing) capacity, and the government has set an ambitious target of 30% waste reduction by 2025.
Pillow aspires to be an all-in-one platform that helps even newbie users save, spend and invest in crypto currency.
Noom, a health coaching platform valued at $3.7 billion last year, is laying off a portion of staff for the second time in a matter of months, TechCrunch has learned from sources.
French startup Homa has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. Quadrille Capital and Headline are leading the round.
Insite AI, a platform for consumer packaged goods companies that uses AI to provide recommendations on how to price, distribute and promote their products in physical stores, today launched out of stealth with $19 million in Series A capital from NewRoad Capital and M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture arm.
Workmate, a Singapore-based on-demand staffing platform, has been acquired by Persol Asia Pacific, one of the region’s largest HR service providers.
In the traditional business-to-business world, sellers often don’t know how much of a product they should order.
Fintor, a fintech startup making it easier for non-accredited investors to invest in real estate properties, has just launched its mobile app for both iOS and Android.
Jiko started its life as a mobile bank for consumers. But over time, the fintech startup has evolved its model – mostly fueled by demand – and is now making a push into corporate money storage.
The proliferation of delivery services give customers many options, but means chaos for busy restaurants that need to manage orders across multiple apps and channels.
Oort, an identity threat detection and response platform, today announced that it raised $11.5 million in a Series A round co-led by .406 Ventures and Energy Impact Partners with participation from Cisco Investments.
Techstars, a network of startup accelerators and an investment company, is launching a new accelerator in Paris called Techstars Sustainability Paris.
French startup Gourmey just raised a Series A funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital. In total, the company banked $48 million (€48 million).
IriusRisk, a threat modeling platform, today announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B funding round led by Paladin Capital Group with participation from BrightPixel Capital, SwanLab Venture Factory, 360 Capital and Inveready.
The role of HR professionals grew in scope during the pandemic as companies were forced to navigate major workplace changes, like working from home. Unsurprisingly, those professionals have had some of the highest burnout rates over the past two years, particularly as HR departments remain under-resourced. According to an August survey from Workvivo, an employee […] Humaans raises $15M to simplify HR tasks like onboarding by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Another major piece of mobile M&A appears to be in the works in the UK. Today, Vodafone confirmed that it was in merger discussions with Three UK, a carrier owned by CK Hutchison, to accelerate their 5G rollout.
Juno, a startup that provides checking accounts to crypto enthusiasts and allows them to take their paychecks in digital tokens, has raised a new funding round as it expands its offerings to include a tokenized loyalty program.
In 2011, the Apache Software Foundation released Flink, a high-throughput, low-latency engine for streaming various data types.
Created by developer who needed to test apps at scale, TestGrid is an on-demand platform that lets users run tests on websites and apps across browsers, operating systems.
Software product marketers typically are charged with creating demos for potential customers.
The digital ads market is robust, with Statista predicting that worldwide spend will reach nearly $900 billion by 2026.
French startup Pigment has raised a new round of funding less than a year after raising a $73 million Series B round.
Although today’s rocket engines are advanced and powerful, they tend to rely on traditional — and naturally volatile — fuels like hydrazine or liquid oxygen and kerosene.
French startup Stockly is raising a $12 million Series A round (€12 million) from Eurazeo, Daphni and several business angels.
AmazeVR, a Los Angeles-based virtual concert platform, said Tuesday it has raised a $17 million funding round to create immersive music experiences through virtual reality (VR) concerts.
In a world of climate change-fueled food shortages, insect-based proteins are being viewed as an increasingly valuable potential alternative food service.
Mark Shaw likes running around. The serial entrepreneur joined activity and fitness tracking platform Strava as a co-founder in 2009 to lead engineering as CTO. He spent eight years there, and as of its most recent raise in 2020,
Checkmate's shopping tool gathers all the online discount codes, gift cards and personalized deals from your inbox and automatically applies them at checkout. Checkmate captures all of your shopping deals so you don’t have to by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Chaos engineering was originally developed at large companies to help them pressure test systems in production.
A cloud kitchen — also known as a ghost kitchen or a shared kitchen — offers restaurant owners and food entrepreneurs a commercial kitchen space at a reduced cost for food delivery and takeout.
Keeping up with tax compliance for cryptocurrency can be tricky, especially since many laws are new (or haven’t been written yet).
French startup Bump has signed a multi-year financing partnership with DIF Capital Partners in order to roll out more charging stations for electric vehicles and double down on growth in general.
In a sign that national security tech is a safe bet even during troubled economic times, defense- and security-focused VC firm Razor’s Edge Ventures today announced the closing of its third startup investment fund at just under $340 million.
Leoparda Electric, a São Paolo–based startup, wants to be the Gogoro of Latin America. In other words, it’s looking to build out a network of battery swapping stations that should help spread adoption of electric two-wheelers in the region.
For more than half a decade, Zopper built a platform for small and medium-sized businesses, helping merchants with invoicing and payments through its point-of-sale platform.
A group of former Meta engineers is building a platform to help enterprises deploy machine learning models at the speed of big tech companies.
Video of a sidewalk delivery robot crossing yellow caution tape and rolling through a crime scene in Los Angeles went viral this week, amassing more than 650,000 views on Twitter and sparking debate about whether the technology is ready for prime time.
In a town hall to some members of their community, Launch House addressed the harassment and assault allegations surfaced by a Vox Investigation earlier this week.
Remote work struck down barriers for many employees, and now Virtual Internships is doing the same for university students around the world by partnering with over 12,000 companies from 100 countries.
Stop trying to make Polywork happen. It’s already happening. You may even be polyworking as you read this.
Denim, the fintech platform for freight and logistics formerly known as Axle Payments, today announced that it raised $126 million in a Series B funding round led by Pelion Venture Partners.
Tech-talent marketplace MVP Match has raised €5 million ($5 million) seed funding from Stage 2 Capital to double down its strategy for pairing companies with talent from across the globe.
The U.S healthcare system is infamously labyrinthine, with a lengthy claims process that results in frequent errors and high administrative costs.
Its technology is a way to grow and control cells without the need for any of those expensive recombinant proteins for cell production. Cultured meat startup Prolific Machines unveils its ‘Henry Ford approach’ to cell growth by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
French biotech company WhiteLab Genomics has raised $10 million in funding for an AI platform designed to aid the discovery and development of genomic therapies.
In recent years, a cottage industry has sprung up around the industrial internet of things (IoT) landscape — and the data generated by it.
HotelOnline, a Kenyan-based travel technology scale-up that fashions itself as an e-commerce and digital marketing enabler in the hospitality industry, has acquired HotelPlus, a software provider with clients in 22 countries.
In 2017, three entrepreneurs — Chris Hazard, Mike Resnick and Mike Capps — came together to launch a platform for building AI and machine learning tools geared toward the enterprise.
Data needs to be stored somewhere. However, data storage costs keep growing, and the data people keep producing and consuming can’t keep up with the available storage.
The app was designed with Gen Z in mind, a generation that will grow up with the blockchain and most likely own some kind of digital assets. Stack.io banks $2.7M to teach teens, parents about crypto by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Cloud storage is expensive (especially in this economy), but many companies often over-provision, cutting their full return on investment. Lucidity was created to help them manage block storage more efficiently with a set of automated tools.
London-based regulatory technology (RegTech) startup SteelEye has raised $21 million in a series B round of funding.
A lot of important data gets lost along the sales pipeline because sales teams use multiple tools, including email, Zoom and WhatsApp, to talk with buyers.
The vegan food market was pegged as a $27 billion industry last year, a figure that’s expected to more than double within a decade.
The company currently works with 50 public defender agencies and has around 60 clients who are private criminal defense attorneys.
My phone buzzes as I get a text from a friend who’s a partner at a VC firm. It’s a screenshot of a Venmo notification that just came in.
India’s financial crime fighting agency searched the offices of fintech unicorns Paytm and Razorpay as well as Cashfree on Friday as part of an ongoing investigation into fraudulent Chinese loan apps, it said Saturday, the latest in a series of probes in recent months.
Companies tend to divide their procurement spending into two main buckets. The first is large purchases over $500,000 with some starting $1 million, depending on the size of the organization. Anything below that figure falls under a category known as “tail spend.”
I’ve been tracking PsycApps, a startup that came up with a gamified mental health game ‘eQuoo’, since 2016, and this company – and its founder – is nothing if not persistent in ‘pivoting into the wind’. T
You know the feeling; you’re on a dating app, and you start a conversation with someone, and things don’t seem like they add up completely.
Falkon, a sales analytics platform that uses AI to attempt to show where successful product sales are occuring in an organization, today announced that it raised $16 million in a funding round led by OMERS Ventures.
MEDU aims to reduce hospital garment waste and replace single-wear items with its line of sustainable, virus-resistant reusable pieces.
The process of finding job candidates often entails a lot of tedious manual work for recruiters, like sending versions of the same email over and over again. That’s Kula was created.
The first major subsidy contract under the U.K. Government’s £5 billion ($5.9 billion) Project Gigabit scheme has officially been awarded, with Wessex Internet securing £6 million ($7 million) to connect remote properties in South West England to high-speed broadband.
Headquartered in Singapore, proptech startup Propseller is on a mission to make real estate transactions more efficient and data-driven for sellers and buyers alike. Its platform is able to tell users the likelihood of a conversion each step of the way.
Weeks after laying off workers, supply chain startup FourKites has raised $30 million as part of an ongoing financing round, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
StarTree, a company building what it describes as an “analytics-as-a-service” platform, today announced that it raised $47 million in a Series B round led by GGV Capital with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and CRV.
Augmented reality headsets have been around for years, but none of the market players has really expanded beyond the techy demographic and broken into the mainstream.
Supply chain disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine is driving increased costs of goods and services, affecting not only the industrial sector (e.g., semiconductors), but also the agriculture industry.
Web3 doesn’t have the most inclusive reputation, yet so many crypto founders talk about onboarding the next 100 million users into the space.
Servify, a startup that manages lifecycle of devices for several popular smartphone vendors including Apple and Samsung in many markets, has raised $65 million as it eyes becoming a public company in two years.
Based in Japan, biotech startup Dioseve’s ambitious goal is to grow human oocytes, or eggs, from other tissue. Its aim is to help people struggling with infertility, and it recently raised $3 million led by ANRI, with participation from Coral Capital.
Programming involves a lot of monotonous tasks. Based in Gujarat, India, DhiWise wants to makes things less onerous for developers with its programming automation platform.
Modern DevOps turned back the clock on agile software development. Them’s fighting words, but they’re words Cory O’Daniel, the CEO of Massdriver, stands by.
Stripe has laid off some of the employees that support TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that it acquired last year, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources and firsthand documentation.
Sunstone, a higher education startup that collaborates with academic institutions to help upskill their students for employability, has raised $35 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more Indian cities. Sunstone founders said Friday WestBridge Capital led the startup’s Series C financing round. Alteria Capital also participated in the funding, […]
Aero Technologies, which describes itself as a “next-generation air travel company” which currently operates on a limited number of routes in the U.S. and Europe, today announced that it has raised $65 million, with $50 million as a Series B funding round co-led by Albacore Capital Group and $15 million in convertible notes. Expa and […]
Health information publishing giant WebMD has announced that it’s acquiring Jim.fr, a French-language medical news and information website aimed at healthcare professionals (HCPs).
All major social networks including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have their own take on how collaborations should work.
Multi-asset social investment network and Robinhood competitor eToro has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gatsby.
Bangalore-based Exponent Energy might have come up with a way to deliver 15-minute rapid charging for electric vehicles.
Mobile apps have to be bug-tested across countless devices to ensure they work as intended.
As the jobs market remains tight (mass layoffs and hiring freezes in tech aside), companies are laser-focused on retaining staff.
WhatsApp has long transcended its roots as a simple messaging app for friends, and is now a core communication tool for businesses seeking a direct channel to their customers’ pockets — both literally, and metaphorically.
Positive Food is going after the $34 billion fresh prepared foods market with its take on salads, heat-and-eat prepared meals and vegan overnight oats.
It’s not unusual for a tech company to be born by accident. Famously, Slack was created as a byproduct of a now defunct gaming company.
Her product is a hit with investors, the most notable of which include Morgan Stanley, The BFM Fund and Northwestern Mutual Futures Ventures.
Jiminny, a U.K.-based conversational intelligence platform that companies use to record, transcribe, and analyze communications from across sales and other customer-facing teams, today announced it has raised $16.5 million in a series A round of funding.
FundamentalVR, an immersive simulation platform for medical and health care professions, has raised $20 million in a round of funding to “accelerate skill-transfer and surgical proficiency” through virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) applications.
Since the start of the pandemic, the global supply chain has undergone — and is undergoing — immense strain.
Convertedin, an Egyptian startup that operates a marketing operating system for e-commerce brands, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Saudi Arabia-headquartered Merak Capital.
The Mexico-based company enables retailers to bring their inventory relationships online, expand their product selection and get more favorable credit terms.
Spin Technology, a data protection software vendor catering to enterprise clientele, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Blueprint Equity with participation from Santa Barbara Venture Partners and Blu Venture Investors.
It’s easy to think about satellites as a bunch of mini-moons, orbiting the Earth seamlessly and without any (noticeable) movement.
The pandemic prompted countless companies to migrate to the cloud. By 2025, driven partly by the need for digital services, 85% of enterprises will have a cloud-first principle, according to Gartner.
On Deck, a tech company that connects founders to each other, capital and advice, has conducted another round of layoffs just three months after laying off a quarter of staff.
Employee benefits platform Ben today announced it has raised $16 million in a series A round of funding led by European VC giant Atomico. While salary is undoubtedly the main draw in a company’s compensation offer, additional “perks” can help sweeten the deal for current or would-be employees — this could be anything from gym […]
Cera, a U.K. provider of healthcare inside people’s homes augmented by a platform that allows carers to monitor a patient’s health and potentially flag problems, has raised $320 million (£260 million) in an equity and debt financing round, split roughly 50/50.
Braxia Scientific is a Toronto-based company that focuses on depression, suicidality and related mental health conditions. T
Sprig, a startup offering tools for user and software product research, today announced that it raised $30 million in a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, First Round Capital, Elad Gil and Figma Ventures.
Large-scale and mid-sized enterprises and businesses are increasingly adopting — and offering — software-as-a-service platforms as they seek to increase their revenue and parlay their growth into greater efficiency.
Israeli lidar startup Innoviz will supply its lidar sensors and perception software to all vehicles with automated driving capabilities within Volkswagen group brands, the company said Tuesday.
Bolt Mobility, the Miami-based micromobility startup co-founded by Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt, appears to have vanished without a trace from several of its U.S. markets.
Hyundai Motor is considering increasing its stake in, or fully acquiring, the South Korea-based lidar-free autonomous mobility platform 42dot, the latest signal of its growing interest in the fast-growing space.
Today, digital world maker Stadium Live Studios, Inc. announced its $10 million Series A funding round to continue its mission of bringing fantasy sports to a younger generation.
When Leapfin founder and CEO Ray Lau was managing financial operations at the game company Zynga a decade ago, he saw just how hard it was for his team to get answers about the financial health of the company quickly.
Autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai is forming a strategic joint venture with Sany Heavy Truck, a subsidiary of Chinese heavy equipment manufacturer Sany Heavy Industry, to create an autonomous truck brand.
Switchboard, a collaboration app that combines features of videoconferencing and digital whiteboarding, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round that values the company at $200 million post-money.
Cordial, a cross-channel marketing and data management platform, today announced that it closed a $50 million Series C funding round led by NewSpring.
Proving that there’s room in the robotic process automation (RPA) market for another vendor, RPA Supervisor today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Dawn Capital with participation from S16vc and existing investor MMC Ventures.
When Charles Onu’ cousin was both born with birth asphyxia and later developed a hearing condition, the seed for Ubenwa, an audio biometric company geared at identifying neurological disorders in infants, was also planted. Onu, CEO and co-founder, said he hopes Ubenwa will change the way physicians provide care to infants.
Insightly Analytics helps engineering teams stop problems before they happen, like slow release cycles, bottlenecks and uneven workload distribution that can lead to employee burnout.
World Fund, a newcomer in climate-VC land, is taking the lead in a $128 million round for IQM, with hopes the Finnish quantum computing company will one day deliver carbon cuts by the megatonne.
When Kristy Kim started TomoCredit in early 2019, she was on a mission to help international students more easily obtain credit.
“Buy now, pay later” (BNPL) startups have gained traction by targeting consumers, but BNPLs for businesses are also starting to take off.
Digit, the bipedal robot developed by Agility Robotics, will continue to evolve and improve, including the addition of a head and some digits of its very own.
In the software industry, observability tools provide businesses insights on the health of their production apps. At best, observability tools can flag when apps are performing under par and help identify the root causes of issues. But rarely is it this simple.
15Five — an early mover in the world of building technology to help motivate teams, and to improve performance management for execs overseeing those teams — has raised $52 million in a round of growth funding that it will be using to expand its own performance.
Opendoor opened the door, so to speak, to the idea of applying technology to the concept of house flipping to both scale the opportunity and make it considerably more efficient.
Conversational commerce isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, with countless companies using live chats, messaging apps, chatbots, voice assistants and more to encourage consumers to part with their cash.
The pandemic has triggered more demand for online shopping and fueled many smaller retailers to establish their own online offerings.
The credit card market has become increasingly crowded, with consumer fintech startups like locked in a fierce competition to differentiate their offerings through branding, rewards programs and even crypto compatibility.
Privacy is a core concern in crypto. Once you know a crypto wallet address corresponds to a certain individual, you can track all the transactions that individual has made through their wallet on any public blockchain, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Some cryptographers think the solution to crypto’s privacy concerns lies in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a […]
When Andrew Hines started Canvas Medical in 2015 he couldn’t have predicted that telehealth would go from niche to norm or that a pandemic would inspire entrepreneurs to launch a new fleet of digital health startups that needed fresh infrastructure.
Medusa aims to offer APIs beyond the standard marketplaces ones for merchants to build more advanced features like fulfillment, subscriptions or a wholesale channel.
What started as a pet project to electrify food trucks in the San Francisco Bay area — an enterprise inspired by the cacophony of generators that greeted Ben Parker every day during his lunch break at Tesla — has evolved into a much larger, complex and potentially more lucrative undertaking.
Hormonal healthcare can be intimidating, since it touches on the most intimate parts of our lives. Kindly Health wants to make it accessible to more people, with a combination of at-home diagnostic tests (including semen tests and tests for polycystic ovary syndrome), telehealth consultations and supplements.
Deci, a startup company with 50 employees who are developing a platform to build and optimize AI-powered systems, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series B financing round led by Insight Partners.
DeltaStream, which is developing a streaming database platform geared toward enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a seed round led by New Enterprise Associates.
Uprise takes in a user’s full financial picture, including overlooked aspects like employer benefits, and offers recommendations on where to funnel money.
Edge computing is seeing an explosion of interest as enterprises process more data at the edge of their networks.
Tech layoffs have hit almost every region in the world, and Southeast Asia is no exception, with companies like Sea, Crypto.com and JD.ID among those affected. In particular, fintech startups—BNPL, credit and lending, and inventory-holding businesses—are vulnerable, like in other parts of the world.
Company founders pivoted when customers wanted their fintech data engine over their budgeting app.
Since departing his role as Casper CEO in 2021, Philip Krim has spent the majority of his time investing and incubating companies via Montauk Ventures. The latest is an insurance company called Ranger, which aims to elevate the agents in the insurance industry, rather than replace them. Most of the new-wave insurance platforms out there […]
If you haven’t heard yet, there’s a new and awesome opportunity available for early-stage startup founders at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18-20. It’s called the Startup Battlefield 200, and it’s packed with perks and possibility. Here’s the thing — it’s a time-sensitive application process, and you only have until July 31 to […]
A number of crypto gaming firms have ramped up production in the past year with hopes of revolutionizing the growing industry. Adding to the list is London-based gaming firm Cauldron, which plans on becoming the “Pixar of web3” through a key element: storytelling. The company just closed a $6.6 million seed round and plans to […]
Deep tech and D2C have very little in common, except Noah Kraft. The Doppler Labs founder, who first came into the spotlight in 2014 with the launch of a wireless earbuds company, is teaming up with his brother to start something brand new. Well, for clarity’s sake, the brother duo are actually disrupting something relatively […]
Finli’s platform was developed so owners could send invoices, look up customer information and check on payment status in between gigs.
IBM today announced that it acquired Databand, a startup developing an observability platform for data and machine learning pipelines. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Tel Aviv-based Databand had raised $14.5 million prior to the acquisition. Databand employees will join IBM’s data and AI division, with the purchase expected to close on June 27. […]
The company identifies and extracts functional proteins from bovine colostrum and uses them to make milk protein mixtures that could be used for different immune-boosting applications.
As a stock photographer, taking great photos is often only just a tiny part of the job. To run a successful business, keywording, categorizing, captioning, and all the other admin that goes with it can take up almost as much time. That’s the problem Wirestock is solving, and the company just landed an important deal […]
Consumer packaged goods companies — think PepsiCo or Nabisco — face steep challenges from the rising cost of living and distribution. As inflation continues unabated, consumers’ disposable income isn’t going as far as it used to while products are becoming more expensive to ship. The pressure is on businesses to place their bets on the […]
TikTok rival Triller has confidentially submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission paperwork for an initial public offering of its Class A common stock. The announcement comes as the company ended its $5 billion merger with video-tech company SeaChange International two weeks ago. Similar to TikTok, Triller allows users to create and share short-form […]
Medical diagnostics company Visby Medical raised $100 million in a Series E round earlier this year.
For many marketplaces, those search, recommendation and ad functions are typically siloed, but Promoted has them all under one umbrella.
Most Americans dread doing their taxes. Surveys show as much. But as many as 40% rely on money from tax refunds to satisfy some financial obligation.
Retail Rocket, a retention management platform for brands, today announced that it raised $24 million in a Series A round led by Cyprus-based private equity fund Flintera.
The company is boiling down the time it takes for businesses to create an e-commerce marketplace from two to three years to about 90 days.
Walmart is expanding its array of virtual try-on services for shoppers with today’s news that it’s planning to acquire Memomi, an AR optical tech company and current Walmart partner offering virtual try-on experience for eyewear.
Sharebite, a startup that partners with restaurants to deliver food to corporate clients, today announced that it raised $39 million in a Series B round led by Prosus with participation from Fiserv, Contour Venture Partners, Reign Ventures, London Technology Club and Not Boring Fund.
Edtech up-skilling platform Degreed has acquired Learn In, which creates talent resource hubs for employers to better spin up education services for their teams.
The founders of ConductorOne, an identity and access control startup, both came from Okta, which is itself a single sign-on vendor based on the zero trust model.
Zomato has acquired Blinkit, a struggling 10-minute grocery delivery startup, in a $568.1 million all-stock deal as the loss-making food delivery firm looks to broaden its offerings at a time when its shares are trading far below last year’s debut price.
The past several months haven’t been entirely kind to the NFT market — while transaction volume hasn’t stuttered too significantly, the dollar amount invested in the space has been in free fall as cryptocurrency prices have taken a historic dive.
The space industry is evolving, as are the tools it uses; Epsilon3 is a startup trying to make launches, satellite design, rocket manufacturing, and other complex processes easier and more collaborative.
Social commerce — the process of buying and selling products or services directly through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — is becoming the most natural way for consumers to make purchases since people use social media and messaging apps almost every day.
Starburst, the well-funded data warehouse analytics service and data query engine based on the open-source Trino project, today announced that it has acquired Varada, a Tel Aviv-based startup that focuses on data lake analytics.
When Fermyon’s founders were working at Microsoft, they helped build a lot of cloud native technologies.
Based in Vietnam, Anfin wants to turn more people into stock investors with features like fractional trading and in-app communities.
The growing complexity of web infrastructure is a challenge that many organizations face today. When building and deploying web apps, IT teams must grapple with an array of choices, from selecting which backend system to use to deciding which framework to code in.
Redwood Materials, the lithium-ion battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, is partnering with Toyota to collect, refurbish and recycle batteries and battery materials that can be sent to the Japanese automaker’s upcoming North Carolina battery plant.
Mono is building a fully digital bank with accounts that can be opened in around 15 minutes versus an average of two weeks at an incumbent bank.
New York-based Wonder, a mobile restaurant delivery service led by Marc Lore, has raised $350 million in Series B funding. The company is now worth about $3.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Rune Labs, a precision neurology company in San Francisco, announced that its StrivePD software ecosystem for Parkinson’s disease has been granted 510(k) clearance by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin using the Apple Watch to collect and measure data from Parkinson’s patients.
Millions of Indians each year assemble virtual sports teams, placing their hopes on the players they pick to perform exceedingly well in real-world matches.
The competition in ecommerce has become fiercer as the pandemic drives shoppers online. At the same time, customers have grown to expect better experiences. According to helpdesk software vendor HiverHQ, 32% of consumers want customer service to be both more responsive and empathetic.
Tabnine, a startup creating an “AI-powered assistant” for software developers, today closed a $15.5 million funding round co-led by Qualcomm Ventures, OurCrowd, and Samsung NEXT Ventures with participation from existing backers Khosla Ventures and Headline Ventures.
Pok Pok, a Toronto-based edtech company, has announced that it raised $3 million in seed funding to expand its play-based learning experiences for kids.
Cube, a startup that wants to help companies “plan their financial future,” has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Battery Ventures.
Onymos, a “feature-as-a-service” platform for app development, today announced that it closed a $12 million Series A round led by Great Point Ventures with participation from Benhamou Global Ventures, Engineering Capital, and Industry Ventures.
Amid an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into inaccurate statements to investors, Faraday Future has received a preliminary request for information from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The company is serving several thousand patients and growing its footprint as a value-add employee benefit.
The world of AI-powered drug discovery keeps expanding as the capabilities of machine learning grow. One approach that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago is simulating the complicated interplays of two interlocking molecules.
Product research generally involves determining whether an idea for a new product might be successful and how to best develop and sell that product. It’s a straightforward process, in theory, but the basic definition belies the barriers that can crop up.
The founders of DigitalBrain have quite a back story, a pair of immigrants living in a hacker house in San Francisco, the two paid bills for a time by competing at hackathons and winning.
Hybrid Cloud Up Time (HYCU), a self-described “backup-as-a-service” company for customers managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments, today announced that it raised $53 million in a “majority equity” Series B round led by Acrew Capital with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, and Cisco Investments.
TestBox, an early stage startup, has a goal of making it easier to test software you want to purchase in your own environment. What’s more, it comes pre-populated with synthetic data that is similar to yours.
What’s one of the hottest areas within fintech today? Funny enough, it’s fintech for fintechs (say that a few times fast). Fintech startups have absolutely proliferated in the past few years.
One of Better.com’s former executives has filed a lawsuit against the online mortgage lender, alleging that the company and its CEO Vishal Garg misled investors when it attempted to go public via a SPAC, reports the Wall Street Journal.
It’s the belief of some analysts that the market for robotic process automation, which leverages AI to automate certain software tasks, is headed toward consolidation.
Finding and affording child care is one of the biggest challenges parents face. Kinside makes the process easier by not only providing a marketplace of verified carers, but also helping parents tap into their flexible spending accounts (FSA) and other benefits to afford care.
Opal, a platform that decentralizes access management for enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Greylock.
The rest of the startup universe may be struggling to bring in funds, but it’s still a good time to get a robotic raise.
Global venture capital firms are pouring money into the semiconductor startups developing the next generation of chips.
Kolors, a Mexico City-based startup, says its platform that connects intercity bus riders with bus drivers is like “if Uber and Southwest Airlines had a baby.”
Sanlo, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that offers small to medium-sized game and app companies access to tools to manage their finances and capital to fuel their growth, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Konvoy.
Chainguard, a startup that focuses on securing software supply chains, announced today that it has raised a $50 million Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital.
When Refraction AI was founded in 2019, its goal was to use robotics to bring down the cost of last-mile delivery.
Peer-to-peer car sharing company Turo is expanding to New York State and France in June, the company said on Wednesday.
Whether to power translation to document summarization, enterprises are increasing their investments in natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that helps developers remove the bottlenecks in their machine learning training pipelines, today announced that it has raised a $7.8 million seed round.
About 80% of household retail in sub-Saharan Africa is delivered through informal channels, which perennially face several challenges like stockouts, leading to an instability in earnings, and a lack of attractiveness to financiers.
Mintlify, a startup developing software to automate software documentation tasks, today announced that it raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, Sourcegraph’s co-founder.
More than 80% of food delivery orders in Latin America are still made over phone calls and settled with cash.
The excitement around web3 and the metaverse have pulled plenty of entrepreneurs who defined the first generation of native mobile apps to begin questioning what’s next.
Although we’ve long understood that asteroids are not simply the rubble of the universe, but potentially profitable stores of precious minerals, humanity has never been able to unlock this value.
When I wrote my big TC1 on Bowery Farming late last year, there was a lot of talk of the company’s third commercial farming site in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Fresh off a $100 million funding round, Hugging Face, which provides hosted AI services and a community-driven portal for AI tools and data sets, today announced a new product in collaboration with Microsoft.
Firework provides tools for retailers and consumer brands to tap into their own customer data to build engaging video experiences across their own digital properties and social channels.
Weeks after laying off about 30% of its staff, MainStreet is said to be raising another round of funding at a $200 million valuation, sources tell TechCrunch.
Swedish payment giant Klarna is going to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming days. Today’s news comes a few days after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was going to cut its valuation in order to raise fresh capital.
Unless you live near a port, you probably don’t think much of the tens of thousands of container ships tearing through the seas, hauling some 1.8 billion metric tons of stuff each year.
What makes FloorFound stand out from its competitors is its approach to putting retailers, which often struggle with how to effectively do returns, at the center of recommerce.
Dig, a Tel Aviv-based cloud data security startup, has emerged from stealth with an $11 million investment to help organizations protect data stored in public cloud environments.
ChargeLab, a Toronto-based startup that builds software to operate and optimize electric vehicle charging equipment for fleets and commercial customers, has raised a $15 million Series A round.
Joby Aviation, a California-based company developing electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOL) for commercial passenger service, announced the acquisition of Avionyx, an aerospace software engineering firm, on the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility stage on Wednesday.
Singapore-based venture firm Jungle Ventures is digging deeper into Southeast Asia and India with the close of its fourth fund.
Meet Palette, a software-as-a-service startup that is going to be particularly interesting if you’re also running a software-as-a-service startup.
The pandemic has majorly affected the global supply chain, with 60% of U.S. adults in an August 2021 Gallup survey saying that they’ve been unable to get a product they wanted in the past two months because of shortages.
The gig economy has, to use a well-worn word, disrupted industries from ride-hailing to quick-service restaurants. Contract work has its downsides, namely on the pay and benefits side of the equation.
Uber Eats is launching two autonomous delivery pilots in Los Angeles on Monday with Serve Robotics, a robotic sidewalk delivery startup, and Motional, an autonomous vehicle technology company.
Tel Aviv-based Classiq, a startup that wants to make it easier for developers to build quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised additional funding for its service by adding HSBC, NTT Finance, and Intesa Sanpaolo as new investors.
Bubbles, a startup that pitches its platform as the “anti-Zoom” for video messaging, today announced that it closed a $8.5 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, 468 Ventures, and Bain Capital.
Gusto, an HR technology unicorn worth nearly $10 billion, has raised an extension to its 2021-era Series E funding round.
The coaching world is crowded. There’s BetterUp, a re-skilling platform that wants to bring executive coaching to employees, and Sounding Board, which mixes SaaS and coaching services.
Good Startup, a Singapore-based venture capital firm focused on alternative protein, has closed its latest fund.
Berlin-based GetHenry, a startup that provides electric last-mile delivery bikes to couriers and logistics companies, has raised a $17.4 million (€16.5 million) seed round to expand its business across Europe.
Electric vehicle startup Canoo has filed suit against one of its largest shareholders, demanding that the firm pay back more than $61 million in “short-swing profits.”
To date, Blueland, fresh off its $20 million fundraise back in February, has mostly been focusing on home cleaning products.
Hannah Life Technologies, a startup for couples trying to conceive, announced today it has raised $5.15 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.
During the worst days of the pandemic, when people were stuck at home and starving for some form of entertainment beyond streaming yet another TV series, many turned to DIY home improvement projects.
Spotify cofounder Daniel Ek said on Friday that he’s pouring $50 million into the music streaming service, driving its stock price up by more than 3% to a high of $108.98 per share during regular trading hours.
Lucid Group is the latest automaker to up the price of its electric vehicles. The company announced Thursday alongside its first-quarter earnings report that it was raising prices of the variants of its luxury Air sedan, beginning June 1.
Tomorrow Farms is turning the concept of pantry and refrigerator staples on its head to create foods that are better for us.
Shopify today announced that it will acquire Deliverr, a San Francisco, California-based ecommerce fulfillment startup, for $2.1 billion.
It used to be getting from prototyping to manufacturing meant long, expensive trips to places like Shenzhen and a whole lot of trial and error. Fictiv was founded back in 2013 to address some of the biggest pain points of bringing products to market.
Fundid has a three-pronged approach to simplifying access to capital for small businesses with fewer than 10 employees.
Meet Getlife, a Madrid-based startup that just raised $6.3 million (€6 million) in seed funding. The company wants to make it easier to access life insurance products in Europe. For instance, there’s no medical exams needed to subscribe to Getlife.
For product-led growth companies (PLG), the perennial question is: how do we get non-paying customers to subscribe?
Lottie animations are everywhere. The JSON-based file format, first introduced as an open-source library by Airbnb engineers, can now be seen in the top 500 iOS and Android apps, said LottieFiles co-founder Kshitij Minglani.
Less than a year ago, Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, intending to perform research in the public interest on making AI more reliable and explainable. Its $124 million in funding was surprising then, but nothing could have prepared us for the company raising $580 million less than a year.
As you might’ve heard, it’s getting a little crowded in space, between thousand-satellite constellations à la SpaceX’s Starlink and the millions of pieces of space junk accumulated from decades of launches.
Glorang, a Seoul-based edtech startup that offers after-school classes and extracurricular activities via online for students between the ages of 3 and 18, said Friday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding co-led by Korea Investment Partners and Murex Partners, along with Japan’s Pksha Capital.
PullRequest, a five year old startup that came out of Y Combinator in 2017, helps software developers by providing an external code review team.
Buoyed by a new $33 million investment, plans are in the works to add another 20 hair color bar locations and hire 850 new colorists by the end of the year.
Natural language processing (NLP), the field of AI that involves parsing text for tasks including summarization and generation, is a fast-growing technology.
Luis Vera believes the third time is the charm. The self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur admits that his vision for digitizing retail was a decade or two early when he started his journey in the 90s.
Don’t call it a pivot, exactly — but it’s a fascinating journey, nonetheless. Umaro Foods, which is set to release a seaweed-based bacon replacement, entered the world as Trophic.
Lead generation is a critical cornerstone in the world of sales — in a seemingly infinite sea of potential customers, you need to know who wants to buy, or who might buy.
A bit more than a year after private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in Lengow, the company is expanding its product offering with the acquisition of Netrivals.
Yesterday, Amazon announced that Agility Robotics is one of the five initial startups benefitting from the company’s $1 billion innovation fund.
MadEats, Y Combinator alum, claims to be the first “‘full-stack’ delivery-only startup in the Philippines,” with their own virtual storefront, ghost kitchens and fleet of drivers.
Skyflow, which sells data privacy tools for corporate customers, this morning announced a partnership with Plaid, a unicorn that helps pass fintech data between parties through an API.
The firm invests in the manufacturing, transportation and logistics sectors, which, they say “represent over half our country’s GDP and have not been tech-enabled.”
Morado, a two-month-old Colombian startup aiming to digitize beauty salons in Latin America, has raised $5 million in a pre-seed round from a bevy of global investors.
Ordinary Folk, a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures.
Demostack, a San Francisco, California-based startup creating a “demo experience” platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales teams, today announced that it raised $34 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global Management.
For sales reps, commission plans are often complicated and lack transparency, leading to accounting errors and frustration. Everstage, a sales commission platform, solves that, letting sales rep see exactly how much they earned.
Planetary aims to bring all of the alternative protein production planets into orbit with its scaling technology.
In a bid to position its brand as more tech-forward — and, in the process, foster new culinary innovations — Chipotle today announced the launch of Cultivate Next, a venture fund run by Curt Garner, the restaurant chain’s chief technology officer.
Its first product is a crispy, plant-based riff on chicken nuggets that is made with just seven ingredients.
What if you could buy a Peloton with pre-tax dollars? How about vitamins and supplements? Skincare products? Or even mattresses and massages?
The founders of Speckle, an early-stage startup based in London, are both trained architects and engineers, probably a rare combination. It enabled them to see and understand firsthand the issues associated with exchanging large proprietary 3D files from vendors like Autodesk and Trimble.
For the bulk of the past two years, the pandemic has put the kibosh on corporate travel of nearly any kind.
Shared micromobility company Luup has raised $8 million (1 billion yen) in debt and asset financing to meet the growing demands of Japan’s micromobility market, which according to a recent report, is projected to reach $11.6 billion in 2030.
E-commerce retailers of all sizes can have that supply chain coordination layer that enables them to provide fast and cheaper shipping, too.
As Ariana Grande would say, god is a woman. So it should come as no surprise that Chief, the network designed to develop the leadership skills of women, has hit a $1.1 billion valuation in a matter of three years.
Quantum Machines, the well-funded Israeli startup that specializes in building control systems for quantum computers, today announced that it has acquired QDevil, a well-known Danish company that specializes in building control hardware for quantum systems.
The race is certainly on in the electrification of boating… even if everyone is jockeying for position before the market materializes.
As businesses increasingly rely on an ever-growing number of SaaS products, it has become imperative for security teams to get a better understanding of which applications a company’s employees are actually using and the risks associated with those.
It’s no secret that digital supply chains are increasingly under attack as hackers look to use this vector to get access to company networks and confidential information.
The lowly breaker panel has been around for a century without getting much love, and along comes Span.
Singapore-headquartered esports startup Ampverse has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Falcon Capital.
Zepto, an Australian real-time account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments platform, said Monday it has raised a $25 million Series A co-led by AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners.
It’s consolidation time in the freelancer marketplace industry. French startup Malt is acquiring Comatch, a competing marketplace focused on consultants and industry experts.
As developers build new features into software, they have to be sure that the new functionality doesn’t break what’s already there. So they often will roll it out slowly and see what happens using a technique of placing feature flags in the code.
Kyte, the startup that delivers rental cars to customers’ doors, has raised $200 million in asset-backed credit financing from Goldman Sachs and Ares Global Management, money the company will use to pay for new vehicles that will fuel its expansion.
It’s been a little less than a year since we first noted Rugged Robotics. The Houston-based startup developed a robot that prints building layouts on the floor of construction sites, so workers know where — and where not — to build.
I would put window washing fairly high (so to speak) on the list of jobs it makes sense to automate.
ShopThing, a live shopping marketplace focused on luxury brands, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Origin Ventures, with participation from Pritzker Group and Interplay.
With its self-serve platform, Datagen now has a much more scalable way to help clients themselves generate the visual data that they need to train their computer vision applications.
Wealth gives you a one-stop shop where your entire financial portfolio can live and accumulate in real-time.
The comics world has seemingly been waiting for a digital revolution since the birth of the internet. Launched in 2007, ComiXology has come the closest to delivering such a play to the medium, so naturally, Amazon went and purchased the service and messed it up.
Kenya-based agritech Apollo Agriculture, which helps farmers access high-quality farm inputs, financing and markets, plans to double the number of farmers it is serving by the end 2022 and to introduce other products that deliver more value per acre of land.
When it comes to data-intensive applications, setting up the infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming. You’re often paying for resources you aren’t using, even in the cloud.
The Expert, which provides video consultations with top designers, expands into e-commerce to become what co-founder Leo Seigal referred to as “Farfetch for home.”
Hence Technologies, a Kigali and London based startup that uses data and AI technologies to match companies with external legal service providers is set to scale its precision matching engine after raising $1.8million in seed funding from various institutions and angel investors.
Security companies typically start by focusing on one particular problem, but the biggest ones like Palo Alto Networks, FireEye and Symantec have shifted to a horizontal approach typically gaining functionality over time through acquisition.
The company is building web-based tools that can turn a 2D sketch into a 3D representation so that someone can design anything from a small building to a skyscraper.
TruEra, a startup that offers an AI quality management solution to optimize, explain and monitor machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures.
Plantish aims to get its salmon product into the first five restaurants by December 2023.
Employee sentiment can be hard to gauge, even at smaller businesses. This can lead to burnout and attrition, when managers least expect it.
Pareto’s team of data experts offer actionable insights on everything from TikTok influencers to qualifying B2B sales leads.
French startup Fleet wants to become your IT department’s best friend by managing hardware as a service. Fleet clients can rent computers and smartphones for a flat monthly fee. If there’s a hardware issue, the startup handles returns and repairs.
Boston-based Zeta Surgical comes out of stealth this week, with the announcement of a $5.2 million seed round. The funding, led by Innospark Ventures, follows a $250,000 pre-seed featuring Y Combinator and Plug and Play Ventures.
Stilt, which started its life as a provider of financial services for immigrants, has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Link Ventures as it expands its focus to include a B2B offering.
Despite the fact that we spend more on healthcare per capita, the U.S. leads the wealthy world in maternal mortality. And health inequity plays a big part.
Blink’s co-founders have been working in security and automation for a number of years, and they observed that there was a strong overlap between developer operations (DevOps) and security operations (SecOps) when it came to managing cloud infrastructure.
Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics has partnered with Ceva Logistics to deliver freight autonomously between Dallas-Forth Worth and Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, the company said on Wednesday, marking its first publicly announced customer.
The global thirst for an up-charged pair of Yeezy’s or limited edition Jordan’s combined with a growth in a digital ecosystem is creating new opportunities, particularly in the sneaker resale market, for companies like Kicks Crew, a Los Angeles- and Hong Kong-based sneaker and apparel platform.
Fundrise will acquire warehouses ranging in size from 50,000 to 150,000 square feet that will house the new Saltbox locations.
Online mortgage lender Better.com is poised to lay off roughly 50% of its staff of about 8,000 this week, according to sources familiar with internal happenings at the company.
Gecko Robotics’ mission statement is “To protect today’s critical infrastructure, and give form to tomorrow’s.”
You can’t swing an ethically sourced, locally produced, sustainably raised dead fish these days without hitting a set of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals in a company’s board meetings or annual reports.
Volocopter, the startup out of southern Germany (Bruchsal) that has been developing electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft and a business model for operating them in taxi-style fleets in urban areas, has picked up another big round of funding as it inches closer to its first commercial launches.
Blocknom, a crypto-earning platform in Y Combinator’s current batch, has aspirations to become the “Coinbase Earn for Southeast Asia.” Today the company announced it has raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator, Number Capital and Magic Fund.
Shares has closed a $40 million Series A funding round led by Valar Ventures. The company has been working on a mobile app that lets you easily buy and sell shares, but with a social twist.
Microsoft has today announced plans to support 10,000 startups in Africa over the next five years through a series of initiatives including partnerships with accelerators and incubators across the continent.
For fintechs to thrive in such a way that they remain meaningful to economies, a synergy between them and regulatory bodies is inevitable.
Enterpret is building and deploying customer-specific models, based on customer feedback, for product development teams.
By using data and technology to accurately price the risk, Kin Insurance is able to remove some of the costs of traditional insurance firms, like agents.
European spend management startup Payhawk has added $100 million to its Series B round that I already covered back in November.
Toronto-based Flashfood, a mobile marketplace that provides customers with access to discounted food nearing its best-by date, has raised $12.3 million in Series A funding led by S2G Ventures.
Better Dairy is using precision fermentation to produce cheeses that are molecularly identical to traditional dairy.
Beam, a Singaporean shared micromobility operator, announced today that it has raised $93 million in a Series B round to accelerate growth into new countries in Asia.
Cococart's tools enable merchants to set up an online store in minutes with no code, no design and no app downloads.
Brands don’t often know everyone who is attending their big events, which leads to limited return on investment and actionable insights. AnyRoad provides that insight.
When Redpanda launched in 2019, company founder and CEO Alexander Gallego thought a startup devoted to modernizing streaming data should have an appropriately nerdy name.
Vendr, a startup that aims to help its customers buy software products faster and at a lower cost, announced this morning it has acquired Blissfully, a startup that builds SaaS management tooling.
ThatDot, a Portland, Oregon-based startup that focuses on streaming event processing, today announced the launch of Quine, a new MIT-licensed open-source project for data engineers that combines event streaming with graph data to create what the company calls a ‘streaming graph.’
Zoomo, an Australian startup that builds utility e-bikes for delivery workers, has raised an additional $20 million in equity to close out its Series B round. In November, the company raised $60 million in equity and debt for its Series B, which it used to fund further software development and more vehicles to expand.
Delivery has become one of the fastest growing verticals for robotics investments amid pandemic-related shutdowns. There’s been plenty of interest in the category over the years, but Covid-19 has accelerated interest on all sides of the equation.
Volta Trucks — the Swedish electric vehicle startup that believes it can build better urban delivery vehicles and other trucks that are safer and take up a smaller carbon footprint than their gas-guzzling, more clumsy, existing counterparts.
Voltron Data was launched last year by former employees from NVidia, Ursa Computing, BlazingSQL and the co-founder of Apache Arrow.
ICON, which creates homes using 3D printing, has raised an additional $185 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
When Ibex Investors founder and CEO Justin Borus looks at the transportation industry — and the technological changes that are coming — he sees one of the biggest opportunities in a lifetime. And with a fresh $113 million fund focused on early stage mobility companies, his firm is tapping into it. “There will be more […]
Trying to deal with the huge amount of data associated with how companies are going to transition to a “net zero” economy is an uphill task.
Virtual veterinarian care platform Dutch has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures and Eclipse Ventures.
Genesis, which has built a low-code/no-code application platform specifically for the financial markets, announced today it has landed a $200 million investment led by Tiger Global Management.
Human resources platform Employment Hero announced today it has raised $181 million AUD (or about $129 million USD), putting it at unicorn valuation in Australian dollars of $1.25 billion.
Scrona AG caused a minor splash all the way back in 2015 when it snagged a Guinness World Record for the “smallest inkjet-printed color image.”
Tropic’s technology brings a click-and-approve approach to buying and managing all of that software.
You might not think much about the train or the airplane that gets you from one place to another, but behind any transportation link is a vast sprawling network of electronics, devices, and data that keep trains on the tracks and planes in the sky.
Chicken is the most consumed meat in the United States and the world. And yet, the system in place to breed and feed and raise all this chicken is incredibly detrimental to our overall wellbeing.
French startup Silvr has raised a $20.6 million (€18 million) Series A funding round and has opened a $128 million (€112 million) debt line for its activities.
Endgame connects the dots between product usage and sales opportunities to put employees in the driver's seat of the software they like to use instead of a top-down approach.
Dating app company Bumble, Inc. is making its first acquisition with today’s news that it’s adding the fast-growing French dating app Fruitz to its family of applications.
Soelect, a battery technology startup based in North Carolina, has closed an $11 million Series A round. It plans to use the fresh capital to scale its fast charge-capable anode technologies that might enable the next generation of batteries for electric vehicles.
A true “metaverse” may not yet exist, but that hasn’t stopped marketers from adopting the buzzword to promote their apps and games on mobile app stores.
Even small changes made by individuals to reduce plastic waste can add up to a big positive impact on the environment, founder and CEO Zuleyka Strasner said.
Scale AI’s path to becoming a $7.3 billion company was paved in real data from images, text, voice and video.
Waldo has raised $15 million for its ‘no code’ automated testing tool. Mobile development teams using Waldo can set up tests without writing a line of scripting code.
Whose Your Landlord,1 or WYL, announced a $2.1 million seed round today led by Black Operator Ventures, better known as BlackOps Ventures.
Last November, Apple announced the launch of Self Service Repair — a surprising addition for a company that has notoriously lacked such capabilities. Those changes didn’t happen in a vacuum, of course. The president and Congress have both been pushing to open the so-called right to repair.
Jellyfish essentially pioneered the term “engineering management” to provide a software tool for insight into engineering organizations, including what they are working on and how they operate.
VendorPM, a Toronto-based marketplace that connects property managers with reputable vendors, has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
As a company grows, the amount of important information employees need to keep track of inevitably grows right along with it. And, as your tech stack gets more complicated, that information ends up split up across more places.
Meet Rise, a new startup working on a calendar app that is specifically designed for team work.
bloss is a UK startup that connects would-be or existing parents to pre-vetted parenting experts.
QuizUp founder Thor Fridriksson is at it again. The Icelandic serial entrepreneur is two-for-two in creating viral mobile games, but has thus far struck out in turning those into viable businesses.
Applying to colleges is one of the hardest parts of high school, especially for students who want to study abroad. Cialfo wants to make the process easier.
Identity verification provider Veriff, has raised a $100 million Series C round co-led by Tiger Global and Alkeon. They were joined by existing investors IVP and Accel, bringing Veriff’s total funding to date to $200 million.
IRobot announced Terra three years ago this week. After making some tough internal decisions to delay launch back in 2020, the robot mower is still MIA.
Dresden, Germany-based Wandelbots has raised a healthy sum in the years since it appeared on our Disrupt Berlin stage, way back in 2017.
Mark Cuban’s announcement over the weekend of an online pharmacy selling over a hundred generic drugs at near cost was totally unexpected but will likely be welcomed by millions who struggle to afford medication.
Cana focused on identifying the basic set of ingredients, basically deconstructing beverages to figure out what makes it taste like a certain drink.
Weather forecast company AccuWeather is acquiring French startup Plume Labs — terms of the deal are undisclosed. Originally founded in 2014, Plume Labs has gradually expanded its product offering to offer three different products focused on air pollution data.
Tech sees differently, and can fuse multiple types of data we can’t even perceive: lidar, IR, ultrasonic, and so on. Metalenz, maker of highly compact “2D” cameras for advanced sensing, hopes to bring polarized light into the mix for security and safety.
A new app called Weavit wants to be a “Shazam for your thoughts” — that is, it wants to offer people a different way to quickly capture their thoughts in a note-taking tool with a press of a button.
Autograph, an NFT agency co-founded by athlete Tom Brady with a particularly deep bench of star power, has banked new funding from crypto investors who hope the platform can bring a new generation of celebrities and their fans into the fold of crypto collectibles.
Nowsta’s web and mobile app rolls workforce management tools into an all-in-one resource that includes an on-demand labor marketplace connecting employers with a skilled pool of workers.
Ancient8, Vietnam’s blockchain gaming guild, develops a community and software platform to enable everyone to play P2E (play-to-earn) games and build the metaverse while earning rewards.
The first electric bus by Swedish-Kenyan EV startup, Opibus, has hit Kenya’s roads marking the beginning of the company’s venture into the mass transit industry. Opibus first announced plans to roll out electric public transport buses last year when it raised $7.5 million in a pre-Series A round.
A Canadian startup working at the cutting edge of satellite imaging has raised $4.5 million across a combination of a $2.25 million seed round, and $2.25 million from a combined pre-seed and government funding.
Fintech startup Spendesk is announcing that it has raised an extension to its Series C round. Tiger Global is investing $114 million (€100 million) in the startup.
French startup Exotec has raised a $335 million Series D round in a new round of funding led by Goldman Sachs’ Growth Equity business. Following today’s investment, the company has reached a valuation of $2 billion.
London-based legaltech startup Juro has grabbed $23 million in Series B funding for its browser-based contract automation platform. In total the startup has raised $31.5M since being founded back in 2016.
Retailers often build their own “orchestration” platforms for payment processing and routing, but these can be complex to maintain.
Companies use invoices to pay for many of their major costs, ranging from materials to contract work.
When the consumer opens an account and hits savings milestones for products they want to buy from their favorite brands, they can receive cash contributions from the brands.
Over the past two years, since the pandemic hit, there has been a sharp rise in financial crime compliance costs, nearing $50 billion in 2021, up 58% compared to 2019, in the U.S. and Canada.
Every company has to decide what to pay their employees and track that compensation in some way, often in spreadsheets and across disparate payroll, finance and HR systems.
Headspace Health has acquired Sayana, an AI-powered mental health and wellness company, for an undisclosed amount. Headspace Health says the acquisition of the San Francisco-based company will expand its ability to provide personalized self-care to its users.
Foxtrot is reimagining the convenience store experience by seeking out the best food items by local artisans along with its core offerings of coffee, ready-to-eat cafe meals and wine.
The company's technology makes it easier for companies to create demonstration videos, called “arcades,” that walk people through how their tools work.
Career Karma raised its first millions off of a pitch that resonates with anyone who has ever googled coding bootcamps: a navigation tool for aspiring students and working professionals.