TechCrunch Startup News

At a time when many startups have struggled to raise money and keep their heads above water, Kandji, an Apple device management platform, has been an exception. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Astor is a free personal finance platform for women that merges community and investing in an approachable way, came to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Danish startup Toddle has launched a no-code web app builder that's designed as a full-featured alternative to Javascript frameworks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Adaptive is a platform that provides tools designed to simplify payments and accounting for general construction contractors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When VanMoof declared bankruptcy last year, it left around 5,000 customers who had pre-ordered e-bikes in the lurch. Now VanMoof is up and running under new management, and the company’s current owners are courting those same customers by offering them a €1,000 discount off a new bike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fusion power may still be a few years away, but one startup is laying the groundwork for what it hopes will become a bustling sector of the economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The founders of HERO Software didn’t start out to help small tradespeople in construction with a platform. They started out to fight the climate crisis. But in doing so, they stumbled on a way to help the whole business. Now, the company has closed a €40 million Series B financing round, and plans to expand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Visual effects have emerged as essential in filmmaking and have transformed storytelling and creativity in the film industry with its diverse digital techniques. However, the high cost of VFX tools often leaves independent filmmakers and content creators working with modest budgets struggling to compete with larger productions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joby Aviation is still a year away from commercially launching its electric air taxi designed for urban environments, but the startup is already looking towards its next chapter: Intercity flight, powered by hydrogen. To get the conversation started with regulators and demonstrate hydrogen’s capabilities, Joby told TechCrunch that it completed a 523-mile test flight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Iceland’s startup scene is punching above its weight. That’s perhaps in part because it kept the 2021 hype in check, but mostly because its tech ecosystem is coming of age. Iceland attracted the most venture capital per capita of all Nordic countries in 2023, but that stat is somewhat skewed by its relatively small population. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SaaS founders trying to figure out what it takes to raise their next round can refer to Point Nine’s famous yearly SaaS Funding Napkin. (The term refers to “back of the napkin” plans or calculations.) Now, European hardware deep tech teams have a similar resource from First Momentum, a pre-seed fund investing in technical B2B Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nala, a remittance startup that is now widening its portfolio through a new B2B payments platform, has raised $40 million equity in a rare deal that becomes one of the largest Series A transactions in Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Solo founder Cat Jones took the plunge on setting up a travel business right around the time the pandemic was hitting Europe in March 2020. Fast forward to summer 2024 and her curated package tour business, Byway, is announcing close of an oversubscribed £5.4 million Series A round (around $6.9M at current exchange rates). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Investors are betting on Indian wealthtech startups as a growing middle class turns to diversify investments and startups challenge traditional financial advisors for high-net-worth clients. Premji Invest is in advanced stages of talks to lead a funding round of $30 million to $40 million in Dezerv, an app offering a suite of investment solutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quantum Rise, a Chicago-based startup which does AI-driven automation for companies like dunnhumby (a retail analytics platform for the the grocery industry), has raised a $15 million seed round from Erie Street Growth Partners. Its approach is somewhat akin to UIPath’s, a company famous for bringing robotic process automation to the enterprise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon as the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team join the ecommerce giant. Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samyr Laine and Ayanna Alexander-Laine now put their grit and determination to work for founders wanting to launch and scale consumer brands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CoinDCX, India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, is expanding internationally through the acquisition of BitOasis, a digital asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, the companies said Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based startup said BitOasis’s team is joining CoinDCX, with the original leadership continuing to manage the exchange, which offers trading in more than 60 tokens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Indian edtech giant Unacademy is laying off about 250 employees, the latest in a series of layoffs since the reopening of schools across the country after the pandemic. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, valued at $3.4 billion in its last funding in 2021, is cutting 100 jobs in core roles (marketing, business and product) , Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the past couple of years, innovation has been accelerating in new materials development. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this innovation cycle. The deep tech startup has already raised €3.7 million (around $4 million at current exchange rates). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Electricity demand is booming on account of AI. In a May 2024 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.’s total power supply by 2030, up from 3% in 2022, as cloud service providers expand to meet the demand for AI infrastructure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The amount of waste produced by the construction industry adds up to more than a third of the overall waste produced each year in the European Union. And it’s no better in the U.S. Stateside, the construction industry produces more than double the waste that households do each year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By now we know how crucial it is to have quality data for use by large language models (LLMs), but getting data ready for the models has been an early challenge for companies, an opening that represents an opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Artyc has raised $14 million to date and has a product on the market, Medstow Micro, that helps ship temperature-sensitive specimens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Climate tech startups especially those building hardware, face a particular challenge when trying to move beyond the prototype or pilot phase and start selling finished products to customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Ironspring Ventures launched in 2020 to back startups in industrial sectors like construction and manufacturing, it was one of very few early-stage venture firms paying attention to those capital-intensive sectors. Now, the firm is doubling down. The Austin, Texas-based firm raised $100 million for its second fund to focus on industrial startups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Older adults increasingly want to age in their homes rather than nursing facilities. A study by the American Association of Retired People (AARP) found that nearly 90% of people over 65 want to stay in their homes as they grow older. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As generative AI touches a growing number of industries, the companies producing chips to run the models are benefitting enormously. Nvidia in particular, which commands an estimated 70% to 95% of the market for AI chips, wields massive influence. Cloud providers from Meta to Microsoft are spending billions of dollars on Nvidia GPUs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rainforest, a startup that embeds payment processing into other software platforms, has raised $20 million in Series A funding — less than a year after announcing the close of its seed financing. Raising back-to-back rounds was more common in 2021 but we don’t see it happening as often in this new environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wisk Aero, a subsidiary of Boeing, has acquired Verocel, a software verification and validation company with 25 years of experience in the aerospace industry. Wisk has an autonomous-first approach to eVTOL. The company’s Generation 6 aircraft, which is slated to begin airborne tests this year, is designed to be supervised by humans, but not physically Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rocketlane initially aimed to support customer onboarding. However, it has broadened its scope and doubled down on addressing the needs of professional services teams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yet another generative AI venture has raised a bundle of money. And, like the others before it, it’s promising the moon. Emergence, whose co-founders include Satya Nitta, the former head of global AI solutions at IBM’s research division, today emerged from stealth with $97.2 million in funding from Learn Capital plus credit lines totaling more Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang set off another debate with an anti-DEI post. It revealed a lot about the current state of DEI in tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

18-year-olds Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot have founded APIGen, a platform to build custom APIs from natural language prompts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has somehow managed to attract the backing of two well-known venture capital firms. The startup targets in-house legal teams and law firms with an AI platform that they can configure to help other workers in the company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Christopher O’Donnell has hobbies. He likes music and playing guitar, but above all, he loves building software. Which is why three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM for the age AI. Unlike modern CRMs, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that somebody needs to populate and keep updated, Day learns everything Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speak, the AI-powered language learning app, has raised new money from investors at double its previous valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For retailers, e-commerce is a bit of a puzzle at the moment. Online shopping trends are expected to stay strong this year, so companies can’t afford to curtail their e-commerce budgets, but at the same time, e-commerce is more fragmented than ever before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We all know the feeling when we send a funny TikTok video, anticipating a response from a friend, only to receive a basic laughing emoji or, worse, no reaction at all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Self-driving vehicles rely on many sensors to detect objects and the world around them. The conventional approach is to work with cameras and lidars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cheap irrigation has transformed many regions around the world into breadbaskets, but it also means that there can be little left for other uses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Check out TechCrunch.com for more news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Golf has exploded in popularity in recent years thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of Netflix’s Full Swing documentary series. More than 531 million rounds of golf were played in the U.S. in 2023 alone, according to the National Golf Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

StepStone raised the largest fund dedicated to investing in venture secondaries ever, the firm announced last week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GPTZero's growth and financials made it one of the AI startups ruthlessly pursued by VCs. And Footwork's Nikhil Basu Trivedi won the deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Small VC firms require deep trust, mutual support, and long-term commitment among the partners —a kinship that, in many ways, resembles a family dynamic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AccountsIQ, a Dublin-founded accounting technology company, has raised $65 million to build “the finance function of the future” for mid-sized companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s not the sexiest of subject matters, but someone needs to talk about it: The CFO tech stack — software used by the chief financial officers of the world — is ripe for disruption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices