TechCrunch Startup News
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Fashinza, a B2B supply chain marketplace for fashion brands, raises $100M
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
A.Team emerges from stealth with a gig marketplace for product specialists
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Uber Eats pilots autonomous delivery with Serve Robotics, Motional
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Classiq raises additional funding for its quantum algorithm design tools
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bubbles aims to supercharge chats with async video messaging
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Gusto raises an extension round, following Faire as unicorns react to a changing market
Gusto, an HR technology unicorn worth nearly $10 billion, has raised an extension to its 2021-era Series E funding round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Leland breaks into the coaching space with a focus on careers, not classes
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Singapore-based Good Startup raises $34M fund to invest in alternative protein companies
Good Startup, a Singapore-based venture capital firm focused on alternative protein, has closed its latest fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Berlin’s GetHenry breaks into last-mile delivery e-bike scene with $17.4M seed
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
EV startup Canoo sues major investor over sketchy share sales
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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Blueland takes its ‘don’t ship water’ model to body wash
To date, Blueland, fresh off its $20 million fundraise back in February, has mostly been focusing on home cleaning products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fertility startup Hannah Life Technologies gets $5.15M Pre-Series A
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
South Korea’s OHouse lands $128M to add AR to home improvement app
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Daniel Ek pumps $50 million into Spotify: ‘I believe our best days are ahead’
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Lucid is raising prices on its luxury Air EV by as much as 13%
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Tomorrow Farms wants to revamp the pantry
Tomorrow Farms is turning the concept of pantry and refrigerator staples on its head to create foods that are better for us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Shopify acquires shipping logistics startup Deliverr for $2.1B
Shopify today announced that it will acquire Deliverr, a San Francisco, California-based ecommerce fulfillment startup, for $2.1 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
As supply chain issues mount, Fictiv helps companies get from prototype to manufacturing
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fundid’s injects first funding into providing capital, credit for small businesses
Fundid has a three-pronged approach to simplifying access to capital for small businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Getlife wants to democratize life insurance in Europe
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Backed by Tiger Global and Sequoia India, Toplyne helps product-led growth teams tackle user conversion
For product-led growth companies (PLG), the perennial question is: how do we get non-paying customers to subscribe? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
LottieFiles raises Series B to make the animation format even more ubiquitous
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Anthropic’s quest for better, more explainable AI attracts $580M
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Vyoma is the latest player seeking to prevent satellite collisions with space junk
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Glorang scores $10M Series A to expand its edtech marketplace across Asia
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
HackerOne buys YC-backed PullRequest to add code review to bug-squashing platform
PullRequest, a five year old startup that came out of Y Combinator in 2017, helps software developers by providing an external code review team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Madison Reed, which made DTC hair color a thing, is now going after larger retail footprint
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Deepset raises $14M to help companies build NLP apps
Natural language processing (NLP), the field of AI that involves parsing text for tasks including summarization and generation, is a fast-growing technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Zippedi is using robots to digitize inventory for last-mile delivery
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Umaro is turning ocean-farmed seaweed into imitation bacon
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Qualified raises $95M to help Salesforce users with sales pipeline generation
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Lengow acquires e-commerce intelligence startup Netrivals
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
As it brings its bipedal robots to market, Agility announces a $150M round
Yesterday, Amazon announced that Agility Robotics is one of the five initial startups benefitting from the company’s $1 billion innovation fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Manila-based MadEats is more than a ghost kitchen startup
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Skyflow and Plaid partner in effort to bolster fintech data security
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Construct Capital’s $300M fund targets critical infrastructure automation
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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Meet Morado, a two-month old Colombian marketplace for the beauty industry that just raised $5M
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Singapore-based healthcare startup Ordinary Folk gets $5M to fight stigma
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
SaaS demo platform Demostack raises $34M to expand to new markets
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Everstage raises $13M Series A to make sales commissions more transparent
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Planetary wants to help food startups brew up more fake meat
Planetary aims to bring all of the alternative protein production planets into orbit with its scaling technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chipotle launches $50M venture fund in bid to foster new restaurant tech
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Nowadays puts its spin on plant-based nuggets
Its first product is a crispy, plant-based riff on chicken nuggets that is made with just seven ingredients. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sika lets patients ‘hack’ their health savings accounts to buy wellness products tax-free
What if you could buy a Peloton with pre-tax dollars? How about vitamins and supplements? Skincare products? Or even mattresses and massages? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Speckle snags $5.5M seed to build open source platform for 3D drawings
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Itilite secures $29M to automate corporate expensing workflows
For the bulk of the past two years, the pandemic has put the kibosh on corporate travel of nearly any kind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Tokyo-based Luup to more than double shared e-scooters, e-bikes
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Shipium gives e-commerce retailers Amazon-like supply chain tech
E-commerce retailers of all sizes can have that supply chain coordination layer that enables them to provide fast and cheaper shipping, too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Snap debuts its fifth cohort of Yellow accelerator startups
Snap’s in-house Yellow accelerator program, which invests in startups, has debuted its fifth batch of investments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hookdeck snares $2.4M seed to help developers manage webhooks
Hookdeck founders Alexandre Bouchard and Eric Tran were working on a product to help manage webhooks in 2020 when they became discouraged and decided to step away to gain some perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices