TechCrunch Startup News
3,873 episodes — Page 43 of 78
Fundrise invests $128M into expansion of Saltbox’s warehouse, co-working spaces for entrepreneurs
Fundrise will acquire warehouses ranging in size from 50,000 to 150,000 square feet that will house the new Saltbox locations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Better.com plans to lay off about 4,000 people this week, sources say
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Infrastructure is broken, Gecko is using robotics to help fix it
Gecko Robotics’ mission statement is “To protect today’s critical infrastructure, and give form to tomorrow’s.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Environmental, social and governance tracking gets easier with ESGgo
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Volocopter raises $170M, now valued at $1.87B, to fuel the first commercial launches of its flying taxi fleet
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
YC-backed Blocknom wants to become the “Coinbase Earn of Southeast Asia”
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Shares raises $40 million for its social investment app
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Microsoft partners with VCs, accelerators to back 10,000 startups in Africa
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
After raising $4 million, Emtech supports central banks across Africa, the Caribbean to deploy regulatory sandboxes
For fintechs to thrive in such a way that they remain meaningful to economies, a synergy between them and regulatory bodies is inevitable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Enterpret launches with $4.4M, NLP technology to decipher customer feedback
Enterpret is building and deploying customer-specific models, based on customer feedback, for product development teams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Live near an ocean? Kin Insurance’s data aims to more accurately predict home risk
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Payhawk becomes a unicorn as it extends its Series B
European spend management startup Payhawk has added $100 million to its Series B round that I already covered back in November. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Flashfood raises $12.3M to scale its grocery app that helps tackle retail food waste
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Better Dairy slices into new funding for animal-free cheeses
Better Dairy is using precision fermentation to produce cheeses that are molecularly identical to traditional dairy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Singapore-based micromobility startup Beam secures $93M Series B, enters new markets
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Cococart sweetens the process for e-commerce companies to take orders immediately
Cococart's tools enable merchants to set up an online store in minutes with no code, no design and no app downloads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
AnyRoad helps brands measure customer experiences
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
With mission to modernize data streaming, Redpanda snares $50M Series B
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Vendr acquires Blissfully, combining its SaaS buying services with management tools
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
thatDot launches Quine, a streaming graph engine
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.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Last mile delivery e-bike supplier Zoomo tacks on $20M to Series B
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Agility Robotics and Playground Global join TechCrunch Live to speak on fundraising robotic delivery
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sweden’s Volta raises $260M at a $490M valuation to get its all-electric trucks into production by the end of this year
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Voltron Data grabs $110M to build startup based on Apache Arrow project
Voltron Data was launched last year by former employees from NVidia, Ursa Computing, BlazingSQL and the co-founder of Apache Arrow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
ICON raises $185M in Tiger-led round to build more homes with its 3D printing tech, now approaching $2B valuation
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Ibex Investors’ newest fund is betting on a mobility revolution
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 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Actual, which renders company ESG data in a SimCity-like platform, raises $5M seed
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Dutch raises $20M to scale its telemedicine platform for pets
Virtual veterinarian care platform Dutch has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures and Eclipse Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Genesis raises $200M in Tiger-led round to grow its finance-focused low-code application platform
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Employment Hero raises $181M AUD at $1.25B AUD valuation, acquires KeyPay
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Scrona has big manufacturing plans for its tiny 3D printing
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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Tropic takes in more capital as demand for software procurement savings continues
Tropic’s technology brings a click-and-approve approach to buying and managing all of that software. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Insify is modernizing insurance, but this time for SMEs
Meet Insify, an insurtech startup that raised a $17 million (€15 million) Series A round led by Accel. The company wants to modernize the insurance market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Lung-health startup Respira Labs inhales $2.8M to help respiration patients breathe easier
Respira Labs, a medical technology company specializing in respiratory care, which first unveiled its product to the world last year, successfully raised $1 million in funding and an additional $1.8 million in grants to continue building its acoustic resonance technology to assess lung function and changes therein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
RedRoute wants answering customer service calls to be as easy as using ‘Alexa’
It takes as little as 30 minutes to get RedRoute set up, and customers can try the software with zero upfront costs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Remote work and events startup twine acquires YC-backed Glimpse to launch on Zoom
Twine, a company that provides networking tools for virtual events and remote teams, will soon bring its services to Zoom thanks to its just-closed acquisition of the Y Combinator-backed startup, Glimpse, which had developed a “speech matching” platform designed for virtual events. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Neo.tax raises $10M to help startups access R&D tax credits
For most people, mention of the word “taxes” conjures up unpleasant things like tedious processes, mountains of paperwork and shelling out a lot of money to the government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Republic’s metaverse real estate arm spins off, rebrands as Everyrealm
Over $500 million worth of real estate was sold on the top four metaverse platforms in 2021, data shows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Shift5 raises $50M to defend transport networks from cyberattacks
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Cooks Venture, the chicken company with big dreams, eats up $50M
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Silvr wants to bring revenue-based financing to Europe
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Endgame grabs another cash infusion as product-led growth momentum builds
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bumble makes its first acquisition with deal for French Gen Z dating app, Fruitz
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
GM Ventures invests in startup building fast charge-capable battery tech
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Over 500 mobile apps are now using the term ‘metaverse’ to attract new users
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
No plastic clamshells here: Zero Grocery aims to eliminate unnecessary plastic in grocery delivery
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Scale AI gets into the synthetic data game
Scale AI’s path to becoming a $7.3 billion company was paved in real data from images, text, voice and video. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Waldo raises $15 million for its automated mobile testing service
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Whose Your Landlord raises $2.1M for its rental review and data service
Whose Your Landlord,1 or WYL, announced a $2.1 million seed round today led by Black Operator Ventures, better known as BlackOps Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Framework looks to expand repairability beyond the laptop
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices