TechCrunch Startup News

The Philippines is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, with geography that makes it vulnerable to typhoons, floods, volcanos, earthquakes and droughts. While working in IT, Felix Ayque began compiling cyclone reports and sending them as email alerts to communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brands wanting to get into influencer marketing can use ProductWind's platform to set up campaigns with hundreds of influencers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the greatest challenges for farmers today is the increasing volatility in the climate, leading to unpredictable weather patterns, making growing conditions challenging. If farmers can’t grow crops, then our food security is as risk. Gradually, the field of agtech is attempting to address this issue. There are increasing numbers of FaaS (farming as […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Voodoo has made a significant acquisition in the casual mobile gaming market. The company is acquiring Beach Bum, a game studio based in Israel and specialized in tabletop and card games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spudsy is on track to save 1 million of these so-called flawed sweet potatoes by the end of 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Satellite servicing company Starfish Space has closed $7 million in funding to accelerate the development of a space tug vehicle that can extend the life of spacecraft and get rid of orbital debris. Servicing satellites used to be nigh impossible, due to the extreme costs associated with going to orbit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When engineers are building software, they often run into issues around testing it without using actual customer data. Creating a meaningful test set can be time-consuming and challenging. Tonic.ai, a startup that helps engineers create synthetic data sets is trying to fix that, and today the company announced a $35 million Series B. Insight Partners […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Genomic data is considered to be the key to unlocking so-called “precision medicine”. Some estimates suggest that by 2025, 500 million human genomes will have been sequenced, but only a fraction of it is being utilized for drug discovery and precision medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For many financial institutions in Southeast Asia, verifying new customers takes a week or two, said the founders of Verihubs. The startup cuts that time down to as little as five seconds, using AI-based identity authentication technology and APIs that let companies continue verifying returning customers through SMS, WhatsApp or flash calls. Verihubs announced it […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mobile spyware is one of the most invasive and targeted kinds of unregulated surveillance, since it can be used to track where you go, who you see and what you talk about. And because of its stealthy nature, mobile spyware can be nearly impossible to detect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ninja Van, a Singapore-based logistics startup, has closed a $578 million Series E round to support its operations infrastructure and technology systems growth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bay Area-based autonomous farming startup Iron Ox this week announced a $53 million round. The Series C, led by Breakthrough Energy Venture, brings the firm’s total funding up to $98 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Loyal is building an animal pharmaceutical company that is developing therapeutics aimed at extending both lifespan and healthspan for dogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When founder Somdip Dey was a computer science masters student at the University of Manchester, his parents got in a terrible car accident. He sent all of his money back to his parents in India to help with their medical bills, but then he faced a problem familiar to too many. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cobo, a Singapore-based crypto asset management platform, raised a $40 million Series B to accelerate the development of decentralized finance as a service (DFaaS). The round was co-led by DST Global, A&T Capital and IMO Ventures. The company will use its proceeds for the development of DeFi as a service (DFaaS) infrastructure and its existing […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sunday, a startup that didn’t exist just a few months ago, has raised a $100 million Series A funding round. Today’s funding round is led by Coatue with participation from partners of DST Global. Investors in the restaurant, hospitality and tech industries are also participating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Tatum, a blockchain infrastructure startup that wants to make it much easier to develop your own blockchain-based product. The company operates a platform-as-a-service product so that you don’t have to manage your own nodes and learn how to interact with each client. Tatum is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. While blockchain […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Alan is better known for its health insurance products — they now insure 200,000 people. But it has been slowly building a superapp for your health and expanding with new services. Today, the company announced its first acquisition ever with the acquisition of Jour for $20 million. This is going to be the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The decreasing cost of launch and a slew of other tech innovations have brought about a renaissance in geospatial intelligence, with multiple startups aiming to capture higher-quality and more frequent images of Earth than have ever before been available. Most of these startups, however, are focused on using satellites to collect data. Not so for […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fivetran, the data connectivity startup, had a big day today. For starters it announced a $565 million investment on $5.6 billion valuation, but it didn’t stop there. It also announced its second acquisition this year, snagging HVR, a data integration competitor that had raised over $50M, for $700 million in cash and stock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flippa uses a proprietary business valuation tool and algorithm to match online business owners to qualified buyers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ketch's OTC enables developers to embed security and governance into a piece of data as they build software. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Aircover’s conversational AI software integrates with Zoom and automates parts of the sales process to lead to more effective conversations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fiberplane, an Amsterdam-based early stage startup that is building collaborative notebooks for SREs (site reliability engineers) to collaborate around an incident in a similar manner to group editing in a Google Doc, announced a ​​€ 7.5M (approximately $8.8 million USD) seed round today. The round was co-led by Crane Venture Partners and Notion Capital with […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Its natural language processing platform aids subject-matter experts in finding answers to their questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Relyance AI, an early stage startup that is helping companies stay in compliance with privacy laws at the code level, announced a $25 million Series A today. At the same time, they revealed a previously unannounced $5 million seed round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Folk is a new productivity tool started by European startup studio eFounders. And the startup just raised a $3.3 million seed funding round led by Accel with a big group of business angels. When you think about managing contacts and relationships in a professional environment, you might think that companies have solved this already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wall-mounted fitness startup Tonal this morning announced that it’s bringing live courses to it portfolio of strength training workouts. The company did a soft launch of the live offering back in December of last year, though at the time, it wasn’t live, so much as prerecorded — “live, on tape,” to steal a line from […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Five months ago, Ambi Robotics emerged from stealth with a $6 million raise. Today the Bay Area-based firm is back with several times that, announcing a $26 million Series A, led by Tiger Global. The new round also features participation from existing investors, including Bow Capital, Vertex Ventures US and The House Fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

JumpCloud, the late-stage startup that is modernizing the notion of corporate directories in a cloud context, announced a $159 million Series F investment on a healthy $2.56 billion valuation today. Sapphire Ventures led the round with new investors participating including Owl Rock, Whale Rock Capital, Sands Capital and Endeavor Catalyst along with existing investors General […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

MarginEdge’s tool is a restaurant management app that works with a business’ point of sale to streamline inventory, cost-tracking, ordering and recipes to eliminate the paperwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quizlet, a flashcard tool turned artificial intelligence-powered tutoring platform, is planning an initial public offering nearly a year after it was valued at $1 billion. According to people familiar with the matter, Quizlet is considerably far along in the process to go public. A recent job filing shows that it is hiring for senior roles […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snyk, the Boston-based late-stage startup that is trying to help developers deliver more secure code, announced another mega-round today. This one was for $530 million, with $300 million in new money and $230 million in secondary funding, the latter of which is to help employees and early investors cash in some of their stock options. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Affinity is focused on industries like investment banking and venture capital, where there aren’t CRMs or networking platforms that cater to the specific needs of the long-term relationship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Neuroglee Therapeutics, a startup developing digital therapeutics for people with neurodegenerative diseases, has raised a $10 million Series A led by Openspace Ventures and EDBI. The funding will be used to launch virtual neurology clinics and to support Neuroglee’s move to Boston. Other participants included Ramen Singh, the former chief executive officer of Mundipharma; Biofourmis […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Intudo Ventures, the “Indonesia-only” investment firm, announced today it has closed its third fund, totaling $115 million. Called Intudo Ventures Fund III, it was raised in less than three months and oversubscribed. Fund III’s limited partners include Black Kite Investments, the family office of Singaporean businessman Koh Bon Hwee; Wasson Enterprises, the family office of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Four months after its last funding announcement, Singapore-based e-commerce aggregator Rainforest has closed a $20 million pre-Series A round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. Other participants included January Capital, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Amasia and Lo & Behold Group, along with returning investors Nordstar and Insignia Venture Partners. Rainforest announced in May that it had raised […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As developers look for ways to simplify how they create software, serverless solutions, which enable them to write code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure required to run their applications, is becoming increasingly popular. DigitalOcean announced today that it is enhancing its existing offering in this area with the acquisition of serverless startup Nimbella. The […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A startup called Playbyte wants to become the TikTok for games. The company’s newly launched iOS app offers tools that allow users to make and share simple games on their phone, as well as a vertically scrollable, fullscreen feed where you can play the games created by others. Also like TikTok, the feed becomes more […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The mobile app that provides information and reviews on barbers for potential customers while also managing appointments, mobile payments and pricing on the back end for barbers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clootrack is a real-time customer experience analytics platform that helps brands understand why customers stay or churn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amsterdam-based challenger bank Bunq is updating its service with a handful of new features. In addition to Dutch, German and French bank account numbers, existing and new users in Spain can now get a Spanish IBAN. European IBANs are supposed to work across Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amsterdam-based startup VanMoof has raised a $128 million Series C funding round. The company designs and sells electric bikes that are quite popular in some markets. It now wants to become the world’s leading e-bike brand by iterating at a faster pace. Asia-based private equity firm Hillhouse Investment is leading the round, with Gillian Tans, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pancake is democratizing interior design services to make it accessible to everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pixalate provides fraud protection, privacy and compliance analytics for connected television and mobile advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Even as hundreds of millions of people in India have a bank account, only a tiny fraction of this population invests in any financial instrument. Fewer than 30 million people invest in mutual funds or stocks, for instance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

German startup Dance is launching its subscription service in its hometown Berlin. For a flat monthly fee of €79 (around $93 at today’s exchange rate), users will get a custom-designed electric bike as well as access to an on-demand repair and maintenance service. Founded by the former founders of SoundCloud and Jimdo, the company managed […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The buildout of 5G networks continues apace, with wide-scale deployments across much of the developed world. Yet, one of the largest challenges with closing the gaps in coverage maps are constraints on 5G transmissions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With more than 270,000 stickers, Stipop’s library of colorful, character-driven expressions has a little something for everyone. The company offers keyboard and social app stickers through ad-supported mobile apps on iOS and Android, but it’s recently focused more on providing stickers to developers, creators and other online businesses. “We were able to gather so many […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices