TechCrunch Startup News

Meet Mediflash, a new French startup that wants to improve temp staffing in healthcare facilities, such as nursing homes, clinics and mental health facilities. The company positions itself as an alternative to traditional temp staffing agencies. They claim to offer better terms for both caregivers and institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Databases run the world, but database products are often some of the most mature and venerable software in the modern tech stack. Designers will pixel push, frontend engineers will add clicks to make it more difficult to drop out of a soporific Zoom call, but few companies are ever willing to rip out their database. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twine, a video chat startup that launched amid the pandemic as a sort of “Zoom for meeting new people,” shifted its focus to online events and, as a result, has now closed on $3.3 million in seed funding. To date, twine’s events customers have included names like Microsoft, Amazon, Forrester, and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It certainly follows then that some leading construction robotics companies are able to strike while the iron is hot with some healthy raises. Today, Bay Area-based Dusty Robotics announced a $16.5 million Series A. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social calendar app IRL has been busy building a messaging-based social network, or what founder and CEO Abraham Shafi calls a “WeChat of the West.” Following its pandemic-fueled growth and further push into the social networking space with group chat and other features, IRL is today announcing a sizable $170 million Series C growth round, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A group of 200 startup founders, investors, associations and government members are backing a manifesto and a set of recommendations in order to create the next wave of tech giants in Europe. Today, French President Emmanuel Macron is hosting an event in Paris with some of the members of this group called Scale-Up Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Serial edtech entrepreneur David Blake, who co-founded Degreed and launched LearnIn, is living the dream of any book worm. He reads at least one book a week, talks to the authors behind it and unpacks his biggest questions around the subtlest of passages. And it’s all thanks to his latest startup, BookClub, which first launched […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Klaxoon is announcing a product update for its whiteboard collaboration platform as well as a new hardware product. With Hybridity, the company is going to sell ready-to-use conference rooms that optimize hybrid meetings between people currently in the office and people on the go. Let’s start with the software update. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The round will help the company bolster the predictive AI and machine learning algorithms that power nSure AI’s “first of its kind” fraud protection platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s easier than ever to build a product and sell it around the United States, or the world. But if you want to do so without incurring the wrath of any particular state, or nation-state, you’d best have your tax matters in order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Lydia is better known as the dominant app for peer-to-peer payments. But the company has been adding more features, such as a debit card, account aggregation, donations, money pots and more. This week, the company is adding savings accounts thanks to a partnership with French fintech startup Cashbee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New regulations are making it easier to invest in alternative assets via crowdfunding, and the recent explosion of crypto and NFTs means that investors are more diversified than ever. Keeping up with such a variety of investments may prove difficult to those who want to handle managing their investment portfolios on their own. Money Minx, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One clear outcome of the pandemic was pushing more people to do their shopping online, and that was as true for B2B as it was for B2C. Knowing which of your B2B customers are most likely to convert puts any sales team ahead of the game. Slintel, a startup providing that kind of data, announced […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Threat intelligence company Recorded Future is launching a $20 million fund for early-stage startups developing novel data intelligence tools. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After co-founding Insomnia Consulting, Stacey Abrams and Lara O’Connor Hodgson started Nourish to address a personal problem. “We were at a meeting, I think for one of my campaigns,” explains Abrams, the Georgia-based lawyer and politician whose voting rights work became a focal point for the country in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Pennylane has raised a new $18.3 million funding round (€15 million). Interestingly, this is Sequoia Capital’s first investment in France after they announced ambitious expansion plans in Europe. If you’re not familiar with Pennylane, the startup has been developing an accounting platform that improves accounting for both clients and their accountants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The buy now, pay later frenzy isn’t going anywhere as more consumers seek alternatives to credit cards to fund purchases. And those purchases aren’t exclusive to luxuries such as Pelotons (ahem, Affirm) or jewelry someone might be treating themselves to online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New York-based Simulate today announced a $50 million fundraise. Led by Alexis Ohanian’s 776, the Series B brings the meat alternative’s total funding to north of $60 million and values it at $260 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Astra, the space launch startup with plans to go public via a SPAC merger, will acquire electric propulsion maker Apollo Fusion, the company said Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Toyota AI Ventures, Toyota’s standalone venture capital fund, has dropped the “AI” and is reborn as, simply, Toyota Ventures. The fund is commemorating its new identity by investing an additional $300 million in emerging technologies and carbon neutrality via two early-stage funds: the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund and the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Indonesian healthcare startup Prixa has raised $3 million led by MDI Ventures and the Trans-Pacific Technology Fund (TPTF), with participation from returning investors including Siloam Hospitals Group. This brings Prixa’s total raised to $4.5 million since it launched in 2019. Co-founder and chief executive officer James Roring M.D., told TechCrunch in an email that the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gong, the revenue intelligence startup, has been raising capital at a rapid pace, and today the company announced another $250 million on a $7.25 billion valuation, a number that triples its previous valuation from last summer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Climate change is intensifying across the globe, and one of the most challenging cases is Japan. In addition to lying on a major fault, the archipelago is increasingly inundated from rising sea levels that make the country more prone to disasters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Lightyear, a new London-based startup coming out of stealth today. The company is building a stock trading app with a focus on creating a truly commission-free app. In addition to waving account fees and trading fees, Lightyear doesn’t charge foreign exchange fees either — up to a certain point. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As companies increasingly rely on data to run their businesses, having accurate sources of data becomes paramount. Stemma, a new early stage startup, has come up with a solution, a managed data catalogue that acts as an organization’s source of truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kabuto, the French startup that designs and sells smart suitcases, is releasing a new suitcase today. Called the Kabuto Trunk, this is the company’s biggest suitcase to date. Unlike smart suitcases from other brands, this isn’t just a suitcase with a battery in it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Even as remote software uptake has boomed during the pandemic, certain workflows have gotten prioritized for specialized toolsets while other team members have been left piecemealing their productivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zenyum, a startup that wants to make cosmetic dentistry more affordable, announced today it has raised a $40 million Series B. This includes $25 million from L Catterton, a private equity firm focused on consumer brands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet June, a new startup that wants to make it easier to create analytics dashboards and generate reports even if you’re not a product analytics expert. June is built on top of your Segment data. Like many no-code startups, it uses templates and a graphical interface so that non-technical profiles can start using it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cloud kitchens are already meant to reduce the burden of infrastructure on food and beverage brands by providing them with centralized facilities to prepare meals for delivery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As AI has grown from a menagerie of research projects to include a handful of titanic, industry-powering models like GPT-3, there is a need for the sector to evolve — or so thinks Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI, who struck out on his own to create a new company a few months […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Café, a new French startup founded by two brothers that wants to help companies switch to a hybrid remote-and-office workplace model. Café isn’t a traditional desk-booking tool. Instead, the company helps you see when people in your team are coming to the office so that you can plan when you should go to the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Drug discovery is a large and growing field, encompassing both ambitious startups and billion-dollar Big Pharma incumbents. Engine Biosciences is one of the former, a Singaporean outfit with an expert founding crew and a different approach to the business of finding new therapeutics, and it just raised $43 million to keep growing. Digital drug discovery […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Insurtech is picking up steam in a big way, but startup Parametrix thinks there is still plenty of room left to innovate. The company, which today announced the close of a $17.5 million funding round, offers insurance policies for companies who rely on third-party cloud providers, ecommerce services, payment gateways and CRM systems. In essence, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Another sizable raise for a pet (cats and dogs) tracking company this morning. Austria-based Tractive has announced a $35 million Series A, led by Guidepost Growth Equity. The round is the company’s first since 2013, when its GPS-based tracker first hit the market. Along with the funding round, the company is also announcing its official […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Aurora Solar had one of those pitches that seemed obvious in retrospect. Instead of going to a house and measuring its roof manually for a solar panel installation, why not use aerial scans and imagery of the whole region? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier this year, Turntable.fm’s founder Billy Chasen dusted off the old site and resurrected it for the pandemic age. I know I wasn’t the only one feeling a wistful pang of nostalgia for the service during the long, dull days of sheltering in place. And while March 2020 would have been the best time for […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New York City-based vertical farming startup Bowery Farming this week has announced a $300 million Series C. The round, which brings its total funding north of $472 million, values the company at $2.3 billion. Fidelity Management & Research Company led the beefy round, with participation from existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), General Catalyst, GGV […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are hopping around like crazy to invest in ideas that push the boundaries in fields far flung from enterprise SaaS. Case in point today: Gridware. It’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Fireflies.ai project is a good reminder that not every startup project goes from idea to unicorn-status in 48 minutes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve ever been self-employed you know what a pain it is to keep up with the hassles of running a business. From bookkeeping to invoicing to paying taxes — it’s one big headache. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I am not a smart man. Earlier today I tweeted about $ASS, a cryptocurrency named after a dog. In this case, Australian Shepherds. And after doing that obviously stupid thing, my Twitter feed became chock-full of ass-related imagery, memes, and $ASS coin stans breathing on me. It’s all very annoying as I run Tweetdeck on […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you have a LinkedIn profile with your digital resume and hundreds — if not thousands — of professional connections. But how many of those people do you actually know well, and, more importantly, do you ever connect with them and meet others from their networks? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

European startup studio eFounders has now been around for 10 years. And because a birthday sounds like a good opportunity to share some metrics, the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together —Â only 18 months after reaching $1 billion. eFounders says it is focused on building the future of work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Electric aviation startup Beta Technologies closed a $368 million Series A funding round on Tuesday, with investments from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. The new capital is the second round of funding announced by the company this year, after the company raised $143 million in private capital in March. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Finary, a new French startup that wants to change how you manage your savings, investments, mortgage, real estate assets and cryptocurrencies. The company lets you aggregate all your accounts across various banks and financial institutions so that you can track your wealth comprehensively over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One thing is clear in the cloud native world. Developers use a lot of services to create applications, and while service meshes define how these services work together, just getting a grip on the services a team uses is usually tracked manually in spreadsheets. That’s where Cortex, a new startup, comes in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a longtime real estate developer based in Chile, Benjamin Labra was able to spot gaps in the buying and renting markets in Latin America. To meet demands, he started Houm, an all-in-one platform that helps homeowners rent and sell their properties in the region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cisco has been busy on the acquisition front this week, and today the company announced it was buying threat assessment platform Kenna Security, the third company it has purchased this week. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price. With Kenna, Cisco gets a startup that uses machine learning to sort through the massive […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices