TechCrunch Startup News

Against Gravity, the startup behind the social gaming platform Rec Room, has scored some new funding as it brings its once VR-centric platform to every major gaming platform out there. The startup has closed a $20 million Series C led by Madrona Venture Group . Existing investors including First Round Capital, Index, Sequoia and DAG […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Corporate spend management startup Ramp has raised $30 million more in a new round, it announced today. TechCrunch covered Ramp’s launch earlier this year, when it also detailed that it had raised around $23 million up to that point. The startup raised its latest round in August of 2020, with conversations about the deal kicking […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French fintech startup Lydia has extended its Series B round. Accel is leading the extension with all major existing shareholders also participating. Lydia first raised $45 million in January 2020 — Tencent led that investment. The startup is now raising another $86 million, which means that Lydia has raised $131 million in total as part […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mike Folgner has had his share of success building video editing tools, having sold Jumpcut.com to Yahoo and SnappyTV to Twitter. But as he explained in a new Medium post, he still sees “unfinished business” in the video industry. “Today, most major productivity software categories have made the leap from desktop software to the web,” […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Revolut is tweaking its subscription plans with a new mid-tier offering called Revolut — it costs £2.99 per month. Like N26 Smart and Monzo Plus, the new plan is a pandemic-proof package that doesn’t focus as much on travel. For the past couple of years, challenger banks and alternatives to traditional bank accounts […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Less than a year after it raised a $15 million Series B, Public, a social-focused free stock trading service, has raised a $65 million Series C. The startup is not the only company to raise successive rounds this year. Welcome has managed the feat, along with Skyflow and others. Public’s Series C, therefore, fits into […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dott is better known for its electric scooter service that is available in a few cities across Europe. But the company is working on electric bikes and wants to launch a bike-sharing service in London and Paris in March 2021. Dott currently doesn’t operate in London. So it looks like it’ll be the company’s 16th […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Enterprise recruiting company iCIMS is announcing that it has acquired Altru. iCIMS declined to comment on the terms of the deal, but a source with knowledge of the companies told us that the price is a combination of cash and stock, totaling around $60 million. Founded in 2000, iCIMS offers a “talent cloud” used by […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reddit announced that it has acquired short video platform Dubsmash. The deal’s terms were undisclosed. Dubsmash will retain its own platform and brand, and Reddit will integrate its video creation tools. Its co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel and Tim Specht, will join Reddit. According to Crunchbase data, the app has raised $20.2 million from investors […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup In&motion has raised a $12 million (€10 million) funding round led by Upfront Ventures with 360 Capital also participating. The company has been working on wearable airbag systems for motorbikes. Integrated in a vest, the airbag is completely autonomous and can detect crashes in 60 milliseconds. The company has worked on a device […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the pandemic has raged on, it has shined a spotlight on the importance of procurement, especially in certain sectors. Fairmarkit, a Boston startup, is working to bring a modern digital procurement system to the enterprise. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B. GGV Capital and Insight Partners led the round with help […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nobody likes dealing with taxes — until the system works in your favor. In many countries, startups can receive tax credits for their R&D work and related employee cost, but as with all things bureaucracy, that’s often a slow and onerous task. Boast.ai aims to make this process far easier, by using a mix of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Candu, a software startup that provides no-code web tools for SaaS apps, announced a $5 million funding round. TechCrunch caught up with founder Jonathan Anderson and lead investor Villi Iltchev, a partner at Two Sigma Ventures, to chat about the deal. First thing: This round, a bit like Scotch, has aged. It’s from […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lemonade is launching its renters insurance in France. This is the company’s third European launch after the Netherlands and Germany. Originally from the U.S., Lemonade is now a public company with a current market capitalization close to $4 billion. Lemonade will compete directly with a local competitor called Luko. Both companies share a lot of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce, who helped build the Einstein artificial intelligence platform, is taking on a new challenge — and it’s a doozy. Socher wants to fix consumer search and today he announced you.com, a new search engine to take on the mighty Google. “We are building you.com. You can already go […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pandemic has been terrible for many industries, but the book industry has gotten a rare reprieve in an otherwise dismal past decade. Locked in homes and forced to socially distance from others, us humans have more time on our hands and more need to connect to characters than ever before. That surge in interest […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Getsafe, the digital-first insurance startup that initially launched with an app for home contents insurance, has closed $30 million in Series B funding. Swiss Re, the reinsurer giant, led the round. Existing investors, including Earlybird and CommerzVentures, also participated. Getsafe has raised a total of $53 million to date since being founded in May 2015. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When one of AWS’s east coast data centers went down at the end of last month, it had an impact on countless companies relying on its services including Roku, Adobe and Shipt. When the incident was resolved, the company had to analyze what happened. For most companies, that involves manually pulling together information from various […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zephr has raised $8 million in a new funding round led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (owned by media giant Bertelsmann). The London-headquarted startup’s customers already include publishers like McClatchy, News Corp Australia, Dennis Publishing and PEI Media. CEO James Henderson told me via email that rather than creating “a monolithic product that tries to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Stripe has announced an ambitious new product today called Stripe Treasury. The company is partnering with banks to offer a banking-as-a-service API. In other words, Stripe clients will be able to provide bank accounts to their customers — the service is invite-only for now. This is part of a bigger trend called embedded […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Esports One, a startup bringing the fantasy approach to esports, is announcing that it has raised an additional $4 million in funding. When I first wrote about Esports One in April, co-founder and COO Sharon Winter described it as the first “all-in-one fantasy platform” in the esports world, allowing you to research players, create fantasy […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Given the attention that TechCrunch pays to Y Combinator’s Demo Days, we also try to keep tabs on the same startups as they scale and raise more capital. Yesterday we covered YC Winter 2020 participant BuildBuddy, for example. Today we’re taking a look at Heru, a startup based in Mexico City that is announcing a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wellory, a startup that bills itself as taking an “anti-diet approach” to nutrition and wellness, is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in funding. The round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from Harlem Capital, Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Ground Up Ventures, NBA Player Wayne Ellington, Hannah Bronfman and others. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eat Just will start offering lab-grown chicken meat in Singapore after gaining regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA). The cell-cultured chicken will eventually be produced under Eat Just’s new GOOD Meat brand through partnerships with local manufacturers and go on sale to restaurants before it is available to consumers. No chickens were killed […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As we’ve moved to work from home during the pandemic, it’s been challenging for remote workers to feel connected. Loop Team, a new entrant into the enterprise communications space, thinks the way we are communicating needs improvement. That’s why the startup is releasing Loop Team today, a tool that is trying to use software to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Salut, an app-based service that allows fitness trainers to host classes virtually, announced that it has raised $1.25 million in a new financing event. The round was led by Charles Hudson, an investor at Precursor Ventures. Founder Matthew DiPietro, formerly of Twitch, told TechCrunch that Salut soft-launched in mid-September, with a wider release […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vista Equity Partners hasn’t been shy about scooping up enterprise companies over the years, and today it added to a growing portfolio with its purchase of Gainsight. The company’s software helps clients with customer success, meaning it helps create a positive customer experience when they interact with your brand, making them more likely to come […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Materialize, the SQL streaming database startup built on top of the open source Timely Dataflow project, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Lightspeed Ventures. While it was at it, the company also announced a previously unannounced $8 million Series A from last year that had been […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hacker houses are making a comeback for entrepreneurs as remote work drags on. While founders are adapting to quarantine in style, a group of college women in their 20s aren’t waiting until they are done with undergraduate to plunge into the lifestyle themselves. Started by college juniors Coco Sack and Kendall Titus, Womxn Ignite is […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you launch an application in the public cloud, you usually put everything on one provider, but what if you could choose the components based on cost and technology and have your database one place and your storage another? That’s what Cast.ai says that it can provide, and today it announced a healthy $7.7 million […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WeGift, the London-based startup that has built an “incentive marketing” platform that lets businesses easily issue e-gift cards and other digital rewards to customers, has raised $8 million in new funding. Dubbed a Series A extension, the round is led by AlbionVC. Existing investors including Stride.vc, SAP.iO fund and Unilever Ventures also followed on. Following […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just a few months after launching margin trading on Coinbase Pro, the company is disabling the feature. Margin trading lets you trade on leverage. But it works both ways — margin trading lets you multiply your gains and your losses. Starting on November 25, 2pm PT, users won’t be able to place new margin trades. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dija, a new U.K. based startup founded by senior former Deliveroo employees, is closing in on $20 million funding, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, the round, which has yet to close, is being led by Blossom Capital, the early stage venture capital firm founded by ex-Index and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown. It’s not […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Challenger bank N26 is adding a third subscription product called N26 Smart. N26 Smart is designed to be a mid-tier subscription plan with advanced banking features but without a travel insurance package. In Europe, in addition to the free plan, N26 already provides two subscription tiers called N26 You and N26 Metal. N26 You costs […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Several years ago Serenade co-founder Matt Wiethoff was a developer at Quora when he was diagnosed with a severe repetitive stress injury to his hand and couldn’t code. He and co-founder Tommy MacWilliam decided to use AI to create a tool that let him speak the code instead and Serenade was born. Today, the company […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Onit, a workflow software company based in Houston with a legal component, announced this week that it has acquired 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield alum McCarthyFinch. Onit intends to use the startup’s AI skills to beef up its legal workflow software offerings. The companies did not share the purchase price. After evaluating a number of companies […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Wish, a well-known mobile ecommerce startup, filed to go public. It joins Affirm, Airbnb, and Roblox in filing this week as many well-known and valuable private companies look to debut before the year ends and the holidays start. Wish’s S-1 (which is filed under its corporate name ContextLogic) is of particular interest given […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The security sector is ever frothy and acquisitive. Just last week Palo Alto Networks grabbed Expanse for $800 million. Today it was FireEye’s turn snagging Respond Software, a company that helps customers investigate and understand security incidents, while reducing the need for highly trained and scarce security analysts. The deal has closed, according to the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Micromobility company Lime says it has moved beyond the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a milestone that seemed unthinkable earlier this year. In short, the company is now largely profitable. Lime said it was both operating cash flow positive and free cash flow positive in the third quarter — a first — […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Starting a small company used to be simple. Get some space on Main Street, put out a shingle, and begin plying your trade. Then the regulatory state came, and so did the internet. Now, entrepreneurs have to apply for licenses — sometimes multiple licenses in multiple states — and also handle all the intricacies of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Bella, a new challenger bank launching on November 30th. The company is trying to differentiate itself with two distinctive features. First, you can interact with the app using keywords and text commands. Second, Bella is trying to build a community that helps each other to differentiate its product from soulless monolithic banking services. Let’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If we are to realize telehealth’s full potential, we must first reckon with the fact that there are serious flaws in the predominant way it is delivered today — flaws that endanger patients themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbnb filed to go public today, bringing the well-known unicorn one step closer to being a public company. The financial results show a company on the rebound, but smaller than it was. Its more granular financial results also make clear how hard the pandemic was on the travel-reliant unicorn. Regarding Airbnb’s worth, investors will have […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a period of social distancing, making new professional connections feels harder than ever. So Amsterdam-based Cooper is building a network that’s all about making and receiving introductions. “Everything that happens in the network is based on on the foundation of introductions,” CEO Robert Gaal told me. “You should never get an unwanted message, and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Deep Vision, a new AI startup that is building an AI inferencing chip for edge computing solutions, is coming out of stealth today. The six-year-old company’s new ARA-1 processors promise to strike the right balance between low latency, energy efficiency and compute power for use in anything from sensors to cameras and full-fledged edge servers. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After filing earlier this year, DoorDash dropped its public S-1 filing this morning, bringing clarity to its numbers and moving it closer to a public debut that should happen before the end of the year. The company is one of several startups that we expect to see IPOs from before the year ends, despite some […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Silicon Valley peer-to-peer car rental startup Getaround has secured a $25 million loan from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation. The financing announcement comes one month after Getaround raised $140 million from investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund, Menlo Ventures, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus’ Reinvent Capital. Getaround’s raise signals that the company is looking for new ways […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

JumpCloud, the cloud directory service that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2013, announced a $75 million Series E today. The round was led by BlackRock with participation from existing investor General Atlantic. The company wasn’t willing to discuss the current valuation, but has now raised over $166 million, according to Crunchbase data. Changes in […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Software is eating the world, and that grub can be costly. As the market for enterprise tools and software continues to balloon, organizations are spending more and more on that software across an increasingly complicated and rapidly evolving landscape. That’s where Clearfind comes in. Clearfind was founded (and bootstrapped) by James Layfield and Jocelyn Simon. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mozart Data founders Peter Fishman and Dan Silberman have been friends for over 20 years, working at various startups, and even launching a hot sauce company together along the way. As technologists, they saw companies building a data stack over and over. They decided to provide one for them and Mozart Data was born. The […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices