TechCrunch Startup News

French startup Molotov provides a TV streaming service in France that replaces the traditional set-top box. You can access live TV, subscribe to premium channels, watch content after they air and record content in the cloud. Today, the company is launching a different service, its own ad-supported on-demand streaming service — or AVOD service for […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Isovalent, a startup that aims to bring networking into the cloud-native era, today announced that it has raised a $29 million Series A round led by Andreesen Horowitz and Google. In addition, the company today officially launched its Cilium platform (which was in stealth until now) to help enterprises connect, observe and secure their applications. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Berlin-based micro-mobility startup Tier has raised a significant Series C round of $250 million. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is leading the round, which proves that the Vision Fund team is still focused on high-risk, high-potential bets. As a reminder, SoftBank has invested in many late-stage funding rounds through its Vision Fund team. Portfolio companies include […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Xpressbees, an Indian logistics firm that works with several e-commerce firms in the country, said on Monday it has raised $110 million in a new financing round as online shopping booms in the world’s second largest internet market. The Pune-headquartered startup’s Series E financing round was led by private equity firms Investcorp, Norwest Venture Partners […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stock markets worldwide are soaring on news that a vaccine candidate is 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, and could start coming to market in a matter of months. This is upending the stock market, sending futures shares shooting higher in pre-market trading. But while the euphoria is helping sectors that have taken punishment during COVID-19, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last year, the French government and the government-backed initiative La French Tech unveiled an index of French startups so that it would be easier to identify them. The 40 top-performing startups get the label Next40, and the top 120 startups are grouped into the French Tech 120 — it’s a play on words with the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Starling founder Anne Boden recently told TechCrunch that the U.K. challenger bank is on track to be profitable by Christmas, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t out raising additional capital already. According to well-placed sources, Starling has hired Rothschild with the aim of raising a new £200 million round. The draw is its expected profitability, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rocket Lab is set to complete a crucial test for its rocket reusability program during its next mission, which is currently set to take place sometime in mid-November, with a launch widow that opens on November 16. This is a bit of a surprise, because the launch company said that it would be doing this […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Osome, a Singapore-headquartered business assistant app that digitizes accounting and compliance tasks, has raised $3 million. An extension of Osome’s seed round, the new funding was led by XA Network and AltaIR Capital. The startup currently has about 4,500 SME clients across Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, founder and chief executive officer Victor […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding. When the company raised its $7 million Series A two years ago, founder and CEO Noah Dinkin told me about how it spun out of his previous startup, FanBridge. And while there are many products focused […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When we covered Leena AI as a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 cohort, the young startup was firmly focused on building HR chatbots, but in the intervening years it has expanded the vision to a broader HR policy platform. Today, the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Greycroft with help […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Indonesia’s logistics industry is very fragmented, with several large providers operating alongside thousands of smaller companies. This means shippers often have to work with a variety of carriers, driving up costs and making supply chains harder to manage. Logisly, a Jakarta-based startup that describes itself as a “B2B tech-enabled logistics platform,” announced today it has […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TVision is building what its team hopes will become the standard for measuring streaming viewership — and to accelerate those efforts, it’s raised $16 million in new funding. The New York City startup started out by measuring traditional TV viewing, using webcams to determine whether viewers were actually paying attention to the ads. More recently, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Financial guidance company NerdWallet announced at the end of last week that it has acquired Fundera. New York City-based Fundera was co-founded in 2013 by Jared Hecht, who previously co-founded GroupMe. It created a marketplace where small businesses could find loans, subsequently expanding into other areas like legal services, while also (like NerdWallet) offering free […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Started as a side project by its founders, Warren is now helping regional cloud infrastructure service providers compete against Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and other tech giants. Based in Tallinn, Estonia, Warren’s self-service distributed cloud platform is gaining traction in Southeast Asia, one of the world’s fastest-growing cloud service markets, and Europe. It recently closed […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Daimler’s trucks division has invested in lidar developer Luminar as part of a broader partnership to produce autonomous trucks capable of navigating highways without a human driver behind the wheel. The deal, which comes just days after Daimler and Waymo announced plans to work together to build an autonomous version of the Freightliner Cascadia truck, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Atmos wants to make designing a house as simple as a single click. Well, that vision is now getting a double click from VCs. The company, which we profiled back in July, announced today that it raised another $4 million, this time from Evan Moore at Khosla Ventures, real estate strategic investors like David Gerster […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Atmos wants to make designing a house as simple as a single click. Well, that vision is now getting a double click from VCs. The company, which we profiled back in July, announced today that it raised another $4 million, this time from Evan Moore at Khosla Ventures, real estate strategic investors like David Gerster […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you miss hanging out with your coworkers but don’t want to spend a single second more on Zoom, the latest product from Donut might be the answer. The startup is launching its new Watercooler product today while also announcing that it has raised $12 million in total funding, led by Accel and with participation from […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Upgrade has been quite successful with its two flagship products —Â a low-cost credit card and personal loans. The company is making its credit card more attractive by adding rewards. Upgrade Card consumers will earn 1.5% cash back on all purchases made with the card — there’s no specific category, no partner retailer, no […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anima, the company that turns design prototypes into code, has today announced the launch of Anima 4.0, which will allow designers to create prototypes in Figma that are translated into components in React with the click of a button. The company was founded by Or Arbel (cofounder of Yo!), Avishay Cohen (who led R&D at […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rockset, a cloud-native analytics company, announced a $40 million Series B investment today led by Sequoia with help from Greylock, the same two firms that financed its Series A. The startup has now raised a total of $61.5 million, according to the company. As co-founder and CEO Venkat Venkataramani told me at the time of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Seasonality is critical for the media. End-of-year wrap-ups, best books for the summer, things to do this weekend — they’re all methods to note not only the passage of time, but also to begin to set the tone for what is about to come. Everyone covered the end of the 2010s with aplomb, a decade […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The long-anticipated IPO of Alibaba-affiliated Chinese fintech giant Ant Group could raise tens of billions of dollars in a dual-listing on both the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges. Shares for the company formerly known as Ant Financial are expected to price at around HK$80, or roughly 68 to 69 Chinese Yuan. The company is selling […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Internships are an opportunity for students to experiment with new career paths and land a full-time offer ahead of graduation. For companies, the weeks-long programs help recruit and train job-ready hires. While the stakes are high, the coronavirus-spurred office closures and market volatility made a number of tech companies slim down or cancel their internship […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simple, link-centric user profiles might seem might not seem like a particularly ambitious idea, but it’s been big enough for Linktree. The Melbourne startup says that 8 million users — whether they’re celebrities like Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa or brands like HBO and Red Bull — have created profiles on the platform, with those […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lunar, the Nordic challenger bank that started out life as a personal finance manager app (PFM) but acquired a full banking license in 2019, has raised €40 million in Series C funding from existing investors. The injection of capital follows a €20 million Series B disclosed in April this year and comes on the back […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

RepTrak and Onclusive are announcing a partnership that Onclusive CEO Dan Beltramo said will combine corporate reputation tracking and PR analytics for the first time. RepTrak, founded in 2004, helps businesses measure their reputations (and their competitors’ reputations) through a database of more than 1 million company ratings collected every year. Meanwhile, Onclusive (formerly known […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yes, the media f’ing gorged on the Quibi story yesterday. We did, they did, everyone did. And really, truly, how could anyone not? Nearly $2 billion came in (with $350 million heading back), a star-studded lineup of executives and production teams, an absolutely massive advertising campaign, and a PR strategy that all but begged the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s only been a few months since Lili announced its $10 million seed round, and it’s already raised more funding — namely, a $15 million Series A. The startup, founded by CEO Lilac Bar David and CTO Liran Zelkha, is creating a bank account and associated products designed for freelancers, with features like early access […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yin Wu has cofounded several companies since graduating from Stanford in 2011, including a computer vision company called Double Labs that sold to Microsoft, where she stayed on for a couple of years as a software engineer. In fact, it was only after that sale she she says she “actually understood all of the nuances […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Index founders, Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet, have been friends since they were small children in the Dominican Republic. Both came to college in the U.S., and last year the two decided to launch a startup to help non-technical users build business intelligence dashboards without coding. Today they get to keep building on that dream […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer? Those applications from the 1990s used emphatic metaphors in their names to talk about a simple task — browsing the web. Today, nobody would say that Google Chrome is a web explorer. Browsing the web has become an effortless — and often mindless —Â task. You grab your phone or […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Open banking enables bank-to-bank payments, meaning that (in theory) merchants should be able to accept payments without having to hand over fees to Visa or Mastercard or other payment providers, such as Stripe. The challenge, however, isn’t just implementing open-banking based payments as a checkout option — there are are already a host of open […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

PearPop a new Los Angeles-based company, is on its way to racking up nearly 25,000 users in less than a month, and has already landed seed funding from the firm Rocket One Capital. The company’s premise is simple. Allow fans to bid for shared screen time with their favorite TikTok celebrities, and it’s one that’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Propseller, a Singapore-based real estate agency that combines a tech platform with in-house agents to close transactions more quickly, announced today it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. The round included investment from Iterative; Hustle Fund; XA Network; Rapzo Capital; Lazada co-founder Stein Jakabo; and Dot Property founder Ben Neve. Propseller also said “three […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was just a few weeks ago that Datto, what TechCrunch called a “backup and disaster recovery firm,” filed to go public. This week the firm set an initial range for its debut. The Vista Equity Partners -backed company was picked up by the private equity firm back in 2017. Vista is back in the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vivun’s co-founder and CEO, Matt Darrow used to run pre-sales at Zuora and he saw that pre-sales team members had a lot of insight into customers. He believed if he could capture that insight, it would turn into valuable data to be shared across the company. He launched Vivun to build upon that idea in […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s a difficult time for small businesses — to put it mildly. And Fivestars CEO Victor Ho said that many of the big digital platforms aren’t really helping. Ho argued that those platforms — whether they offer delivery services, user reviews or marketing tools — all have the same underlying model: “They seek to take over a small […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup WizVille is launching a new product called Local Monitor to help restaurant owners, haircut places, bakeries and all kinds of small shops track their Google Maps ratings and the ratings of their competitors. While there are plenty of ratings services to compare places around you, such as Foursquare, Yelp and Tripadvisor, Google Maps […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just months after it announced a $33 million Series B, Chicago-based M1 Finance today disclosed a $45 Series C. The new financing event was led by Left Lane Capital, the same investor that led M1’s Series B. Bear in mind that so-called inside rounds are now a bullish sign in 2020, as opposed to in prior […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the fitness space for a loop. Caliber, a startup that focuses on one-to-one personal training, is today launching a brand new digital coaching platform on the heels of a $2.2 million seed round led by Trinity Ventures. Caliber launched in 2018 with a content model, offering an email newsletter and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Spendesk has added $18 million to its Series B round. The company already raised $38.4 million as part of its Series B last year, which means that it raised $56.4 million as part of this round. Eight Roads Ventures is investing in today’s extension round. Spendesk, as the name suggests, focuses on all […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GoGet, a Malaysian on-demand work platform, announced today that it has raised a $2 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. The platform currently has 20,000 gig workers, who are called “GoGetters,” and has onboarded 5,000 businesses, including Lazada Malaysia, IKEA Malaysia, Foodpanda and flower delivery service BloomThis. While Malaysia has other on-demand work […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The retail landscape is shifting rapidly. While D2C brands have changed the way we shop, Quince is looking to change retail even more dramatically. The brand, which raised $8.5 million in seed funding last year (and only revealed as much today), is looking to rethink the supply chain with its own line of 700 items […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sources have told TechCrunch that Twilio intends to acquire customer data startup Segment for between $3 and $4 billion. Forbes broke the story on Friday night, reporting a price tag of $3.2 billion. We have heard from a couple of industry sources that the deal is in the works and could be announced as early […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most startup founders have a tough road to their first round of funding, but the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit tougher than most. The two young founders survived by entering and winning hackathons to pay their rent and put on food on the table. One of the ideas they came up with […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Revolut has rolled out a handful of additional features over the past few days. The financial app lets you track all your subscriptions that you pay with your Revolut account or your card. In the U.S., Revolut is adding a savings bonus based on your purchasing habits. Finally, business customers can now order […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French fintech startup Lydia is going to work with financial API startup Tink for its open banking features in its app. Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app and now has 4 million users in Europe. Lydia’s vision has evolved to become a financial super app that lets you control your bank accounts and access […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices