TechCrunch Startup News

Transposit is a company built by engineers to help engineers, and one big way to help them is to get systems up and running faster when things go wrong — as they always will at some point. Transposit has come up with a way to build runbooks for faster disaster recovery, while using data to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a business model, SaaS has expanded to epic size. A number of major SaaS companies filed to go public last week, and there are now thousands of SaaS startups growing all around the world. That scale makes it easier for banks and financial institutions to offer tailored solutions to this market around everything from […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gong announced a $200 million Series D investment just last month, and loaded with fresh cash, the company wasted no time taking advantage. Today, it announced it was buying early stage Isreali sales technology startup Vayo. The companies did not share terms of the deal, but Gong CEO Amit Bendov said the deal closed a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Edtech just keeps on booming. Today, Owl Ventures, a San Francisco-based education technology fund whose portfolio includes Byju’s, Labster, Masterclass and Quizlet, announced that it has closed a pair of investment vehicles totaling $585 million. Owl Ventures IV is a $415 million investment vehicle which will be used to invest in edtech startups Series A […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The global legal services industry was worth $849 billion dollars in 2017 and is expected to become a trillion dollar industry by the end of next year. Little wonder that Steno, an L.A.-based startup, wants a piece. Like most legal services outfits, what it offers are ways for law practices to run more smoothly, including […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The right question is almost never whether to buy software or build it internally. Instead, banks have often worked to walk the difficult but smarter path right down the middle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s time again to start warming up your pitching arm. Our next Pitchers & Pitches session takes place next week on September 2. Register today! Pitchers & Pitches sessions combine critique and competition with a focus on helping early-stage startup founders create an iron-clad, 60-second pitch. Here’s how it works. Everyone is welcome to attend, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Fondeadora, a fintech startup based in Mexico City that wants to build a full-stack neobank. The company just raised a $14 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Founded in 2018, the company already manages 150,000 accounts and is adding $20 million in deposits every month. Mexico represents a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Brynne McNulty Rojas moved to Bogotá, Columbia four years ago, she encountered a fragmented real estate industry that lacked a central database for consumers to find or compare homes. Rojas was struck by the magnitude of the problem; she was also inspired by the opportunity. Rojas and business partner Sebastian Noguera homed in on […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Narrative has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding and is launching a new product designed to further simplify the process of buying and selling data. I’ve already written about the company’s existing marketplace and software for managing data transactions. With the new Data Streams Marketplace, the process should be simpler than ever — not […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like any successful founder, Andrew Grauer had bright, long-term ambitions for Course Hero from the moment he launched it in 2006. He started the business to create a place where students could ask questions and get answers similar to Chegg, which launched 15 months before Course Hero . But as he slowly built it, he […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Finix, a startup that provides payments-related services to other companies, announced it has extended its Series B financing with a $30 million investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and American Express Ventures. The fintech startup has now raised over $96 million in venture capital. According to CEO and co-founder Richie Serna, $90 million of that […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eden, the office management platform founded by Joe du Bey, is today announcing the launch of several new enterprise software features. The company, which offers a marketplace for office managers to procure services like office cleaning, repairs, etc., is looking to offer a more comprehensive platform. The software features include a COVID team safety tool […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning MURAL announced that it has raised $118 million in an outsized Series B. The visual collaboration startup provides a whiteboard-like digital environment that allows for users to cooperate and brainstorm. MURAL announced that it had raised $23 million earlier this year, though that investment closed in 2019. The $23 million round was a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2010, TV show host Conan O’Brien was abruptly asked to give up the time slot he’d been handed just six months earlier by his longtime employer NBC. Instead, he famously gave the network the figurative finger, taking his act to the basic cable network TBS later that same year and — embraced by legions […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SugarCRM announced this morning it has acquired customer intelligence startup, Node. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but the deal has closed. While Sugar gains a ton of AI expertise, it also adds a customer prediction element to the platform such as figuring out the customers most likely to convert or most likely […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

George Sehremelis is building what he calls a “social news network,” with the aim of combatting the spread of misinformation and fake news online. “My goal has always been make an impact on the 2020 election,” Sehremelis told me — a tall order, particularly when the big social networks are struggling to solve these same […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The promise of SaaS has always been about taking tedious, expensive manual tasks and finding a way to build a platform to automate them. Cobalt.io is doing that with pentesting, the process of testing an application for security vulnerabilities before it goes out the door. Today, the startup announced a $29 million Series B led […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

DoorDash is announcing that customers can now order groceries through the DoorDash app from partners including Smart & Final, Meijer and Fresh Thyme. Additional stores like Hy-vee and Gristedes/D’Agnostino are supposed to be added in the next few weeks. Through these partnerships, DoorDash says it has a delivery footprint covering 75 million Americans in markets […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a turn of fortune, Airbnb today announced that it has filed to go public, albeit confidentially. The move puts the home-sharing service on a path to a public offering sooner rather than later, and comes after reports that the company was prepping an IPO filing this month. Those same reports indicated that Airbnb could […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Finmark, a member of Summer 2020 Y Combinator cohort, is not your typical YC startup. In fact company co-founder Rami Essaid has already built Distil, a security startup and saw it through to exit when he sold the company to Imperva last year. As he pondered what to do next, he took a quick turn […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator is a technological marvel that sets a new standard for the genre. But to recreate a world that feels real and alive and contains billions of buildings all in the right spots, Microsoft and Asobo Studios relied on the work of multiple partners. One of those is the small Austrian startup […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Movable Ink, a company that helps businesses deliver more personalized and relevant email marketing, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series funding. The company will be 10 years old in October, and founder and CEO Vivek Sharma told me that it’s always been “capital efficient” — even with the new round, Movable […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The uptick in robotics funding continues this week with a big round for Calgary, Alberta’s Attabotics. The warehouse fulfillment startup announced a $50 million Series C, led — interestingly enough — by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Canada’s largest pension plan. It’s a pretty hot moment for robotics and automation investing, as more industries […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A 20-month-old startup in India founded by a group of banking veterans that has built a mobile-first credit card and is improving the experience users have with credit cards has secured $10 million in a new financing round. Pune-based FPL Technologies’ $10 million Series A financing round was funded by Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Autonomous vehicle startup AutoX announced the public launch of of its self-driving taxi service in Shanghai today. Called simply RoboTaxi, AutoX’s offering already faces competition from Didi, China’s largest ride-hailing platform, which launched its own robo-taxi pilot program in Shanghai at the end of June. AutoX’s RoboTaxis will first be available in Jiading District, starting […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By all accounts, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of robotics and automation by months, if not years. The reasons are fairly clear — robotics don’t call in sick, nor are they disease vectors in the same manner as their human counterparts. As food production and agriculture are looking to be among the biggest […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You could Zoom call into your science class, or you could conduct a lab experiment in virtual reality. During the coronavirus pandemic, the latter has never felt more full of potential. The global need for learning solutions beyond Zoom is precisely why Labster, a Copenhagen-based startup that helps individuals engage in STEM lab scenarios using […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Cube announced that it has closed a Seed round worth just over $5 million. The software startup, focused on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) work, raised $3.8 million of the total recently, with remaining $1.25 million having come in an earlier Pre-Seed round. Christina Ross, Cube’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch that she […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the third time since last February, Gong has raised a significant sum. In February, the company scored $40 million. In December, it grabbed another $65 million, and today it was $200 million on a $2.2 billion valuation. That’s a total of $305 million in less than 18 months. Coatue led today’s cash infusion with […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Michael Waxman, co-founder and CEO of dog food startup Sundays, acknowledged that dog owners have no shortage of options when it comes to feeding their beloved pets — but he still thinks there’s room for something new. “There’s a sort of ‘Water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’ phenomenon,” Waxman said. “There are over […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Adaptive Shield, a Tel Aviv-based security startup, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its $4 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures Israel. The company’s platform helps businesses protect their SaaS applications by regularly scanning their various setting for security issues. The company’s co-founders met in the Israeli Defense Forces, where they were […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The automotive industry is knee deep in the vast transition to electric, but one place where gas is still going strong is out on the water. Zin Boats wants to start what you might call a sea change by proving, as Tesla did before it, that an electric boat is not just better for the planet, it's better in almost every other way as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It seems the pandemic has forced the business world to digitize faster, and the industrial sector is no different. Parsable, a San Francisco startup that is helping digitize industrial front line workers, announced a $60 million Series D today. Activate Capital and Glade Brook Capital Partners co-led the round. They got help from new investors […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The team at DoubleVerify, a company that helps advertisers eliminate fraud and ensure brand safety, said that it’s recently identified a new tactic used by ad fraudsters seeking to make money on internet-connected TVs. Senior Vice President of Product Management Roy Rosenfeld said that it’s harder for those fraudsters to create a legitimate-looking TV app […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here’s a shout out to all the early-stage founders attending Disrupt 2020. Don’t forget to register for our next Pitchers & Pitches — on August 13 — and get ready to hone your 60-second pitch to a razor’s edge. If you’re not in the know, our ongoing Pitchers and Pitches webinar series is a pitch-off-masterclass-mashup. It’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clean.io, a startup that helps digital publishers protect themselves from malicious ads, recently announced that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The Baltimore-based company isn’t the only organization promising to fight malvertising (such as ads that force visitors to redirect to another website). But as co-founder wrote Seth Demsey told me last […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As sales teams partner with other companies, they go through a process called account mapping to find common customers and prospects. This is usually a highly manual activity tracked in spreadsheets. Crossbeam, a Philadelphia startup, has come up with a way to automate partnership data integration. Today the company announced a $25 million Series B […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the current level of interest represents the new normal for VCs, we expect it to only increase as we enter the fall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

PandaDoc, the startup that provides a fully digital sales document workflow from proposal to electronic signature to collecting payment, announced a $30 million Series B extension today, making it the the second such extension the company has taken since taking its original $15 million Series B in 2017. The total for the three B investments […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Krisp’s smart noise suppression tech, which silences ambient sounds and isolates your voice for calls, arrived just in time. The company got out in front of the global shift to virtual presence, turning early niche traction has into real customers and attracting a shiny new $5 million series A funding round to expand and diversify […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Electric vehicles (EVs) are spreading throughout the world. While Tesla has drawn the most attention in the United States with its luxurious and cutting-edge cars, EVs are becoming a mainstay in markets far away from the environs of California. Take India for instance. In the local mobility market, two- and three-wheel vehicles are starting to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today Intercom announced that it has hired a chief financial officer (CFO) as it ramps towards an IPO. The unicorn also promoted its COO to the CEO role earlier this year. The company’s recent CEO, Karen Peacock, told TechCrunch that her new CFO Dan Griggs was a strong candidate thanks to his experience helping take […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

EventGeek was a Y Combinator-backed startup that offered tools to help large enterprises manage the logistics of their events. So with the COVID-19 pandemic essentially eliminating large-scale conferences, at least in-person, it’s not exactly surprising that the company had to reinvent itself. Today, EventGeek relaunched as Circa, with a new focus on virtual events. founder […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the Internet of Things, proliferates, security cameras are getting smarter. Today, these devices have machine learning capability that help the camera automatically identify what it’s looking at — for instance an animal or a human intruder? Today, Cisco announced that it’s acquired Swedish startup Modcam and making it part of its Meraki smart camera […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dan Miller Contributor Share on Twitter Dan is a Partner at True Search where he leads the firm's Investment Professional practice, having worked with many top VC & PE firms in their senior hiring efforts. Like many industries with a high concentration of wealth — and the careers that help professionals accumulate it — investment […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I want to believe that companies that promise racial and gender equity in compensation make it happen, but not all do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Point, a new challenger bank in the U.S., is launching publicly today with an invite system. While Point is technically providing a bank account, the company focuses on rewards associated with a debit card. “I started Point as a solution about everything that is frustrating and complicated about credit cards. The incentives between credit card […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Small- to medium-sized companies that do a lot of international business have to deal with two big headaches: high foreign exchange fees and corporate expense tracking. Volopay, a Singapore-based financial tech startup with offices in Bangalore, wants to help by integrating prepaid multi-currency corporate cards, expense tracking and accounting tools into one free-to-use platform. Volopay […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a world with growing amounts of data, finding the right set for a particular machine learning model can be a challenge. Explorium has created a platform to make that an easier task, and today the startup announced a $31 million Series B. The round was led by Zeev Venture with help from Dynamic Loop, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices