TechCrunch Startup News

The robotics industry is having a major moment amid the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s true that category has been an exciting target for investments for a number of years now, but labor issues and concerns over transmission have led many sectors to take a good, long look at automation. Meal preparation is a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The spreadsheet-centric database and no-code platform Airtable today announced that it has raised a $185 million Series D funding round, putting the company at a $2.585 billion post-money valuation. Thrive Capital led the round, with additional funding by existing investors Benchmark, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital and CRV, as well as new investor D1 Capital. With this, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Toucan has developed a Chrome browser extension designed for anyone who wants to learn a new language but hasn’t found the motivation or the time. Once installed, the extension scans the text of any (English-language) website you’re visiting and will automatically translate some of the words into the language that you’re trying to learn. If […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Primary care health tech startup Carbon Health has added a new element to its “omnichannel” healthcare approach with the launch of a new pop-up clinic model that is already live in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Brooklyn and Manhattan, with Detroit to follow soon – and that will be rolling out over the next weeks and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Diffblue, a spin-out from Oxford University, uses machine learning to help developers automatically create unit tests for their Java code. Since few developers enjoy writing unit tests to ensure that their code works as expected, increased automation doesn’t just help developers focus on writing the code that actually makes a difference but also lead to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sprinklr has been busy the last few years acquiring a dozen companies, then rewriting their code base and incorporating them into the company’s customer experience platform. Today, the late-stage startup went back to the fund raising well for the first time in three years, and it was a doozy, raising $200 million on a $2.7 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bay Area-based Iron Ox today announced a $20 million Series B. The funding, led by Pathbreaker Venture and family office firms, brings the robotics company’s total funding up to $45 million to date. A number of other investors also took part in the round, including Crosslink Capital, Amplify Partners, ENIAC Ventures, R7 Partners, Tuesday Ventures, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When we last reported on Snyk in January, eons ago in COVID time, the company announced $150 million investment on a valuation of over $1 billion. Today, barely nine months later, it announced another $200 million and its valuation has expanded to $2.6 billion. The company is obviously drawing some serious investor attention and even […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the heels of new filings from both Sumo Logic and JFrog, Snowflake, a venture-backed unicorn looking to go public on the strength of its data-focused cloud service, set an initial price range for its IPO. The $75 to $85 per-share IPO price target values the firm at between $20.9 billion and $23.7 billion, huge […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Revolut is expanding to Japan. After testing the service with 10,000 users, anybody can now sign up and open an account. The company originally obtained its authorization to operate from Japan’s Finance Service Agency in 2018. When you open an account, you get an electronic wallet and a Visa debit card. You can […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in 2006, Joseph Heller went to China where he spent the next decade learning about the manufacturing business. Based on that experience he eventually built a startup called The Studio. The idea was to help connect people with a small business idea to manufacturers in China in a fully digital way. By 2016 he […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Lokalise, a Latvian startup that focuses on translation and localization of apps, websites, games and more. The company provides a software-as-a-service product that helps you improve your workflow and processes when you need to update text in different languages in your product. The company just raised a $6 million funding round led by Mike […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Disrupt 2020 is all about helping startups find and create ways to drive their business forward in these most challenging times. We partnered with cela to give exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley one sweet opportunity — networking with 13 accelerators. If you’re exhibiting — or plan to — don’t miss out on your chance to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episerver is announcing that it has reached an agreement to acquire Optimizely for an undisclosed sum. Optimizely was founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen. It became synonymous with A/B testing, subsequently building a broader suite of tools for marketers to experiment with and personalize their websites and apps, with more than 1,000 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’re just about a month away from launching TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, but you have only 48 hours left to save yourself $100 on the price of admission. Join the global mobility community on October 6-8 at the lowest possible price. Snag your pass before the early bird expires on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Legion, an artificial intelligence driven platform for workplace management, has raised a $22 million series B round led by Stripes with participation from Workday Ventures and others. Legion is designed to help employers better manage their hourly workforces by automating certain decisions, like how much labor to deploy to meet the needs of the company […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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