TechCrunch Startup News

DocSend has become one of the most popular tools for sharing venture fundraise decks, not only because of the control it offers, but also because of the analytics it can provide founders on how VCs read decks and where they might get stuck as they are perusing from slide to slide. The company has been generous sharing its data with us on what times are best to fundraise and how to structure a slide deck for best performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WellSet is doing a limited launch in Los Angeles of its alternative medicine booking platform Alternative and holistic healthcare seekers in the Los Angeles area have a new service they can turn to in WellSet, the listing platform that launched on Tuesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Podium, a Utah-based SaaS company focused on small business customer interactions, added payments technology to its product suite today. The move accretes a new income stream to the company’s quickly growing annual recurring revenue (ARR). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Le Wagon has raised its first round of funding after many years of bootstrapping. The company closed a $19 million funding round (€17 million) a few months ago. Cathay Capital is leading the round with AfricInvest also participating. “We’ve always bootstrapped since 2013 and we’ve always been profitable since day one,” Le Wagon co-founder and COO Romain Paillard told me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

mParticle, which helps companies like Spotify, Paypal and Starbucks umanage their customer data, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series D funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: “We’re just building games. And to be honest, we don’t know what we’re doing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications. The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding led by Heroic Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A 9-year-old is smashing the shuttle far and wide, and frantically pacing back and forth on the court in Bangalore, India, as her competition refuses to back down. Her rival is not a human. She is playing against a machine that is mimicking the game of badminton legend P.V. Sindhu, toned down a few notches to adjust for the age difference. By the court, her father, Jayanth Kolla, is watching the game and taking notes. Kolla is a familiar name in the tech startup and business ecosystem in India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been a big news day for Salesforce . It announced that Co-CEO Keith Block would be stepping down, and that it had acquired Vlocity for $1.33 billion in an all-cash deal. It’s no coincidence that Salesforce targeted this startup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eagle-eyed readers will recall that we mentioned M1 Finance earlier today in our look at a few trends in the fintech industry. We’re back with the firm this afternoon as it has a bit of news that’s worth discussing. Chicago-based M1 Finance announced today that it has reached the $1 billion assets under management mark, or AUM. Reaching AUM thresholds provides useful milestones that we can use to track the progress of various players in the fintech and finservices worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In an early-evening press conference, President Donald Trump tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead the U.S. response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread through Europe, Asia and Latin America. The new coronavirus strain, which has infected about 81,000 people around the world and killed 3,000, has already wrought havoc on the global economy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned yesterday that the U.S. will likely not be able to escape the spread of the virus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the $100 million ARR club, BounceX. This morning (evening, timezone depending), BounceX, a New York-based marketing technology startup, announced that it has reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold, adding its name to our running list of companies that have crossed over into nine-figure revenue while remaining private. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Recapped. Layoffs. Slowdown. CEO transition. Budget cuts. Downsizing. In spite of a spate of massive startup exits the last few months, culminating in fintech’s shining moment yesterday with Intuit’s $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma, it’s been a tough period for the startup world. Layoffs abound, centered perhaps on SoftBank’s Vision Fund portfolio but hardly exclusive to it. Startups, both infamous and unheard of, are shutting their doors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Revolut is raising a large Series D round of funding. TCV is leading the $500 million round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion. Over the past few years, Revolut has raised $836 million in total. Some existing investors are also participating in today’s funding round, but Revolut isn’t sharing names. Previous investors include DST Global, Index Ventures, Balderton Capital and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With cinnamon, fruit and mint-flavored nicotine gum, is LA’s Lucy Goods the next Juul? David Renteln, the Los Angeles-based co-founder of Soylent and the co-founder and chief executive of new nicotine gum manufacturer Lucy Goods, thinks there should be a better-tasting, less-medicinal offering for people looking to quit smoking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Financial services startups raised less money in 2019 than they did in 2018 as VC firms looked to back late stage firms and focused on developing markets, a new report has revealed. According to research firm CB Insights’ annual report published this week, fintech startups across the world raised $33.9 billion* in total last year across 1,912 deals*, down from $40.8 billion they picked up by participating in 2,049 deals the year before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tier, the European e-scooter rentals startup that operates in 55 cities across 11 countries, has topped up its funding for the second time in four months. The Berlin-based company has extended its Series B round to over $100 million, up from $60 million disclosed in October. The additional capital is a mix of equity and debt financing provided by Moscow’s RTP Global, London’s Novator, and an unnamed U.S. debt fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Six months ago or thereabouts, a group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google and Amazon Web Services had an idea. Data is valuable for helping developers and engineers to build new features and better innovate. But that data is often highly sensitive and out of reach, kept under lock and key by red tape and compliance, which can take weeks to get approval. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before it was worth $7.6 billion, the original idea for Robinhood was a stock trading social network. At my kitchen table in San Francisco in 2013, the founders envisioned an app for sharing hot tips to a feed complete with a leaderboard of whose predictions were most accurate. Once they had SEC approval, they pivoted towards the real money maker: letting people buy and sell stocks in the app, and pay to borrow cash to do so. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It sounds like Liquid Death has won over investors with its promise to “murder your thirst” — the startup is announcing that it’s raised $9 million in Series A funding. Liquid Death sells water in a tallboy aluminum can, and it’s expanding the lineup with a sparkling water can that it plans to start shipping in March. A 12-pack of either regular or sparkling mountain water currently costs $18.99 on the Liquid Death website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

BluBracket, a new security startup from the folks who brought you Vera, came out of stealth today and announced a $6.5 million seed investment. Unusual Ventures led the round with participation by Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures. The company was launched by Ajay Aurora and Prakash Linga, who until last year were CEO and CTO respectively at Auroa, a security company that helps companies secure documents by having the security profile follow the document wherever it goes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is “Twitter Stories” on the way? Or will we just get tools to send prettier tweets? Well now Twitter has the talent for both as it’s just acquihired Chroma Labs. Co-founded by Instagram Boomerang inventor John Barnett, Chroma Labs’ Chroma Stories app let you fill in stylish layout templates and frames for posting collages and more to Instagram Stories, Snapchat, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Budget-lodging startup Oyo reported a loss of $335 million on $951 million revenue globally for the financial year ending March 31, 2019, and pledged to cut down on its spending as the India-headquartered startup grows more cautious about its aggressive expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

PullRequest, a startup that provides code review as a service, announced today that it was buying Moonlight, an early stage startup that has built an online platform for hiring remote developers. The companies did not share the terms. Lyal Avery, founder and CEO at PullRequest, says that he bought this company to expand his range of services. “Our platform is at a place where we’re very confident about our ability to identify issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember when Zenefits imploded, and kicked out CEO Parker Conrad. Well, Conrad launched a new employee onboarding startup called Rippling, and now he’s going after another HR company called Gusto with a new billboard, “Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o.” The problem is, Gusto got it taken down by issuing a cease & desist order to Rippling and the billboard operator Clear Channel Outdoor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Not gonna lie. This f*cking sucks. This is the last HQ ever” yelled host Matt Richards . And it just got crazier from there.The farewell game of HQ Trivia before it shut down last night was a beautiful disaster. The hosts cursed, sprayed champagne, threatened to defecate on the homes of trolls in the chat window, and begged for new jobs. Imagine Jeopardy but Trebek is blacked-out. Yesterday HQ Trivia ran out of money, laid off its 25 employees, and shut down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HQ Trivia is dead. Today the company laid off its full staff of 25 and will cease operation of its trivia, sports, and word guessing games, a source close to the company confirmed. HQ Trivia had a deal in the works to be acquired, but they buyer pulled out yesterday and investors aren’t willing to fund it any longer, CEO and co-founder Rus Yusupov said in a statement attained by CNN Business’ Kerry Flynn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Intuition Robotics, the company best known for its ElliQ robot, a digital home companion for the elderly, today announced that it has raised a $36 million Series B round co-led by SPARX Group and OurCrowd. Toyota AI Ventures, Sompo Holdings, iRobot, Union Tech Ventures, Happiness Capital, Samsung Next, Capital Point and Bloomberg Beta also participated in this round. This brings the total funding for the company, which was founded in 2016, to $58 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is part of the Google Cloud Platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Student loan debt in the U.S. totals $1.5 trillion, and more than 44 million Americans have outstanding student loan debt. According to research by Jason Iuliano, Villanova law professor, a million student loan debtors have filed for bankruptcy in the past five years. However, 99.9 percent of them did not include their student loan debt in their bankruptcy filing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fifty percent of families are scared they can’t cover the cost of a funeral. They end up overpaying because no one wants to comparison shop amidst a tragedy. That’s why ex-Googler Alison Johnston’s startup Ever Loved built a free funeral crowdfunding tool. Now it’s addressing one of the most expensive parts of saying goodbye: burial. Today Ever Loved launches its online marketplace for caskets, urns, headstones and memorial jewelry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Impala has raised another round of funding just a few months after raising an $11 million Series A round. This time, the startup is raising a $20 million Series B round led by Lakestar. Latitude Ventures is also participating in the round. The company is building a service that works pretty much like Plaid, but for hotel rooms. The hotel industry relies on old school “property management systems” to manage rooms, room types, pricing, extras, taxes, etc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Carta, a startup that helps private companies manage equity, announced it has created an investing vehicle called Carta Ventures. The well-funded unicorn wants to invest in young startups that it sees building off of its data-driven perspective into the world of private companies, helping to foster an ecosystem around its core products and services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse company, doesn’t tend to do small rounds. On Friday night word leaked out about its latest mega round. This one was for $479 million on a $12.4 billion valuation. That’s triple the company’s previous $3.9 billion valuation from October 2018, and CEO Frank Slootman suggested that the company’s next finance event is likely an IPO. Dragoneer Investment led the round along with new investor Salesforce Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A startup called Our.News is working to make its users smarter consumers of the news. In other words, it’s confronting some big, seemingly intractable problems. For one thing, there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation online — as Our.News founder and CEO Richard Zack put it, “Unfortunately, you have thousands of people all over the world who intentionally make it hard for people to know what’s true. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Datree, the early stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort. Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million seed round announced in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Deliverr doesn’t own a warehouse or a delivery truck, but the startup is helping e-commerce companies not named Amazon achieve Amazon-like two-day shipping. The startup does it with intelligent algorithms, and today it announced a $40 million Series C investment. Activant Capital led the round. Other investors in the company include 8VC, GLP and Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Peterson. The company reports it has raised a total of $70 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snapchat’s developer platform is blowing up as a gateway to teen social app users. Hoop is the latest Snap Kit blockbuster, rocketing to #2 on the overall App Store charts this month with its Tinder -esque swiping interface for discovering people and asking to message with them over Snapchat. Within a week of going viral, unfunded French startup Dazz saw Hoop score 2.5 million downloads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Industrial robots are expensive. But, then, so are construction mistakes. Being off by an inch here or there adds up quickly, and too often crews need to correctly costly errors. There’s a reason construction has become the next great target of the robotics and automation industries, with a number of startups vying to create solutions that can constantly monitor sites to detect mistakes before it’s too late. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As esports grows and creates opportunities for gamers to level up to the pro or streamer level, there is still a huge barrier in the way. There is not a wealth of training options for gamers. If you can’t get better within the environment of the game itself, then you’ve peaked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Finix, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup selling payments tech to other businesses, announced that it has raised a $35 million Series B. Sequoia led the round, which also saw participation from new investors Activant Capital and Inspired Capital. Finix did not disclose a new valuation as part of its round, and declined to share any growth metrics regarding its business. Instead, it offered a TAM figure and noted the number of countries in which it currently operates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Those looking outside of Silicon Valley as a potential hub for their startup might want to take a gander at Utah — at least that’s the kind of trend the new Silicon Slopes Venture Fund hopes to create. The newly formed fund, put together by Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, Omniture and Domo founder Josh James and Stance co-founder turned Pelion Venture Partners’ Jeff Kearl, pledges to invest solely in Utah-based startups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpsRamp, a service that helps IT teams discover, monitor, manage and — maybe most importantly — automate their hybrid environments, today announced that it has closed a $37.5 million funding round led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, with participation from existing investor Sapphire Ventures and new investor Hewlett Packard Enterprise. OpsRamp last raised funding in 2017, when Sapphire led its $20 million Series A round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SoftBank wants its competing portfolio companies to stop losing so much money and, in some cases, to merge. That’s the news out from the Financial Times today, which reported that Uber and DoorDash discussed merging last year. The talks didn’t wind up in a deal. The two companies, each heavily backed by SoftBank and its formerly active Vision Fund, compete in the food delivery space at great expense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Insticator, a startup helping publishers add elements like polls, quizzes and suggested story widgets to their content, has made its first acquisition — a commenting platform called Squawk-It. Insticator CEO Zack Dugow said his platform benefits online publishers by keeping audiences engaged and bringing in new ad revenue (which is split between Insticator and the publisher). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If parties came with an alert system, this post would qualify as Def Con 4. Now hear this — we just released the final batch of tickets to our3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize, which heats up on February 7 in San Francisco. If you want to be there with more than 1,000 of Silicon Valley’s finest, act now with all due haste. Buy your ticket right here. Hang out with your crowd and enjoy cocktails, craft beer and tempting appetizers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Perdoo, a Berlin-based OKR-focused software startup, has decided to make its basic service free, potentially shaking up its growing, and somewhat crowded, market. “Objectives and Key Results,” a planning and management technique usually shortened to “OKRs,” is a hot space for software startups, with several raising in recent months. WorkBoard and Gtmhub, for example, each raised capital for their OKR products in the last two months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Teller raises $4M to take on Plaid in the U.S. by providing API access to bank accounts “They’re idiots, they’re really naive,” is how Stevie Graham, the co-founder of fintech Teller, once described Open Banking Limited, the body charged with delivering open banking in the U.K. His view back in 2017 — which now looks somewhat prophetic — was that open banking wouldn’t be the competition driver it was hyped up to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cooks Venture, the agtech company looking to revolutionize the chicken industry, has today announced the close of a $4 million funding round led by Golden West Food Group. Cooks Venture has been working in stealth for many years, but launched onto the scene in 2018 with a plan to reshape agriculture from the ground up. And the key to that strategy? Chickens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Challenger bank N26 has reached 5 million customers. In 2019 alone, N26 managed to add over 2.5 million customers. And the company’s growth rate seems to be accelerating as N26 reached 3.5 million customers in June 2019. That represents an addition of 1 million customers during the first half of 2019 and an addition of 1.5 million customers during the second half of 2019. One reason why N26 is growing at a faster pace is that the company is still expanding to new market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices