TechCrunch Startup News

After multiple rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, Nuro is pivoting its business strategy to focus more on the startup’s core autonomous driving technology instead of owning and operating a fleet of low-speed, on-road delivery bots

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Tune.FM is a decentralized music streaming service where users pay for each song they stream using Tune.FM's crypto token JAM.

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Paymob has evolved into an omnichannel gateway offering over 50 methods for offline and online payments to more than 350,000+ merchants.

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Tem wants to do for utilities what neobanks have done for the financial sector: disrupt an industry using tech, streamline it, and cut out the middlemen.

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In the world of pharmaceuticals, companies aim to operate under GMP guidelines — a set of production and manufacturing measures to assure standards for medicinal products. But too often, the reality is anything but that.  “Officially, GMP stands for ‘Good Manufacturing Practices,’” said Dr. David Schneider, the founder and CEO of Qualifyze.

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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects more than 366 million adults globally, according to a 2020 study, but beyond medicating with stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, there are few alternatives for people who suffer from the disorder. Therapy, education, and lifestyle changes are usually also advised, but those avenues can prove difficult as well.

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The startup has devised a durable way to store solar power as heat that can then be used for household heating or hot water.

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This year, the B’s made their debut in the Pioneer League, a professional baseball organization that’s partnered with the MLB, but unlike the minor leagues, it’s not tied to any existing MLB teams.

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As with many open source startups, All Hands AI expects to monetize its service by offering paid, closed-source enterprise features.

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The new business-to-business division is a bet on what co-founder and CEO Thomas von der Ohe thinks is the future of mobility.

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European regulators are pushing hard for greener energy. The REPowerEU plan calls for 10 million additional heat pumps to be added by 2027, and solar panels are also on the rise. But most installations are done by small businesses that could be more productive with better work processes.

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No one is putting the remote working genie back in the bottle. Which is good news for Oyster, a payroll and HR platform that specializes in distributed workforces – or “global employment” as its marketing paints it

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New climate tech VC firms have emerged in recent years, but existing ones are also raising larger funds. Founded in 2007, Dutch firm SET Ventures is one of the latter.

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If you build an AI search product, you compete with Google. But Google has a lot easier time answering queries with a single, simple answer, such as “how many is a dozen?” than it does answering complex questions like “what influence did Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ have on Enlightenment ideals?”x

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Hospitals around the world regularly face bed shortages — an issue that can get exacerbated to breaking point when a health scare or other large-scale disaster occurs. A startup called Doccla is bringing technology to bear address the issue: it’s building “virtual bed” tech to help doctors remotely manage patients who have either been discharged or not.

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Fleet is launching several software services on top of its hardware-as-a-service proposition, from device management to cybersecurity and insurance.

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Magic, an AI startup developing models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks, says that it’s raised a large tranche of cash from investors including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a blog post this morning,

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As businesses experiment with embedding AI everywhere, one area starting to gain more attention is Emotion AI.

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Atlassian plans to integrate Rewatch into its recently launched Rovo AI platform so that transcripts become searchable within the overall business context.

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One of the people who successfully sued the National Association of Realtors (NAR) to change real estate commissions has co-founded a new real estate startup. It all began in 2017 when Josh Sitzer and his wife listed their home for sale in Kansas City.

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Bluesky on Wednesday introduced the ability to hide replies, as well as a way to detach your original post from someone's quote post.

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Fluid Truck, a startup that was founded to disrupt the commercial vehicle rental industry, has ousted its sibling co-founders – CEO James Eberhard and chief legal counsel Jenifer Snyder – according to sources familiar with the matter.

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Planera, scheduling and planning software for commercial construction projects, has raised $13.5 million to expand its reach and help general contractors with more features.

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Supio uses generative AI to automate bulk data collection and aggregation for legal teams. It emerged from stealth Tuesday with a $25 million investment.

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GrubMarket, the $3.6 billion food delivery and supply chain startup backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock and nearly 100 other investors, has snapped up another food delivery startup on its consolidation march: It is acquiring FreshGoGo, a New York-based, B2C platform selling Asian groceries and ready-made dishes.

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AI models are being applied to every dataset under the sun, but are inconsistent in their outcomes. This is as true in the medical world as anywhere else, but a startup called Piramidal believes it has a sure thing with a foundational model for analyzing brain scan data.

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Mical Jeanlys-White built WealthMore out of frustration.  She spent years on Wall Street, building products at American Express and serving as a managing director at JPMorgan Chase. She realized the finance industry still had a long way to go when it came to helping consumers build and understand wealth.

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Travly is a new social-first discovery and hotel booking platform designed to cater to the growing number of travelers who rely on short-form video content for trip ideas.

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Tingit, a startup out of Lithuania, wants to help people restore their used clothing to their former glory with its newly launched repairs marketplace.

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In 2020, Kathryn Wu launched a side hustle while she was working as a product engineer at Pinterest. Wu started a milk tea company, Ohtea, with the hopes of connecting with local grocery stores and gift shops to get them to carry the tea.

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Dropbox has acquired AI-powered scheduling tool Reclaim.ai, which counts Calendly and Index Ventures among its backers. The development was revealed in a blog post on Reclaim.ai’s website Tuesday. Dropbox hasn’t disclosed the terms of the deal.

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The Rounds, the startup that delivers recurring grocery and household essentials in reusable packaging, announced on Monday its $24 million Series B funding round. The new capital will go toward product development, hiring, and expanding the service to additional markets. Alongside the funding announcement, The Rounds introduced new features for customers.

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SleekFlow, a Singapore- and Hong Kong-headquartered social commerce platform that has built a conversational AI suite for customer engagement targeted to Asian markets, said Wednesday it had secured a further $7 million in funding. The money will be used to continue developing its AI, as well as penetrate deeper into Southeast Asia.

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Simulating the real world is a tremendously complex problem if you want to do it at any useful level of fidelity. Traditional techniques are holding back design teams at vehicle and aerospace companies, but Beyond Math is putting AI on the task with a new way of simulating the world that could save them days.

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The U.S. Department of Defense is a mammoth organization. It not only employs millions of service members and hundreds of thousands of civilian employees, but also has the world’s largest military budget that’s used to buy and maintain more equipment than can likely fit into a single paragraph.

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Popular iPad design app Procreate is coming out against generative AI, and has vowed never to introduce generative AI features into its products. The company said on its website that although machine learning is a “compelling technology with a lot of merit,” the current path that generative AI is on is wrong for its platform. 

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Brands can use Keychain to look up different products and see who actually manufactures them.

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Brands can use Keychain to look up different products and see who actually manufactures them.

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An AI social media vetting startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and is launching a new platform designed to screen election personnel. Founded in 2019, Ferretly leverages AI to scan social media and publicly available online data to uncover potential risks and behaviors that traditional background checks may overlook.

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Stoke Space is nothing if not ambitious. The five-year-old launch startup has generated a lot of hype due to its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with both the booster and second stage vertically returning to Earth. 

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Code reviews — peer reviews of code that help devs improve code quality — are time-consuming. According to one source, 50% of companies spend two to five hours a week on them. Without enough people, code reviews can be overwhelming and take devs away from other important work.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) has been top of mind for brands for more than a decade to ensure their websites and products capture as many eyeballs as possible by ranking high up on search results pages. But search is changing, and as consumers increasingly turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude

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EliseAI employs an army of chatbots to text with, email, and respond to calls from renters about things such as apartment tours, maintenance requests, lease renewals and delinquencies.

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ArborXR, a startup that helps companies remotely manage AR and VR devices, believed that enterprise customers would be the primary targets for AR and VR devices. Now, that bet is paying off.

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PayZen aims to make healthcare more affordable by enabling patients to pay their bills in interest and fee-free instalments over time.

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The ex-Clubhouse, Netflix employees raised $1.65M for an app that combines social media, networking, and dating.

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Most startups are looking to solve a problem inside a business, but Bandana, a New York City-based startup has a different goal. It wants to help people at the lower end of the wage scale find better jobs with higher wages and good benefits, all while being closer to home to reduce commuting time

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The startup's core technology is a proprietary material that absorbs moisture from the air, allowing air conditioning to cool buildings more efficiently.

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Los Angeles is notorious for its back-to-back traffic. Three events that promise to bring in millions of spectators from around the world — the 2026 World Cup, the Super Bowl in 2027, and the 2028 Olympics — have LA officials searching for a range of new mobility solutions to address its congestion problems.

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Slag is the molten runoff created while producing steel in a traditional blast furnace. The material has been prized as greener cement alternative for creating concrete, the Earth’s most abundant human-made material. The runoff is facing supply chain issues, however, as the steel industry looks to greener methods of production.

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The Palmer Luckey-founded defense startup wants to become a serious rival to longstanding kingpins, and has been clocking some big wins.

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New York-based fintech Payoneer has acquired Skuad, a Singapore-based global HR and payroll startup, for $61 million in cash, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.  Payoneer said it could also pay up to another $10 million, contingent on if Skuad meets various performance goals within the first 18 months of the acquisition.

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In a sign that big tech companies are ready and willing to shell out cash for database tech, Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, on Wednesday announced that Microsoft’s venture arm M12 led a $25 million strategic investment in its business.

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Many industries that rely on legacy energy sources are aiming to electrify or at least streamline their operations, but for countless use cases the tech just isn’t there. H3X is changing the game with electric motors so compact and efficient that the aerospace and marine world — not to mention investors — are taking notice.

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A startup developing AI market research based on location data, and backed by a who's who, has quietly raised, TechCrunch has learned.

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COVID-19 pushed people to take up outdoor activities. Now, startups are helping companies and consumers keep up with demand.

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Trade My Spin has pieced together a logistics network capable of offering same or next day delivery in most major cities in the continental U.S.

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Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of Google Cloud’s effort to cozy up with promising early-stage AI startups, in hopes some of them will evolve into massive, compute-hungry business.

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Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation is looking to raise hundreds of millions in additional capital as it races towards a driverless commercial launch by the end of 2024.  Aurora, which went public in 2021 through a special purpose acquisition merger, is pursuing a driver-as-a-service model, wherein carriers purchase trucks with the Aurora Driver tech on

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Two large Indian startups, Ola Electric and FirstCry, are set to test investor appetite with their public listings this month, but both have had to price their shares below their previous valuations as they come to terms with new market realities.

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Sybill, a startup that has built an AI assistant specifically for sales reps, has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft.

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Date Like Goblins is geared toward the gaming community and allows users to connect through voice chat while playing video games.

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The startup has raised $21.5 million to build more of its machines and deploy them throughout the U.S.

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Shared micromobility giant Lime is piloting two new vehicles designed to appeal to women and older folks who might appreciate a lower step-through frame, smaller wheels and an upgrade from pedal-assist. Lime has experimented with several new form factors over the years, something it can do because it designs and engineers its vehicles in-house.

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The California Department of Motor Vehicles this week granted Nuro approval to test its third-generation R3 autonomous delivery vehicle in four Bay Area cities, giving the AV startup a positive boost after facing some setbacks and financial struggles.

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Skip exited stealth this week to announce a partnership with outdoor clothing specialist Arc’teryx. The deal is the first to bring Skip’s MO/GO technology to market: “powered pants” that utilize a soft exoskeleton technology, developed in-house at Alphabet’s X Labs moonshot factory. MO/GO, short for “mountain goat,” is a hybrid soft/rigid exoskeleton system.

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Payments giant Stripe has acquired a four-year-old competitor, Lemon Squeezy, the latter company announced Friday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a self-proclaimed “merchant of record,” Lemon Squeezy calculates and pays global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country. It primarily serves SaaS and software businesses.

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The energy transition is a marathon, not a sprint. But opportunities for acceleration are growing. Swedish startup Greenely* has just spotted one. It’s closing an €8 million Series A funding round to expand its energy management platform into neighbouring Nordic countries (so around $8.7M at current exchange rates).

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Voice recognition is getting integrated in nearly all facets of modern living, but there remains a big gap: speakers of minority languages, and those with thick accents or speech disorders like stuttering are typically less able to use speech recognition tools that control applications, transcribe or automate tasks, among other functions.

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Don Burnette, CEO and co-founder of self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics, had an “a-ha” moment when the company started working with the U.S. Department of Defense.  Kodiak’s mission has always been to pursue long-haul autonomous trucking, but two years ago, the startup won a $50 million contract from the DoD to help the Army automate

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Farmers have got to do something about pests. But nobody really likes the idea of using more chemical pesticides. Thomas Laurent’s company, Micropep, thinks the answer might already be in the plants themselves. Micropep is exploring how naturally occurring compounds, known as micropeptides, might work as an entirely new class of pesticides.

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Quality assurance in the app development world is a necessary, but often resource-draining, undertaking. According to Statista, 23% of companies’ annual IT budgets are allocated to in-house or third-party contracted QA and testing. The stakes are high. In a survey by QA software-testing company QualiTest Group, 88% of app users said that they’d abandon apps.

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Identity management is one of the most common fulcrums around which security breaches have pivoted in the last several years. One of the main reasons it has become the gift that keeps on giving to malicious hackers is that it’s a nightmare for organizations to track. A security startup founded in Tel Aviv called Linx

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Nathan Rosenberg, the founder of farm automation platform Farmblox, said if there is one thing to know about trying to sell technology to farmers, it’s that you can’t tell them what to do.

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Marathon Fusion emerges from stealth with a plan to help fusion power plants extract tritium, a necessary fuel.

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Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. TechCrunch’s sources heard similar and added that deal discussions could last into next week. If this deal does end up getting done, it would be Alphabet’s largest acquisition yet.

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Canadian private equity firm PartnerOne paid $28.2 million for HeadSpin, a mobile app testing startup whose founder has been sentenced for fraud earlier this year, according to documents viewed by TechCrunch. The fire sale was reported by TechCrunch last week.

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Coast, a startup that describes itself as “a financial services platform for the future of transportation,” has raised $40 million in Series B funding — just four months after announcing a $25 million round, the startup has told TechCrunch exclusively. Back-to-back fundraises were common prior to and during the wild investment days of 2021.

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Strong magnets are essential for the type of fusion power being pursued by Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a number of other startups.

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Both of Hofy's co-founders, Sami Bouremoum and Michael Ginzo, along with the rest of the startup's leadership team and 120 employees, are joining Deel to build Deel IT.

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Echo Chunk, a company that is building Wordle-styled daily chess puzzle game Echo Chess, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed from a16z Speedrun (Andreessen Horowitz’s early stage games accelerator), founder of Zyanga Mark Pincus, South Park Commons (SPC), Opendoor founder and CEO Eric Wu and Stef Corazza, the Head of Generative AI at Roblox

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At a time when many startups have struggled to raise money and keep their heads above water, Kandji, an Apple device management platform, has been an exception.

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Astor is a free personal finance platform for women that merges community and investing in an approachable way, came to be.

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Danish startup Toddle has launched a no-code web app builder that's designed as a full-featured alternative to Javascript frameworks.

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Adaptive is a platform that provides tools designed to simplify payments and accounting for general construction contractors.

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When VanMoof declared bankruptcy last year, it left around 5,000 customers who had pre-ordered e-bikes in the lurch. Now VanMoof is up and running under new management, and the company’s current owners are courting those same customers by offering them a €1,000 discount off a new bike.

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Fusion power may still be a few years away, but one startup is laying the groundwork for what it hopes will become a bustling sector of the economy.

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The founders of HERO Software didn’t start out to help small tradespeople in construction with a platform. They started out to fight the climate crisis. But in doing so, they stumbled on a way to help the whole business. Now, the company has closed a €40 million Series B financing round, and plans to expand.

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Visual effects have emerged as essential in filmmaking and have transformed storytelling and creativity in the film industry with its diverse digital techniques. However, the high cost of VFX tools often leaves independent filmmakers and content creators working with modest budgets struggling to compete with larger productions

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Joby Aviation is still a year away from commercially launching its electric air taxi designed for urban environments, but the startup is already looking towards its next chapter: Intercity flight, powered by hydrogen.  To get the conversation started with regulators and demonstrate hydrogen’s capabilities, Joby told TechCrunch that it completed a 523-mile test flight.

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Iceland’s startup scene is punching above its weight. That’s perhaps in part because it kept the 2021 hype in check, but mostly because its tech ecosystem is coming of age. Iceland attracted the most venture capital per capita of all Nordic countries in 2023, but that stat is somewhat skewed by its relatively small population.

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SaaS founders trying to figure out what it takes to raise their next round can refer to Point Nine’s famous yearly SaaS Funding Napkin. (The term refers to “back of the napkin” plans or calculations.) Now, European hardware deep tech teams have a similar resource from First Momentum, a pre-seed fund investing in technical B2B

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Nala, a remittance startup that is now widening its portfolio through a new B2B payments platform, has raised $40 million equity in a rare deal that becomes one of the largest Series A transactions in Africa. 

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Solo founder Cat Jones took the plunge on setting up a travel business right around the time the pandemic was hitting Europe in March 2020. Fast forward to summer 2024 and her curated package tour business, Byway, is announcing close of an oversubscribed £5.4 million Series A round (around $6.9M at current exchange rates).

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Investors are betting on Indian wealthtech startups as a growing middle class turns to diversify investments and startups challenge traditional financial advisors for high-net-worth clients. Premji Invest is in advanced stages of talks to lead a funding round of $30 million to $40 million in Dezerv, an app offering a suite of investment solutions

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Quantum Rise, a Chicago-based startup which does AI-driven automation for companies like dunnhumby (a retail analytics platform for the the grocery industry), has raised a $15 million seed round from Erie Street Growth Partners. Its approach is somewhat akin to UIPath’s, a company famous for bringing robotic process automation to the enterprise.

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Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon as the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team join the ecommerce giant. Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news

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Samyr Laine and Ayanna Alexander-Laine now put their grit and determination to work for founders wanting to launch and scale consumer brands.

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In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one. 

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CoinDCX, India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, is expanding internationally through the acquisition of BitOasis, a digital asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, the companies said Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based startup said BitOasis’s team is joining CoinDCX, with the original leadership continuing to manage the exchange, which offers trading in more than 60 tokens.

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Indian edtech giant Unacademy is laying off about 250 employees, the latest in a series of layoffs since the reopening of schools across the country after the pandemic. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, valued at $3.4 billion in its last funding in 2021, is cutting 100 jobs in core roles (marketing, business and product) ,

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For the past couple of years, innovation has been accelerating in new materials development. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this innovation cycle. The deep tech startup has already raised €3.7 million (around $4 million at current exchange rates).

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Electricity demand is booming on account of AI. In a May 2024 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.’s total power supply by 2030, up from 3% in 2022, as cloud service providers expand to meet the demand for AI infrastructure.

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The amount of waste produced by the construction industry adds up to more than a third of the overall waste produced each year in the European Union. And it’s no better in the U.S. Stateside, the construction industry produces more than double the waste that households do each year.

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By now we know how crucial it is to have quality data for use by large language models (LLMs), but getting data ready for the models has been an early challenge for companies, an opening that represents an opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur.

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Artyc has raised $14 million to date and has a product on the market, Medstow Micro, that helps ship temperature-sensitive specimens.

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Climate tech startups especially those building hardware, face a particular challenge when trying to move beyond the prototype or pilot phase and start selling finished products to customers.

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When Ironspring Ventures launched in 2020 to back startups in industrial sectors like construction and manufacturing, it was one of very few early-stage venture firms paying attention to those capital-intensive sectors. Now, the firm is doubling down. The Austin, Texas-based firm raised $100 million for its second fund to focus on industrial startups.

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Older adults increasingly want to age in their homes rather than nursing facilities. A study by the American Association of Retired People (AARP) found that nearly 90% of people over 65 want to stay in their homes as they grow older.

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Rainforest, a startup that embeds payment processing into other software platforms, has raised $20 million in Series A funding — less than a year after announcing the close of its seed financing. Raising back-to-back rounds was more common in 2021 but we don’t see it happening as often in this new environment.

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As generative AI touches a growing number of industries, the companies producing chips to run the models are benefitting enormously. Nvidia in particular, which commands an estimated 70% to 95% of the market for AI chips, wields massive influence. Cloud providers from Meta to Microsoft are spending billions of dollars on Nvidia GPUs

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Wisk Aero, a subsidiary of Boeing, has acquired Verocel, a software verification and validation company with 25 years of experience in the aerospace industry.  Wisk has an autonomous-first approach to eVTOL. The company’s Generation 6 aircraft, which is slated to begin airborne tests this year, is designed to be supervised by humans, but not physically

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Rocketlane initially aimed to support customer onboarding. However, it has broadened its scope and doubled down on addressing the needs of professional services teams.

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Yet another generative AI venture has raised a bundle of money. And, like the others before it, it’s promising the moon. Emergence, whose co-founders include Satya Nitta, the former head of global AI solutions at IBM’s research division, today emerged from stealth with $97.2 million in funding from Learn Capital plus credit lines totaling more

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Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang set off another debate with an anti-DEI post. It revealed a lot about the current state of DEI in tech.

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18-year-olds Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot have founded APIGen, a platform to build custom APIs from natural language prompts.

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Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has somehow managed to attract the backing of two well-known venture capital firms. The startup targets in-house legal teams and law firms with an AI platform that they can configure to help other workers in the company.

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Christopher O’Donnell has hobbies. He likes music and playing guitar, but above all, he loves building software. Which is why three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM for the age AI. Unlike modern CRMs, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that somebody needs to populate and keep updated, Day learns everything

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Speak, the AI-powered language learning app, has raised new money from investors at double its previous valuation.

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Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras.

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For retailers, e-commerce is a bit of a puzzle at the moment. Online shopping trends are expected to stay strong this year, so companies can’t afford to curtail their e-commerce budgets, but at the same time, e-commerce is more fragmented than ever before.

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We all know the feeling when we send a funny TikTok video, anticipating a response from a friend, only to receive a basic laughing emoji or, worse, no reaction at all.

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Self-driving vehicles rely on many sensors to detect objects and the world around them. The conventional approach is to work with cameras and lidars.

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Cheap irrigation has transformed many regions around the world into breadbaskets, but it also means that there can be little left for other uses.

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Check out TechCrunch.com for more news.

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Golf has exploded in popularity in recent years thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of Netflix’s Full Swing documentary series. More than 531 million rounds of golf were played in the U.S. in 2023 alone, according to the National Golf Foundation.

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StepStone raised the largest fund dedicated to investing in venture secondaries ever, the firm announced last week.

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GPTZero's growth and financials made it one of the AI startups ruthlessly pursued by VCs. And Footwork's Nikhil Basu Trivedi won the deal.

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Small VC firms require deep trust, mutual support, and long-term commitment among the partners —a kinship that, in many ways, resembles a family dynamic.

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AccountsIQ, a Dublin-founded accounting technology company, has raised $65 million to build “the finance function of the future” for mid-sized companies.

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It’s not the sexiest of subject matters, but someone needs to talk about it: The CFO tech stack — software used by the chief financial officers of the world — is ripe for disruption.

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With most residential solar panels installed by smaller companies, customer experience can be a mixed bag.

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French startup Kelvin, which uses computer vision and machine learning to make it easier to audit homes for energy efficiency, has raised $5.1M.

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Who would have thought that Raspberry Pi, the maker of cheap, single-board computers, would become a public company?

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Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures

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Former Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch issued a statement Thursday following his acquittal of criminal charges, ending a 13-year legal battle with Hewlett-Packard that became one of Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud cases.

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The company is in the process of building a gigawatt-scale factory in Kentucky to produce its nickel-hydrogen batteries.

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Carta, a once-high-flying Silicon Valley startup that loudly backed away from one of its businesses earlier this year, is working on a secondary sale that would value the company at $2 billion

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"Over half of Americans wear corrective glasses or contact lenses. While there isn’t a shortage of low-cost and luxury frames available online or in stores, consumers can only buy them with a current eyeglass prescription. That means that they first need an eye exam from an optometrist to receive that prescription. But, due to a […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only."

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New York City, home to over 60,000 gig delivery workers, has been cracking down on cheap, uncertified e-bikes that have resulted in battery fires across the city. 

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After growing 500% year-over-year in the past year, Understory is now launching a product focused on the renewable energy sector.

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In 1816, French physician René Laennec invented an instrument that allowed doctors to listen to human hearts and lungs. That device — a stethoscope — eventually evolved from a simple wooden tube to a lightweight two-earpiece version most doctors today wear on their necks.

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The startup has been pursuing a ground-up redesign of a well-understood technology.

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The Raspberry Pi 5, the small-but-mighty computer that has become quite popular with tech hobbyists and industrial companies, is now also an AI computer.

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2023 was the hottest year on record, it doesn’t look like we’re cooling down anytime soon. Rising temperatures have made farming increasingly difficult in areas that were once prime agricultural resources where heat and drought have severely impacted crops.

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Ashby consolidates existing talent acquisition tools and leans heavily on AI to automate the more repetitive steps in the recruitment pipeline.

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As a teen model, Katrin Kaurov became financially independent at a young age.

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YoLa Fresh works with over a thousand retailers across Morocco and records up to $1 million in gross merchandise volume.

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When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window.

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Exactly.ai says it uses generative AI to help artists retain legal ownership of their art while being able to reproduce their designs faster and at scale.

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The company's public fund disbursement and e-commerce platform makes accepting school tuition and enabling educational enrichment more accessible. 

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A new startup called Kinnect aims to help people privately save generational memories, traditions, recipes, and more.

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Ledger, a French startup mostly known for its secure crypto hardware wallets, has started shipping new wallets nearly 18 months after announcing the latest Ledger Stax devices.

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Small operations can lose customers by not offering financing, something the Berlin-based startup wants to change.

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AniML, the French startup behind a new 3D capture app called Doly, wants to create the PhotoRoom of product videos, sort of.

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Indian startup Zypp Electric plans to use fresh investment from Japanese oil and energy conglomerate ENEOS to take its EV rental service into Southeast Asia early next year, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

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A new startup called Auggie is aiming to give parents a single platform where they can shop for products and connect with each other.

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On the heels of raising $102 million earlier this year, Bugcrowd is making good on its promise to use some of that funding to make acquisitions to strengthen its security chops.

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If you thought autonomous driving was just for cars, think again.

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When developers have a particular job that AI can solve, it’s not typically as simple as just pointing an LLM at the data.

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In 2008, Marty Kagan, who’d previously worked at Cisco and Akamai, co-founded Cedexis, a (now-Cisco-owned) firm developing observability tech for content delivery networks.

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These days every company is trying to figure out if their large language models are compliant with whatever rules they deem important, and with legal or regulatory requirements

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Hard tech startups generate a lot of buzz, but there’s a growing cohort of companies building digital tools squarely focused on making hard tech development faster, more efficient, and — well, a whole lot more like software development. 

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Zen Educate, an online marketplace that connects schools with teachers, has raised $37 million in a Series B round of funding.

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CyberArk — one of the army of larger security companies founded out of Israel — is acquiring Venafi, a specialist in machine identity, for $1.54 billion. 

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Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate.

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Private equity giant Thoma Bravo has announced that its security information and event management (SIEM) company LogRhythm will be merging with Exabeam, a rival cybersecurity company backed by the likes of Cisco and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

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Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can wreak havoc on bird populations.

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So did investors laugh them out of the room when they explained how they wanted to replace Quickbooks? Kind of.

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PayHOA, a previously bootstrapped Kentucky-based startup that offers software for self-managed homeowner associations is an example of how real-world problems can translate into opportunity.

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Charging has long been the Achilles’ heel of electric vehicles. One startup thinks it has a better way for apartment dwelling EV drivers to charge overnight.

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Four-year-old Mexican BNPL startup Aplazo facilitates fractionated payments to offline and online merchants even when the buyer doesn't have a credit card.

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Sona, a workforce management platform for frontline employees, has raised $27.5 million in a Series A round of funding.

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Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating.

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The social network has announced an updated version of its app that lets you offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so you can better customize it.

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When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for $1.64 billion in 2011.

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For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives.

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Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous

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We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.

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Meati Foods is adding 2,000 retail locations within Kroger’s family of stores by April. Three products will be available, including the Classic cutlet as well as Classic and Carne Asada steaks.

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Insempra plans to turn oil yeast in lipids on an industrial scale using yeast fermentation factories.

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The French startup's AI assistant is aimed at helping obstetricians and gynecologists with the evaluation and documentation of ultrasound exams.

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As DocuSign reportedly explores a sale to private equity, it’s acquiring a company itself.

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When Itai Ben-Zaken’s first startup failed in 2018, the former BCG consultant and Wharton MBA spent months trying to understand what he could have done differently during the five years he ran the company.

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Lamini, a new startup with funding from Andrew Ng, has emerged from stealth with a generative AI platform aimed at enterprises.

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Iconiq Capital has raised $5.15 billion across two funds associated with the seventh growth fund family, according to SEC filings.

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Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite — a critical technology validation for the company, potentially opening the door to connecting millions more devices anywhere in the world.

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Freshworks, the publicly listed SaaS firm, is acquiring U.S.-based startup Device42 for $230 million, the company disclosed in an SEC filing.

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Digital fraud detection company BioCatch has a new majority shareholder in the form of U.K private equity firm Permira.

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Butcherbox is known for grinding its way forward, bootstrapping to more than $600,000 worth of revenue.

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When Joanna Strober was around 47 she stopped sleeping. While losing sleep is a common symptom of perimenopause, she first had to go to multiple providers, including driving 45 minutes out of San Francisco to pay $750 out of pocket, to get that diagnosis and proper treatment.

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Hyde Park Venture Partners is known for having visibility into more than 90% of mid-continent startups and being early backers of companies like ShipBob, FourKites, G2, LogicGate and Dentologie.

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The eyes aren’t just a window into the soul; tracking saccades can help doctors pick up a range of brain health issues.

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French startup Carbonfact believes that the best carbon accounting solutions will focus on one vertical.

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Two veteran security experts are launching a startup that aims to help other makers of cybersecurity products to up their game in protecting Apple devices.

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Kubik, a plastic upcycling startup, has raised a $1.9 million seed extension, months after announcing initial equity investment.

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Goldman Sachs said in a report late Thursday that Indian food delivery giant Zomato’s quick commerce arm Blinkit is now more valuable than its core food delivery business, as per the bank’s sum-of-the-parts analysis.

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The Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 to ban the use of most noncompete agreements on Tuesday.

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It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing.

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The company produces plant-based ingredients from raw microalgae biomass, generated from spirulina or chlorella, that it claims is more nutritious than meat.

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Madica, an investment program launched by US-based investor Flourish Ventures to back pre-seed startups in Africa, plans to invest in up to 10 ventures by the end of the year, ramping up its funding efforts after closing three initial three deals.

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Conversational AI platform Parloa has nabbed $66 million in a Series B round of funding, a year after the German startup raised $21 million from a swathe of European investors to propel its international growth.

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Although many students in the United States enter community colleges intending to transfer to four-year universities, only 16% of those students receive bachelor’s degrees within six years

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After losing their husbands in devastating and unexpected ways, Karine Nissim and Eloise Bune D’Agostino discovered there were no suitable places where people could go to face all the challenges that surface during the grieving process

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Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that’s raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization.

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Tree planting search engine Ecosia launched a new cross-platform browser today to increase its online footprint.

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Plenty of large corporations want to join the AI revolution, but many feel it’s too early to be locked into one foundational model.

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The startup is developing a technology it claims is as fast and energy efficient as 3D printing at a cost that can compete with sand casting.

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Business banking startup Mercury, founded in 2020, is now launching a consumer banking product.

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Paris-based Dark Space is taking on the dual problems of debris and conflict in orbit with their mobile platform designed to launch, attach to, and ultimately deorbit uncooperative objects in space.

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Application programming interfaces, or APIs as they’re commonly known, are the bedrock of everything we do online.

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Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team.

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finmid is building an embedded finance product that targets that relationship between marketplaces and sellers, and raised a Series A round to further build out its product and enter new markets.

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Quilt promises its heat pump will be a sleeker design that can be installed in more places around a room than competitors’ offerings.

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UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms.

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Layoffs usually drive attention and sympathy towards affected employees, but rarely does anyone talk about what happens to the recruiters who are sometimes also asked to leave when companies decide to cut headcount.

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India is getting an electric three-wheeler passenger vehicle that charges from 0 to 100% in 15 minutes.

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The startup has raised $28 million to help fund a nationwide expansion of its cardboard-based cellulose building insulation.

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Simbian is a cybersecurity platform that effectively controls other cybersecurity platforms as well as security apps and tooling.

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The New York City-based startup has been working on a product that retrofits existing street lampposts to enable EV charging.

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The global demand for wood could grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the World Resources Institute.

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Travel and tourism are very much back on the map for consumers and the business world.

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Multiverse, the U.K. unicorn that builds apprenticeship programs for people to learn technology skills while on the job, has made an acquisition as it aims to skill up itself.

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Sprinto, a startup offering a security compliance and risk platform, has raised $20 million in new investment led by Accel.

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Coalesce offers a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes.

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DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.”

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Robovision has raised $42M to industrialize deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that are not tech companies at their core.

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Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit.

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As big social apps are optimizing for maximum engagement using algorithmic feeds and personalized content recommendations, Retro wants to go in the opposite direction.

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Two years ago, Jobs for the Future, a non-profit dedicated to helping low-wage workers attain upward mobility, established a venture arm, JFFVentures, to back innovative employment tech.

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The funding climate for AI chip startups, once as sunny as a mid-July day, is beginning to cloud over as Nvidia asserts its dominance.

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Full Glass Wine, a brand acquisition management startup that specializes in acquiring wine marketplaces, has raised $14 million in a Series A round.

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A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building.

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Using Quadratic, users can bring in hundreds of thousands of rows of data, write analyses in their preferred programming language and share the results with outside stakeholders.

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This morning Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures.

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Have you noticed the massive gap between consumer and business apps on your phone? While consumer apps are both beautifully designed and easy to use, business apps are simply painful to use.

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All parents know that raising kids is expensive.

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This morning Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures. The deal is interesting on a number of fronts including the round’s structure and how Skyflow has been impacted by growth of AI.

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Climate-tech VC Satgana has reached a final close of its first fund, which targets to back up to 30 early-stage startups in Africa and Europe.

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StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding round.

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When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, Ca., expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When that startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app centered around subscription software for contact management, people wondered if something more ambitious might be around the corner.

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Harvesting methane from organic waste and using it to produce electricity or heat is nothing new, but the startup isn't building another anaerobic digester.

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Here’s the harsh truth behind personal care products: you’re mostly buying water and plastics.

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Some of the new venture-backed beverage startups are hoping to upend the industry by creating new drink categories.

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Uzum, an e-commerce startup offering online shopping, fintech and food deliveries to millions of customers in Uzbekistan, has raised $114 million in funding.

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Globally, a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, and in Kenya, that figure stands at between 20% to 40%.

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World Fund closes first €300M ClimateTech fund, seeking to follow-on and backing hardware

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Biden administration announced that six new countries had joined an international coalition to fight the proliferation of commercial spyware, sold by companies such as NSO Group or Intellexa.

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The company reached profitability in 2023, however, more customers began asking for web and Android capabilities so they could share Copilot with family and friends.

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Silence wants to shake things up when it comes to climate tech investment; The carbon accounting startup targets SMBs to help them assess the carbon footprint of their operations and products.

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India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group.

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Have you ever needed a copy of your medical imaging to take to your doctor or another healthcare provider and received the images on a CD?

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Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov said on his channel today that the company secured $330 million in investment through bond sales last week.

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Poseidona is a Barcelona-based developer of sustainable food technology. It takes invasive seaweed and algal side-streams to make proteins. In this case, it's a soy protein alternative.

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Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency.

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ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced today that it raised $18.5 million.

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Satellite sensors collect an incredible amount of raw data, but on-orbit compute limitations mean that operators have little way to process this data in space.

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When the open source streaming service Apache Kafka was created in 2011 at LinkedIn, it was a different world. Most companies were still on prem.

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The European Union has opened its third formal investigation of a very large platform under the Digital Services Act (DSA), with China’s AliExpress earning itself the dubious honor of being the first online marketplace to face formal probe by the Commission.

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Simulations are an essential step in physical product engineering.

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Kolet is a new French startup created by four experienced co-founders in the French tech ecosystem that wants to make it easier to stay connected when you travel.

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The young automotive company raised $5.4 million and added a Tesla co-founder to its board.

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Tavus, a four-year-old generative AI startup that helps companies create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated personalized video campaigns, has confirmed a fresh $18 million in funding.

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Barcelona-based cleantech startup SolarMente recently added Leonardo DiCaprio to its cap table, hence becoming the actor's and activist's first investment in the country.

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Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing.

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Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff.

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Baron Capital, an investor in Indian food delivery startup Swiggy, has increased the value of its stake in the Indian firm, implying a valuation of $12.16 billion

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Lensrentals, a titan in the online rental service for photo, video, audio and lighting equipment, has announced its acquisition of BorrowLenses.

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In an e-mail exchange, Babylon Micro-Farms CEO Alexander Oleson tells me “we’ll have these in every school and apartment one day.”

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Kurs Orbital, a startup founded by Ukrainian space industry veterans, has closed a new tranche of funding to accelerate the commercialization of its satellite servicing technology.

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These days we have a ton of geospatial data coming off the increasing numbers of satellites circling in our atmosphere, but it takes some serious processing power and engineering prowess to turn that data into something useful.

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Harness Wealth, which started in 2018 primarily offering financial advice to startup founders and employees, has expanded into the tax advisory space and raised a $17 million extension to its Series A round.

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A travel-focused startup that the COVID pandemic could have killed has instead thrived.

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Groq, a startup developing chips to run GenAI models faster than conventional hardware, has an eye toward the enterprise — and public sector.

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MyHeritage announced today that it’s launching OldNews.com, a new website that offers access to thousands of historical newspapers, mainly from the 1800s and 1900s.

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As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface.

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Park and recreation organizations help communities thrive.

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Paris-based cybersecurity startup Filigran is capitalizing on the success of OpenCTI to build a suite of open-source threat management products.

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As part of the new fund, Inspired Capital wrote a manifesto that highlights how the venture capital firm thinks, what it believes in and what it is looking for.

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Black Tech Nation Ventures launched in 2021 to address the funding gap for Black founders amid a wave of venture diversity initiatives after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

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The latest Tech News from TechCrunch

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As generative AI continues to dominate the headlines, it’s hard sometimes to find actual working business use cases among the hype.

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GenAI has its issues. But if there’s one thing it excels at, it’s surfacing answers from vast pools of data.

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Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyper-local and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has raised $100 million in a new funding round as it clocks an yearly growth of over 35%.

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Paris’ commercial court has accepted Cooltra’s offer to acquire Cityscoot. These two companies provide shared electric mopeds that you can unlock and ride to go from one place to another.

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Uber has signed a memorandum of understanding with an Indian government-backed firm that aims to make mobility and commerce more accessible across the South Asian nation.

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A growing roster of vertical AI startups is emerging in Southeast Asia to serve sectors ranging from seafood to finance. Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler recently made a bet on 37 of them, investing $5.1 million in total for pre-seed deals.

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After years of copying and pasting shopping links into spreadsheets and taking screenshots of products to share with her friends and family,

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In a role reversal, Xalts, a Singapore fintech startup founded 18 months ago, has acquired Contour Network, a digital trade platform set up by eight major banks.

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If you’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you may have realized a French peculiarity.

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Whenever you go to a conference, whether as a sales and marketing exercise, or an executive is speaking, there is a cost associated with that.

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1Password, the AgileBits-owned password management software developer, today announced that it has acquired Kolide, an endpoint security platform, for an undisclosed amount.

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The company made advancements in its proprietary dairy seed system to leverage interactions between recombinant dairy casein and native plant proteins, with or without improved fatty acid profiles.

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Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction.

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Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, is testing a technology to detect when users of its GenAI chatbot ask about political topics and redirect those users to “authoritative” sources of voting information.

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The company's fermentation process involves the cultivation of multiple microorganisms, including mycelium, to provide nutrition, flavor and texture.

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The material could drastically improve the durability of existing fuel cell designs while also improving the efficiency of hydrogen production by 15%-20%.

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When looking at startups within healthcare, data and AI and cybersecurity, the firm considers a number of factors like the plan for infrastructure, especially now that AI is everywhere.

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The London-based wellness brand is tapping into functional mushrooms and nootropics to create a line of powder blends that it touts enhances energy, relaxation, mood and general well-being.

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Travel startup Layla — backed by firstminute capital, M13, Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillips, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith, and Paris Hilton — said today that it has acquired AI-powered itinerary building bot Roam Around.

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Bob W, a marketplace for premium short-term apartment rentals, has raised €40 million ($43 million) in a Series B round of funding.

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GenAI might be one of the most exciting technologies today. But it’s also one of the fastest-moving — posing a challenge for enterprises keen to deploy it.

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Upstash announced a $1.9 million seed round almost exactly two years ago, and an idea for building a serverless data platform for data-intensive applications built with Redis and Kafka.

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Your phone’s camera is as much software as it is hardware, and Glass is hoping to improve both.

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Podcast creators can now submit their RSS feed to YouTube and YouTube Music, the company revealed in a video uploaded to its Creator Insider channel.

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Attentive.ai, a startup building vertical software for landscaping and construction services in the U.S., has raised $7 million in a new funding round as it looks to enhance its AI-led offerings and expand them to more businesses.

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Smart water bottle-maker Larq this week announced that it has been acquired by filtration giant, Brita.

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In another sign of the scramble to accelerate the uptake and transformative potential of artificial intelligence, Dutch recycling giant Bollegraaf Group is making a strategic investment in UK AI startup Greyparrot

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Imagine you work for a car rental agency or a package delivery company and you’re in charge of a fleet of vehicles.

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Remember the Chinese “spy” balloon from 2023? If not, here’s a refresher: about a year ago, a high-altitude balloon originating from China flew across American airspace largely undetected.

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Commercial EV startup Arrival’s business continues to unravel. Arrival announced Monday in a regulatory filing that its UK division is entering administration, the country’s version of bankruptcy.

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Stellar Sleep’s mobile app taps into psychological methods to help users break the cycle of those frequent nights awake.

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Naboo, a French company that was created just a couple of years ago, is trying to create a modern online experience for company seminar planning.

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A stealth startup led by ex-Blue Origin leaders, focused on harvesting resources from the moon, has quietly closed a sizable new tranche of funding, according to regulatory documents

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Niremia Collective intends to provide capital and management resources to high-growth well-being startups as well as incubate new businesses.

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Probabl isn’t your average AI startup as this new French company is an Inria spin-off company that revolves around an open-source data science library called scikit-learn

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There’s an acute shortage of radiologists around the world, which means it is harder for medical teams to get imaging studies done.

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Planet A Foods uses fermentation technology to turn all-natural, locally-sourced ingredients, for example, oats and sunflower seeds, into its cocoa-free chocolate brand, ChoViva.

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Accel, an early investor in Indian e-commerce giants Flipkart and Myntra, is preparing a new fashion e-commerce bet in India even as competition intensifies with the recent expansion of Mukesh Ambani’s Ajio platform.

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Vienna-based early-stage VC Speedinvest has closed its fourth early-stage fund, Speedinvest 4, at €350 million (around $380 million at today’s exchange rate), surpassing the initial goal of €300 million ($325 million).

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Fidelity has cut the value of its holding in Meesho by 33.6% since the original investment, giving the Indian social commerce startup a valuation of $3.5 billion, adjusted for outstanding shares.

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Meet BlueLayer, a new European startup that is building a software platform specifically designed for carbon project developers.

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Byju’s, the world’s most valuable edtech startup, launched a rights issue on Monday, seeking to raise $200 million as the Indian firm works to address its working capital issues.

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While running a bar in Melbourne, Katy Barfield was taken aback by the large amount of ingredients thrown out at the end of each day.

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The company said the layoffs are part of a "reorganization of our corporate team to improve efficiencies and accelerate our path to profitability."

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Krutrim, an AI startup founded by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, said it has raised a funding round that values it at $1 billion.

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Elo Life is focused on a number of technologies from developing plant-based sweeteners to crop protection.

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Businesses are moving faster than ever to use generative AI and bring it to both their employees and users.

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Bilt Rewards, whose platform aims to allow consumers to earn rewards on rent and daily neighborhood spend, has raised $200 million at a $3.1 valuation, the company announced today.

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Just a year after raising $11.6 million, Kittl raised another $36 million in a Series B round led by IVP with some existing investors participating once again.

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Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is willing to cut its valuation to below $2 billion as it hunts for new funding, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

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European VC Plural has carved out a reputation for itself as being one of the few VCs in the region started and led by entrepreneurs who grew their own startups.

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Journal app Day One is introducing Shared Journals, a new social feature that lets you share stories and memories with your friends and family.

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Shamba Pride has since 2016 worked to enhance last-mile distribution for farm inputs and tackle price exploitation and quality issues for farmers through its merchant network dubbed digishops.

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Media streamer Plex’s long-delayed plans to launch a marketplace for TV and movie rentals are finally being realized after multiple false starts.

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Agriculture is poised to be one of the next great robotics categories. Everyone needs to eat, and much of what we eat in this part of the world comes from large farms.

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Last week, Artifact, a buzzy news app from Instagram’s co-founders, announced it was shutting down after failing to gain critical mass.

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International Battery Company, a startup developing lithium-ion battery cells for electric vehicles, has raised $35 million as it plans to bridge the demand-supply gap in the growing EV market in India.

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Orbital operations company Astroscale has revealed new details about its approach to refueling satellites in space, as part of a $25.5 million project exploring the concept with the Space Force.

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London-based notetaking startup Goodnotes said today it is acquiring South Korean startup Dropthebit, which operates a meeting and video summary tool called Traw.

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Build a Rocket Boy, a Scotland-headquartered game development company founded by one of the former lead developers behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise,announced it has raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding.

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Argentinian payments infrastructure startup Pomelo has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding.

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After using Figma to create user interfaces and experiences, developers are left with the hefty task of coding the designs in order to create functional websites or apps.

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Low-code dev platforms have gained momentum in recent years, in large part because they promise to shorten what’s otherwise typically a lengthy app development cycle.

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Most humans learn the skill of deceiving other humans. So can AI models learn the same? Yes, the answer seems — and terrifyingly, they’re exceptionally good at it.

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Historically, vacation rental companies have managed homes for homeowners. While this model has proven popular, it also has its drawbacks.

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Some technologies make so much sense that they just won’t disappear. T9 — the old text input from our trusty Nokia phones from the 1990s — is one of those throwbacks.

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After years of exploding growth and massive funding rounds, it’s time for consolidation in the micromobility industry. Tier and Dott, two leading European companies in the space, have announced that they plan to merge.

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Seedstars Africa Ventures has received a $30 million capital commitment from EIB Global, an arm of the European Investment Bank, which becomes the first major institutional investment for its first Pan-African venture capital fund.

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Sony is breaking new ground in the ongoing NFTs and content authenticity saga.

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You can spend all day long curating custom playlists for every mood, picking tracks based on tempo or intensity, but whether you’re corner-carving or just commuting you’ll never perfectly match the cadence and energy of every drive.

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Governance, risk management and compliance — GRC for short — remains one of the most active startup areas in terms of VC investments.

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Paris-based startup Nabla just announced that it has raised a $24 million Series B funding round led by Cathay Innovation, with participation from ZEBOX Ventures — the corporate VC fund of CMA CGM.

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Thanks to bans on pay toilets dating back to the 1970s, folks in the U.S. have become accustomed to enjoying free public restroom access pretty much anywhere their travels take them.

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Indian financial services startup MobiKwik seeks to raise about $84.2 million through issue of new shares in an initial public offering in the home market.

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Fisker remains far from meeting CEO and founder Henrik Fisker’s publicly-stated goal of delivering 300 electric SUVs per day globally

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As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with gen AI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up. It might seem like a Sisyphean task, going up against competitors with billions upon billions of users.

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Intel, intent on making bigger moves in the market for AI-powered enterprise software, is spinning out a new platform company with the backing of Boca Raton, Florida-based asset manager and investor DigitalBridge.

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Another proptech startup has run into trouble.

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Ruth Foxe Blader has left her role as partner at Anthemis Group after nearly seven years to start her own venture firm, Foxe Capital, TechCrunch learned exclusively today.

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Tesla shipped a record number of electric vehicles in the fourth quarter to help it edge out its targets for the year.

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Rivian reported Tuesday it produced 17,541 vehicles at its Normal, Illinois factory and delivered 13,972 to customers in the fourth quarter, mixed results that left investors wary and sent shares down in pre-market trading.

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Defense tech startup Shield AI has expanded its latest funding round with another $300 million in equity and debt, bringing its total Series F to $500 million, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. This total amount reflects $200 million in equity closed in November, $100 million in new equity raised at the Series F price, and $200 […]

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AI is all the rage — particularly text-generating AI, also known as large language models (think models along the lines of ChatGPT). In one recent survey of ~1,000 enterprise organizations, 67.2% say that they see adopting large language models (LLMs) as a top priority by early 2024. But barriers stand in the way.

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E-commerce startup FirstCry is seeking to raise $218 million through issue of fresh shares in its initial public offering, the 13-year-old startup said in a draft prospectus filed with the market regulator Thursday, becoming the latest Indian startup to explore the public markets. FirstCry earlier sought to raise as much as $700 million in its […]

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Amid rising geopolitical tensions, many Chinese tech companies find themselves recalibrating their overseas pursuits, often sidestepping any reference to their origin. One bold startup called DP Technology stands out from the crowd. Working to apply artificial intelligence to molecular simulations, DP, short for “Deep Potential,” believes that the unifying power of “scientific research for humanity” […]

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Homes aren’t getting cheaper — or necessarily easier to secure. This year, the median household income for home buyers jumped to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The volume of homes for sale in the U.S. reached record a low, meanwhile — and shows no sign of recovery. Now, […]

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Code.org, the US educational non-profit, has filed a lawsuit in a California district court alleging that Byju’s subsidiary WhiteHat Jr breached a licensing contract by failing to pay fees while continuing to use Code.org’s platform. WhiteHat Jr, which sold to Byju’s for $300 million in 2020, partnered with Code.org last year and agreed to pay […]

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"ShareChat is in final stages of deliberations to secure about $50 million in new funding that trims the startup’s valuation to below $1.5 billion, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Existing backers including Temasek and Tencent are among the investors in advanced stages of talks to invest in the new round, the sources […]

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"A few years ago, Karine Mellata and Michael Lin met while working at Apple’s fraud engineering and algorithmic risk team. Both engineers, Mellata and Lin were involved with helping to address online abuse problems including spam, botting, account security and developer fraud for Apple’s growing customer base. Despite their efforts to develop new models to […]

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Vestwell, which provides the infrastructure for employers to power workplace savings programs, has raised $125 million in what the company describes as a “preempted” round of funding.

Medallion is a platform for artists to have a dedicated digital hub for promoting album releases, tour dates and merch drops, as well as selling digital collectibles and sharing exclusive content to foster deeper connections with fans.

Claim, a platform that is both a rewards app and a social network, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital.

SimSpace, a startup that creates digital replicas of organizations’ tech and networking stacks for cybersecurity training, has raised $45 million in a funding round led by L2 Point Management.

Salesforce has announced plans to acquire Spiff, a platform that automates commission management for sales teams.

IBM is doling out €2.13 billion ($2.3 billion) to acquire a duo of data integration assets from Germany-based enterprise software company Software AG.

What do iconic Valley investors Zachary Bogue and Chris Sacca have in common?

The investment arm of the UK retail bank M&G has led a funding of $340 million into Udaan, a business-to-business e-commerce startup,

Australia-based link-in-bio platform Linktree announced today that it has acquired competitor Koji from its parent company GoMeta for an undisclosed amount.

Companies are increasingly curious about AI and the ways in which it can be used to (potentially) boost productivity.

Just a couple of weeks after announcing $22 million in fundraising, Paris-based startup studio Hexa is expanding beyond its studio model to partner with later stage companies that have already found product-market fit.

Metafuels sets out to change the landscape of sustainable jet fuel, and has just picked up an $8 million suitcase from baggage carousel 3 at its local ZRH. Ahh, Zurich.

French startup Pivot is an interesting startup story as it is scaling at a rapid pace even though startup investments are down in Europe.

Tribe Capital is in talks to lead a $75 million to $100 million funding into the logistics aggregator Shiprocket, according to a person familiar with the matter, a notable financing deliberation at a time when Indian startups are struggling to raise capital.

AtomicJar was seemingly a high flying early stage startup with a hefty (by today’s standards) $25 million Series A last January.

French startup Mistral AI has officially closed its much anticipated Series A funding round.

Texas has been historically known for its oil booms. Today the state is perhaps better known as a magnet for tech companies and tech talent, especially in its capital city of Austin.

The United States has long had an affordable housing crisis, but it’s been exacerbated as of late by a surge in mortgage interest rates and low inventory.

Mammoth, an app from the Mozilla-backed startup focused on building a more consumer-friendly entry point to the world of decentralized social media, is out today with its next big upgrade: Mammoth 2.

Pimento is a new French startup that is using generative AI in an interesting way as the company focuses on the first step of creative processes — ideation, brainstorming and moodboarding.

A developer platform for the…sky? That’s the vision of OurSky, a startup founded last year that’s aiming to make space observational data more accessible via a software platform and global telescope network.

Discord launched a major refresh of its mobile app on Tuesday, putting messaging front-and-center while making a host of small improvements that users have been asking for.

Twitch plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27, it said, after finding that operating in one of the world’s largest esports markets is “prohibitively expensive.”

Around a year ago, TechCrunch wrote about a little-known company developing AI-accelerating chips to face off against hardware from titans of industry.

Carbon Maps is a relatively new entrant in the carbon accounting space as it is less than one year old.

MoveinSync, an Indian startup offering mobility solutions to blue-chip companies for workplace commute, is engaging with investors to raise a growth round, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Indonesia’s construction industry is growing quickly, driven by residential and industrial building, alongside infrastructure development plans by the government.

Clayful is a platform that enables students aged eight to 18 to connect with a mental health expert within 60 seconds when they need it.

Alternative investment platform Yieldstreet announced today that it has agreed to acquire Cadre, an online real-estate-focused investment platform aimed at institutional and high net worth investors.

It’s only appropriate that, during AWS’ biggest week of the year, a cloud-based software-as-a-service startup closed a sizeable funding round.

Businesses will never not (forgive the double negative) push to improve efficiency. It’s their commercial imperative. Sometimes, that takes the form of budget cuts.

Many companies are trying to use AI chatbots (beyond ChatGPT) in different industries

Textiles and garments contribute 16% of Vietnam’s total GPD, but it’s challenging for small garment brands to take advantage of the country’s manufacturing prowess.

Biotech and AI startup Cradle is finding success with its generative approach to protein design, landing big customers and a hefty $24 million of new investment.

AI startups that aren’t OpenAI are plugging away this week, it’d seem — sticking to their product roadmaps even as coverage of the chaos at OpenAI dominates the airwaves.

Well before Washington banned Nvidia’s exports of high-performance graphic processing units to China, the country’s tech giants had been hoarding them in anticipation of an escalating tech war between the two nations.

The company offers hyper-personalization email and SMS campaigns and retail transaction data insights from one dashboard.

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Audio series platform Pocket FM has topped $160 million in annual recurring revenue and is inching closer to raising over $80 million in a new funding round, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Lightspeed, an existing investor in Pocket FM, is in advanced stages of talks to lead the funding round into the […]

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Vendelux offers 65 million data points on over 160,000 global events, tradeshows and conferences so event marketers can make better decisions about what to attend or sponsor.

One AI startup’s undoing is another’s opportunity. Case in point: today, AI21 Labs, a company developing generative AI products along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT, closed a $53 million extension to its previously-announced Series C funding round. 

SEVA intends to invest in New York-based customer-centric founders of fast-growing, bootstrapped companies to scale via profitable growth.

LucidLink, a startup offering a platform that enables teams to work on files without having to download or sync them, today announced that it raised $75 million in a Series C round led by Brighton Park Capital

Ehsan Vaghefi, CEO and co-founder of Toku, grew up with a blind father who lost eyesight at the age of four due to congenital glaucoma.

The future is going to be electric, but in the air and on the water that transition is proving more difficult than on land.

Ida is a relatively new French startup that wants to work with supermarkets and grocery stores to optimize new orders of fresh products, such as fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry and fish.

The Australian government recently set new packaging regulations after an official review found just 18% of plastic packaging is recycled, falling far short of a 70% target by 2025.

Remote, the HR tech company that allows companies to hire, manage and pay remote workers, is launching a remote job marketplace called Remote

Atlas, a 3D generative AI platform, is launching today after two years in stealth with $6 million in seed funding.

Mark Peter Davis, Interplay founder and managing partner, says the firm stands out with its outsized value proposition relative to its check size.

E-commerce in Southeast Asia grew rapidly during the pandemic, and that momentum is continuing.

Upciti is a French startup that has been working on a hardware sensor for city centers that is easy to install and maintain.

Picsart, a photo-editing startup backed by SoftBank, is launching a new suite of AI-powered tools for businesses and individuals.

Chptr, an app for sharing and holding onto memories of lost loved ones, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

Ozone, the maker of an AI-powered collaborative video editor in the cloud, has raised $7.1 million in seed funding and is launching in open beta.

While the idea of owning rental properties is appealing to many Americans, the ability to vet and afford such investments in single-family homes is out of reach for a large part of the population.

Omegle, an online service that allowed individuals to connect and chat with strangers, has shut down after 15 years citing growing misuse of the platform, including in committing “unspeakably heinous crimes.”

Written by Manish Singh - The U.S. index fund pioneer Vanguard has cut the worth of its holding in the Indian ride-hailing startup Ola by nearly two thirds since original investment.

Written by Pete Sawers - Facebook parent Meta is teaming up with Hugging Face and European cloud infrastructure company Scaleway to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris.

German AI startup Aleph Alpha has raised a Series B funding round of $500 million from a consortium of seven new investors, as well as existing investors from previous rounds.

There’s a new unicorn in town, and its name is Enable.

Appetite, an app for discovering and booking restaurants, is aiming to streamline the process of planning nights out with friends and family.

Electric mobility startup Revel is officially shutting down its shared moped business in New York City and San Francisco, according to a company-wide email that CEO and co-founder Frank Reig sent Friday.

When TechCrunch covered Carepatron’s pre-seed last year, it was focused on serving solo practitioners and small health practices.

Flavrs, an iOS app that lets foodies discover recipes and and then shop for ingredients, is introducing a new takeout feature and AI-powered recommendation systems thanks to a custom integration with OpenAI.

Supply chain logistics platform Flexport is acquiring the assets of shuttered digital freight network Convoy, according to a memo Flexport CEO Ryan Peterson sent to staff Wednesday.

EarlyBird, an app that lets families and friends gift investments to children, has raised $4.5 million in a seed extension round that was partially funded by its user base.

By Kyle Wiggers. Grants are the lifeblood of many organizations. But procuring them often turns out to be a time-consuming, labor-intensive process.

By Mary Ann Azevedo. Less than six months after launching to the public and announcing a $7.5 million seed raise, a startup providing banking services to Americans over the age of 62 has raised additional funding.

Organizations today rely on a growing number of apps to get work done.

In the U.S., figuring out ways to pay for health insurance is a perennial problem — not just for individuals, but for the businesses employing them.

Nectar AI will help brands find new ways to personally engage and convert consumers where they spend the most time.

Norway-based Soundboks just released its latest $1,000 Bluetooth speaker.

Getting answers to tough, qualitative questions about products from users can be costly, both in terms of time and money.

Rapido, the eight-year-old Indian bike taxi startup, is expanding into the cab market in the South Asian nation, where Uber and its homegrown competitor Ola dominate.

Many doctors are overwhelmed by paperwork, leaving them stretched thin, with less time to see patients.

Ola Electric said on Thursday that it has raised $384.43 million in a funding round.

Created by the founder of Thunes, global digital currency payments institution Triple-A wants to close the gap between traditional finance and blockchain-based payments with its white-label solutions for businesses.

Whether we like it or not, the leather industry significantly contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and global waste generation.

Much has been made of AI-powered videos which can either make a real person speak different words or other languages, or generate a synthetic person which can speak on-demand.

Circu Li-ion cofounder and CEO Antoine Welter says his startup’s upcycling machine can diagnose batteries in seconds.

Ternary, a platform that helps companies manage how much they’re spending on cloud resources across multiple public cloud providers, today announced that it raised $12 million in a Series A funding round.

The Rounds, a sustainable “household restocking” service, wants to prove that last-mile logistics can be done both efficiently and profitably.

Expense management startup Navan has inked an exclusive deal with Citi that executives say will open its addressable market significantly.

When Warmly started a couple of years ago, people were meeting regularly in Zoom and the company provided a custom background and information about the participants.

Statement, a startup developing a platform for enterprise cash flow management, today announced that it raised $12 million in seed funding.

Passwordless authentication offers a host of advantages over traditional pins, passphrases and passcodes.

Developer community site Stack Overflow has laid off 28% of its staff, the Prosus-owned company announced Monday.

Flanks gathers global wealth data under one API so that clients can have a complete view of their investment portfolio in real time and make more intelligent investment decisions.

Nearly a year ago, developers Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros released a hobby project called Riffusion that could generate music using not audio but images of audio.

Reality Defender, one of several startups developing tools to attempt to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated content, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by DCVC.

Accessercise, which developed a fitness app for people who want to exercise despite their disabilities, was one of the Startup Battlefield 200 finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023.

Creative Force helps retailers and brands create content at scale for marketing campaigns and online merchandising.

Two of the biggest drivers of growth on social and e-commerce platforms have been food and influencers, so it should come as no surprise that startups are now getting in on the act in trying to combine how these two work together.

Israeli biotech startup Mana.bio has been planning to launch its programmable drug treatment solution for months, and decided to forge ahead in spite of the attacks that happened this past weekend in the country.

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KIT Plugins, a music software development startup, has raised $1 million in Series A funding led by Copycat Holdings.

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Access to education in Bangladesh is filled with inequalities, say the founders of edtech 10 Minute School.

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Germany, France, and Italy are among the countries which last year enacted laws to stop the practice of culling male day-old chicks, because, as they do not lay eggs, are considered surplus to requirements.

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UAE-based Zest Equity, a startup digitizing private market dealings, has raised $3.8 million seed funding to build more tools for enabling fast and transparent transactions by ecosystem players while increasing their liquidity through secondary deals.

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French startup Orus has raised an $11.6 million Series A funding round (€11 million).

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Barcelona-based Heura, a disrupter in the plant-based protein space since 2017, has a product hitting shelves shortly in Spain and France that it reckons will have the most committed meat eaters sitting up in disbelief.

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The company aims to create whole-cut cultivated fish filets, starting with bluefin tuna, using muscle and fat cells.

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Circular, backed by Y Combinator, is a service that offers consumers in Singapore and Australia subscriptions to high-end electronics, like iPhones, Samsung Galaxy, iPad Pros and MacBook Pros.

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The average shopper probably hasn’t heard of SuperOrdinary, but if they are a beauty or skincare fan, they’ve definitely heard of some of the brands the startup works with.

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Ohm’s Quest is a steampunk-inspired cubical device that acts as a sort of escape game console.

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Amazon has shut down its Clubhouse competitor’s live radio app Amp almost 18 months after its launch. The app allowed users to play DJ and provide commentary alongside playing tracks.

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CoPilot, a digital training app that matches users with one-on-one remote fitness coaches, has raised $6.3M in Series A-1 funding led by Jackson Square Ventures.

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Sam Altman, Peak XV, and Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman’s AI grant are among backers of an AI startup, founded by two teenagers, that’s aiming to assist businesses in automating numerous workflows in previously unexplored ways.

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Automata, a company that combines software and hardware to automate science labs around the globe, has raised $40 million in an equity-based round of funding.

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Amar Varma, a three-time entrepreneur and VC, experienced firsthand the challenge of dealing with administering equity stakes within a startup.

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Greener, the Australian cleantech startup that creates custom action plans to help its customers become more environmentally sustainable, is launching Greener for Business today.

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Being is an app that wants to help users map out and address mental health concerns

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The concept of a data mesh has been around for a few years.

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Transfr, a startup creating VR tools for training and career development, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series C round.

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Post, a publisher-focused Twitter/X alternative backed by a16z, is bringing its social news-sharing app to Android today along with new tools that will make it easier for creators to share their newsletter content on the platform.

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Lumu, a startup that helps enterprises identify and isolate security compromises, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Forgepoint Capital, $6 million of which is debt.

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Senser describes itself as an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to help developers and ops teams more easily get to the root causes of outages and service degradations.

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When you think about collaborative design tools, chances are you immediately start thinking about Figma, the popular design tool that Adobe wants to acquire for $20 billion.

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Forget invite-only social apps, Lapse is testing a new technique to acquire its users: it forces you to invite your friends in order to get in.

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If a company wants to offer in-app messaging or voice calls, they don’t have to develop the infrastructure themselves when there’s something like Twilio at their disposal.

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Kneron, which is developing AI chips to power self-driving cars, among other autonomous machines, today announced that it raised $49 million in an extension to its Series B round.

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TeachMe.To, a sports coaching platform for beginner athletes, secured $2 million in seed funding, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

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Amazon said Monday it has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic.

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Astronauts have been conducting experiments on the International Space Station for as long as the station has been in orbit, but astronaut labor is expensive: crew time costs $130,000 per hour, and companies are capped at 25 hours per year.

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Mesh (formerly Front Finance), a startup developing a service to help customers transfer and manage digital assets like crypto, has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round.

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Utsav Somani, who helped AngelList launch in India and oversaw its local operations for five years, is gearing up to find more ways to help founders.

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Google-backed audio content platform Kuku FM has raised $25 million in a new funding round as it looks to make deeper inroads with its audiobook offerings in the South Asian market.

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Legit Security, a cybersecurity company developing a platform to identify app vulnerabilities from code, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by CRV with participation from Cyberstarts, Bessemer Venture Partners and TCV.

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A few weeks ago, it was reported that MotherDuck, the company commercializing the lightweight database platform DuckDB, was in talks to raise new capital from VC firm Felicis.

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French startup Stoïk offers a cyber insurance product to small and medium companies — a bit like Coalition in the U.S. And things have been working well in France.

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Babbel, the popular subscription-based language learning service, today announced that it has acquired Toucan, the well-funded language learning browser extension.

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Dragos, a company building software to secure the control systems for manufacturing and industrial equipment, has raised $74 million in a Series D round extension led by WestCap.

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Kenya-based EV startup Roam has unveiled a new shuttle bus model dubbed Move, coming as the East African country continues to push for the adoption of electric vehicles.

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Pixis, an AI-powered platform for brands to monitor and orchestrate their marketing campaigns, today announced that it raised $85 million in a Series C1 round.

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Data analytics and AI software maker Databricks has raised a Series I round worth more than $500 million, earning a valuation of $43 billion.

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From Tableau and Looker, to PowerBI and beyond, there are no shortage of business intelligence (BI) tools designed to help companies unlock insights from their vast swathes of data.

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Mecho Autotech, a startup offering automotive spare parts, vehicle repairs and maintenance services, has raised a $2.4 million pre-Series A round.

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Mighty Buildings, a startup building tech for prefabricated, ostensibly environmentally-friendly homes, today announced that it raised $52 million in a funding round co-led by Waed Ventures and Bold Capital with participation by Khosla Ventures.

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Kolors, a Mexico City-based startup that connects intercity bus riders with bus drivers, is acquiring B2B van pooling provider Urbvan for $12 million cash.

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FunNow, the Taiwan-based app that lets users book activities on-demand in five Asian countries, is growing its reach in Southeast Asia through a merger with restaurant booking app Eatigo.

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Like in many industries, there’s an acute shortage of security guards. This means guards still on the job have to pull extra hours and are more likely to make mistakes because of fatigue.

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There’s a gold rush on in biotech as AI and other tools are used to find new drugs and treatments. With $5.5 million in new funding,

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Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit underwriting solutions to banks and non-banking financial institutions, has raised $229 million in a new funding round as it looks deepen its expansion into North America and Europe.

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Retool started out as a platform for building line-of-business apps, but over the last few years, the well-funded startup added a number of backend services as well, including, most recently, a workflow automation service.

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Certa, a compliance, governance and risk management platform for enterprises, today announced that it raised $35 million in a Series B round.

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It’s easy to start a startup. But it’s far more difficult to shut one down.

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The U .K. is set to rejoin the European Union’s (EU) preeminent science R&D funding program, after a three-year hiatus resulting from a Brexit fallout.

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Josys, a startup offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to automate corporate IT software application management, has raised a $93 million Series B round.

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Of the many lofty promises of cryptocurrency, one of the most commendable ones is its potential to bring financial inclusion to underserved users.

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Butternut Box, a U.K.-based startup that prepares and ships healthy food and supplements for dogs, is raising £280 million ($354 million) in a round of funding from General Atlantic and L Catterton.

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Sometimes the work of having a job takes time away from work.

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Speak, an English language learning platform backed by OpenAI’s startup investment fund, the OpenAI Startup Fund, announced that it raised $16 million in a Series B-2 funding round led by angel investor Lachy Groom.

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French startup Teale has secured a funding round of $11 million earlier this summer.

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Hyperproof, a software-as-a-service risk and compliance management company, today announced that it raised $40 million in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital with participation from Toba Capital, an early-stage VC firm.

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The majority of Vietnam’s population live in rural areas and often lack access to financial services because banks and other institutions open most of their physical locations in cities.

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The Martian Lawyers Club (MLC) wants to take game personalization to the next level with the help of generative AI.

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Allseated, a platform that helps event organizers plan and showcase venues virtually, has raised $20 million in an equity round of funding.

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During the pandemic, almost all retailers in Asia established an e-commerce presence and adopted digital payments.

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Kiki (formerly EasyRent), a subletting startup that matches listers with people looking to rent for up to six months, recently closed a $6 million seed round, its co-founder Toby Thomas-Smith exclusively told TechCrunch.

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Devolut enables merchants a returns option that doesn’t require boxes or labels. It also provides a network of “city points” where consumers can go to return merchandise.

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Treatments like botox are becoming more ubiquitous, spurring growth in the number of medspas, or centers that offer botox, IV hydration and laser treatments from certified providers like registered nurses.

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Instant grocery delivery startup Zepto has raised $200 million in a new funding round at a valuation of $1.4 billion.

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Job references are an important part of hiring the right person, especially for remote positions.

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What do a chef in Turkey, a pilot in Australia, a physical therapist in Oregon, a submarine operator in the military and a DJ in the Bay Area all have in common?

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There’s a growing number of cybersecurity regulations designed to keep business and customer data protected.

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Following rumors that it was exploring the sale of its weather business as part of a move to streamline operations, IBM says that it’s found a buyer for The Weather Company.

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Despite the abundant venture capital available for startups in the current wave of generative AI breakthroughs, Relume has turned down investments and instead relied on bootstrapping since its launch.

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Before founding dipp, Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City.

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What happens when a maker of tiny electric vehicles dips its wheels into the military industrial complex?

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In the past year, the company grew its membership base to over 1,000 brands and retailers and saw its year over year gross merchandise value run rate grow over 10 times.

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Twiga will conduct another round of layoffs to keep its business afloat amid macroeconomic headwinds that have made capital harder to raise, and forced venture-backed companies to scale down their operations.

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Wonder Brands has since launched over 15 brands in the past 12 months and over 2,000 SKUs in the categories of home and garden, sports and fitness and beauty and personal care categories.

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Defense-focused space technology startup True Anomaly has received key permits from regulators that will allow it to demonstrate imaging and rendezvous capabilities on-orbit for the first time.

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The company brings the entire product testing process under one umbrella and automates it so customers can set up their testing and get the product results they need quickly.

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DynamoFL, which offers software to bring large language models (LLMs) to enterprises and fine-tune those models on sensitive data, today announced that it raised $15.1 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Canapi Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.

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The demand for conversational AI — mostly chatbots — has arguably never been higher, riding the publicity wave of systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

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Traditionally, companies looking to extract data from websites have had to create custom code to get at the data, an expensive and time-consuming process that is often out of reach of smaller businesses.

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As the spend management space continues to get more competitive, the various players seem to be constantly iterating to add new features to their products.

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The new investment, an extension of a previous Series A round, enabled the company to open a third location in the Miami area.

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The company builds automated digital workers that can be used in lieu of human employees.

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We didn’t think we’d see the day. Digital mortgage lender Better.com’s proposal to combine with Aurora Acquisition Corp. via a SPAC.

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Many companies grapple with data challenges. In a 2019 survey, Deloitte reports that 67% of executives aren’t comfortable accessing or using the data at their organizations.

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Osano, an Austin, Texas-based startup developing a platform to help companies manage their data privacy, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series B funding round.

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The architecture, engineering and construction industries involve giant concrete molds that are expensive, slow to manufacture and often only used a few times before being disposed.

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Microplastics are everywhere — quite literall.

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As organizations embrace cloud services — and are forced to confront changing regulations and data use standards — their ability to maintain control of data security frequently becomes strained.

Atmosfy, an app that helps you discover restaurants and local businesses through short-form videos, has raised $12 million in seed funding led by Redpoint Ventures.

The new funding will help Meatable scale its processes and accelerate the launch of its first products — sausages and pork dumplings — in Singapore starting in 2024.

In its continued attempt to diversify its product offerings, Zoom today launched a new asynchronous video tool, Zoom Clips, that lets users record, edit and share video clips without having to hop on a meeting.

One Model, a platform that uses AI to help employers make decisions about recruiting, hiring, promotions, layoffs and general workplace planning, today announced that it’s raised $41 million in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital. 

The appetite for hardware to train AI models is voracious. AI chips are forecast to account for up to 20% of the $450 billion total semiconductor market by 2025, according to McKinsey. 

Several years ago, Zach Epstein was leading marketing measurement initiatives at Google, helping large corporate customers to build out measurement infrastructure. 

Long before people were talking about ChatGPT and generative AI, companies like Datasaur were dealing with the nuts and bolts of building machine learning models, helping label things to train the model.

The platform offers tools and infrastructure so that visual artists can be discovered and sell their art.

We all know how important data quality is. 

Ramp continues to ramp up its business. 

If you ask Pankaj Patel, there’s too much complexity in networks today — particularly enterprise networks. 

The U.S. index fund pioneer Vanguard has cut the worth of its holding in the Indian ride-hailing startup Ola by more than half since original investment.

The company added a social media hub for automated posts and ads as well as an AI-enabled “Super Assistant” to help with navigating through the application and digitizing customer interactions.

Meet Pollen, a new French startup that wants to provide a better way to learn new skills. 

The company offers comprehensive women’s healthcare, either in-person or virtual, and one of its differentiators is that the average appointment is between 20 and 60 minutes.

The company has built up a base of employer clients, including Adobe, Ceridian and Rexford Industrial, eager to offer an employer-sponsored benefit for employees with pets.

Business is regularly won and lost on the strength of a proposal. 

Helpful's app brings insurance benefits, medical records and caregiving resources into one place.

The company seeks to digitize the rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) financial technique often used by ethnic communities.

Dioxycle is a carbon transformation startup that is working on a new process to produce ethylene at scale using recycled carbon emissions. 

It would be fair to say there’s no global solution for instant 24/7 access to mental health support. 

A key Byju’s investor has gone on record to express its disappointment in the edtech giant’s governance issue, just weeks after all the independent members quit the startup’s board. 

Remote working and digital nomads became two very prominent aspects of the world of work during the pandemic, shedding a light on the millions of people who live in one country but earn money in another. 

Amazon might have the monopoly on physical goods sold online. 

Cruise, the self-driving arm of General Motors, has begun initial testing and data collection in Miami, the company said in a tweet Wednesday. 

Collectly customers have, on average, been able to increase patient collections for medical group partners by 75% and reduce the “days sales outstanding” to 12 days from between 60 and 90 days.

InDrive (formerly inDriver) is bringing a new type of ride-hailing app to South Florida. The startup operates a “bid-based” platform wherein passengers can name their own fare for a ride, and nearby drivers can accept, decline or counter the offer. 

Gushwork.ai, a global platform that aims to advance business process outsourcing (BPO) using AI and human expertise, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lightspeed. 

A recent report said that Indonesia’s electric vehicle (EV) market is projected to reach $20 billion by 2029, up from $533 million in 2022. 

Another grim stage for VanMoof, the e-bike startup backed by venture capitalists to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Running a multi-cloud strategy where you use different cloud vendors for different workloads, helps companies avoid vendor lock-in and lets them use the best-of-breed tools across different platforms. 

Polar Analytics gives each brand a so-called “knowledge worker,” that aggregates all of the different data sources so that users can then pose questions about the data.

Six months after raising a $7 million seed round, Herself Health is back with some additional venture capital to expand its clinic footprint.

Inngest, an open-source startup that helps developers build and manage serverless queues, background jobs and workflows.

Spline, a no-code design tool for creating 3D assets, today announced that it raised $15 million in a seed round led by Gradient Ventures.

There are a number of companies in the U.S. that offer revenue-based financing to SaaS companies including Capchase, Pipe, Founderpath and Arc. 

In 2015, Pieter Danhieux and Matias Madou, both cybersecurity analysts, came to the realization that they wanted to provide a way to make software more secure by empowering developers with the skills and tools to enhance their speed of delivery.

With the Nature’s One acquisition, Bobbie becomes the third-largest fully integrated brand in the U.S. and will grow to a 15% non-WIC market share.

Pearpop, a marketplace for social collaborations, announced today that it’s launching a new product called “Boost Mode.” 

San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Coalition is acquiring Jumbo, a mobile app that lets you control your privacy on the web. 

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps are an essential part of how many companies do business. But when the number of apps grows beyond a certain threshold, it can be difficult to secure them.

During the pandemic, the digitisation of the freight industry took off like a rocket, and stayed that way. 

As email has becomes an increasingly clogged communication mechanism, businesses looking for more direct ways to communicate with their customers in a B2B context have been turning to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and other channels. 

While working at Vetan, a startup helping small- and medium-sized (SMBs) businesses manage employee payroll, Jatin Mehta realized that SMBs often lack the tools to thrive online with organic sales. 

Google’s venture capital arm Gradient Ventures has made another foray into Europe, investing as part of a $3.2 million seed round in two-year-old German startup Weflow. 

The pandemic has damaged the entire manufacturing supply chain, which is not likely to return to normal until at least 2024 due to a few challenges, including the ongoing U.S.-China tech battle.

Brinc, the Hong Kong-based accelerator backed by investors like Animoca Brands, is launching a new program for fledgling climate tech startups.

DigitalOcean, the cloud hosting business, today announced that it’s agreed to acquire Paperspace, a New York-based cloud computing and AI development startup, for $111 million in cash.

New offerings include an on-demand pay solution where users can withdraw funds immediately for the money they've earned, but not yet received, and a lending program for employers.

Dougs, a French accounting startup, has been around since 2015. It already generates $16.4 million (€15 million) in annual recurring revenue. And it’s a bootstrapped company, meaning that it hasn’t opened its capital and raised any funding from VC firms.

Indian online pharmacy startup PharmEasy has informed its existing investors that it plans to raise a new round of funding via rights issue at a 90% markdown from the previous valuation, Indian newspaper Economic Times reported.

Secret sprawl, where companies store authentication credentials and similar sensitive data across multiple locations, is a real and growing problem for any company wanting to avert a security breach. 

In 2023, funds of funds (FoFs) are on track to raise the smallest amount of money this year in more than a decade. 

The Naked Market is relaunching Haus favorites, including Citrus Flower, Pomegranate Rosemary and Grapefruit Jalapeño. 

B Garage, a San Jose-based startup building autonomous drones along with software to track warehouse inventory, said that it has picked up $20 million in a Series A round of funding. 

Indian startups experienced a significant contraction in funding in the first half of 2023, revealing the knock-on effect of broader public market instability on young ventures in emerging regions.

Parabola, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to help expedite back-office processes, particularly in the logistics and ecommerce sectors, today announced that it raised $24 million in a Series B funding round.

Astrix Security, a platform that helps companies manage and secure third-party app integrations, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series A funding round led by CRV with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and F2 Venture Capital. 

Amazon, keen to avoid being left behind in the hyper-competitive AI race, is launching a new program to invest in startups and organizations focused on generative AI.

The success of large language models like GPT has sparked a frenzy of developers eager to make AI-powered applications.

ThoughtSpot, an AI-powered analytics platform last valued at $4.5 billion, today announced that it’s entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Mode Analytics, a business intelligence startup, for $200 million in cash and stock. 

Frst, the Paris-based VC firm with no vowel in its name, is in the process of raising its second fund. 

The amount of plastic waste produced globally is on track to triple to over 1,000 million tonnes by 2060. The OECD report predicts that developed countries will continue to produce the most plastic waste per person, although emerging regions like Africa and Asia are expected to experience the fastest growth owing to rapid population growth.

Supercritical, the carbon removal marketplace aimed (at the moment) mainly at tech companies that want to hit ‘net zero’, has raised a $13 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round includes funding from RTP Global, Greencode Ventures, MMC Ventures and others.

In late 2022, BetterBrand found success on Whole Foods Market shelves, driving over $1 million in gross sales in the first five months.

 

Notarize, the world’s largest online notary network, is launching Proof, a new company and platform for digital identity verifications. Beginning in August, Notarize’s business tools will be rebranded to Proof, and it is also changing its company name to Proof. Notarize will continue serving its online notary network, which is used by companies like Adobe.

Seedstars Capital and Swiss philanthropic foundation Fondation Botnar have launched Seedstars Youth Wellbeing Ventures, a $20 million investment mandate targeting early-stage startups in Africa that are focused on improving the wellbeing of people below 30 years in low-and-middle-income countries.

Meet Gladia, a French AI startup that wants to change how companies interact with audio data. The company develops an audio transcription application programming interface (API) that you can integrate with other products and is supposed to work much better than what’s available out there. And this tech foundation unlocks new use cases around audio.

Luminoah has reinvented a tube feeding device that’s more portable, discreet, and easy to use, and it has raised $6 million dollars.

Glystn is a tool for content creators that allows them to engage with followers and read/answer comments from multiple social media platforms all in one place.

Competition appears to be alive and well in another (smaller) area of gaming: modding and analytics.

According to a new study from Sista and the Boston Consulting Group, women are still underrepresented in the European tech ecosystem.

ChrysCapital has invested $100 million in Lenskart, the two said Thursday, pushing the Asian eyewear startup’s raise to $850 million in the past year. The Indian venture firm is buying shares worth $100 million into the Bengaluru-headquartered startup through both primary and secondary transactions, the two said. The new investment follows Abu Dhabi Investment AuthoritY.

As companies increasingly rely on machine learning models, it’s imperative that they continuously check the models to make sure they are working as intended and that the data is valid, unbiased and not corrupted in any way. Deepchecks, an Israeli startup has come up with a solution to continuously test models from development through production.

Finfra, an Indonesian startup that provides the tech infrastructure for online businesses that want to offer embedded finance products, has raised $1 million in new funding. The round included participation from DSX Ventures, Seedstars International Ventures, Cento Ventures, Fintech Nation, FirstPick, BADideas Fund and Hustle Fund. The startup’s new funding will be used on product.

The Philippines’ startup ecosystem is poised for strong growth, thanks to the country’s rising GDP, fast adoption of online services and a new generation of founders. Launched by tech and investment veterans, Kaya Founders wants to back the most promising startups from the very beginning. The venture firm announced today that it has closed $12.

Oova's new membership offering is priced at $99 and includes The Oova Kit, personalized support from healthcare professionals and access to a community of peers.

Nordic VC firm Voima Ventures today announced its third fund with an initial closing of €90 million fund and a final target of €120 million, focusing on early-stage “deep tech” startups from across the science realm. 

Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here. In recent years, a number of startups have made a business out of providing corporate credit cards to companies. 

Acquired by HSBC in an emergency sale for just £1 in March as SVB was melting down, SVB UK is now getting a rebrand and expansion under its new owner. 

U.K.-based cultivated meat startup Higher Steaks has raised $30 million in a Series A round of funding and revealed that it’s changing its name to Uncommon. 

Green Coffee is a consolidated arabica coffee farming company, headquartered in the U.S., with operations in Colombia that span 9,000 acres across 14 farms.

Amsterdam-based insurtech startup Insify has completed its Series A funding round with another €10 million ($10.7 million at today’s exchange rate). 

Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4 are powerful, paradigm-shifting tools that promise to upend industries. 

With the new fund, Positive Ventures intends to invest in between 20 and 25 companies at the pre-seed and seed levels.

BOND's founders say their approach to livestream shopping is creator and content first so that the “creator in the driver's seat and at the forefront of the experience.”

OurX has seven products currently for tightly textured hair, and the average regimen of products offered is between $115 and $130.

French startup Escape has raised a $3.9 million (€3.6 million) funding round shortly after ending Y Combinator’s winter 2023 cohort. 

As companies look to update their databases, especially in a cloud native context, with so many different databases out there, it’s a huge challenge for developers when migrating from one environment to another.

PropTech firm Aurum is acquiring NestAway, a once high-flying Indian startup operating in the same space, for up to $10.9 million, in a deal that marks a near complete erosion in value for the startup’s investors.

Stripe wants to make it easier for businesses to access credit. 

Working in customer support often means navigating disjointed tools to find data and solve issues. However, many of these actions are routine and repeatable, making them ideal candidates for automation. 

Measurabl, a startup developing a platform for environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in the real estate space, today announced that it raised $93 million in a Series D funding tranche co-led by Energy Impact Partners and Sway Ventures.

The full-stack insurance carrier is targeting Latin America’s growing middle class that may have previously been unable to obtain financial protection.

Taxfix leaped to a $1 billion valuation in 2022 on the back of a popular mobile app used by consumers help with tax returns. 

Strive Health works with local providers to form an integrated care delivery system that follows a patient from chronic kidney disease to end-stage kidney disease. 

Wellplaece’s takes in a client’s ordering data and then enables the customer to make those specific purchasing behaviors across a large network of suppliers via one shopping cart.

Carrum Health CEO Sach Jain noted that 2022 “was a big year for us” that included nearly doubling its book of business.

As developers work with an increasing number of third-party APIs, they need a tool that mocks those APIs for testing purposes without actually firing the API gateway. 

We’ve all been there. Shopping online and desperately searching for a promo code so that you can save some money on a purchase. Well, at least I’ve been there. Enter Checkmate.  

Nymbus, a startup that partners with banks to migrate their legacy stack and launch neobanks to attract new customers, today announced that it raised $70 million in a Series D round led by Insight Partners. 

Kapital's platform gives small and medium-sized businesses across Latin America a way to see their finances in one place.

Arc, the jobs platform created especially for software developers looking for remote positions, wants to make recruitment easier with the launch of HireAI.

Generation Prime, a startup that wants to make IVF and other fertility services more accessible to patients in Asia, is launching its first two clinics in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. 

Daylight, an LGBTQ+ banking platform, is shutting down. Its operations will cease on June 30, according to embattled co-founder and CEO Rob Curtis.

Episode Six, a global payments and banking infrastructure provider, today announced that it raised $48 million in a Series C funding round led by Avenir with participation from Anthos Capital. 

It was only recently that we reported Buildier.ai had signed a strategic collaboration with and undisclosed investment from Microsoft. 

The price of food continues to go up and up, but surprisingly that hasn’t (yet?) played out as pressure on the wider restaurant industry. 

Yet another early-stage VC fund has closed in Europe this week, as Elkstone finalized a €100 million ($108 million) pot aimed at Irish startups. 

The new fund hopes to deploy the $150 million within three years, and has appointed Paul Judge as its managing partner.

Stability AI, the AI startup behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, this week announced the release of StableStudio, an open source version of DreamStudio, Stability AI’s commercial AI-powered design suite.

Union AI, a Bellevue, Washington–based open source startup that helps businesses build and orchestrate their AI and data workflows with the help of a cloud-native automation platform, today announced that it has raised a $19.1 million Series A round from NEA and Nava Ventures. 

India’s Swiggy said on Thursday that its food delivery business has become profitable, eclipsing its publicly-listed rival Zomato on another key metric a day before the firm is set to report its quarterly earnings. 

Wefox, the German insurtech startup, has closed a new funding round from existing investors. 

Embedded insurtech is still hot, as the $196 million in funding landed by bolttech proves. 

In 1846, London surgeon John Hutchinson invented the spirometer, a thing you blow hard into, to measure the volume of air inspired and expired by the lungs. 

Jenfi, a “growth-capital-as-a-service” platform, can provide online businesses with revenue-based financing in a little as a day. 

In 2007, Alan O’Herlihy, who previously worked with large SAP installations as well as retail, set out to find a way to help retailers minimize “shrinkage,” or where a store has fewer items in stock than in its recorded inventory. 

Sweden-based VC fund Pale Blue Dot bounced onto the scene in 2020 with a €53 million fund to help climate-focused startups. 

AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that can automatically sort recyclable material, today announced that it extended its Series C round to $99 million, thanks to an investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. 

Millions of people use sign language, but methods of teaching this complex and subtle skill haven’t evolved as quickly those for written and spoken languages. 

It used to be that having a corporate blog and some paid content was the gist of your marketing department’s content efforts, and that was enough. 

Cable enables banks and fintechs to monitor all of their accounts — not just a fraction as before — to know, in real time, if failure controls are working as expected to combat breaches. 

Despite the investor caution narrative permeating the startup world throughout the economic downturn, certain startup-types have been a little more impervious to market conditions. 

Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) startups is the latest bandwagon VCs are piling onto. 

Invesco, which led Swiggy’s previous round, has marked down the Indian food delivery giant’s valuation in its holding to about $5.5 billion, according to a filing. 

PermitFlow has software for developers and general contractors to streamline the construction permit application and management processes.

One constant theme we’ve been hearing from the big cloud infrastructure vendors this year is helping customers increase the efficiency of their cloud spend. 

After raising $100 million at a valuation of over $2 billion last year, the Australian ed-tech startup Go1 is making an acquisition and getting some investment to expand its reach and technology to serve the market of corporate online learning. 

Around two years ago, Victor Cardenas and Kevin Bai built a fintech platform called Slash that lets users create shareable virtual cards to split recurring expenses. 

Signaling that investments in the supply chain sector remain robust, Pando, a startup developing fulfillment management technologies, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing its total raised to $45 million.

French startup Green-Got is building an alternative to your traditional bank account with a focus on climate change. 

Many employee engagement and retention tools were created with the assumption that workers spent most of their time at desks. 

In 2021, gig marketplace Fiverr acquired Stoke Talent, a startup developing freelance management tools for employers, for $95 million. 

Even today with all of the layoffs we have seen in the tech industry over the last year, there is still a shortage of technical talent.

Citymapper is lowering the paywall around its premium features and introducing a new subscription plan purely for removing ads. 

Several years ago, entrepreneur Dhiraj Sharma’s first company, a software consultancy, was hired by an HR tech firm to develop an app to improve the employee onboarding experience.

In this increasingly AI-driven era, creative and media teams will probably need to employ the technology to up their game on analyzing their creative assets and A/B testing — or someone else will simply beat them to the punch.

Poparazzi, the once-hot photo-sharing app that hit the top of the App Store in 2021, is shutting down. 

The company develops whole cuts of alternative proteins using fermentation technology and food-grade microorganisms.

Clubhouse, a once skyrocketing social audio app built by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, has laid off more than half of its staff. 

Meet Bastion, a French startup that was created in October 2022 to help small companies tackle cybersecurity risks without too many complexities. 

Containers and micro services may not be a new concept at this point, but lots of companies are struggling with the transition to cloud native applications, and the impact of that approach on their security. 

Japanese shared micromobility startup Luup has raised $30 million in a Series D financing round, which consists of 3.8 billion yen in equity and 700 million yen in debt.

The energy-intensive process of separating and purifying chemicals and gases is a big reason why industries like plastic manufacturing cause so much pollution. 

ZEBOX, an international accelerator network founded by shipping conglomerate CMA CGM to introduce more tech innovation into the supply chain industry, announced today the launch of its APAC headquarters. 

Every time a member of their crew changes, maritime crew managers need to handle immigration regulations, COVID requirements and travel plans for each person. 

Constrafor provides embedded financing and software to keep payments flowing between contractors and their subcontractors.

Super.com's super app is focused on helping “everyday Americans” find deals and savings across multiple categories, including travel and shopping.

Largely because of their age, houses in Europe can be notoriously hard to heat. Most were built for an era when the knowledge about energy consumption just wasn’t available in the way it is today. 

Betterdata, a Singapore-based startup that uses programmable synthetic data to keep real data secure, announced today it has raised $1.55 million. 

French startup Kate has raised a $7.6 million (€7 million) funding round from a bunch of business angels. 

Primo, a French startup that recently raised a $3.4 million funding round to build a software-as-a-service product that handles the IT needs of small and medium companies.

While Generative AI is buzzy right now, what OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are doing may be only part of the story. 

Rally provides one-click checkout and post-purchase offers that allow the merchant to inject offers after the checkout.

The global management consulting industry is worth billions of dollars but to this day it’s been tough to disrupt with technology. 

Odeko has operations software for coffee shops to manage inventory, get data insights and order equipment and supplies from over 400 vendors.

There have been several startup attempts to measure staff morale, some more halting that others. We reported on Plasticity Labs back in 2014, though their web site seems no longer functioning.

French startup Fleet has been growing nicely over the past four years as the company has deployed nearly 10,000 devices with long-term leasing contracts. 

Stability AI, the startup funding a range of generative AI experiments, has released a new version of Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI system that was among the first to rival OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. 

Zoom today announced that it has acquired Workvivo, a six-year-old Irish startup focused on improving companies’ internal communications and culture. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. 

Meet Thynk, a new company that wants to build the definite enterprise software solution for the hospitality industry.

Tomer Greenwald, Uri Sarid and Ori Shoshan, software developers by trade, found themselves building and configuring software authentication and authorization mechanisms repeatedly — each time with a different tech stack. 

General Atlantic has poured another $100 million in PhonePe, three months after leading a $350 million investment in the Indian fintech startup that has so far raised $750 million in an ongoing financing round. 

Clear Street, which says it is building “modern infrastructure” for capital markets, has raised $270 million in the second tranche of a Series B funding round at a $2 billion valuation. 

French startup Graneet is building an all-in-one software-as-a-service product focused on small construction companies. 

Reach Capital, one of the first venture firms to focus exclusively on edtech, closed its last investment vehicle during an unprecedented boom within tech. 

Axle allows users to connect their insurance account to trusted companies in seconds and then automates insurance verification.

Honeycomb was founded in 2016 by two former Facebook engineers to create a new way of looking at application monitoring based on the internal tooling they had seen at Facebook. 

AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch. 

Aqua Cultured Foods is using proprietary mycoprotein (fungi) fermentation processes to create whole cuts of calamari, shrimp, scallops and filets of tuna and whitefish.

SetSail set out to build a new way to compensate sales people, where based on the data, companies could pay salespeople on where they were in the pipeline, not in just one big chunk when they landed the sale. 

Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. 

The firm uses an in-house data algorithm it hopes will help it find startups that have teams designed to scale — beyond just the founders.

CarmaCare take over where traditional car insurance leaves off to provide an easier way to buy extended warranties for car repairs.

Generative AI is hot among venture capital firms now, with $4.5 billion invested in 2022. Narrato, a AI content creation and collaboration platform, announced today it has joined the ranks of other generative AI startups with VC funding. 

 

Amazon’s first foray into the world of accelerator programs, designed to help early-stage startups build and launch, was focused on conversational AI back in 2016. 

Quantum computers have the potential to carry out highly complicated calculations in minutes that would have taken classical computers thousands of years to work out. 

When you play a game, how do you play it? Monopoly or Settlers of Catan around the dining table? Mario Kart on your Nintendo Switch? Assassin’s Creed on your Xbox? Among Us on your phone? 

Online businesses are at risk of bad bot activity, certainly more now than they used to be. 

Aravita's AI-powered solution for supermarkets looks at variables, including climate, seasonality and consumer behavior, to manage the purchasing of fresh food.

French startup Ledger has added more money to its Series C funding round. The company designs and manufactures so-called hardware wallets to secure crypto assets.

Green Labs, a Seoul-based agritech startup, has secured $38.4 million (50 billion won) in debt financing from existing investors BRV Capital Management and Skylake Incuvest. 

Krisp got its start as an AI-powered noise cancellation service, but now the startup is moving beyond that with instant on-device transcription of all your calls and meetings — and of course it integrates ChatGPT now for quick summaries as well. 

Indian insurtech Acko is in late-stage discussions to secure $120 million in a funding round at a time when weak global market conditions have subdued large financing deliberations in the South Asian market.

German launch startup Isar Aerospace has scored $165 million (€155 million) in new funding as it races toward the inaugural flight of its Spectrum small rocket later this year. 

Last-mile robotics startup Neubility — which makes autonomous delivery robots that work without lidar — says that it plans bump its fleet up to 400  by the end of this year, up from the 50 it currently has in circulation. 

OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now browse the internet — in certain cases.

Snap quietly acquired Amsterdam-based 3D scanning studio Th3rd in the second quarter of last year, at a time when the company was looking to bolster its AR-powered commerce ambitions.

Workera, an upskilling platform geared toward enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $23.5 million in a Series B round led by Jump Capital with participation from existing investors NEA, Owl Ventures, the AI Fund and Sozo Ventures.

Beam, a five-month-old startup out to more easily help general contractors pay subcontractors and get paid themselves, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Accel.

Proving that there’s still plenty of venture money in cybersecurity, cloud identity security platform Britive today announced that it raised $20.5 million in a Series B funding round.

The startup funding environment is more challenging right now, but some companies and industries still draw investors’ attention and money.

Developers building front-end Jamstack web applications often struggle to build identity with traditional API tools.

This means that Good Meat’s cultivated chicken was accepted as a product safe for humans to eat.Â

Duolingo, a language learning app with over 500 million users, is working on a music app, TechCrunch has learned. The Pittsburgh-based tech company currently has a small team working on a music product and is hiring a learning scientist who is an “expert in music education who combines both theoretical knowledge of relevant learning science […]
Duolingo is working on a music app by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

Somewhere along the way, ProMat turned into a robotics show.

Reebelo has added embedded financial services, including a buyback program and device upgrade options, while its warranty program, ReebeloCare, grew 330% year over year.
Consumer electronics reseller Reebelo adds to Series A as it lays down roots in US by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

When Porsche partnered with venture studio Up.Labs, the mission was to create six startups over three years all designed to solve the German automaker’s biggest problems and be compelling enough as a standalone business it that can attract other customers.

Cloud costs remain a top concern for organizations. According to a recent Anodot survey, 50% of businesses are struggling to control them, in part because they lack visibility into their cloud usage.

Sidechat, the anonymous posting platform that began blowing up last year on college campuses, appears to have acquired a rival anonymous social platform, Yik Yak.

Code editors are complex and demanding pieces of software, but from a business standpoint, they’re notoriously difficult to monetize.

Lenskart has signed a definitive agreement to raise $500 million from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, they said Wednesday, at the height of the market slump as the Indian eyewear retailer bulks up its offerings and scales to international markets.

When Masaya Aso worked on autonomous driving technology at Bosch in Japan and Germany, he realized that “many tasks were still manual as over 85% of warehouses have almost no automation at all.”Â

Medwing, a European startup building a recruitment marketplace for healthcare workers, has raised €44 million ($47 million) in a Series C round of funding.

You’d think that an industry like manufacturing had its own software stack, but in a lot of cases, a huge amount of getting-things-made is managed through Excel spreadsheets.

Companies moved en masse to the cloud during the pandemic, under pressure to digitally transform. According to a 2021 survey from O’Reilly, cloud adoption steadily rose across industries, with 90% of organizations using cloud computing compared to 88% in 2020.

Global payroll provider Deel plans to provide $120 million of its own cash off its balance sheet to support startups’ payroll operations in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank shutting down.

Signature Bank is the second casualty of the ongoing banking crisis in the U.S. The New York-based financial institution stopped operating abruptly on Sunday — customers will be made whole.

Bach, an app for planning bachelorette trips and group travel experiences, has announced $9 million in Series A funding led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital.

Synctera, a banking-as-a-service startup, has raised an additional $15 million as it expands into Canada. NAventures, the corporate venture arm of National Bank of Canada, led the financing, which brings Synctera’s total raised to $60 million since its June 2020 inception.

For years, Phil George was the executive sponsor of a mentoring program at McMaster-Carr, an industrial hardware supplier, where he spent weeks trying to match program participants with only scant information about them to go on.

Brussels-based startup Cowboy has been in the news lately for its cash burn rate. But the company wants to control its narrative again with some product and business news.

Amazon rules the roost when it comes to e-commerce, with its marketplace outpacing everyone else when it comes to gross merchandise value, reach and market capitalization.

Garin Hess, a tech entrepreneur based in Utah, experienced what he calls the “demo bottleneck” at a previous software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup while pitching to potential customers.

Cash management — tracking who needs to pay an invoice and whether it’s been done — can make or break a business.

The company uses machine learning and predictive analytics along with science-of-aging and essential human support to offer retirement products and programs.Â

Wunderkind, a platform that enables brands to target web visitors through emails, texts and other digital advertising formats, today announced that it raised $76 million in a Series C round led by Neuberger Berman.

While a partner at a VC firm, Nicolas Sharp took on the project of finding customer relationship management (CRM) software for the firm.

Japanese marketing tech firm Geniee, part of the SoftBank Group, has paid about $70 million in cash to acquire the revenue optimization platform Zelto.

VCs see a rich opportunity in tools to manage the contract lifecycle.

Hexa, a 3D asset visualization and management platform, today announced that it closed a $20.5 million Series A round from Point72 Ventures, Samurai Incubate, Sarona Partners and HTC.

Austin-based venture firm 8VC, led by controversial Palantir founder Jon Lonsdale, has raised $880 million in its fifth fund.

StudentFinance, a European fintech that funds educational programs for individuals through so-called income share agreements, has raised €39 million ($41 million) in a Series A round of funding.

Una Brands, a Singapore-based e-commerce aggregator, has raised $30 million in pre-Series C financing just five months after announcing its $30 million Series B funding that was raised in September of last year.Â

Meet Cycle, a French startup that is building a collaboration tool for product managers where they can collect data from various tools, work on the next product iterations and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers.

With global digital payments revenue expected to reach $14.79 trillion by 2027, payment infrastructure has arguably never been more critical.

It’s only human nature. If you tell a driver their insurance premium will go down if they drive more safely, then – it turns out – they will probably drive more safely.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery, aka CI/CD, is a modern development concept where code is being constantly updated and delivered to a central repository, rather than waiting for a set of features to be completed and releasing it all at once. It’s a fairly recent construct, but Earthly Technologies, an early stage startup, believes that […]
Earthly wants to reinvent continuous integration to make it faster and cheaper by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Based in the Netherlands, blossoming agtech startup Source.ag has announced a $23 million Series A funding round to help grow its business, less than a year after its previous, $10 million round.

Merchants can use Rebuy to create personalized shopping experiences for their customers through upsells, cross-sells and post-purchase follow-ups.
Rebuy is out to change the customer buying experience, one personalization at a time by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Drafting a will and planning for what happens to your estate once you pass away is well, not exactly fun.

Byju’s is weighing whether to wind down WhiteHat Jr, a coding platform that it acquired over two years ago at an enterprise value of $300 million, as the edtech group looks to cut expenses and eliminate a business unit that has drawn considerable criticism to the firm.

While much of the white-collar workforce has adjusted to the new norm of videoconferencing from home, that doesn’t mean that they — or their bosses — necessarily like it.

Finch, a platform that helps companies connect to various HR apps, services and systems, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B round co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with participation from QED Investors, Altman Capital and PruVen Capital.

Strive is an online learning platform that teaches kids to code, but it wants to do more than just that.

You would expect the co-founder of a startup that improves on traditional slide presentations to hate tools like PowerPoint.

With so many fintechs laying off staff, it can be easy to assume that the entire industry is in distress. But that’s not the case. In fact, some companies are finding opportunity in the masses of layoffs.

Meet Carbon Maps, a new French startup that raised $4.3 million (€4 million) just a few weeks after its inception.

Planetarians' plant-based whole cuts of protein have a umami-like flavor and are made with two ingredients: the oil cakes and brewer's yeast.
Planetarians grabs $6M to get its plant-based protein into foodservice orbit by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Transcelestial is on a mission to make the internet more accessible by building a network of shoebox-sized devices that send lasers to one another, creating a fiber-like network.

CommandK, a startup offering a dedicated platform to manage enterprise security, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed.

After two years of seeking regulatory approval, Wefunder has officially received the green light to operate its investment crowdfunding services within the European Union.

Most merchants in South Korea keep track of their international shipping logistics via email until their cargo safely gets to its destination.

In 2024, a number of new EU regulations are expected to come into force, which will tighten the obligation of electric vehicle manufacturers and resellers to recycle batteries at the end of their natural lifespan.

Amine Skalli recruited teams for ten years, including four as a tech professional recruiter. In her last startup, he relied exclusively on outbound recruiting — in other words, proactively searching for and contacting potential candidates for open positions.

Aspire, the Singapore-based neobank that wants to become the financial operating system for SMEs, has raised an oversubscribed $100 million Series C round.

Qotto, a solar kits provider with operations in Burkina Faso and Benin, has raised $8 million in a Series A equity-debt round led by the IBL group, a billion-dollar conglomerate headquartered in Mauritius with business interests in a number of sectors including energy, financial services, logistics, distribution, and engineering.

Strava is on the hunt for a new CEO, after Michael Horvath revealed that he’s stepping down from the role for a second time.

Prior to starting Replo, the co-founders launched and sold Berkeleytime.com, a platform that digitized University of California, Berkeley’s course scheduling system. 
Replo gives businesses a low-code option for creating Shopify landing pages by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Meet Wikifarmer, an agriculture-focused startup based in Athens that has an interesting two-sided strategy.

Jacob Beckerman, a former investment logic engineer at Bridgewater Associates, grew frustrated using standard document apps like Acrobat and Microsoft Office to print out and mark up documents.

Fintech startup Atlantic Money is rolling out its international money transfer service to more markets and more platforms.

Zypp Electric, an Indian startup that offers an EV-as-a-service platform catering to e-commerce companies and gig workers, has received a $25 million investment led by Taiwan’s battery-swapping giant Gogoro.

Acceldata, the company behind a data observability platform used by multinational enterprises including Oracle and Verisk, today announced it has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding.

Meet Dotfile, a new startup backed by eFounders that just raised a $2.7 million funding round (€2.5 million) to help companies verify users and other companies with a single application programming interface (API).

The uptake of customer relationship management (CRM) tools has grown immensely over the last few years such that the market size is expected to experience a 12.5% compound annual growth rate, and to be worth $145.79 billion in the next six years.

Breef, a platform that allows brands to manage and service marketing agency projects, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A round (an undisclosed portion of which was debt) led by Greycroft with participation from BDMI, UTA.VC, Afterpay’s Touch Ventures and UC Berkeley’s The House Fund.

ShiftMed, a Virginia-based W-2 healthcare workforce management marketplace that focuses on nurses and aides, closed on $200 million in new funding.

Rebellyous, a startup that’s striving to build “a better chicken,” has raised at least $20 million in fresh funding,

Shopify powers a massive number of e-commerce sites, so it’s also no surprise that there is a vast ecosystem of tools around it that help these merchants manage all aspects of running their stores.

Years ago, Will Allred and William Ballance were developing a tech platform, Sorter, to apply personality and communication psychology to marketing campaigns.

New School Foods created a proprietary muscle fiber and scaffolding platform for making whole-cut salmon alternatives with the same colors, flavors, fats, texture and mouthfeel of traditional fish.Â

Countries worldwide have pledged to reduce their energy usage and reach net-zero energy targets by 2050.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI can help usher in “unbelievable abundance,” but he says he wants to ensure that such abundance is shared.

Finley helps companies taking out debt capital understand their loan agreements and better comply with terms and reporting requirements.
Finley closes $17M to turn 100-page debt capital agreements into software-managed code by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Even if insects don’t sound appealing to you, black soldier flies could play an essential role in the food chain in the coming years. In particular, these flies’ larvae can become an important source of proteins for livestock and fish. That’s why Entocycle is raising another $5 million in a Series A funding round led […]
Entocycle grabs $5 million for its insect breeding technology by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Hypernative, a crypto security-focused startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding as it emerges from stealth, co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie exclusively told TechCrunch.

Chroma, a startup working to build a new type of audiovisual entertainment specifically for mobile devices, is now adding a Twitter co-founder to its board.

Generative AI is the tech industry’s buzzword of the moment.

Spatial Labs, a web3 infrastructure and hardware company, closes $10M seed round by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch

Smart home energy startup Tado has raised €43 million ($46.9 million) in a round of funding led by Trill Impact Ventures, as the company pursues plans to become profitable in 2023.

Mega Ranch enables Meati Foods to grow, harvest and process its mycelium and then produce its products under one roof.
Mushroom protein company Meati Foods opens ‘mega’ facility; closes $22M in new funding by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Sequoia Capital and Bain Ventures are among the high-profile investors that have backed the venture firm Kearny Jackson’s second fund, the early-stage focused firm said Wednesday as it gears up to invest in more startups.

Terra Drone said today it has raised $14 million in Series C funding from Wa’ed Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, marking the VC firm’s first investment in Asia.Â

Solar-powered electric vehicle maker Lightyear said it’s halting production on its flagship Lightyear 0, its premium EV with a sticker price of €250,000.

Scythe first hit our radar when it emerged from stealth in 2021 with a $13.8 million Series B.

Nourish connects users with a registered dietitian (RD) via telehealth and helps them get their consultations covered by health insurance.

Area 120, the Google in-house incubator responsible for products such as Checks, Tables, Stack and ThreadBite, has been significantly affected by broader layoffs at Google parent company Alphabet.

You know what it’s like — you’ve been on vacation and you’ve taken 28 million photos, and you just want to select the best 12 so you can make a calendar.

Swiggy plans to lay off 380 jobs as the Prosus Venture and SoftBank-backed Indian food delivery giant looks to navigate the market downturn that has forced firms to become leaner and more disciplined. In an email to employees on Friday, Swiggy co-founder and chief executive Sriharsha Majety said the startup has advanced its plans for […]
Indian food delivery giant Swiggy to cut 380 jobs by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

The teenage market for apps is a tough nut to crack and stay relevant in. Just ask Snapchat.

Meet Kate, a French company that wants to create a tiny car that you can use for your daily commute and various errands.

PeopleFund, a South Korean marketplace that connects borrowers and investors to enable lending, has recently added $20 million to its $63.4 million Series C.

Good Meat announced today it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency to use serum-free media for the production of its cultivated meat.

Syky will serve as an incubator, marketplace and social community for the next generation of fashion designers and consumers.
Luxury fashion meets blockchain on Syky, the Seven Seven Six-backed web3 platform by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Several years ago, co-founders Leena Joshi, Ben Cheung and Erik Buchanan experienced frustration with the amount of manual work they were putting into collecting information about sales and marketing accounts.

An increasing number of organizations are adopting microservices, the loosely-coupled, independently-deployable services that together make up an app.

ShareChat, the Indian social media startup backed by Twitter, Google, Tiger Global and Temasek, has laid off 20% of its workforce — or over 400 employees — just a month after eliminating more than 100 roles.

Kano Computing (“Kano”), the venture-backed company best known for its DIY computer kits and software for teaching coding and STEM skills to kids, is spinning out its creative software suite and online community platform as an independent business.

FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried launched his own Substack newsletter today, in a very unusual move for someone who was recently arrested and is facing eight counts of U.S. criminal charges.

Teams dedicated to boosting customer acquisition, retention and sales don’t necessarily have the time or tools to use data insights effectively.

Stripe, a richly-valued payments startup, has cut its internal valuation yet again, according to sources familiar with the manner.

Project Eaden produces edible plant-based protein fibers, similar to those already being used to create textiles, that mimic the texture and appearance of animal-based meats.

The need for data observability, or the ability to understand, diagnose and orchestrate data health across various IT tools, continues to grow as organizations adopt more apps and services.

Running a data center means that you have to find innovative ways to manage heat from the servers.

About a decade ago, Donghwan Kim helped his cousin, a ceramist, look for sales channels, like flea markets, to sell his ceramics.

Releaf, a Nigerian agritech startup that supplies ingredients (starting with the oil palm) to consumer goods manufacturers and their food factories, has received $3.3 million in an oversubscribed pre-Series A round.

Superscript, an insurance broker and tech platform targeting SMEs and “high-growth” tech firms, has raised £45 million ($54 million) in a Series B round of funding.

Microsoft plans to collaborate with the Indian space agency to give Indian space tech startups free access to cloud tools, the two said Thursday, the latest in the U.S. tech giant’s attempts to deepen its ties with young firms in the South Asian market.

Indian fintech Kreditbee has raised an additional $100 million in a funding round, it said, as the lender looks to scale its business in the South Asian market.

In the past year, OneRoof has transformed from a chat room app into a platform offering in-person events, a neighbor directory and a “grow” feature to help people create their own communities.

Not everyone believes that the metaverse — social, VR-centric worlds — has staying power. But MeetKai is among the steadfast optimists.

There’s plenty of vendors in the managed database services market — and plenty that are well-financed.

Food waste and food packaging take up a significant portion of the world’s landfills. AlterPacks is tackling both issues with technology that turns food waste into takeout boxes and other containers.

Uber and Airbnb have long been the poster children for the sharing economy. In other realms of society, entrepreneurs are also trying to match demand with untapped assets and services.

SpaceX is poised to launch 114 payloads to orbit on a Falcon 9 tomorrow morning, the sixth mission of its smallsat rideshare program.

Viva Republica, an operator of South Korean finance super app Toss, has finalized a $405 million Series G funding and it says it is now valued at 9.1 trillion won ( $7 billion), up from 8.5 trillion won in June 2021.

As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands.

Fintech startup Vint thinks everyone should invest in wine and spirits and is hoping to facilitate such investments with the help of fresh seed funding.
Fintech Vint hopes to turn wine and spirits into a mainstream asset class by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

A few bright spots remain in the autonomous vehicle industry even amid macroeconomic headwinds that have nearly shut off the spigot of venture capital and led to further consolidation.

Galaxy plans to acquire Argo’s bitcoin mining facility Helios for $65 million and provide a $35 million loan amid the miner’s restructuring.

For organizations that do a good chunk of their work through virtual meetings, simply hitting record or taking notes isn’t enough to capture everything that’s said.

As generative AI like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 attract investor attention, startup entrepreneurs are looking to cash in with new business models built around them. One of the more interesting ventures to emerge from the space recently is Poly, which lets designers create video game and other virtual assets, including textures for 3D models, using […]
Y Combinator-backed Poly uses AI to generate art assets by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Jakarta-based fintech Akulaku has raised $200 million from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), the largest bank in Japan.

Whether you’re singing “Take This Job and Shove It” while workin’ “9 to 5” or you’re a fledgling startup founder, TechCrunch Early Stage 2023 is the bootstrapping bootcamp designed just for you. The daylong founder-focused summit — on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts — covers the essential building blocks you need to build a solid foundation […]
TechCrunch Early Stage focuses on fledgling founders by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

Indian fintech Money View said on Monday it has raised $75 million in a new funding round, its second this year, despite the market slump as it looks to scale its core credit business and build more products in the South Asian market.

Meet Vianova, a French startup that is building a data platform for shared mobility companies as well as local governments.

Reliance has backed Philadelphia-based AI and robotics startup Exyn, the Indian conglomerate disclosed in a stock exchange filing on Thursday, making further inroads in startups globally.

Software spend is becoming a prime target for cuts as it grows into a larger line item in enterprises’ budgets.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park and various other media over the years, have raised $20 million to continue work on their professional deepfake studio for creators, Deep Voodoo.

ImagenAI, a startup using AI to help professional photographers edit photos and automate post-production work, today announced that it raised $30 million in an all-equity growth investment from Summit Partners.

Aviva uses AI and natural language processing to match customers’ spoken words with fields of a loan application. Within minutes, customers can qualify for up to $1,000.
Early-stage Mexico fintech Aviva is making loans as easy as a video call by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Social collectibles platform Revel describes itself as 'a cross between Instagram and Robinhood, wrapped in social game economics.'

Ever needed to read your credit card information on the phone to make a massage appointment?

Wischoff Ventures closed a second fund of $20 million that will be 'leaning in heavily on B2B.'

Dropbox today announced that it’s acquired FormSwift, a cloud-based platform designed to help businesses build, edit, approve, share and print custom personalized and documents.

Seeking to bring greater security to AI systems, Protect AI today raised $13.5 million in a seed-funding round co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures with participation from Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures and Aviso Ventures.

Today, banks and fintech startups tend not to provide products dedicated to families, specifically, and this has appeared as something of a gap in the market.

Businesses often encounter challenges in configuring their customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, whether because of requirements specific to their organization or industry or a lack of institutional technical knowledge.

In countries where English is not a main language, listed companies not only have to deal with financial disclosure regulations, but make sure their investor materials are available in English for global backers.

AI is an imperfect technology, but one task at which it excels is identifying patterns in vast amounts of data.

Bondaval, the London-based B2B insurtech that gives credit teams assurance that customers will fulfill their financial obligations, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Talis Capital.

It doesn’t matter what kind of web site it is, the ‘customer journey’ has always been important, otherwise you lose that engagement and the end result can hit the bottom line.

Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested by The Royal Bahamas Police Force following reports that the United States had filed criminal charges against the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and is likely to request his extradition.

Artificial intelligence is taking over almost every industry.

For companies aiming toward net zero, tracking scope 3 carbon emissions is a key challenge.

Brodmann17, an Israeli computer vision technology startup that developed a novel approach to take on a marketplace dominated by Mobileye, shut down this week.

After weeks of rumors, Getir has announced that it is acquiring Gorillas. This is a major consolidation deal for the instant grocery delivery space. The Financial Times first reported that Getir has closed the acquisition of its competitor.

WeWalk, a U.K.-based startup developing a “smart cane” for visually-impaired people, today announced it has raised £2 million ($2.4 million) in venture funding from several notable institutional and angel investors — this includes Manchester City and German international footballer Ä°lkay GündoÄŸan.

Uolo, an Indian edtech platform that works with private K-12 schools to offer online learning programs to middle and low-income families, has raised $22.5 million in a funding round led by UAE-headquartered VC fund Winter Capital.

In 2018, appliance conglomerate Bosch created a startup, Security and Safety Things (or “SAST” for short), whose stated mission was to develop a platform to help developers create software for AI-equipped cameras.