From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was no secret that video chat was about to become a very hot space. Over the past several months investors have bankrolled a handful of video startups with specific niches, ranging from always-on office surveillance to platforms that encouraged plenty of mini calls to avoid the need
Month: March 2021
Fast-growing fintech Pipe has raised another round of funding at a $2 billion valuation, just weeks after raising $50M in growth funding, according to sources familiar with the deal. Although the round is still ongoing, Pipe has reportedly raised $150 million in a “massively oversubscribed” round led by Baltimore, Md.-based Greenspring Associates. While the company
Facebook has some thoughts and updates about its News Feed, Siri gets some new voices and Tonal becomes a unicorn. This is your Daily Crunch for March 31, 2021. The big story: Facebook makes it easier to view a non-algorithmic News Feed Facebook highlighted features today that should make it easier for users to see
Meet Leeway, a French startup that is building an end-to-end software-as-a-service solution for your contracts. Leeway lets you centralize all your contracts in a single repository, go through multiple negotiation steps and trigger a DocuSign event for the signature. The company raised a $4.2 million seed round from HenQ, Kima Ventures as well as several
As companies embrace the use of data, hiring more data scientists, a roadblock persists around sharing that data. It requires too much copying and pasting and manual work. Hex, a new startup, wants to change that by providing a way to dispense data across the company in a streamlined and elegant way. Today, the company
At the age of 14, Jacklyn Rome saw firsthand how divorce can impact families, and how arguing about finances both during and after the process can impact children. The experience stuck with her. As an adult, after leading new product launches at Uber and Blue Apron, Rome came up with the concept behind her startup,
Following years of backlash over its algorithms and their ability to push people to more extreme content, which Facebook continues to deny, the company today announced it would give its users new tools to more easily switch over to non-algorithmic views of their News Feed. This includes the recently launched “Favorites,” which shows you posts
Zapp, one of a number of startups currently battling it out in London and beyond by promising to let you order everyday items on-demand from its own delivery-only stores, has quietly raised a new round of funding from leading VCs, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed and Europe’s Atomico (the VC
When investors gave Moveworks a hefty $75 million Series B at the end of 2019, they were investing in a chatbot startup that to that point had been tuned to answer IT help question in an automated way. Today, the company announced it had used that money to expand the platform to encompass employee questions
imToken, the blockchain tech startup and crypto wallet developer, announced today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Qiming Venture Partners. Participants included returning investor IDG Capital, and new backers Breyer Capital, HashKey, Signum Capital, Longling Capital, SNZ and Liang Xinjun, the co-founder of Fosun International. Founded in 2016, the startup’s
Ugandan technology-enabled asset finance company Tugende today announced that it has closed $3.6 million in a Series A extension round. The investment, which, according to the company, was agreed on and structured in 2020, follows the $6.3 million raised in November 2020 and led by Toyota Tsusho investment fund Mobility 54. This brings Tugende’s total
Cybersecurity training is one of those things that everyone has to do but not something everyone necessarily looks forward to. Living Security is an Austin-based startup out to change cybersecurity training something you look forward to, not dread. And the company has just closed on a $14 million Series B to continue its expansion beyond
Otrium has raised a $120 million round just a year after raising its $26 million Series B round. BOND and returning investor Index Ventures are leading the round. Existing investor Eight Roads Ventures is also participating. The concept behind Otrium is quite simple. When items reach the end-of-season status, brands can list those items on
Self-driving and robotics startup Cartken has partnered with REEF Technology, a startup that operates parking lots and neighborhood hubs, to bring self-driving delivery robots to the streets of downtown Miami. With this announcement, Cartken officially comes out of stealth mode. The company, founded by ex-Google engineers and colleagues behind the unrequited Bookbot, was formed to
Amazon has acquired a startup in India that is helping offline stores go online, the e-commerce group’s latest attempt to make inroads in the world’s second most populous nation where brick and mortar continue to drive more than 95% of sales. The American e-commerce group said on Tuesday evening that it has acquired Perpule, a
YouTube announced today it will begin testing what could end up being a significant change to its video platform: It’s going to try hiding the dislike count on videos from public view. The company says it will run a “small experiment” where it will try out a few different designs where dislike counts are no
MessageBird, the omnichannel cloud communications platform recently valued at $3 billion, is continuing to ramp up its M&A activity. Following last year’s acquisition of Pusher, a company that provides real-time web technologies, it is announcing that it has acquired “video-first” customer engagement platform 24sessions, and customer data platform Hull. Terms of the two new deals
AI has become a fundamental cornerstone of how tech companies are building tools for salespeople: they are useful for supercharging (and complementing) the abilities of talented humans, or helping them keep themselves significantly more organised; even if in some cases — as with chatbots — they are replacing them altogether. In the latest development, 6sense,
Substack didn’t invent the paid newsletter, but the startup’s early success with the model is enticing previous backers to more than double down on the media startup. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Last evening, Axios reported that Substack is
Capitolis, which makes technology for capital markets players such as investment and merchant banks, has closed on a $90 million Series C funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The financing included participation from existing backers Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, S Capital, Spark Capital, SVB Capital, Citi, J.P. Morgan and State Street and brings Capitolis’
Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site. If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re
Last week the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the national government’s plan to tax carbon emissions was legal in a decision that could have significant implications for the nation’s climate-focused startup companies. The ruling put an end to roughly two years of legal challenges and could set the stage for a boom in funding and
As more companies become ever more reliant on digital infrastructure for everyday work, the more they become major targets for malicious hackers — both trends accelerated by the pandemic — and that is leading to an ever-greater need for IT and security departments to find ways of protecting data should it become compromised. Today, one
LIVEKINDLY Collective, the shouty parent company behind a family of plant-based food brands, has snagged cash from the global impact investing arm of $103 billion investment firm TPG to close its latest round of funding at $335 million. The company’s fundraising shows that investors still have high hopes for plant-based food brands and that despite
Cazoo, the UK used-car sales portal that has been on a major fundraising tear in the last year, will be next company to pursue more growth by way of a SPAC: the company today announced that it will list on the NYSE by way of a business combination with AJAX I, a special purpose acquisition
During every economic boom, there are startup investors who appear on the scene from new corners. Some churn out; others earn the respect of the old guard over time. Jake Paul would be happy to be in the latter camp. Then again, the 24-year-old didn’t become a social media star by being conventional. Little wonder
Everli, the European marketplace for online grocery shopping that started in Italy but now also operates in Poland, Czech Republic and France, has raised a $100 million in Series C funding. The round is led by Verlinvest, with participation from new investors Luxor, DN Capital, C4 Ventures, and Convivialité Ventures. FITEC (part of Fondo Italiano
A growing number of companies have emerged over the last few years determined to reduce waste in the electric vehicle battery market. Chief among these is recycling firm Redwood Materials, which has quickly expanded since its launch in 2017 by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel to become the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in North America. Now
If you develop software for a large enterprise company, chances are you’ve heard of Tricentis. If you don’t develop software for a large enterprise company, chances are you haven’t. The software testing company with a focus on modern cloud and enterprise applications was founded in Austria in 2007 and grew from a small consulting firm
The coming wave of electric vehicles will require more than thousands of charging stations. In addition to being installed, they also need to work — and today, that isn’t happening. If a station doesn’t send out an error or a driver doesn’t report it, network providers might never know there’s even a problem. Kameale C.