Startup raised $225 million from investors, including SoftBank, as online grocery sales continue to boom.
Category: Companies
Human Interest raises $200M at a $1B valuation, plans for an IPO
Less than six months after raising $55 million in a Series C round of funding, SMB 401(k) provider Human Interest today announced it has raised $200 million in a round that propels it to unicorn status.
The Rise Fund, TPG’s global impact investing platform, led the round and was joined by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The financing included participation from new investor Crosslink Capital and existing backers NewView Capital, Glynn Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Wing Venture Capital, Uncork Capital, Slow Capital, Susa Ventures and others.
All-In-One Doc Startup Coda Reaches $1.4 Billion Valuation In $100 Million Raise From A Major Pension Fund
In the battle for the almighty blinking computer cursor, all-in-one doc startup Coda is gaining steam. The startup, which offers customizable and collaborative documents, has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round that values it at $1.4 billion, more than double its valuation a year ago.
“Our viewpoint is that the lines between the different document formats are artificial and that anyone can make a doc as powerful as an app,” says Shishir Mehrotra, Coda’s cofounder and CEO.
Gotrade gets $7M led by LocalGlobe to let investors around the world buy fractional shares of U.S. stocks
Stock in many American companies, like Amazon, Alphabet or Tesla, can host hundreds or thousands of dollars per share. Fractional trading, or buying part of a single share through a brokerage, makes them more accessible—at least to people within the United States. Investors in other countries, however, often have to pay high fees through interactive brokers. Gotrade makes fractional trading of U.S. stocks available to people in 150 countries, and charges a minimum of just one dollar.
Robot Truck Startup Embark Joins Race To Go Public In SPAC Deal That Raises $614 Million
Embark, a San Francisco-based developer of robot truck technology, plans to list shares in a merger with a blank check company that may raise $614 million to help meet a goal of commercializing its service by 2024. The company is also adding former U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to its board.
Y-Combinator backed Bimaplan raises $2.5 million in Pre-Series A round Y-Combinator backed Bimaplan raises $2.5 million in Pre-Series A round
Earlier this year, the company had raised its seed round worth $500,000, which saw participation from Y Combinator, FinSight Ventures, Kunal Shah of CRED, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter, among others
Embark Trucks to go public via merger with SPAC Northern Genesis in $4.55 billion deal
Embark Trucks Inc., a maker of self-driving technology for the trucking industry, said Wednesday it is going public via a merger with special purpose acquisition corporation Norther Genesis Acquisition Corp. II NGAB, 0.71%, in a deal with a pro forma implied enterprise value of about $4.55 billion. “Over the last five years, Embark has operated America’s longest running road-testing program for self-driving trucks to refine the company’s sophisticated self-driving software — purpose-built to navigate Class 8 trucks on long-distance freight trips,” the companies said in a joint statement.
FamPay, a fintech aimed at teens in India, raises $38 million
How big is the market in India for a neobank aimed at teenagers? Scores of high-profile investors are backing a startup to find out.
Bangalore-based FamPay said on Wednesday it has raised $38 million in its Series A round led by Elevation Capital. General Catalyst, Rocketship VC, Greenoaks Capital and existing investors Sequoia Capital India, Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital and Venture Highway also participated in the new round, which brings FamPay’s to-date raise to $42.7 million.
Cruise secures $5B credit line to buy electric, autonomous Cruise Origin vehicles from GM
Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of GM, has tapped a $5 billion line of credit from the automaker’s financial arm to pay for hundreds of purpose-built electric and autonomous Origin vehicles as they start to roll off the assembly line.
The access to the credit provided by GM Financial will push Cruise’s “total war chest” to more than $10 billion as it prepares for commercialization, CEO Dan Ammann wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
On any given day, thousands of drivers snake through the Dodger Stadium parking lot, not to catch a game but to swab their mouths to test for Covid-19. By most measures, Los Angeles, where hospitals are running out of space and morgues are at capacity, is not a model city for how to control a deadly pandemic.
For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business can easily run out of money or have considerable savings. Most restaurants don’t have access to deal directly with farms to get better deals because they lack the staffing to chase them. Besides, they also don’t have the aggregation pull as single entities to directly get good value from the farms.
Diagnostics Startup Curative Is Testing Thousands of Angelenos for Covid Every Day
On any given day, thousands of drivers snake through the Dodger Stadium parking lot, not to catch a game but to swab their mouths to test for Covid-19.
By most measures, Los Angeles, where hospitals are running out of space and morgues are at capacity, is not a model city for how to control a deadly pandemic.
Hydrant raises $5.7 million Series A to help consumers hydrate faster
Eight glasses of water a day. That’s the old recommendation you and I have heard growing up. And while we all know the importance of hydration to our health, some methods of hydration are more efficient than others. At least, that’s the premise that Hydrant was built on.
Flat, a Mexican property tech startup, raises $4.6M pre-seed led by ALLVP
Flat has raised one of Mexico’s largest pre-seed rounds to take the Opendoor real estate marketplace model across the Rio Grande.
The company snagged a $4.6 million pre-seed round to expand its business helping homeowners quickly sell their properties in Mexico. The round was led by ALLVP, an active early-stage fund in Mexico. California-based Liquid 2 Ventures (for which Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana is a GP), Next Billion, Picus Capital and a few angels supported the round, as well.
Transforming Latin American Corner Stores: Chiper Carries In $12M Series A
Chiper has been amassing a network of digitized corner stores in Latin America for the past two years. Now armed with $12 million in Series A funding, the Colombia-based e-commerce platform for independent merchants is poised to capture even more corner-store retailers.
Uber-like app for motorcycles eases traffic woes in one of world’s most congested cities
The narrow waterway separating the European and Asian sides of this metropolis has inspired classical myths and frustrated invading armies for centuries.
But today drivers traveling over the three bridges spanning the picturesque Bosporus are more likely to experience road rage than nostalgia in a city known as one of the world’s most congested for traffic.
Roger Dickey ditches $32M-funded Gigster to start Untitled Labs
Most founders don’t walk away from their startup after raising $32 million and reaching 1000 clients. But Roger Dickey’s heart is in consumer tech, and his company Gigster had pivoted to doing outsourced app development for enterprises instead of scrappy entrepreneurs.
Sundae School: Luxury Cannabis Success, And Humility
World-Class cannabis, richly textured and studied success, all tempered by deep humility and a history far greater than anyone here (meaning the USA), would even comprehend, nor understand. Let me share with you, I was immediately taken by Dae Lim. So self assured, highly polished yet approachable and peacefully humble.
Laika, la startup que entró al desarrollador Y Combinator
Qué tienen en común Laika, Airbnb y Dropbox? Laika, una plataforma colombiana que se especializa en comercializar productos y servicios para mascotas, ingresó en un grupo de startups que son seleccionadas por Y Combinator, la aceleradora estadounidense más importante del mundo catalogada por la revista Fortune como un criadero de gigantes tecnológicos emergentes.
Mighty, the Stadia of browsers, thinks you’ll subscribe to use Chrome without screaming fans
Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming may have shown that remotely running your console titles in the cloud has big performance advantages, but would you pay a monthly subscription to do the same with your browser? That’s what startup Mighty is hoping to convince people comes next, with the promise of turning the computer on your desk or lap into a viewer for Chrome engine Chromium running on a potent remote server.
Athlane looks to connect brands and esports streamers with a fresh $3.3 million in funding
Athlane, the YC-backed company from the Summer ’19 cohort, is today ready to launch with a fresh $3.3 million in capital. Investors include Y Combinator, Jonathan Kraft (New England Patriots), Michael Gordon (President of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club), Global Founders Capital, Romulus Capital, Seabed VC and more.
Music for the soul: Vahan CEO learnt piano during the pandemic; keeps his guitar close to desk
Madhav Krishna, Founder and CEO, Vahan started playing the guitar in 2003 when he started college.
“I also played in a band back then. Piano is something I picked up during the pandemic as I was keen to learn a new skill. Music, especially playing an instrument, is a fantastic way of de-stressing. It helps take one’s mind off the day-to-day problems that are a part and parcel of entrepreneurship. It is also a great way of exercising the left/artistic side of the brain which helps hone ..
ZeroDown is constructing a new path to home ownership
Part real estate fund, part tech startup, ZeroDown wants to make it easier to buy a home in the Bay Area
Nabis raises $5m Series A to grow its cannabis distribution platform
The cannabis industry is quickly growing up, and companies like Nabis play a critical role. Today, the company is announcing it raised $5 million in Series A funding, which will help it grow and expand its offering.
Food Supply Chain Automation Could Be A Bright Spot For Restaurants Amidst The COVID-19 Fight
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a negative, life-altering event for restaurant owners across the world. Even before COVID-19, it was well known that running a successful, profitable restaurant was one of the most difficult things for any talented business owner to do. So difficult, in fact, that Restaurant Brokers concludes 90% of independently owned restaurants, i.e. neighborhood restaurants, close during their first year, and the remaining 10% will only survive a total of five years! It is heartbreaking then, to see an already challenging industry face a watershed event like COVID-19.
Cityfurnish Launches its Offerings in Hyderabad
Cityfurnish – a Gurgaon-based furniture and consumer appliances rental startup, which was recently part of the Y Combinator winter batch of 2019, has announced the launch of its operations in Hyderabad. The offerings of Cityfurnish already live in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Gurgaon & Noida. The online rental furniture startup is revolutionizing the on-demand rental economy in India.
Unleashing Some of the Most Ambitious Women on the Planet
At Singularity University, we are unleashing a generation of women who are smashing through barriers and starting some of the most ambitious technology companies on the planet.
Shapewear Would Like to Be Loved by You. No Pressure Though
New brands are trying a take-it-or-leave-it approach in marketing to millennials. But will young women stand for being squished?
Coral Partners with DrugViu to Address Minority Representation in Autoimmune Precision Medicine Initiative
Coral, a San Francisco biotech developing new clinical tests to improve medication selection and market access for autoimmune patients has partnered with DrugViu, a healthcare technology company that helps patients with autoimmune diseases get full control and consolidate their medical records to find better treatment options, participate in clinical trials and track their contributions to research.
Anne Arundel natives Leif Frey and Erin Robert Frey create a natural laundry detergent
Harwood natives and brothers Leif Frey, 28, and Erin Robert Frey, 26, never thought that dirty laundry could become their key to success.
Their natural laundry brand, Frey, got them selected to the Retail & Commerce section of the famed Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Since 2016, the brothers have been building the company with their friends Aidan Porter and Patrick Keshishian, and have quickly been building a name for themselves.
Investment Strategy: Ming Zhao to raise capital for PROVEN Skincare from streaming viewers
This summer, a new series called Going Public will stream on Entrepreneur.com and across that publication’s social channels. Both accredited and non-accredited investors will have the opportunity to invest in companies appearing on the series.
Enzyme.com wants to make FDA compliance easier for startups
The Food and Drug Administration approval process can be like navigating a minefield for health startups hoping to get through regulations and begin selling to the American public. YC company Enzyme.com hopes to help these small businesses by automating the process for them.
Biomedical engineer Jared Seehafer came up with the idea through his own experience consulting with health companies like Genentech. He found going through all the paperwork to get into compliance wasn’t just tedious but also a big part of what’s holding back small companies.
“You find you spend almost as much time documenting the work as you do doing the work,” Seehafer told TechCrunch. “This is a multitrillion-dollar industry and I thought ‘why isn’t there software to automate the process?’ ”
Darmiyan Raises $6M in Initial Close of Seed Funding
Darmiyan, Inc., a San Francisco, CA-based developer of brain diagnostics, raised $6M in the initial closing of a seed funding.
The round was led by Eisai with participation from IT-Farm and Y-Combinator (YC).
Led by Padideh Kamali-Zare, PhD, president and founder CEO, Darmiyan provides AI-Powered virtual microscope BrainSee, its novel and proprietary technology (US patent 10573414) that provides a solution for early diagnosis, monitoring, and stratification of Alzheimer’s disease. BrainSee’s AI-powered algorithm takes the currently available standard clinical brain MRI and basic cognitive tests and generates brain maps and scores that indicate pathology at the earliest stages of the disease when treatments are feasible.
The Alibaba of Africa: WaystoCap provides a platform for businesses to buy and sell goods
Growing up in Morocco, Niama El Bassunie observed the many highs and lows her parents experienced as they ran the business they started 45 years ago – an enterprise she was always expected to join. But even as her siblings were signing on, she was eyeing an opportunity to help small businesses in Africa use the internet to securely buy and sell goods online. She envisioned a pan-African digital marketplace as varied and vibrant as the kiosks, boutiques, and shops scattered throughout Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, and Togo.
In 2016, she and her co-founders created WaystoCap, a unified platform for businesses to buy and sell goods starting in those five African countries, with a plan to expand into more nations over the upcoming years. The technology-driven platform now sells Kente fabric, diapers, argan oil, rice, and hundreds of other products fast and securely. Thousands of buyers and suppliers have signed up.
The 12 startups with ideas that seek to change Latin America through technology
Platzi , the online learning platform, announced the 12 finalist startups of the seventh edition of its DemoDay and that they will compete on April 10 for
“The finalist startups are exceptional. In total, they have added $ 4.6 million in revenue in the last six months and have created more than 200 jobs. In addition, they combine the ability to have traction, make a product and manage as teams, ”Juliane Butty, director of Startups at Platzi, the online education platform, said in a statement.
Many 3D printing companies restrict customers to a limited selection of costly, proprietary materials. AON3D, however, has committed to the open materials standard since its founding; customers can print hundreds of different materials on open materials 3D printers.
In addition, AON3D has focused its materials engineering expertise on developing optimized process parameters for vendors that provide the highest quality materials on the market. These include notable brands such as Solvay, SABIC, Kimya, DSM, Infinite Material Solutions, and many others.
Canadian Company AON3D Launches Industrial 3D Printer Built for the Strongest Plastics in the World
AON3D announces the launch of their AON-M2 2020, the latest large format industrial 3D printer in their flagship product line. A high-temperature 3D printer designed to print an expanding array of plastics, including PEEK, ULTEM™, PEKK, polycarbonate, and hundreds of other materials. This enables cutomers to print parts for the most demanding applications and environments, such as harsh chemical environments, extreme temperatures, and intense mechanical stress.
Many 3D printing companies restrict customers to a limited selection of costly, proprietary materials. AON3D, however, has committed to the open materials standard since its founding; customers can print hundreds of different materials on open materials 3D printers.
Leading direct-to-consumer brand FLEX partners with CVS Health to bring eco-friendly period products to shoppers in 5,000 stores nationwide
In a joint effort to innovate for period health, retail giant CVS and direct-to-consumer brand, FLEX, are partnering to bring comfortable, high-performance, eco-friendly period products to shoppers in over 5,000 CVS stores nationwide.
According to recent June 2019 syndicated retail sales data, traditional tampon unit sales are down 4.3% year over year across drug retailers. Category growth is being driven by alternative period products, including innovation led by FLEX in cups and discs.
Additionally, industry reports do not yet capture the unprecedented growth of online sales of alternative period products like FLEX™ Discs and the FLEX Cup™. With changing consumer attitudes and behaviors toward alternative period products, retailers like CVS are starting to recognize the gap in physical distribution and are taking swift action to meet the growing demand by consumers.
The Flex Company launched its first period product, the FLEX Disc, in late 2016. It quickly developed a devoted and engaged consumer following and has grown to be a top performing direct-to-consumer brand.
Validere Raises $15M USD Series A Funding led by Wing VC to Accelerate Supply Chain Efficiencies in the Energy Industry
Validere, a leading informatics platform that enables energy companies to realize efficiencies through real-time product quality insights, announced the closing of its US $15 million USD ($20,551,275 CAN) Series A funding round led by Wing VC, with participation from Greylock Partners and Sallyport Investments.
With offices in Houston, Calgary, and Toronto, Validere was founded by Harvard graduate and award-winning scientist Dr. Ian Burgess and entrepreneur Nouman Ahmad, who both recognized the enormous opportunity to bring data transparency to oil and gas.
“Forty trillion dollars of physical oil and gas is traded annually and 3 – 5% of that value evaporates due to opaque and fragmented product quality data,” said Ahmad, CEO at Validere. “As oil changes hands multiple times across the supply chain, it’s incredibly challenging to keep track of product quality. Product quality is critical as it underpins what the product is worth and where it can be delivered. Despite its importance, access to real-time quality data has been an elusive gap for the industry. We are solving this fundamental challenge by bridging new technologies with a deep understanding of the industry’s complexities. As recent market volatility has shown, optimization tools like Validere’s are more important than ever in helping the industry reduce costs and increase profitability.”
Nectar’s sonar bottle caps could save $50B in stolen booze
Bars lose 20% of their alcohol to overpours and “free” drinks for friends. That amounts to $50 billion per year in booze that mysteriously disappears, making life tough for every pub and restaurant. Nectar wants to solve that mystery with its ultrasound depth-sensing bottle caps that measure how much liquid is left in a bottle by measuring how long it takes a sonar pulse to bounce back. And now it’s bringing real-time pour tracking to beer with its gyroscopic taps. The result is that bar managers can determine who’s pouring too much or giving away drink, which promotions are working and when to reorder bottles without keeping too much stock on hand — and avoid wasting hours weighing or eyeballing the liquor level of their inventory.
Linkagoal Secures $1.25M in Series A Funding
Linkagoal, the first-ever ‘Goal Oriented Social Network’, announced today that it has raised $1.25M in Series A funding, led by Sh. Amr F M Zedan, CEO of the Saudi Zedan Group, with advisory services provided by Privity FZ LLE. With the funding, San Francisco-based Linkagoal will continue to advance its Goal Based Engine with a veteran software development team led by Founder and CEO Mohsin Shafique and a Sales and Marketing team led by Co-Founder and Deputy CEO Nasir Jamal.
With its rapidly growing user base and an approved patent by USPTO (Method of Goal Based Social Network – Patent No: 8694439), Linkagoal is an innovator in the goal-oriented social networking space. Linkagoal aims to build a global community of goal oriented, like-minded individuals, under its revolutionary social networking platform with a mission of identifying personal and professional objectives and accomplishing them, supported by other members of the community.
BEAUTY Subscription company Scentbird moves into wellness to stay on trend
Direct-to-consumer subscription-based beauty company Scentbird is adding wellness to its offerings in an effort to expand its portfolio and keep up with consumer trends.
In May, the company added 17 full-size wellness-focused products to its assortment, including powder supplements from Golde, and CBD cream and ingestibles from Highline Wellness. Founded in 2014 as a fragrance subscription service, Scentbird has slowly been expanding its offerings: In March, it began offering skin care, and last year, it moved into private-label body and skin care and launched a makeup pilot program. The company, which has over 300,000 subscribers and has raised more than $18 million in venture capital funding, declined to state its annual revenue.
“We realized we wanted to stay on-trend, and wellness is a category that is driving a lot of interest and curiosity from the consumer,” said Richard Vera, vp of brand relations for Scentbird. “These are brands that have a very millennial profile and a unique value proposition.”
Sym raises $9M Series A for its security workflow platform
Sym, a new platform that makes it easier for developers to integrate security and privacy workflows into their process, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Amplify Partners. Earlier this year, the company announced its $3 million seed round lead by Andy McLoughlin of Uncork Capital and Robin Vasan of Mango Capital. Angel investors include former Google CISO Gerhard Eschelbeck, Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath and Jason Warner, the CTO of GitHub.
Sym co-founder Yasyf Mohamedali spent the last few years as CTO of health tech company Karuna Health. In that role, he became intimately familiar with working in a high-compliance industry, handling vendor reviews and security audits. To make those processes more efficient, his team built lots of small tools, but he realized that everybody else in the industry was doing the same.
Flatfile Raises $35 Million in Series A Funding Led by Scale Venture Partners
Flatfile, the groundbreaking data onboarding software company, today announced $35 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Workday Ventures. and previous investors including Afore Capital, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, Gradient Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures. Among a list of powerful angels investing in this round you’ll find founders of Box, Looker, and Segment. This brings the company’s total funding to nearly $45 million, $42.6 million of which has been raised in just the last year. This latest infusion of capital will be used to accelerate the company’s expansion of its all-remote workforce, along with continued product development.
Workstream, a platform for deskless work, raises $10 million to serve local businesses
Deskless workers make up 80% of the global workforce, but to Desmond Lim, that job title is his entire world.
Lim grew up in Singapore and saw his father wake up every morning, six days a week, at 5 a.m. to start his job as a driver. Lim and his mom, who worked as a cleaner, joined his father from time to time in the van. Lim realized there needed to be an easier way for hourly, or deskless, workers to find jobs quickly.
Lim is the founder of Workstream, an end-to-end software solution to help small-and-medium businesses fill open positions. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $10 million Series A round, bringing its total known financing to $12.5 million.
Alloy raises $4M to build out its e-commerce automation service
Alloy Automation, a startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced today that it has closed $5 million across two rounds, the most recent of which brought $4 million to the company in October of 2020.
The new funds were raised at a $16 million pre-money, $20 million post-money valuation, Alloy told TechCrunch.
The company’s latest fundraising was led by Bain Capital Ventures and Abstract, with participation from Color Capital, BoxGroup and a collection of individual investors, including Shippo’s Laura Behrens Wu.
TechCrunch spoke with co-founders Sara Du, CEO, and Gregg Mojica, CTO, about the round, their market and their experience in Y Combinator.
Du, a Harvard dropout, and Mojicam, who skipped college altogether, met after the former emailed the latter about speaking at an open-source conference. The event didn’t end up happening, but the pair stayed in touch. Du wound up running a small streetwear store, interested in automation and app-connecting tools like Zapier, which she found to be too simple, and MuleSoft, which she described as very expensive. Out of a desire for something in between that would let her connect apps, Alloy Automation was eventually born.
Startup Gets Backing to Create Clearing Firm for Equities
A new startup hopes to build a better clearing firm, a type of financial-market infrastructure business that drew scrutiny during the GameStop Corp. stock frenzy earlier this year.
Embedded Financial Technologies Inc. is a new custodian-and-clearing firm for equities and options founded by Michael Giles, who previously ran Cash App Investing LLC, a subsidiary of Square Inc. Its future customers would be able to integrate stock trading features into their mobile apps through Embedded’s APIs, or code that allows apps to communicate.
An Update on Microverse, the Global School for Software Developers
I started Microverse in February 2018 to help anyone, anywhere, learn software development and connect with life-changing global opportunities.
While we have much work to do, I’m happy with what we’ve been able to accomplish at just over a year old.
💪🏼 Created an incredibly selective process to identify the world’s most talented individuals (current selection rate is 0.3%).
Philippines payment processing startup PayMongo lands $12 million Series A led by Stripe
Stripe has led a $12 million Series A round in Manila-based online payment platform PayMongo, the startup announced today.
PayMongo, which offers an online payments API for businesses in the Philippines, was the first Filipino-owned financial tech startup to take part in Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Y Combinator and Global Founders Capital, another previous investor, both returned for the Series A, which also included participation from new backer Bedrock Capital.
Insurtech startup Obie raises $10.7M Series A led by Battery Ventures
Obie, which has developed an insurtech platform for landlords, has raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures.
Thomvest Ventures, Funders Club, MetaProp and Second Century Ventures also participated in the financing.
If this sounds like a niche offering, that’s because it is. Obie’s software specifically targets small-to-medium size apartment landlords who own single-family rentals and/or larger apartment buildings.
Chicago-based Obie — which also went through the Y Combinator program — says its platform stands out because it offers instant quotes (by instant, they mean in about three to five minutes). The company also claims to save policyholders up to 25-30% compared to other insurance premiums. Over the past year, Obie has secured insurance for over $3 billion worth of property.
Kelly Smith, Prenda CEO, on Microschooling & the Future of K-12 Learning
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Kelly Smith, founder and CEO of Prenda, a company that helps create flexible learning environments known as microschools. Often described as the “reinvention of the one-room school house,” microschools combine homeschooling, online education, smaller class sizes, mixed age-level groupings, flipped classrooms, and personalized learning. Kelly shares what inspired him to launch Prenda in 2018, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted microschools to fame. They discuss how Prenda ensures teacher preparation in core academic areas, holds teachers accountable for student outcomes, and works to bridge achievement gaps.
Stories of the Week: A new report from Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann projects that school closures could cost the U.S. economy over $14.2 trillion by the end of the century. Idaho Gov. Brad Little announced $150 million in funding to public schools and parents for COVID-19 relief, including direct payments to families for educational materials, devices, and services. In The Atlantic, scholars discuss the pros and cons of families’ increasing propensity to consider alternatives to public schools, as a result of COVID.
Accel-Backed Searchlight.ai, A B2B Hiring Software Startup, Fixes The Broken Interviewing Process
As global economic competition grows each year, firms work tirelessly to recruit the best talent available on the market. Companies invest in university and college recruiting sessions extensively. They also incentivize their employees with cash rewards to tap their networks to fill empty positions. Many think the problem with hiring top talent is related to not reaching enough potential candidates. However, Kerry and Anna Wang viewed the problem differently and created Searchlight.ai as their solution. Searchlight.ai is a hiring software startup integrating automated reference checks to companies’ hiring processes to build in-depth profiles of prospective candidates. The startup was in Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch. The San Francisco-based startup raised over $2.5 million in their recent oversubscribed seed round led by Accel, with participation from Founders Fund, Soma Capital, Operator Collective, Jason Boehmig, Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front), and Amber Feng.
YC alum Keeper raises $1.6M to help gig workers pay taxes
Every year around this time, Uber drivers, Wag dog walkers, Bird scooter chargers, social media influencers and other gig economy workers face the unsightly challenge of paying their taxes.
Companies like Uber and Lyft classify their drivers as independent contractors, which means you aren’t given any benefits and the company doesn’t withhold any of your taxes. This puts gig workers in a tough position come tax day, especially if they aren’t prepared to shell out big sums to the IRS.
Handle.com helps independent construction workers get paid on time
From long payment cycles to antiquated processes on how to bill workers, the hefty inefficiencies of the construction industry are long overdue for innovation.
Enter startups such as the large venture-backed Katerra and recently public companies such as Procore. Still, independent contractors or workers from small family businesses often can’t afford hefty fees from SaaS platforms promising better management. Or, they don’t have a parent company behind them to foot the bill.
Convex Helps Commercial Service Businesses Find New Customers At Scale
Commercial contractors are critical to maintaining a building’s key infrastructure, such as elevators, escalators, security systems, and more. However, their business potential is limited by their antiquated, manual go-to-market strategies. Charlie Warren, Blake Meulmester and Brandon Dement saw the need for software in the commercial services business, creating Convex as a result. Convex is an enterprise software company focusing on helping commercial servicers increase their revenues through data-driven go-to-market strategies and improved customer discovery techniques. The San Francisco-based startup participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch.
Volta raises $28M for AI-based interventional cardiac electrophysiology tool
Four years after being set up in Marseilles, France, Volta Medical SAS reported raising $28 million in a series A round for the VX1 software mapping system, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that is compatible with most readily available multipolar catheters and technology used in operating rooms and cath labs to treat cardiac arrhythmia.
Startup and Academics Find Path to Powerful Analog AI
Engineers have been chasing a form of AI that could drastically lower the energy required to do typical AI things like recognize words and images. This analog form of machine learning does one of the key mathematical operations of neural networks using the physics of a circuit instead of digital logic. But one of the main things limiting this approach is that deep learning’s training algorithm, back propagation, has to be done by GPUs or other separate digital systems.
Now University of Montreal AI expert Yoshua Bengio, his student Benjamin Scellier, and colleagues at startup Rain Neuromorphics have come up with way for analog AIs to train themselves. That method, called equilibrium propagation, could lead to continuously learning, low-power analog systems of a far greater computational ability than most in the industry now consider possible, according to Rain CTO Jack Kendall.
Spero Foods – A Closer Look at this FoodTech Company Disrupting the Dairy and Egg Industry
The dairy and egg industries are being disrupted by plant-based foodtech and the implications are huge. Phenomenal advances in food science are happening as consumers realise the benefits of plant-based both to themselves and to the environment. Food tech is stepping in, one such company is Spero Foods.
Eggs are consumed in more than 90% of North American households, however, 40% of American households are turning to plant-based, and the forecast is that this will continue to rise. Spero is one of the plantbased egg alternatives on the market, in addition to JUST, Clara Foods and others.
Lowkey raises $7 million from a16z to help game streamers capitalize on short-form video
While the growth of game-streaming audiences have continued on desktop platforms, the streaming space has felt surprisingly stagnant at times, particularly due to the missing mobile element and a lack of startup competitors.
Lowkey, a gaming startup that builds software for game streamers, is aiming to build out opportunities in bit-sized clips on mobile. The startup wants to be a hub for both creating and viewing short gaming clips but also sees a big opportunity in helping streamers cut down their existing content for distribution on platforms like Instagram and TikTok where short-form gaming content sees a good deal of engagement.
Bill Gates-backed venture moving to Hudson Research Center
Taconic Partners and Silverstein Properties announced that c16 Biosciences Inc. will establish its executive headquarters and biomanufacturing research lab within the Hudson Research Center at 619 West 54th Street.
A biomanufacturing company that uses microbiology to brew sustainable alternatives to palm oil, c16 Biosciences Inc. has leased 20,000 s/f of pre-built lab and office space on the 7th floor of the building. The company will move in at the end of summer.
“Hudson Research Center’s pre-built lab program was perfectly suited for what we do and where our company is headed,” added Shara Ticku, co-founder and CEO of c16 Biosciences Inc. “Its location, flexible lab spaces and amenities made the building an ideal fit for our team as we continue to address the drastic societal and environmental costs associated with palm oil. We are excited to grow our company here in New York City.”
Torch + Radical Candor Launch “The Radically Candid Coach,” A New Month-Long Course from New York Times Best-Selling Author Kim Scott
Torch, a leading coaching, mentoring and learning development platform for enterprise-level executives, employees and HR leaders, and Radical Candor, an executive education company co-founded by Kim Scott, author of the bestselling book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, together announce the launch of a new month-long course called “The Radically Candid Coach.”
Participants of the course will attend virtual presentations from Scott and randomly selected participants out of the first 100 to register will have a chance to receive live personal coaching with Scott during the sessions. The course launches May 27 and will run for four weeks. Those interested can register at: https://lp.torch.io/the-radically-candid-coach/.
12 No-Code Platforms for Some DIY Machine Learning
Only 25% of organizations are using artificial intelligence (AI) in their businesses today. Why? Custom AI-enabled solutions are expensive to build, as talented data scientists are a hot commodity today and don’t come cheap. Top performers can easily command over $250,000 in annual salary, which seriously makes us question the money we wasted invested in getting our MBAs. Not to mention, it can take months or even years to implement. CTOs are understandably suspicious of the latest buzzword du jour, so you need to show results fast.
All 51 startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2
More than 15,000 founders from 7,200 startups applied to this batch of Y Combinator. It chose just over 100, with founders from 22 countries, to go through its accelerator program. Today, the second half of those companies launched onstage, and we have breakdowns of all 51 of these businesses.
Oh, and the ACLU. The 97-year old legal activism nonprofit is far from a startup, but went through YC to learn more growth tactics.
Today’s set of companies focused on hardcore backend engineering tools and scrappy social apps. And thanks to YC’s recently developed Investor Match system, it’s able to route the startups and VCs most interested in each other into meetings.
Secureframe raises $18M Series A to simplify cybersecurity compliance
Security compliance may not be the hottest conversation starter, but it’s a critical and often grueling process that companies have to endure every year to show that their security practices are up to par. It’s a burden that bogs down startups more than others, and so it’s fitting that startups are trying to find a better way.
Enter security compliance startup Secureframe, founded by Shrav Mehta and Natasja Nielsen, which thinks it has.
Universal Secrets Manager Innovator Unveils Doppler Share and New Enterprise Features as Customer Demand Soars
Today Doppler, the Universal Secrets Manager leader, launched Doppler Share and released enterprise-grade enhancements to its flagship platform. Now most organizations, regardless of size, can use Doppler to securely store secrets, increasing developer productivity while strengthening overall security. “In today’s environment speed equals competitive advantage,” stated Brian Vallelunga, founder and CEO of Doppler. “However speed can lead to compromised security when trying to meet aggressive timelines, especially if the security protocols create roadblocks.
How FamPay, a start-up by IIT Roorkee grads could give teens financial swag via a ‘numberless’ card
One of the woes of anyone’s teenage years is that no one trusts you with money. You’re young enough for adults to be a little skeptical but old enough that it stings. But what if there was a platform where you could have control over how you spend your money? Well, that is exactly what FamPay, a Bengaluru-based neo-bank (a bank that’s completely online) start-up, is providing adolescents. With its app and numberless card, called Famcard, its founders, Kush Taneja and Sambhav Jain expect that it will impart some financial education on the youth.
AI-powered grocery inventory startup Shelf Engine nabs $41M
Prior to the pandemic, average grocery profits hovered around 2%, mostly due to transportation and logistical inefficiencies. Shifting product demand and sales compounded these issues, with stores now responsible for 10% of U.S. food waste. This over-ordering not only costs profitability, but forces retailers to increase prices to make up for the losses. In April 2020, grocery prices showed their steepest monthly increase in nearly 50 years, led by rising prices for perishables like meat and eggs.
Kathleen Gallagher: Why do schools like MIT excel in launching startups, while UWM and other area schools do so little?
UWM’s Sandra McLellan and MIT’s Eric Alm are among the world’s foremost experts at detecting very small organisms in very large quantities of sewage — a useful tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite their similar research capabilities, Alm’s work is having a wider impact and creating more economic value and high-paying jobs.
The reason: A startup spinout called Biobot Analytics.
This little known Seattle startup just raised $25M to grow its ‘mobile infrastructure as a service’ tech
Jim Xiao learned about building enterprise platforms at Microsoft China. An executive role at a wireless company taught him about manufacturing Android devices. And he saw how hardware wasn’t catching up to software during a 4.5-year stint with Dan Gilbert’s venture capital firm.
All three experiences led Xiao to what is arguably his most exciting adventure yet: leading Seattle startup Mason, which has quietly grown into a fledgling “mobile infrastructure as a service” company that just raised a $25 million investment round.
ReadMe scores $9M Series A to help firms customize API docs
Software APIs help different tools communicate with one another, let developers access essential services without having to code it themselves and are critical components for driving a platform-driven strategy. Yet they require solid documentation to help make the best use of them. ReadMe, a startup that helps companies customize their API documentation, announced a $9 million Series A today led by Accel with help from Y Combinator. The company was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2015 cohort.
Discount grocery startup Misfits Market raises $200M
Misfits Market, a startup known for selling “ugly” fruits and vegetables at discount prices, announced this morning that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding.
The company says this brings its total funding to $301.5 million and moves its valuation into unicorn territory (i.e. above $1 billion). It isn’t getting any more specific about that valuation, though Bloomberg reports that it’s $1.1 billion.
Remote hiring startup Deel raises $156M at a $1.25B valuation after 20x growth in 2020
Many of the world’s organizations shifted to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even as more people are vaccinated and offices are planning re-openings, it’s clear that for some organizations, remote work is here to stay.
Deel, a startup that provides payroll, compliance tools and other services to help businesses hire remotely, has seen increased demand in the wake of this shift.
Walmart invests in self-driving startup Cruise
Walmart is investing in self-driving startup Cruise as part of a massive $2.75 billion investment round in the company—an expansion of the $2 billion round announced in January. That original announcement featured three other big names: GM, Honda, and Microsoft.
Cruise was originally an independent startup but was acquired by GM in 2016. GM has poured billions into the company and has increasingly sought additional financial support from outside investors.
Stoke Space aims to take reusable rockets to new heights with $9M seed
Many launch providers think reusability is the best way to lower the cost and delay involved in getting to space. SpaceX and Rocket Lab have shown reusable first stages, which take a payload to the edge of space — and now Stoke Space Technologies says it is making a reusable second stage, which will take that payload to orbit and beyond, and has raised a $9.1 million seed round to realize it.
Designing a first stage that can return to Earth safely is no small task, but the fact that it only reaches a certain height and speed, and doesn’t actually climb into orbit at an even higher velocity, means that it is simpler to try. The second stage takes over when the first is spent, accelerating and guiding the payload to its destination orbit, which generally means it will have traveled a lot farther and will be going a lot faster when it tries to come back down.
Kalshi Raises $30 Million in Series A Funding Led by Sequoia
Kalshi, the first federally regulated exchange dedicated to trading on event outcomes, announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Charles Schwab, chairman of Charles Schwab Corporation, Henry Kravis, co-chairman & co-CEO of KKR, SV Angel and previous investors including Neo and YC Continuity. The announcement comes on the heels of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approving Kalshi as a Designated Contract Market (DCM) in November, making it one of just 16 DCMs in the U.S.
Ramp secures $150M debt line from Goldman Sachs as the corporate spend market grows
This morning Ramp, a startup that competes in the corporate spend market, announced that it has secured a $150 million debt facility with Goldman Sachs. Ramp previously raised a $30 million Series B in late December 2020, after raising a $23 million Series A earlier in the same year.
TechCrunch spoke with Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman about its new credit access. Glyman said that until it was secured, his company had previously financed customer corporate spend off its own balance sheet. That effort would have become more difficult and inefficient as Ramp secured more customers, something that its rapid-fire fundraising implies that it has.
Roche and Genentech’s latest AI collaborator raises $25M Series A to reinvent one of the oldest cancer targets
Jonah Kallenbach spent the summer before his senior year with Anton, the hulking fluorescent supercomputer housed in the midtown Manhattan offices of hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Armed with 512 processors running in parallel, it’s been used since 2008 to probe some of the biggest questions in protein folding and structure.
Alloy raises $4M to build out its e-commerce automation service
Alloy Automation, a startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced today that it has closed $5 million across two rounds, the most recent of which brought $4 million to the company in October of 2020.
The new funds were raised at a $16 million pre-money, $20 million post-money valuation, Alloy told TechCrunch.
The company’s latest fundraising was led by Bain Capital Ventures and Abstract, with participation from Color Capital, BoxGroup and a collection of individual investors, including Shippo’s Laura Behrens Wu.
Announcing Ironclad’s Series D — Towards a New Standard for Business Contracting
I am proud to announce that BOND has led Ironclad’s $100 million Series D round. Lux Capital, known for investing in frontier technologies like space and AI, also participated, along with our lead investors in prior rounds, Accel, Sequoia, and Y Combinator Continuity.
With this financing, we aim to solve the most important unsolved problem of modern business: the problem of business contracting.
The problem of business contracting
The problem of business contracts in 2021 reminds me of a totally different problem from the last century: shipping, before containerization.
Gainful raises $7.5M for personalized sports nutrition
Gainful, a startup offering personalized subscriptions to protein powders and hydration products, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.
COO Eric Wu, who founded the company with CTO Jahaan Ansari, told me that Gainful began with his own experience experimenting with different protein powders and eventually finding the combination that worked best for his goals and dietary needs.
ElectroNeek, a Robotic Process Automation company, reports 5x annual revenue growth in 2020
Our accelerating global growth is a product of ElectroNeek’s diverse team, working in almost all of the time zones around the globe, making Robotic Process Automation accessible to mid-market and smaller companies no matter where they are. A big Thank You to everyone who worked with us this year as well as to those who have just embarked on their automation journey with ElectroNeek – your talent and dedication is what fuels better customer and user experience.
GM leads $23 million investment in on-demand vehicle maintenance service Yoshi
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]The start-up has raised more than $38 million for its expansion plans.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Ramp raises $30M as the battle to own corporate spend heats up
Corporate spend management startup Ramp has raised $30 million more in a new round, it announced today. TechCrunch covered Ramp’s launch earlier this year, when it also detailed that it had raised around $23 million up to that point.
The startup raised its latest round in August of 2020, with conversations about the deal kicking off in June. The new capital is Ramp’s second priced raise after its August, 2019 seed round worth $8 million and the first after its February, 2020-era $15 million raise. D1 and Coatue were new investors in this new investment, which included some prior backers.
NBA Joins GreenPark Sports Mobile Fan Experience, Adds $14 Million Series A Round
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
GreenPark Sports, a novel combination of sports fan experience and mobile game whose founders include former YouTube and Zappos CEOs, said it has signed a partnership with the NBA and added $14 million in a Series A investment round.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Healthtech startup Loop Health Bags $2.3 Mn Seed Funding From Sierra Ventures, Soma Capital and others
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]Loop Health offers companies group health insurance plans from prominent insurers bundled with a virtual primary care experience through an in-house medical team[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Datafold raises seed from NEA to keep improving the lives of data engineers
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
With Datafold, changes made by data engineers in their extractions and transformations can be compared for unintentional changes
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Walmart and Cruise partner to test autonomous grocery delivery in Arizona
U.S. retailer Walmart and autonomous vehicle company Cruise are pairing up to test grocery delivery in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Under the pilot program, customers will be able to place an order from their local Walmart store and have it delivered via one of Cruise’s autonomous, electric Chevy Bolt cars. While the vehicles will operate autonomously, a human safety operator will always be behind the wheel.
India’s WareIQ raises $1.65M for its Amazon-like delivery platform for sellers
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]The one-year-old startup WareIQ operates a platform to leverage the warehouses across the country. It has built a management system for these warehouses, most of which largely engage in offline business-to-business commerce and have had little to no prior e-commerce exposure.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
SpeedScale makes to developers is that its service can give coders the ability to see the problems before the release
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]Speedscale givers coders the ability to see their problems before the release[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Secureframe raises $4.5M to help businesses speed up their compliance audits
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
Secureframe, helps businesses get and maintain their SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Transforming Latin American Corner Stores: Chiper Carries In $12M Series A
Chiper has been amassing a network of digitized corner stores in Latin America for the past two years. Now armed with $12 million in Series A funding, the Colombia-based e-commerce platform for independent merchants is poised to capture even more corner-store retailers.
Nabis raises $5m Series A to grow its cannabis distribution platform
The cannabis industry is quickly growing up, and companies like Nabis play a critical role. Today, the company is announcing it raised $5 million in Series A funding, which will help it grow and expand its offering.
Nabis is a business to business distributor, handling logistics, payment, and warehousing. Instead of being a distributor for beer, snacks, or pet supplies, Nabis is a cannabis distributor. The company acts as a middleman between cultivators and retail establishments, providing both parties’ unique services. Since it’s illegal to ship cannabis through traditional means, most cannabis operators turn to private operations to transport goods.
India’s Razorpay becomes unicorn after new $100 million funding round
Bangalore-headquartered Razorpay, one of the handful of Indian fintech startups that has demonstrated accelerated growth in recent years, has joined the coveted unicorn club after raising $100 million in a new financing round, the payments processing startup said on Monday.
The new financing round, a Series D, was co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia India, the six-year-old Indian startup said. The new round valued the startup at “a little more than $1 billion,” co-founder and chief executive Harshil Mathur told TechCrunch in an interview.
Doppler Raises $2.3 Million From Sequoia And Kleiner Perkins To Create The First Universal Secrets Management Solution For Developers
A developer’s primary priority is to write code. The secondary tasks, like keeping track and managing access of secrets, or digital authentication credentials, go on the back burner. However, secrets management must be done well, or a developer team risks compromising their code at critical times. Yet, most secrets management software are built by DevOps and security-focused teams or are quickly hacked-together developer solutions that won’t be able to scale with greater use.
Brian Vallelunga has struggled first-hand with secrets management. He and his team have built Doppler to address the problem. Doppler is the first ‘Universal Secrets Manager’ built specifically for developer teams of all sizes. The San Francisco-based startup has raised $2.3M in a seed round from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Abstract Ventures and Soma Capital, with participation from prominent tech investors and executives such as Aaron Levie, Peter Thiel, Nat Friedman, Dylan Field, Kevin Hartz, Greg Brockman, Jeremy Stoppelman and Ben Porterfield, and more.
Philippines payment processing startup PayMongo lands $12 million Series A led by Stripe
Stripe has led a $12 million Series A round in Manila-based online payment platform PayMongo, the startup announced today.
PayMongo, which offers an online payments API for businesses in the Philippines, was the first Filipino-owned financial tech startup to take part in Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Y Combinator and Global Founders Capital, another previous investor, both returned for the Series A, which also included participation from new backer BedRock Capital.
Rappi raises over US$300 million
It’s official: Rappi is raising big funds. We’d previously reported that the Colombian unicorn had rallied US$155.8 million as per a recent SEC filing. But the startup, via press release confirmed today (24) that it raised more than US$300 million.
It’s worth pointing out that within the aforementioned SEC document, the startup is aiming for US$350 million.
“We’re happy to be working with this team of investors who trust our growth model and believe in our region and the role we have to play in promoting local commerce and actively contributing to the region’s economic recovery. This round of investments will allow us to fund the business, our partners, and the future,” said Rappi in a statement.
Deel nabs $30M more for payroll, compliance and other tools to run global workforces
Remote working has become the norm for many of us not on the front lines, and what’s been notable is that this is also changing the mindset for a lot of organizations, which are now hiring from an increasingly global talent pool.
Flat, a Mexican property tech startup, raises $4.6M pre-seed led by ALLVP
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
Flat has raised one of Mexico’s largest pre-seed rounds to take the Opendoor real estate marketplace model across the Rio Grande
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
YC startup SockSoho is using data science in a bid to become the ‘Uniqlo of India’
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]SockSoho now has more than 30,000 customers, and plans to launch into new menswear verticals soon[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Lambda School raises $74M for its virtual coding school where you pay tuition only after you get a job
In the world of technology, online learning has been one of the bigger beneficiaries of the last several months, with people staying home and away from their normal routines because of the coronavirus pandemic and using that time to expand their knowledge, or more critically, figure out what to do next if they want to change careers, or have found themselves without a job.
Data science startup Pachyderm, which just raised $16 million, says remote work has been ‘a massive benefit’ to its business
When the data science platform Pachyderm first launched in 2014, open source project Hadoop was the only major big data player on the market (the startup’s name is actually an early jab at Hadoop, which has an elephant in its logo).
Pachyderm’s business didn’t really take off until 2017, says cofounder Joey Zwicker, when the demand for data science skyrocketed. From there, the startup started attracting the attention of venture capitalists and large business customers alike.
Kenyan startup WorkPay raises $2.1m seed funding to fuel its growth
Kenyan startup WorkPay, which builds human resources (HR) and payroll solutions for Africa, has raised US$2.1 million in seed funding to fuel its growth.
Originally called TozzaPlus until it rebranded in 2019, WorkPay is a cloud-based human resources management and payroll solution for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Africa. The startup’s time tracking and salary disbursement tools help African businesses save money and time by eliminating ghost workers from their payroll and inefficiencies associated with cash payments.
Asian-Inspired Sparkling Water Brand Sanzo Raises $1.3 Million In Seed Funding To Expand Distribution
The battle for the increasingly popular frizzy water market in the U.S. is heating up as Asian-inspired brand Sanzo has just closed a $1.3 million seed funding to expand distribution.
This round was led by entrepreneurs and angel investors, whom Sanzo’s founder and CEO Sandro Roco believes have a better understanding of his entrepreneurial journey than VC funds, including co-founder of Away, Jen Rubio; CPO and EVP at Adobe Creative Cloud, Scott Belsky; Boba Guys’ co-founders, Andrew Chau and Bin Chen.
Rippling nabs $145M at a $1.35B valuation to build out its all-in-one platform for employee data
Big news today in the world of enterprise IT startups. Rippling, the startup founded by Parker Conrad to take on the ambitious challenge of building a platform to manage all aspects of employee data, from payroll and benefits through to device management, has closed $145 million in funding — a monster Series B that catapults the company to a valuation of $1.35 billion.
Parker Conrad, the CEO who co-founded the company with Prasanna Sankar (the CTO), said in an interview that the plan will be to use the money to continue its own in-house product development (that is, bringing more tools into the Rippling mix organically, not by way of acquisition) but also to have it just in case, given everything else going on at the moment.
YC alum Paragon snags $2.5M seed for low-code app integration platform
Low-code is a hot category these days. It helps companies build workflows or simple applications without coding skills, freeing up valuable engineering resources for more important projects. Paragon, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced a $2.5 million seed round today for its low-code application integration platform.
Investors include Y Combinator, Village Global, Global Founders Capital, Soma Capital and FundersClub.
Misfits Market raises $85 million Series B to send you ‘ugly’ fruits and veggies
Misfits Market, the ecommerce platform that sells ‘ugly’ produce (among other things), has today announced the close of an $85 million Series B financing round. The funding was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Greenoaks Capital, Third Kind Venture Capital, and Sound Ventures.
Misfits Market started out as a subscription box that allowed folks to buy ugly or misshapen product on the cheap each week. This product would have been thrown out at the farm, before ever heading to a distributor or grocery store, because it usually goes to waste sitting on a grocery store shelf.
There’s nothing actually wrong with this produce, except for the fact that shoppers wouldn’t normally choose it from a pile of fruit or vegetables that look more pleasing.
Since raising its Series A, Misfits Market has been working to expand its selection, which now includes chocolate, snacks, chips, coffee, herbs, grains, lentils, sauces and spices. Users can add these products to their usual weekly produce box on an a la carte basis, and they’re priced 20-25 percent below retail. These products are available to ‘add to box’ once a week (on Thursdays).
Sora raises $5.3M to power its HR automation service
Think back to the last time you onboarded at a new job. Was it a mishmash of documents and calendar invites and calls and, generally speaking, a mess?
Probably. That’s likely because onboarding is a process that often depends on disparate, unconnected HR tools. Sora, a startup that today announced $5.3 million in collected fundraising, wants to shake up the HR software world with a low-code service that helps companies connect their tooling and automate their HR processes. The startup might be able to make things like onboarding better for employees and companies alike.
Shelf Engine has a plan to reduce food waste at grocery stores, and $12 million in new cash to do it
For the first few months it was operating, Shelf Engine, the Seattle-based company that optimizes the process of stocking store shelves for supermarkets and groceries, didn’t have a name.
Co-founders Stefan Kalb and Bede Jordan were on a ski trip outside of Salt Lake City about four years ago when they began discussing what, exactly, could be done about the problem of food waste in the U.S.
Kalb is a serial entrepreneur whose first business was a food distribution company called Molly’s, which was sold to a company called HomeGrown back in 2019.
YC-Backed FamPay Launches First Numberless Payments Cards For Teens
Y Combinator-backed fintech startup FamPay, on Thursday (July 16), launched FamCard, a numberless card to allow teenagers to independently transact online with minimal intervention from parents.
However, the card requires top-ups from an adult but lets children spend it the way they want, under supervision. This relieves parents from giving children physical cash or their debit/credit card, and gives a sense of financial freedom to teens. FamPay believes that such an offering can efficiently teach children about financial management.
Mighty Health created a wellness app with older adults top of mind
Virtual classes might make it easier to work out anywhere, anytime, but not for anyone. Mainstream fitness tech often targets the young and fit, in advertisements and cardio-heavy exercises. It effectively excludes aging adults from participating.
This gap between mainstream fitness and elders is where Mighty Health, a Y Combinator graduate, comes in.
Mighty Health has created a nutrition and fitness wellness app that is tailored to older adults who might have achy hips or joint problems. Today, the San Francisco-based startup has announced it raised $2.8 million in funding by Y Combinator, NextView Ventures, RRE Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital and more.
Lattice, a people management platform, picks up $45M at a $400M valuation
Working these days is not what it used to be. To enforce social distancing and slow the spread of the COVID-19 health pandemic, many of us have decamped from our offices to our homes, we only connect with colleagues and others virtually, and it’s all too easy to lose sight of our focus and strategy in the midst of it all.
But in the grand tradition of enterprise IT, that creates an opportunity, and today, a startup called Lattice, whose platform helps track, reward and set goal achievement in the workplace, has closed a round of $45 million to help address some of those issues.
Flatfile scores $7.6M seed investment to simplify data onboarding
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
One of the huge challenges companies like enterprise SaaS vendors face with new customers is getting customer data into their service.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Athlane looks to connect brands and esports streamers with a fresh $3.3 million in funding
Athlane, the YC-backed company from the Summer ’19 cohort, is today ready to launch with a fresh $3.3 million in capital. Investors include Y Combinator, Jonathan Kraft (New England Patriots), Michael Gordon (President of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club), Global Founders Capital, Romulus Capital, Seabed VC and more.
The startup originally positioned itself as the “NCAA of esports” but, after some time in stealth, has taken a new approach. Athlane is looking to be the connective fiber between streamers and brands, facilitating sponsorship and endorsement deals with more transparent data and analytics and a streamlined communications flow.
Quaestor is reinventing business metric collaboration for the startup party-round era
[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-6-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]
Quaestor wants to upend the static spreadsheets and PDFs sent to dozens if not hundreds of people on cap tables today with a software-first solution that allows executives and their investors to hold better, more intelligent conversations about business performance.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Exclusive: Swap Taps $3.3M Seed Round To Create Better Infrastructure For Fintechs
Brazil-based Swap raised a $3.3 million seed round to help financial institutions create their own internal financial technology businesses faster and more effectively.
“We are like AWS [Amazon Web Services] for payments, helping companies improve connection, experience and embed finance into their business so they can stop outsourcing those functions,” Swap`s co-founder and Chief Product Officer Ury Rappaport, told Crunchbase News.
ONEVC led the seed round, with participation from GFC, SOMA Capital, Brad Flora, ABSeed, Flourish Ventures, Rhombuz, Canary, Hustle Fund and Patrick Sigrist.
Karat launches a credit card for online creators
Karat is a new startup promising to build better banking products for the creators who make a living on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and other online platforms. Today it’s unveiling its first product — the Karat Black Card.
The startup, which was part of accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, is also announcing that it has raised $4.6 million in seed funding from Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, SignalFire, YC, CRV and Coatue.2
Astranis reaches key milestone with MicroGEO communication satellite, aims for service to begin next summer
Satellite telecommunications startup Astranis has achieved a key technical milestone with its MicroGEO product, a small geosynchronous communications satellite that it will use to launch its first commercial service starting next summer for customers in Alaska. This is a big milestone for Astranis because the MicroGEO satellite test article that passed this round of thermal-vacuum qualification testing will serve as the basis for a whole planned line of first products, designed to affordably provide low-cost broadband to specific geographic markets using individual spacecraft, region by region.
Benepass raises $2.4 million to help employees get the most out of their tax-advantaged benefits
Tax-advantaged benefits, like flexible spending accounts, can save employees in the United States thousands of dollars annually, and reduce the amount of payroll taxes companies pay. But those benefits are often underutilized, simply because they can be confusing to navigate. Benepass wants to make the process easier with a mobile app that centralizes all of an employee’s tax-advantaged accounts, and is linked to physical and virtual payment cards. The startup announced today that it has raised a $2.4 million seed round.
Remote work start-up Deel scores $14 million investment led by Andreessen Horowitz
Amid a sharp pullback in venture capital activity during the coronavirus pandemic, one Silicon Valley start-up is showing what could be a path forward for other new companies seeking funding.
The business, a payroll platform for remote workers called Deel, has secured a $14 million series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, sources told CNBC exclusively. As part of the investment, Andreessen general partner Anish Acharya is joining the San Francisco-based company’s board.
African fintech firm Flutterwave launches SME e-commerce portal
San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup Flutterwave has launched Flutterwave Store, a portal for African merchants to create digital shops to sell online.
The product is less Amazon and more eBay — with no inventory or warehouse requirements. Flutterwave insists the move doesn’t represent any shift away from its core payments business.
The company accelerated the development of Flutterwave Store in response to COVID-19, which has brought restrictive measures to SMEs and traders operating in Africa’s largest economies.
ElectroNeek, A Y Combinator Robotic Process Automation Startup, Raises $2.5M To Increase Remote Work Productivity
The novel coronavirus pandemic has forced many non-essential businesses across the US to close their offices in a bid to stop the spread of the virus. The disruption caused by the virus has diminished consumer demand and severely impacted the day-to-day operations of firms of any size. Sergey Yudovskiy, Dmitry Karpov, and Mikhail Rozhin started ElectroNeek to help businesses increase their productivity, given the necessity for remote work during the pandemic. ElectroNeek picked up $2.5 million in their seed round led by 645 Ventures, with participation from Soma Capital, I2BF Global, and other funds and angel investors. The San Francisco-based startup was recently in Y Combinator’s (YC) Winter 2020 batch.
WorkClout shifts focus to manufacturing performance support and raises $2.3M seed
WorkClout, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort, announced today that it has shifted its focus from manufacturing automation to manufacturing performance support and has raised a $2.3 million seed round.
The funding was led by Spider Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Liquid 2, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Mehta Ventures and several individual investors.
When the company launched last year, it was looking at helping customers drive operational efficiency in their processes, but WorkClout founder and CEO Arjun Patel says they were seeing that there was a ceiling in terms of how much efficiency they could squeeze out of work processes using software.
Forager raises $10 million Series A for cross-border tech
Forager, the Chicago-based technology and logistics company focused on cross-border freight, announced Wednesday morning that it had closed a $10 million Series A round of venture capital funding.
The Series A was led by Silicon Valley firm U.S. Venture Partners (USVP); previous investor Chicago Ventures and new investor Soma Capital also participated in the round. Forager’s valuation was not disclosed.
CEO Matt Silver, VP of Finance & Analytics Jordan Salins, and COO Jessie Essman founded Forager in January 2019. Silver’s industry experience came from growing up at Coyote Logistics, the freight brokerage founded by his father in 2006, where he managed cross-border operations in Mexico and Canada. In November, Forager launched the first version of its cross-border freight matching and pricing platform, SCOUT.
Glisten uses computer vision to break down product photos to their most important parts
It’s amazing that in this day and age, the best way to search for new clothes is to click a few check boxes and then scroll through endless pictures. Why can’t you search for “green patterned scoop neck dress” and see one? Glisten is a new startup enabling just that by using computer vision to understand and list the most important aspects of the products in any photo.
Now, you may think this already exists. In a way, it does — but not a way that’s helpful. Co-founder Sarah Wooders encountered this while working on a fashion search project of her own while going to MIT.
“I was procrastinating by shopping online, and I searched for v-neck crop shirt, and only like two things came up. But when I scrolled through there were 20 or so,” she said. “I realized things were tagged in very inconsistent ways — and if the data is that gross when consumers see it, it’s probably even worse in the backend.”
Human Interest Raises $40M Series C To Close Retirement Savings Gap for SMBs
When it comes to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), it’s not always as easy to offer 401(k)s as a benefit. And owners of those businesses often struggle with being able to save for retirement themselves. A startup out to change that has just raised a new round of funding to help it advance on its goal.
Human Interest, a retirement plan provider for SMBs, announced today it has closed a $40 million Series C round just months after raising a $15.4 million Series B.
Oberndorf Enterprises LLC, a family-owned office led by William Oberndorf, led the latest round, which brings Human Interest’s total debt and (mostly) equity raised to just over $75 million since its April 2015 inception. Combined, the last two rounds total more than three times the capital Human Interest raised during its first four years of operation, the company said.
YC-backed Cleanly merges with NextCleaners to vertically integrate
Cleanly, the YC-backed company that looked to bring tech to the laundry industry, has today announced a merger with NextCleaners. The New York-based companies signed an all-stock deal after more than a year of negotiations, with Cleanly founder and CEO Tom Harari serving as Chairman of the Board and Next CEO Kam Saifi will stay in the Chief Executive role at the new company.
Kenyan HR & Payroll Startup WorkPay Joins Y Combinator
Founded in 2017 as TozzaPlus by Paul Kimani, WorkPay aims is to be the go-to workforce management solution for businesses located in Africa by providing a cutting-edge enterprise HR and payroll software at a price point that can be availed by any business. By using a multi-module system, they help companies automate payroll from punch-in to payout.
Palm oil alternative startup C16 Biosciences raises $20 million
C16 Biosciences, a company seeking to commercialize a manufactured alternative to palm oil, announced yesterday that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding from backers including the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Why it matters: Palm oil is used in a massive array of products — from shampoo to foods to biofuels.
- Palm plantations are fueling deforestation that releases CO2 and erodes wildlife habitat in multiple countries.
How it works: The New York-based startup has a fermentation-based “bio-manufacturing” process for “brewing palm oil like beer.”
Cruise can now transport passengers in self-driving cars in CA
Cruise recently received a permit to transport passengers in its autonomous vehicles in California. Granted by the California Public Utilities Commission, the permit is part of the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot.
As part of the program, Cruise must provide data and reports to the CPUC regarding any incidents, the number of passenger miles traveled and passenger safety protocols. Cruise must also have a safety driver behind the wheel and not charge passengers for rides.
Cruise is now one of five self-driving companies allowed to participate in this program. The others are Zoox, Waymo, Pony.ai, Aurora and AutoX. This program is a bit different from the one run by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which has granted 66 companies permits to test their respective vehicles in the state.
Astranis raises $90 million for its next-gen satellite broadband internet service
YC-backed Astranis has raised $90 million of new combined debt and equity funding in a Series B round led Venrock, with a sizeable contribution by existing investor (and lead of their 2018 round) Andreessen Horowitz. The funding will be used to help the company launch its first commercial satellites, the bedrock of its future internet service offering, aimed at connecting the massive market of underserved populations around the world.
Ramp is a corporate card focused on helping you spend less
Meet Ramp, a new startup that offers corporate credit cards with 1.5% cash back on everything. The company thinks that a cash-back program combined with an analysis of your payments to help you spend less is more valuable than alternative corporate card offerings.
Ramp is launching publicly today and has raised $25 million in funding from Keith Rabois, Coatue, BoxGroup, Conversion Capital, Soma Capital, Backend Capital and more than 50 business angels.
Quo, A Stanford Consumer Fintech Startup, Leverages AI To Provide Financial Security
The car payment is due in seven days. The electric bill is past due. The cable service has been shut off. You need to go to the doctor, but you’re uninsured.
You also found out that your house needs significant repairs. You’ve hit your credit card limit, and your next paycheck doesn’t come for another week and a half.
These challenges are all too familiar in the United States of America. In the midst of an unprecedented stock market rally and record-low unemployment, many Americans still struggle to meet their financial needs. CNBC reports that roughly 40% of Americans can’t handle a $400 emergency. Anyone can fall behind on these recurring bills, and unexpected expenses can make the financial constraints even worse. Payday loans are used to bridge the gap between paychecks, but end up making a cash-flow issue worse due to their usurious interest rates. Financial disaster can happen to anyone in the United States.
SoftBank leads latest Alto Pharmacy funding round at over $1 billion valuation
SoftBank’s second Vision Fund has led a new round of funding for Silicon Valley-based drug delivery firm Alto Pharmacy that valued it at over $1 billion, according to two people familiar with the development.
African fintech firm Flutterwave raises $35M, partners with Worldpay
San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup Flutterwave has raised a $35 million Series B round and announced a partnership with Worldpay FIS for payments in Africa.
With the funding, Flutterwave will invest in technology and business development to grow market share in existing operating countries, CEO Olugbenga Agboola — aka GB — told TechCrunch.
The company will also expand capabilities to offer more services around its payment products.
New Arizona Development Bans Residents From Bringing Cars
Culdesac is a $140 million Arizona development is banning residents from bringing their own cars in favor of scooters, bikes and ride-sharing, testing demand for a new type of walkable neighborhood.
The 1,000-person rental community, which broke ground this month in Tempe, won’t allow residents to park cars on site or in the surrounding area as a term of their leases. The founders say it will be the first of its kind in the U.S.
India’s Razorpay launches corporate credit cards, current accounts support in major neo banking push
India’s Razorpay, one of the largest payments processing firms in the country, today announced a range of new services aimed at startups, businesses, merchants and freelancers as the Bangalore-based firm expands the reach of its financial platform in the nation.
The startup, which raised $75 million from Ribbit Capital and others in June this year, today introduced a new kind of corporate credit card and some banking services for startups and SMEs, and a new payment option for individuals to quickly receive money from their clients.
Hype & Vice, A Y Combinator Collegiate Apparel Startup, Raises $1.5M From Founders Fund To Create Women’s Sportswear
College apparel is an integral part of how students express their pride for their universities and unique identities. However, university-branded clothing is not designed or reflective of women’s taste in fashion, as most sizes and designs are based on the average male body size. Cecilia Gonzalez, 25, and Kimberly Robles, 26, have started Hype and Vice (H&V) to create “cute, trendy, and fashionable” university clothing for women to wear on any occasion. The Los Angeles-based startup has successfully raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by Founders Fund’s Delian Asparouhov, with participation from Soma Capital, USC Marshall Venture Fund, and angel investors such as Jessica Livingston (co-founder of Y Combinator).
Eight Sleep Raises $40 Million To Make Slumber A Medical Solution
Eight Sleep wants hitting the pillow to be the equivalent of hitting the doctor’s office. The company, founded in 2014 by husband-wife duo Alexandra Zatarain (VP of Brand & Marketing) and Matteo Franceschetti (CEO) as well as Massimo Adreasi Bassi (CTO), makes high-tech mattresses and sleep products to turn bedtime into recovery time—filled with healthcare insights and analytics–with hope of sleep quality translating to life quality. Forbes is the first to report the company’s $40 million growth funding round, which brings their total funding to $65 million. This round was led by Founders Fund and joined by Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, 8VC, Flexport Founder Ryan Petersen and Eventbrite Cofounder and Chairman Kevin Hartz.
“We’re a sleep-fitness company. The night is a moment for you to recharge and really wake up at your peak,” 38-year-old CEO and cofounder Franceschetti
Brazilian Mobility Startup Kovi Raises $30M Series A From Global Investors
Kovi, a fast-growing 17-month-old Brazilian mobility startup, has raised a $30 million Series A led by Global Founders Capital.
New investor Quona Capital and existing investors Monashees, Maya Capital, Accel partner Kevin Efrusy, Y Combinator, Broadhaven Ventures, Tinder founder Justin Mateen and ONEVC also participated in the financing, which brings Kovi’s total raised since its inception to $40.6 million.
Founded in 2018 by two former 99 (Brazil’s first tech unicorn) executives, São Paulo-based Kovi rents vehicles to on-demand drivers who work for ride-hailing companies such as Uber, Didi and Lyft. It operates under the premise that more people in Latin America would work for these companies if they could afford to operate the necessary vehicle. Less than half the population in Brazil own a car. Also, cars are significantly more expensive in countries like Brazil than in the U.S. and the difference is even greater when it comes to the average income of the population. Kovi gives drivers who don’t necessarily want, or cannot afford, to own a vehicle “quick access to quality cars” at what it says is “a fair price”
YC grad Taskade raises $5M to take on Notion with a more collaborative productivity platform
Enterprise software tool startups are so often birthed to either un-bundle or re-bundle what came before them. In an age where “consumerization of the enterprise” is a trendy phrase for investors, it was natural a startup would come along to bundle its take on some of the trendiest startup tools.
Taskade appears to be the love child of Notion, Slack and Asana. It’s a tool for startup teams to collaborate around projects that can be re-organized based on how the individual user best works through tasks. The startup graduated from YC in the most recent batch and has now locked down $5 million in seed funding from Grishin Robotics and Y Combinator, Taskade CEO John Xie tells TechCrunch.
ZeroDown, valued at $150M, plans to take on Zillow
Days out of Y Combinator, venture capitalists valued ZeroDown, a financial and real estate technology startup, at $150 million, the company has confirmed. The startup had the perfect match of experienced founders and eye-popping ambitions to carve a new path to home ownership.
“I think we will be known as a company that makes it easier to buy a home in every single aspect,” ZeroDown co-founder and chief executive officer Abhijeet Dwivedi tells TechCrunch.
Tiger Global values people management tool Lattice at ~$200M
The secretive New York-based hedge fund Tiger Global Management has led a $25 million Series C investment in Lattice, an employee performance and engagement management tool, with participation from the startup’s existing investors.
The round, which values Lattice in the ballpark of $200 million, says co-founder and chief executive officer Jack Altman, comes just six months after the business closed a $15 million Series B led by Shasta Ventures. The HR tool, founded in 2015 by Altman and Eric Koslow, is also backed by Thrive Capital, the Slack Fund, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator.
Get guaranteed rent for your home from new startup Doorstead
Missing out on a month’s rent because you can’t find a tenant is a huge loss. Searching for someone to fill a home takes work, while property managers are incentivized to price your place too high, leading to costly vacancies.
But new startup Doorstead wants to take on the risk and the work for you. It acts as a property manager for single-family homes, but guarantees you rent at a specific rate starting in a certain number of days, even if it can’t fill the house or apartment. It also handles all the algorithmic pricing, advertising, tenant interviews, repairs, maintenance, leases and online payments in exchange for 8% of rent. Owners just sit back and receive the money, making it much easier to profit off of distant real estate. The startup claims to earn users 3% to 9% more than other property management models.
Self-Driving Startup Embark Raises $70 Million, Opens Freight Transfer Hubs For Robot Big Rigs
Embark Trucks, a self-driving tech firm created by two twenty-something Canadian computer scientists, just landed $70 million in new funding, its biggest investment round to date, and is opening the first cargo transfer hubs for its growing fleet of robotic semis.
The San Francisco-based startup is among a wave of companies including Alphabet’s Waymo, TuSimple, Starsky Robotics, Kodiak and Ike that see commercial opportunities to apply the same type of technology developed for autonomous robotaxis to long-haul trucks ferrying goods cross country. Three years after college friends (and Forbes 30 Under 30 alums) Alex Rodrigues, 23, and Brandon Moak, 24, founded Embark, the company has raised a total of $117 million, including the latest round. It operates 13 18-wheelers and has 70 employees.
Fintech firm PayMongo attracts $2.7m in seed funding from Stripe, Y Combinator, others
Manila-based financial tech startup PayMongo has raised $2.7 million in seed funding to give merchants in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian markets simple ways to set up online payments. Investors included Founders Fund, Peter Thiel and Stripe, with participation from Y Combinator (PayMongo is the first Philippine fintech company it has funded), Global Founders Capital, Soma Capital, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen and other angel investors.
An Indian startup that uses WhatsApp to serve thousands with chronic disease raises $5.5M seed round
Another startup in India is cashing in on the popularity of WhatsApp, the most popular app in the country with more than 400 million users, to build a business around it.
Digi-Prex is a seven-month old startup that runs an eponymous online subscription pharmacy in Hyderabad and serves patients with chronic diseases. Patients share their prescription with Digi-Prex through WhatsApp and the startup’s workers then deliver the medication to them on a recurring cycle.
Ironclad raises $50M Series C round for its digital contracting platform
Ironclad, a startup that makes it easier for legal teams to manage their contracts workflow, today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series C round led by Y Combinator Continuity, with participation from Emergence Captial, as well as existing investors including Accel and Sequoia Capital. This round brings Ironclad’s total funding to $83 million, according to Crunchbase.
In addition to the new funding, Ironclad, which was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 class, also today announced the launch of its Workflow Designer. This tool allows teams to easily create their own custom workflows based their individual business processes and timelines. Setting up those workflows looks be a pretty straightforward process. After tagging the existing contract, teams can then set up their processes based on what’s in a specific document. If a contract is over a specific value, for example, they can add a payment clause, or set up an approval process based on that value.
Colombian Startup Rappi Plans to Expand to 100 New Cities
Colombian delivery app Rappi is reportedly set to expand operations to nearly 100 new cities around the world by the end of this year.
Rappi is currently operating in 55 cities across seven Latin American countries including, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.
The news comes barely three months after the Colombian firm received US$1 billion in venture capital from Japanese investment group Softbank, setting a milestone in the region’s startup scene.
Misfits Market raises $16.5 million for their ‘ugly’ produce subscription box
YC-backed Eden Farm wants to cut out the middlemen between farmers and restaurants in Indonesia
Eden Farm is a startup with the ambitious goal of building a food distribution network for Indonesia, where many restaurants currently rely on markets for fresh ingredients.
But this means high markups and unreliable supplies for restaurant owners and lower profits for farmers, co-founder and CEO David Gunawan tells TechCrunch. The company, part of Y Combinator’s current batch, wants to help both by simplifying the supply chain, ensuring stable pricing and reducing food waste. Eden Farm currently focuses on fresh produce and non-perishable items, but plans to expand its product line to meat and seafood, too.
Flutterwave and Alipay partner on payments between Africa and China
San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup Flutterwave has partnered with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba to offer digital payments between Alipay and African merchants.
Flutterwave is a Nigerian-founded B2B payments service (primarily) for companies in Africa to pay other companies on the continent and abroad.
Alipay is Alibaba’s digital wallet and payments platform. In 2013, Alipay surpassed PayPal in payments volume and currently claims a global network of more than 1 billion active users, per Alibaba’s latest earnings report.
This 4-month-old Y Combinator startup wants to be the Stripe for the Philippines
Francis Plaza, a serial entrepreneur, was long frustrated with the poor digital payments services in his home country the Philippines. One day, he decided to do something about it.
About four months ago, Plaza sat together with his Software Engineer friends to discuss the issues in the payments space in the country and developed a solution.
And it has now made it to Y Combinator’s summer batch 2019, the first Filipino fintech startup to achieve the feat.
Integrate Acquires ListenLoop, Combines Programmatic ABM & Demand Gen In New Solution
Integrate, a demand orchestration platform, has acquired ListenLoop, an account-based programmatic advertising platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company also unveiled a new solution powered by ListenLoop that is designed to connect programmatic ABM and demand generation.
Electric scooter and bike startup Grow hits 10 million trips across Latin America
Latin America-based Grow, which formed after micromobility companies Grin and Yellow merged earlier this year, has hit 10 million rides. Grin, which first started operating about one year ago in Mexico, has since expanded into 23 cities across Latin America. That is, of course, thanks in part to its mergers with Yellow and Ride.
Nowports raises $5.3 million to become Latin America’s digital shipping answer to Flexport
Nowports, a developer of software and services to track freight shipments from ports to destinations across Latin America, has aims to become the regional answer to Flexport’s billion-dollar digital shipping business.
Almost 54 million containers are imported and exported from Latin America each year, and nearly half of them are either delayed or lost due to mismanagement.
Machine learning for everyone startup Intersect Labs launches platform for data analysis
Machine learning is the holy grail of data analysis, but unfortunately, that holy grail oftentimes requires a PhD in Computer Science just to get started. Despite the incredible attention that machine learning and artificial intelligence get from the press, the reality is that there is a massive gap between the needs of companies to solve business challenges and the availability of talent for building incisive models.
YC-backed Intersect Labs is looking to solve that gap by making machine learning much more widely accessible to the business analyst community. Through its platform, which is being launched fully publicly, business analysts can upload their data, and Intersect will automatically identify the right machine learning models to apply to the dataset and optimize the parameters of those models.
Online payments provider Razorpay raises $75M in Series C round led by Ribbit Capital and Sequoia India
Bengaluru-based online payments solution provider Razorpay on Tuesday said it had raised $75 million as a part of its Series C funding, led by new investors Ribbit Capital and Sequoia India. The round also saw participation from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Y Combinator.
Earlier, the company had raised a total of $31.5 million across Series A (2016) and Series B (2018) rounds, from 33 angel investors and a strategic investment by MasterCard. Matrix Partners had also participated in Razorpay’s last fundraise.
Tesla loses key Autopilot engineer to self-driving truck start-up Embark
Zeljko Popovic, a leader within Tesla’s Autopilot team, is leaving for Embark, the autonomous trucking start-up in San Francisco, according to a person familiar with the move. Embark confirmed the hire.
The departure comes at a critical time, as Tesla is promising its electric vehicles will be capable of operating as “robotaxis” by the end of next year — which is to say, they’d be fully self-driving in normal conditions, without human intervention. Tesla also says it plans to start production of its long-awaited electric semi trucks by the end of 2020.
Shield Diagnostics announces launch of Target-NG test for antibiotic susceptibility in Neisseria gonorrhoeae
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Shield Diagnostics, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed clinical laboratory tackling antibiotic resistance by bringing precision medicine to infectious disease, announced the launch of Target-NG, a rapid molecular test for antibiotic susceptibility in Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
A common sexually transmitted infection, Gonorrhea has quickly become resistant to most major classes of antibiotics and resistance has now been reported in the final class of antibiotics we have left, requiring those patients to be hospitalized and treated with broad spectrum antibiotics in order to be cured. With 820,000 cases of Gonorrhea each year in the US, the CDC has named antibiotic resistant gonorrhea (dubbed “Super Gonorrhea”) a top 3 urgent public health threat.
GM Cruise raises $1.15B at a $19B valuation from SoftBank and Honda
GM Cruise has raised another $1.15 billion in new equity from a group of investors that includes T. Rowe Price Associates, Honda, SoftBank Vision Fund and its parent company GM, as the self-driving vehicle company pushes to launch a commercial autonomous ride-hailing service this year.
This investment increases Cruise’s post-money valuation to $19 billion, inclusive of SoftBank’s previously announced investment commitment. Cruise has secured capital commitments totaling $7.25 billion in the past year, according to the company.
SoftBank Is Near $1 Billion Investment in Colombia’s Rappi
SoftBank Group Corp. is close to making a $1 billion investment in Latin American delivery app Rappi, according to people familiar with the matter. The investment is likely to be led by the Japanese company’s newly formed Innovation Fund, which was launched by SoftBank Chief Operating Officer Marcelo Claure to focus on technology investments in Latin America, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public. It’s expected to invest alongside the conglomerate’s Vision Fund, the people said.
Lattice raises another $15M to improve performance reviews
Jack Altman, whose resume includes a stint as vice president of business development at Teespring, has raised $15 million in Series B funding for his startup, Lattice, a modern approach to corporate goal setting. Shasta Ventures led the round, with participation from Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the latter being the organization his brother led as president until very recently.
Lattice, used by high-growth companies like Reddit, Slack, Coinbase and Glossier, helps human resources professionals develop insights about their teams. Founded in 2015, Altman and Eric Koslow, like most entrepreneurs, developed the idea for Lattice out of their own pain points.
EAROS ONE – The First Hearing Protection You Will Actually Want to Wear
The New Yorker entrepreneur Ronnie Madra has made it his mission to save our hearing. His stylish EAROS ONE is a sleek and comfortable way to protect your ears in places where the decibel levels can soar while still enabling full enjoyment of music and communication with those around you.
Rippling raises $45M at $270M to be the biz app identity layer
Parker Conrad’s last startup, Zenefits, drowned in busy work. Now with Rippling, he wants to boil that ocean. Instead of trying to nail one thing then expand, “very counter to conventional wisdom, we took on something that’s a lot broader and more ambitious.” That meant spending two years with 40 engineers working in stealth to build integrations with nearly every popular business tool to combine HR, IT and single-sign on services. The result is that when you hire an employee, Rippling onboards them to all those services in a single click. Goodbye, busy work. Hello, gateway to the enterprise app ecosystem
Torch takes $10M to teach empathy to executives
Now Torch is ready to lead the way to better management for more companies, as it’s just raised a $10 million Series A round led by Norwest Ventures, along with Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and West Ventures. It already has 100 clients, including Reddit and Atrium, but the new cash will fuel its go-to market strategy. Rather than trying to democratize access to coaching, Torch is doubling-down on teaching founders, C-suites and other senior executives how to care… or not care too much.
Skymind raises $11.5M to bring deep learning to more enterprises
Skymind, a Y Combinator-incubated AI platform that aims to make deep learning more accessible to enterprises, today announced that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A round led by TransLink Capital, with participation from ServiceNow, Sumitomo’s Presidio Ventures, UpHonest Capital and GovTech Fund. Early investors Y Combinator, Tencent, Mandra Capital, Hemi Ventures, and GMO Ventures, also joined the round/ With this, the company has now raised a total of $17.9 million in funding.
Ironclad raises $23 million in funding from Sequoia
When Jason Boehmig was in law school at Notre Dame in 2012, he decided he really wanted to be in technology. So he sent a cold email to Ted Wang, who was one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent lawyers, having represented Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and Spotify.
Boehmig asked Wang for a 15-minute meeting to pitch him on his idea to bring intelligent software to the legal world. Wang agreed to hear him out, so Boehmig hopped on a plane from Indiana to meet with the lawyer in the Bay Area.
FemBeat: P&G Acquires Organic Period Care Startup This Is L.
Yesterday, Procter & Gamble (P&G) announced its acquisition of This is L., a period care startup that manufactures organic pads and tampons. Although the startup would not disclose the acquisition amount, TechCrunch reported that a person with knowledge of the investment put the price tag at roughly $100 million. This is a big win for the Femtech space, which some still view as “niche”.
This is L. was founded in 2011 by Talia Frenkel, a former photojournalist who worked with the United Nations and the Red Cross. While documenting humanitarian crises around the world, Frenkel witnessed first-hand the neglect of women’s sexual reproductive rights and the effects of HIV/AIDS on women and girls. She initially began a distribution campaign of condoms and then expanded her business to include period products. But the mission has always been the same: for every product sold, another is made accessible to a girl or woman in need.
Showing the power of startup women’s health brands, P&G buys This is L
The P&G acquisition of This is L., a startup retailer of period products and prophylactics, shows just how profitable investing in women’s healthcare brands and products can be.
A person with knowledge of the investment put the price tag at roughly $100 million — a healthy outcome for investors and company founder Talia Frenkel. But just as important as the financial outcome is the deal’s implications for other mission-driven companies.
This is L. launched from Y Combinator in August 2015 with a service distributing condoms in New York and San Francisco and steadily expanded into feminine hygiene products.
Amazon is hauling cargo in self-driving trucks developed by Embark
Amazon is using self-driving trucks developed by Embark to haul some cargo on the I-10 interstate highway, CNBC has learned.
The trucks were previously noticed by a Reddit user, who photographed and shared images this week showing tractors emblazoned with the Embark logo and trailers painted with the Amazon Prime logo.
Electric scooter startup Grin merges with Brazil-based Yellow
Consolidation in the micromobility space has arrived — in Brazil, at least. A few months after Y Combinator-backed Grin merged its electric scooter business with Brazil-based Ride, it’s now merging with Yellow, the bike-share startup based in Brazil that has also expressed its ambitions to get into electric scooters.
If Yellow sounds familiar to you, it may be because, in September, the company raised $63 million in a funding round led by GGV Capital. That was the largest Series A round for a Latin American startup. A month later, Grin raised a $45.7 million Series A round.
Flutterwave and Visa launch African consumer payment service GetBarter
Fintech startup Flutterwave has partnered with Visa to launch a consumer payment product for Africa called GetBarter.
The app-based offering is aimed at facilitating personal and small merchant payments within countries and across Africa’s national borders. Existing Visa cardholders can send and receive funds at home or internationally on GetBarter.
20% Of Alaskans Don’t Have Access To Broadband Internet. This Satellite Startup Aims To Change That.
Internet satellite startup Astranis, which aims to deliver cost-effective high-speed internet to underserved markets, announced Wednesday that it has signed an exclusive agreement to provide satellite bandwidth to Alaska-based internet provider Pacific Dataport.
Under the terms of the contract, Astranis launch a single satellite in 2020 that will provide 7.5 Gbps of bandwidth. Pacific Dataport will use a portion of the available bandwidth to provide internet services to business. Those businesses include Microcom, which provides residential internet services and launched Pacific Dataport as a separate venture two years ago.
Alto raises $50 million to grow its online pharmacy across the U.S.
Next-gen pharmacy Alto Pharmacy has raised $50 million in a series C round of funding from Greenoaks Capital, Zola Capital, and Jackson Square Ventures.
Founded in 2015 after acquiring AG Pharmacy, a brick-and-mortar pharmacy which served San Francisco for more than 30 years, Alto Pharmacy is one of a number of online pharmacies to offer same-day prescription deliveries, in addition to related services such as medication management apps.
BlueCargo optimizes stacks of containers for maximum efficiency
Meet BlueCargo, a logistics startup focused on seaport terminals. The company was part of Y Combinator’s latest batch and recently raised a $3 million funding round from 1984 Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, Sound Ventures, Kima Ventures and others.
Pachyderm Raises $10M In Series A To Lead Data Science In The Enterprise.
Today we are proud to announce that Pachyderm has closed a Series A financing of $10M led by Benchmark, with participation from existing investors Ace & Co, Blumberg Capital, Data Collective, Foundation Capital, Susa Ventures, Tuesday Capital, and Y Combinator. As part of the funding, Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta will be joining our board. We’re also announcing our next major version of Pachyderm, v1.8.
We founded Pachyderm over four years ago with the understanding that data science would be critical to businesses over the next decade, and that Docker® containers were the perfect technology with which to build the next generation of tools. Those beliefscontinue to strengthen with each day.
Pachyderm allows data scientists to use the tools they already know and love on unified infrastructure while maintaining complete data lineage and provenance. We believe it’s the future of how individuals and teams develop, deploy, collaborate on and communicate about all things data.
Electric scooter startup Grin merges with Brazil-based Ride
Grin, the Mexico City-based electric scooter company backed by Y Combinator, is merging with São Paulo-based Ride to further the company’s expansion across Latin America. This comes shortly after Grin raised a ~$45 million Series A round.
Currently, Grin only operates in Mexico City, but it has plans to expand to other cities throughout Latin America. The merger with Ride, which already operates in São Paulo, will enable Grin to do this as early as next week, Grin co-founder Sergio Romo told TechCrunch.
After raising $25M in XRP, Omni lets you earn it renting stuff out
“I think any company scaling today has to have a crypto strategy. This is the start of ours,” Omni founder and CEO Tom McLeod tells me. His on-demand property storage and rental marketplace raised $25 million in XRP coins back in January in what some saw as an opportunist move to capitalize on the cryptocurrency boom. That industry has since gone bust, and XRP is in the cross-hairs of regulators who may classify it as a security with extra restrictions.
Now Omni has a way to get rid of some of its XRP. It’s beginning to let people get paid in the coin when they rent their stuff to fellow Omni users. Their balance of earnings is held in USD, but they can cash out to XRP at any time with no fee.
Electric scooter startup Grin raises ~$45 million
Grin, an electric scooter startup backed by Y Combinator, has raised a $45.7 million Series A to operate shared, electric scooters in Latin America.
Self-driving truck policy takes a big step forward
Last week the Federal Government released an update to their self-driving policy known as Automated Vehicles (AV) 3.0. This update is especially significant because, for the first time, it includes rules that set out how to deploy self-driving trucks. We are very excited about this update — as a result of AV 3.0 self-driving trucks are now allowed to operate across more than 90% of the United States once they are demonstrated to be safe.
Honda commits $2.75 billion to build autonomous vehicles with GM’s Cruise
Honda will commit $2.75 billion as part of an exclusive agreement with GM and its self-driving technology subsidiary Cruise to develop and produce a new kind of autonomous vehicle
Atrium raises $65M from a16z to replace lawyers with machine learning
Let the computers do the legal busy work so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That’s the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables.
Rappi raises $200M in funding at a valuation north of $1 billion
Investment in Latin American tech continues to reach new highs. In the first quarter of 2018, more than $600 million was invested. That followed a record 2017, which was the first time VCs funneled more than $1 billion into the continent’s tech ecosystem during a 12-month period.
Scooter Startups Try to Solve Their Parking Problem
Sergio Romo is trying to build the Latin American version of Lime or Bird, recently raising about a $20 million seed round for Grin, his scooter startup, from prominent Silicon Valley investors including Y Combinator, DCM Ventures and Shasta Ventures, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Romo said he has learned a lesson from some of the disorderly scooter deployments in U.S. cities: Find brick-and-mortar allies.
C16 Biosciences at Demo Day YC S18
C16 Biosciences is aiming to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the globe with their lab-grown palm oil, an alternative to a product that is found in a truly massive amount of goods. C16’s alternative is grown in bioreactors and is 20 percent less expensive to customers but “doesn’t destroy the planet,” the company says.
The startup has already begun early partnerships with a number of beauty and food distributors that together spend $1.2 billion on palm oil annually.
Safety and inspection bot startup Gecko Robotics adds $7 million to the coffers
Gecko Robotics aims to save human lives at our nation’s power plants with its wall-climbing robots. To continue doing so, the startup tells TechCrunch it has just secured $7 million from a cadre of high-profile sources, including Founders Fund, Mark Cuban, The Westly Group, Justin Kan and Y Combinator.
We first reported on the Pittsburgh-based company when co-founder Jake Loosararian came to the TechCrunch TV studios to show off his device for the camera. Back then, Gecko was in the YC Spring 2016 cohort, working with several U.S. power plants and headed toward profitability, according to Loosararian.
Autonomous retail startup Inokyo’s first store feels like stealing
Inokyo wants to be the indie Amazon Go. It’s just launched its prototype cashierless autonomous retail store. Cameras track what you grab from shelves, and with a single QR scan of its app on your way in and out of the store, you’re charged for what you got.
Y Combinator invests in non-invasive breast cancer screening bra EVA
According to a report by the American Cancer Society, an estimated 266,120 women will be newly diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States this year and (according to a 2016 estimate) can expect to pay between $60,000 and $134,000 on average for treatment and care. But, after hundreds of thousands of dollars and non-quantifiable emotional stress for them and their families, the American Cancer Society still estimates 40,920 women will lose their battle to the disease this year.
Worldwide, roughly 1.7 million women will be diagnosed with the disease yearly, according to a 2012 estimate by The World Cancer Research Fund International.
Shelf Engine uses machine learning to stop food waste from eating into store margins
While running Molly’s, the Seattle-based ready meal wholesaler he founded, Stefan Kalb was upset about its 28 percent food wastage rate. Feeling that the amount was “astronomical,” he began researching how to lower it — and was shocked to discovered Molly’s was actually outperforming the industry average. Confronted by the sheer amount of food wasted by American retailers, Kalb and Bede Jordan, then a Microsoft engineer, began working on an order prediction engine.
The project quickly brought Molly’s percentage of wasted food down to the mid-teens. “It was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my career,” Kalb told TechCrunch in an interview. Driven by its success, Kalb and Jordan launched Shelf Engine in 2016 to make the technology available to other companies. Currently participating in Y Combinator, the startup has already raised $800,000 in seed funding from Initialized Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Alexis Ohanian and Gerry Tan, and is now used at more than 180 retail points by clients including WeWork, Bartell Drugs, Natural Grocers and StockBox.
This couples counselor left his job to coach Silicon Valley tech workers
Cameron Yarbrough was working as a couples counselor in San Francisco when he started booking appointments with a new type of client: would-be tech startup founders who were trying to launch the next billion-dollar company together.
The fit made sense, according to Yarbrough. Couples counseling is typically more affordable than individual therapy, because two people split the bill, and startup cofounders are typically eager to save money.
JetLenses aims to save you a bunch of money on your contacts
A Y Combinator-backed startup, JetLenses, is taking on the major contact lens e-commerce sites, like 1-800-Contacts, Lens.com, and other online ordering systems offered by major retailers, such as Walmart. The startup’s goal is to bring down the cost of prescription products by automating the overhead associated with these businesses, in areas like prescription verification, order tracking, compliance and fulfillment, then pass those savings on to customers.
YC-backed Send Reality makes 3D virtual walkthroughs for residential listings
The fields of computer vision and VR are difficult. But a new company, Send Reality, is entering the race. The Y Combinator-backed company is looking to offer full 3D-modeling for virtual walkthroughs of real estate listings.
Founder and CEO Andrew Chen said he was the kid back in middle school and high school that spent hours walking around the streets of Paris, NYC and SF on Google Streetview.
HoneyLove looks to reinvent shapewear
Betsie Larkin spent the first ten years of her professional career as an EDM artist. She released two solo albums, toured five continents and worked with the likes of Armin van Buuren and Ferry Corsten. But after being constantly frustrated by shapewear she wore under her stage outfits, she felt compelled to try her hand at a new industry.
That’s how HoneyLove was born.
Autonomous trucking startup Embark lands $30 million in funding
Embark Trucks has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital in its bid to be the first to develop and launch a commercially viable driverless truck.
Scramblit Superfood Vegan Egg by Spero Foods is made from Pepitas
Spero Foods‘ newest product is shaking up the food industry. Scramblit is a vegan “superfood” egg mix that can be used to make omelettes, quiches, or scrambled eggs. It is said to be the first product of its kind.
Scramblit is made using pepita, the edible seeds from squash or pumpkin. Its only other ingredients are water, turmeric, garlic powder, and black salt. On a per gram basis, the pepita contains three times the amount of protein, eight times the amount of iron, and seven times the amount of zinc than an egg from chickens. Additionally, it has 400 times more fiber, 20 times more antioxidants, and twice as many omega-3s than eggs. It is also more sustainable to produce.
Shone wants to automate container ships
While everybody is focused on self-driving cars, Shone is working on autonomous technologies for container ships. The startup doesn’t want to turn those giant ships into unmanned vehicles, but it wants to help seafarers and make ships more efficient.
After attending Y Combinator, Shone recently raised a $4 million round from Alven, Liquid 2, Paul Graham, David Marcus, D. Scott Phoenix and The Refiners.
“The basic idea is that autonomous ships are coming. Overall, it seems unavoidable,” co-founder and CEO Ugo Vollmer told me. “And yet, there are still 25 people on the boat and it runs on Windows.”
GM’s Cruise gets $2.25B from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, $1.1B from GM
General Motors today announced a large investment into its self-driving unit, Cruise. SoftBank’s Vision Fund will invest $2.25 billion in GM Cruise Holdings LLC and when the deal closes, GM will invest an additional $1.1 billion. The investments are expected to inject enough capital into Cruise for the unit to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019.
Laika: The app where you find everything your pet needs
Laika , the new digital tool provides all the support to people so that the needs of your pet do not become a problem and customers always get the lowest prices.
This app seeks to prevent you from leaving your home, to become your assistant so you don’t have to worry about your dog or cat. Laika has a wide variety of food and products of all brands and services ranging from daycare, home bathroom, veterinary at home to the funeral home when the pet ceases to exist.
Sugar substitute technology wins scale-up funding
A Cambridge-based biotech company focused on disrupting the sugar industry to improve human health has been awarded a £60,000 grant by The Eastern Agri-Tech Growth Initiative to invest in the development of its natural sugar substitute technology.
Scentbird raises $18.6M, largest series A by female CEO
Scentbird, the subscription-based fragrance company, announced it has raised $18.6 M, one of largest Series A funding rounds secured by a direct-to-consumer brand led by a female CEO, taking the total investment to $24.4 M.
Soma invested in the seed round.
Living Out Loud
At eight years old, a young Ronnie Madra moved to New York City having no idea he would experience a world far greater than his own. Born in the South American country of Guyana to West Indian parents, Bibi and Ronald, he recalls the pivotal moments of being a part of a large family because they fostered a part of his identity which he lives out every single day, that 1 Of A Kind hospitality.
Taskade is a gorgeous to-do list manager that makes collaboration easy
As someone who struggles with personal organization, I often find myself experimenting with new to-do apps and productivity tools, in order to cure my scatterbrained ways. The latest app I’ve tested is Taskade, from the company of the same name.
Taskade’s biggest strength is that it doesn’t do too much. It lets you effortlessly group your to-do lists into folders, allowing you to segment your business and personal duties.
Leif Partners With Lambda School, Allocates Up To $50 Million To Provide High Tech Education at No Upfront Cost.
We are thrilled to announce that Leif has allocated up to $50 million in financing capacity to Lambda School to make the education students need to transform their careers available at no cost until they are making more than $50,000/year.
IAC Invests $14 Million In An App That Makes It Easier to Find Temp Work Straight From Your Phone
Isaac Mangrum was just hanging out with a friend when he looked over his buddy’s shoulder and saw him scrolling through an app filled with jobs. Mangrum had already been driving for Uber and Postmates in his spare time just to get through college. The list of jobs he saw as his friend scrolled through the app had similar flexibility where he could work in his spare time, but paid a guaranteed hourly wage.
Reverie Labs uses new machine learning algorithms to fix drug development bottlenecks
Developing new medicines can take years of research and cost millions of dollars before they are even ready for clinical trials. Several biotech startups are using machine learning to revolutionize the process and get drugs into pharmacies more quickly. One of the newest is called Reverie Labs, which is part of Y Combinator’s latest batch. The Boston-based company wants to fix a critical bottleneck in the drug development process by speeding up the process of identifying promising molecules using recently published machine learning algorithms.
Eight Sleep Receives $14 Million in New Funding
Sleep tracking tech company Eight Sleep has raised $14 million in a new round of funding, which the brand says it’ll use to expand distribution of its ever-growing line of products.
Eight Sleep was founded in 2014 with the goal of being as much a leader in the technology sphere as in the bed-in-a-box industry. In this vein, the brand has always sought to improve users’ sleep not only with comfortable mattresses, but also with advanced sleep tracking tech.
Andreessen Horowitz leads $18 million investment in satellite startup Astranis
Andreessen Horowitz is venturing into space with today’s announcement that it’s leading an $18 million round in Astranis. The San Francisco-based startup is launching out of stealth today with plans to build its first commercial telecommunications satellite. Y Combinator, Fifty Years, Refactor Capital, and Indicator Fund also participated in the round.
Proven wants to sell AI distilled custom skincare
YC-backed startup Proven wants to make it suck less for women to find skincare that works for them. The co-founders are taking what they describe as a “rational, logic-based” approach to figuring out which ingredients might be most appropriate for each individual.
As a TC Disrupt battlefield founder once memorably put it during her on-stage pitch, the beauty industry makes a whole lot of money from a whole lot of BS. And skincare falls squarely into the ‘full of it’ category, with its expensively marketed pseudoscientific claims touting ‘miracle’ fixes that most definitely aren’t.
Captain401, now Human Interest, raises $11M to build a 401(k) for small businesses
Human Interest — as its former name Captain401 implied — focuses on creating an easy system for small businesses to begin offering a 401(k) to employees. It’s geared toward companies trying to get it up-and-running for the first time, as when companies start to mature benefits like that quickly become table stakes, lest they lose those employees to competitors with more robust benefits. It’s also important to get those plans in place early, as employees likely want to begin securing their finances early on.
GM and ExxonMobil lead $13.7 million investment in on-demand car care startup Yoshi
Founded in 2016, Palo Alto-based startup Yoshi is an on-demand car maintenance platform that delivers gas to your automobile, as well as handling related tasks, such as oil changes, cleaning, and more — all while your car is parked just where you left it. Drivers can order the service directly from the Android or iOS mobile app.
Embark Self-Driving Truck Completes Coast-to-Coast Test Run
A self-driving truck operated by tech startup Embark recently completed a test run from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Fla., which the company hailed as the first coast-to-coast journey by an automated truck.
Lamda Announces $4 Million in Seed Funding
Lamda closes a $4 million seed round (led by Y Combinator and Tandem Capital) that will help us fully realize our mission of finding and training untapped talent for the most in-demand careers today.
Second, we’re announcing Lambda School’s first graduating class! This initial class includes 20 students that have worked incredibly hard over the past six months to become talented and capable software engineers. We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to learn alongside these individuals, and we thank them for helping us continually improve the Lambda School experience for future learners.
Ripple turns investor as execs lead $25M round for storage and rental startup Omni
Earlier this month, I wrote that crypto companies are going to become investors in 2018. I didn’t quite imagine that happening as quickly as mid-January, but here we are. Ripple, the fintech startup behind the controversial XRP token, has its first investment after it backed U.S.-based storage startup Omni through a $25 million round.
India’s Razorpay nabs $20M led by Tiger Global for its Stripe-like payment gateway
E-commerce remains among the biggest tech opportunities in India, one of the world’s most populated countries whose economy continues to rapidly evolve and now has over 500 million people connecting to the Internet. And today, a startup that is playing in this space — aiming to make it easier to take and make payments online — has announced a significant round of funding.
Sourceress raises $3.5M to find candidates that managers want without realizing it
When a company is looking for a candidate for an open role, the hiring manager is probably going to rattle off a bunch of qualifications that they’re looking for to a recruiter — and Kanjun Qiu says recruiters will probably just run with that when the manager’s requirements might not actually be so rigid.
It’s that intent from the manager — the idea that the actual boundaries for a qualified candidate are more opaque — that sparked the idea for Sourceress. Instead of just hunting down candidates based on a bunch of keywords, Sourceress works with hiring managers to understand the kinds of attributes they need in a potential hire and builds a model to find someone who would fit what a hiring manager is looking for, even if they don’t fit the bill explicitly. To do this, Sourceress has raised $3.5 million in new financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, OpenAI researchers, Y Combinator, Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, as well as other smaller investors.
Plant-based Peroxide-Maker Solugen Raises $4.4m Seed Round from Y Combinator, Joe Montana’s VC, others
A biomaterials startup using CRISPR gene-editing technology has raised $4.4 million in seed funding for its plant-based bio-peroxide technology. Solugen will use the funding to expand distribution of its bioperoxide and launch a consumer brand of household cleaning products. Investors in the round include Y Combinator, Refactor Capital, MIT, Liquid 2 Ventures and Social Capital Partnerships, among others.
Two Google alums just raised $60M to rethink documents
When you open a Google doc or a spreadsheet, you get a blank spreadsheet and some documentation as to what you can do with it — and that’s pretty much where we’ve been for quite some time.
But two MIT graduates, coming in from Microsoft and Google, have built up a team that for the past three years has quietly been trying to rethink how we approach documents. CEO Shishir Mehrotra spent his life in documents, and now he and co-founder Alex DeNeui have raised $60 million for a startup called Coda that’s trying to start the concept of an online document or spreadsheet from scratch. Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst participated in the financing, with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja joining the board of directors.
Gainful is personalized protein powder, delivered directly to your doorstep
Customers complete a quiz, and Gainful’s algorithm tailors a protein powder blend to their unique body type and fitness goals. Each customer is also matched with their very own Registered Dietitian.
Michael Jordan funds mercenary dev hub Gigster’s $20M enterprise pivot
Gigster is shifting from letting anyone outsource full-stack app development to building next-gen tech projects for big companies. If an enterprise needs machine learning and vision, data visualization, blockchain, React or Swift work done and doesn’t want to hire full-time employees, Gigster assembles a squad of freelancers and guarantees the work at a fixed price.
Indeed is buying Interviewed to make task simulations part of job applications
Indeed, the job platform with over 200 million people searching for jobs each month, is acquiring Interviewed, the online job assessment tool. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but all 12 of Interviewed’s employees, including the three co-founders, will be going to work at Indeed .
Meadow is the Amazon of weed
Marijuana legalization is sweeping the nation, and The Green Rush is upon us. As pot sellers scramble to comply with complex regulations, one startup has built the full-stack of specialized commerce software they need. Meadow offers everything from an eye-catching digital storefront for teasing tasty plants, to automated patient records management for which you’ll go to jail if you screw up.
Ironclad – This Startup Wants to Be the Salesforce for Legal Departments
Ironclad, a Silicon Valley startup that wants to automate the way legal contracts are created and managed, now has $8 million in new funding to try to make that happen.
This Series A round, led by Accel, brings total funding to over $11 million for the two-year old company, which sees a huge opportunity to ease the workflows used by tens of thousands of corporate lawyers. Steve Loughlin, a partner at Accel, will join Ironclad’s board.
Flutterwave raises $10 million in Series A funding round
Flutterwave, the payment company founded by Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, has just raised over $10 million in a series A funding round. Greycroft Partners and Green Visor led the new funding round with existing investor Y Combinator and new investors like Glynn Capital.
Start-up: “Ways to Cap”, a Moroccan success story
ENTREPRENEURSHIP – Successful start-up in Morocco may seem impossible, but by launching “Ways to Cap” , Niama El Bassunie has proven that with perseverance (and some failures), the dream of every entrepreneur is not out of achievement.
Lattice Raises $6.4M From Thrive Capital And Khosla Ventures To Fix Performance Reviews
Jack Altman and Eric Koslow were working on software to track team goals a year ago when the cofounders of startup Lattice realized they were missing out. Corporate America had fallen out of love with performance reviews, but it didn’t like the alternatives, either.
“Employees hated performance reviews, so [companies] said let’s throw them away,” says Altman, Lattice’s CEO. “And they switched to continuous feedback, and it turned out a lot of employees didn’t like that, too.”
Self-driving truck startup Embark raises $15M, partners with Peterbilt
Self-driving trucking startup Embark has raised $15 million in Series A financing, the company announced on Tuesday. Embark first broke cover back in February, when it revealed trucks equipped with its neural net-based deep learning approach to autonomous trucking. The startup’s also revealing a team-up with heavy equipment manufacturer Peterbilt today, which will help it roll out its new group of test trucks.
Open Listings raised $6.5M to help you buy a home without an annoying agent
Open Listings, the YC-backed startup that lets buyers purchase homes and get a 50% refund on whatever fee their real estate agent would normally make, has raised $6.5M in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners. Initialized Capital and Arena ventures also participated as new investors.
Moroccan Startup WaystoCap Is Enabling Africa’s Businesses To Trade Better
As a platform that addresses the business-to- business buying and selling of merchandise across Africa, Morocco-born WaystoCap is aiming to solve the fragmented situation in a market that is still in the process of going digital. Besides being an online marketplace for products, founder and CEO Niama El Bassunie asserts that WaystoCap is also an “ecosystem offering services such as insurance to suppliers, financing to buyers and logistics management to remove inefficiencies.”
LendUp gets strategic investment from PayPal and adds to its executive team
LendUp has built business providing personal loans to customers that traditional financial institutions wouldn’t touch. As it looks to expand into credit cards and other services, the company has raised some strategic funding from PayPal and also has expanded its executive ranks.
With $13.5M in new funds, Pillow partners with building owners to make rentals Airbnb-friendly
Short-term rental management startup Pillow has raised $13.5 million in new funding, and is launching a new product to provide more transparency to apartment owners when renters make their apartments available on platforms like Airbnb.
Alto Pharmacy prepares for expansion with $23M in fresh funding
Alto is also pushing beyond the Bay Area for a nationwide rollout with the new capital. Most of its competitors have focused on certain cities and areas so it will be interesting to see how Alto fares with such a large expansion.
Soma invested in the seed round. Alto investors include Greenoaks Capital, Jackson Square Ventures, and Twitch co-founder, Justin Kan.
African trading platform WaystoCap raises $3M right after graduating Y Combinator
Cross-border commerce platform WaystoCap has raised new funding to expand its reach in Africa, the startup confirmed to TechCrunch today.
A recent graduate from the Y Combinator accelerator program in the U.S., WaystoCap is an online destination for buyers and sellers of business-to-business goods in Africa. Founded in Casablanca, Morocco, it aims to digitize the centuries old cross-bordering trading industry that exists in the continent and make it easier for those outside of Africa to get into the region.
A Mexican Startup road to $2M USD in funding.
Through my years as a founder, I have always wondered: What are other entrepreneurs experiences raising money for startups whose markets are only in LATAM?
By experiences I mean: I want to know the real deal. I want to see the raw numbers. What are your metrics? What was easy? What was tough? Tell me about the time everyone said no, and you cried like a baby in a corner, all alone. What did you do next?
Cleanly raises a $5M Series A to bring profitability to the on-demand laundry space
Cleanly, the on-demand laundry and dry cleaning service started in NYC, has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The startup had previously raised $2.3 million in seed funding after participating in Y Combinator in 2015.
FREY Men’s Laundry Detergent
So I kept seeing ads on Facebook for this product called FREY for men. I finally was interested enough to look into what it was. That was when I realized my wife was telling me about it for several weeks. It’s Laundry Detergent… For Men. Now I have seen everything. My amazing wife does 99% of the laundry in our household, which I am eternally grateful for, but this seemed like a ploy.
So I got me a set. Included was fabric softener dryer sheets, detergent, smell good (freshener), stain remover, all in a fancy box. This isn’t something that I would normally go for, but I gave it a shot.
Eligible founder Katelyn Gleason’s plan to upend the billion dollar medical billing industry
Medical billing is a largely untapped and lucrative industry, potentially pulling in $55 billion globally by 2020. But its inner workings are still very murky — most of the time it’s not clear how much something will cost and sometimes you don’t even get the (possibly whopping) bill until months down the road. Founder Katelyn Gleason wants to make it easier to know what and how much you are paying for before you step into the doctor’s office with her new medical billing startup Eligible.
Beek is the emoji-based book review site aiming to change e-commerce in Latin America
Leveraging post-literate tools like YouTube and emojis to create a website and mobile app that allows people to review the books they’re reading while they’re reading them, Beek is a startup that embraces the amazing contradictions of the internet age.
Graduating from the most recent batch of Y Combinator, the Mexico City-based company began as a hackathon project in Austin, Texas, where co-founder Pamela Valdes was studying at the University of Texas.
Zenefits founder Parker Conrad takes another crack at HR onboarding
Conrad’s new company is called Rippling, which is launching today. The goal is to turn the process of bringing on an employee and assigning them hardware and the services they’ll need to operate — like Gmail or Salesforce — right away. Rippling integrates with a bunch of major services on the back-end and automatically assigns those accounts to new employees, and also helps managers set up payroll in several states.
TL Biolabs (now Shielddx) Announces $4M in Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz
TL Biolabs’ $15 genomic test provides farmers information on the health, productivity, and fertility of their cows — from early in the animal’s life — so farmers can make management and breeding decisions earlier and more efficiently. The results are provided in software that helps farmers improve production by selecting which calves to keep or sell, and which bulls to breed to which cows.
With Houseparty, The Meerkat Team Is Trying–Once Again–To Reinvent Live Video
On February 29th, 2016–that’s Leap Day–the team members behind Meerkat secretly launched a new live-streaming app. Rather than pitch reporters or spend money on ads to promote it, they opted to just put the app in the App Store and see what happened. To help keep their identity secret and avoid potential coverage, they identified the developer using a pseudonym rather than credit Alexander Herzick, who happens to be the husband of the app’s cofounder, Sima Sistani .
Houseparty raises $50 million at a $130 million valuation
Business Insider confirmed that that the company had raised $50 million from leading venture firm Sequoia, beating out other investors interested in the deal, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the raise. The company’s previous investors, including Greylock Partners, Aleph, and Comcast Ventures participated in the round. Houseparty’s CEO Ben Rubin didn’t return a request for comment.
Joe Lonsdale pours $4.55M for alcohol IoT startup Nectar
Nationally, bars today lose billions of dollars from improperly managed alcohol inventory. These losses add up quickly as a result of oversized pours, spills and even theft.
Nectar, a stealth connected-device startup operating out of a Palo Alto dentist’s office (of all places), just locked down a $4.55 million seed funding round from the likes of Joe Lonsdale (8VC + Palantir), Lior Susan (Eclipse Ventures) and the founding family of Modelo Group (brewery) to complete development on a new IoT solution for the hospitality and consumer packaged goods industries.
Flex raises another $3 million to replace tampons
Flex, the tampon alternative you can wear during sex, has raised a $3 million seed round led by Vivek Ranadive’s new fund, Better Our World Capital, with participation from Cyan Banister of Founders Fund, Ellen Pao and others.
Capital One acquires online price tracker Paribus
Capital One is making another acquisition in the fintech space, this time snatching up the price tracking service Paribus, which helps online shoppers get automatic refunds when prices drop on items they purchased. Deal terms were not disclosed, but the acquisition involves bring both the team and the technology itself to Capital One.
Jumpcut launches at YC S16 Demo Day
Last year, LinkedIn spent $1.5 billion on Lynda.com, an online learning platform. Online education itself has become a huge market. But the course completion rates and retention is far too low, according to Jumpcut CEO Kong Pham — because the lectures are simply too boring. He’s hoping that his team can build a company based around “Spielberg-like” online courses, starting with professional networking videos like learning how to network and become better at social media. The company has $85,000 in monthly recurring revenue and is doubling month-over-month with a $17-per-month subscription model. It’s going to be challenging for sure: it’s going to be hard to figure out how to make highly cinematic videos that go into tough subjects like computer science and mathematics. But Pham and his team — which have previously built a company in viral video — hope they can crack that market.
LendUp Gets a Leg Up with $47 Million
Payday lender-alternative LendUp landed $47 million in series C funding this week. Y Combinator’s growth fund, Y Combinator Continuity, led the round. Google Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, QED Investors, Data Collective, Susa Ventures, Radicle Impact, Bronze Investments, SV Angel and other angels also contributed.
ApolloShield’s new system detects and sends unwanted drones home
ApolloShield, which was originally incorporated as Airfence Inc., has launched an anti-drone system that detects drones flying where they’re not authorized or wanted, and forces them to fly home.
The startup intends to sell its technology to owners or managers of venues that have intense security needs such as oil refineries, nuclear facilities, airports, prisons, stadiums or hotels and buildings where high-net worth individuals or public figures may reside.
OMG Digital, the ‘BuzzFeed of Africa,’ raises a seed round of $1.1M
OMG Digital, the Ghana-based media startup dubbed the “BuzzFeed of Africa,” announced today that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Its main site, OMG Voice, already has versions for Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, and the new capital will be used to expand into more countries.
OMG Digital’s new investors are Kima Ventures, Soma Capital, Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, Social Capital, M&Y Growth Partners, and Macro Ventures. Angel investors, including Josh Buckley of Mino Games, Will Sternlicht, entertainment lawyer Kenneth Hertz, and Off-Grid Electric founder Frances Xavier Helgesen, also participated. The startup was previously covered by TechCrunch last summer while taking place in Y Combinator’s accelerator program.
GM Buying Self-Driving Tech Startup for More Than $1 Billion
General Motors this morning announced that it will acquire Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based developer of autonomous vehicle technology. No financial terms were disclosed, but Fortune has learned from a source close to the situation that the deal is valued at “north of $1 billion,” in a combination of cash and stock.
Lugg, An App For On-Demand, Short-Distance Moves, Raises $3.8 Million
While Uber, Lyft, and similar ride-sharing services can help you get from one place to the next, they aren’t practical for hauling your large purchases – like those from an IKEA shopping spree, or a sofa you found on Craigslist, for example. That’s where a service called Lugg comes in. If Lyft is like your friend with a car, then Lugg is like your friend with a truck.
These two guys launched a Y Combinator-backed startup to build the LinkedIn for small businesses
Before Sumir Meghani was a Groupon exec and Saureen Shah was a Google engineer, they both dipped their toes into much smaller ventures. Meghani was raised by two small business owners, and Shah used to be a McDonald’s cashier.
Now the 34-year olds have teamed up to launch a Y Combinator-backed startup called Instawork to combat the pain small business owners have to go through when it comes to hiring employees.
Solar Power Startup Bright Raises $4 Million To Distribute Energy In The Developing World
Bright, a solar panel installation and distribution startup, pulled in $4 million in seed money to build out its solar software and financing team.
The startup launched out of the last batch of Y Combinator and began building in Mexico last year. Energy is expensive and often complicated in the country, costing upwards of $4,000 MXD ($250 USD) in hot summer months in some cases, according to the Mexican Federal Electric Commission.
YC-Backed GrowSumo Helps Businesses Grow Sales Through Partner Programs
Partner programs can be a big source of revenue — for example, channel sales account for 80 percent of Cisco’s revenue. Now a startup called GrowSumo is working to make those programs easier to manage, particularly for businesses that don’t have Cisco’s resources.
GrowSumo is part of the current batch of startups at incubator Y Combinator. Co-founder Bryn Jones told me that the team was originally trying to build online collaboration tools, but “it turns out that we weren’t Slack.”
Pachyderm Raises $2 Million To Power Big Data Processing For The Docker Era
Controversial After School App Relaunches With New Safety Features And Zero Tolerance For Hate
After School is back and ready to try again. The mission is the same: Give teens a safe but anonymous place to talk to high school classmates. After several months of retooling the app just relaunched on the App Store and, even with the aggressive safety features in place, growth hasn’t slowed down.
When After School hit the App Store in October 2014, it immediately sparked outrage as teens took to the platform and anonymously posted derogatory and hateful content without fear of repercussion (or so they thought). But the creators didn’t give in to the immense pressure to shut down the app or change course.
Kickpay Is A Marketplace For Invoices That Helps SMEs Get Paid Quickly
Cash flow is all important for small businesses — it’s the difference between life or death — so it is frustrating when customers don’t pay invoices up front. Nothing puts a strain on finances quite like waiting 30, 60 or 90 days for your money, and that’s not even mentioning the resources spent following up and chasing down payment.
Scenarios like this are where Kickpay, a startup that is graduating from Y Combinator‘s latest batch, hopes to make a difference.
YC-Backed Kickback Offers An Easy Way To Play Minecraft Competitively
From Starcraft to League of Legends, the e-sports market has gone through a massive expansion over the last decade in a half. Millions of dollars are now at stake over video games played in front of audiences of thousands, both at live events and in matches broadcast online.
Y Combinator -backed Kickback is looking to expand the scope of that market by building competitive ecosystems around pre-existing games. Its initial release is built upon Minecraft, the adventure toolbox now owned by Microsoft.
NexTravel Wants To Change The Way Corporate Travel Is Booked
Booking travel is never easy, but booking travel for work is even worse. NexTravelwants to provide a better way for employees to search flights and hotels, while giving employers the ability to track and manage costs.
Even as consumers have gotten used to using simple online platforms for booking their own travel, the corporate travel world has failed to catch up. Employees are asked to navigate archaic travel booking websites or talking to travel agents for hours trying to get the right hotels or flights confirmed.