Category: Uncategorized

As teammates at buy now, pay later fintech Affirm, Stella Han and Carlos Treviño bonded over their shared background of growing up in real estate families. The mission of “pay at your own pace” at Affirm clashed with their firsthand experience of the taxing time commitment and high costs that comes with owning real estate; a contrast that eventually seeded the idea for Fractiona

Looking for a new apartment is either a leisurely thing to do or something that has to take place quite quickly. When you don’t reach anyone in the leasing office, you often move on to the next one on the list, even if it was one you would have considered.

The Great Resignation, the pandemic-caused seismic shift in the way we work, play and live, and the boom of the creator and influencer economy, has led to a surge in apps designed to serve those creators. In fact, we had a very long-winded discussion about it at TechCrunch just this week.

It’s hard to know which apps are going to change the game and which are going to sink, but Emergence is betting big on a platform called Talent Hack.

The company is today announcing a $17 million Series A financing round, led by Emergence, with participation from existing investor Global Founders Capital.

CostCertified, a Canadian startup which provides real-time, interactive residential construction estimates, raised $8.45 million in a seed round of funding.

FUSE, a Pacific Northwest venture firm which counts former Microsoft CFO John Connors and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner as venture partners, led the round.

The company is also backed by Y Combinator (having participated in the accelerator’s S21 batch), I2BF Global Ventures, Soma Capital and a number of proptech/construction tech founders such as Willy Schlacks, CEO and co-founder of EquipmentShare; Ryan Sutton-Gee, PlanGrid co-founder and former COO; Jonathan Wasserstrum, co-founder and CEO of SquareFoot and Bill Smith, founder and CEO of Landing.

GreenPark Sports today revealed it has closed a successful Series B round, raising $31 million. This investment comes just as GreenPark is preparing its first NFT drop.

GreenPark is a mobile platform that marries the communities of sports fans and esports fans. According to GreenPark’s site, members can “suit up for your favorite team and go head-to-head against rivals in epic battles to win Fanergy.”

Indian mobile wallet firm Razorpay is talking to large global funds about raising $200 million to $250 million at a $4 billion valuation, two people familiar with the talks said in a Mint report.

Razorpay is talking to hedge funds including Tiger Global Management, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners and technology-focused funds DST Global, Dragoneer Investment Group and Falcon Edge Capital, among others, the sources told Mint anonymously.

Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners and Rabbit Capital have already invested in Razorpay. It’s unclear if those companies or other existing investors would give up their ownership stakes as part of the latest fundraising round.

Earlier this year, Razorpay raised $160 million at a $3 billion valuation as part of a plan to bulk up its business banking unit.

“Players such as Razorpay are looking at acquisitions on the talent pooling side, besides targeting a bit matured places in the B2B SaaS (software as a service) space,” one of the sources told Mint.

Today we’re wrapping our multi-week exploration of the global venture capital market’s second-quarter performance. We’ve gone around the world, working to better understand the geyser of cash flowing into today’s startups. But we’ve saved the best for last: Latin America.

Startup aims to make sensible tax advice and filing accessible for anybody making 1099 income, helping them identify write-offs and deductions from everyday purchases. Keeper Tax, the #1 tax filing software for gig workers, creators and freelancers, today announced it has raised its $13M Series A.

Julián Ríos Cantú knows all too well about the importance of early and accurate breast cancer detection. The 19-year-old’s mother survived two bouts with breast cancer, despite an inaccurate diagnosis. But from that experience came EVA — a bra that detects cancer.

Sagar Malhi pulls out his phone and calls up a map of North America, covered in 7,200 pink dots. They speckle the continent, streak down the West Coast and cluster around cities like Chicago.

Each circle represents a truck fitted with one of Vancouver-based Switchboard’s electronic logging devices (ELDs).

“We bet huge on ELDs,” said Michael Ip, who co-founded the now nine-person startup with Malhi.

“This ELD was a big boon because this U.S. government mandate forced pretty much 20 million trucks to adopt this new technology. That’s crazy.”

Reverie Labs, a pharmaceutical startup founded by Jonah Kallenbach, A.B./S.M. ’17 (computer science) and Ankit Gupta, A.B./S.M. ’17 (computer science) raised $25 million from investors.

The company uses machine learning, physics-based modeling, and massive-scale computational infrastructure to engineer new medicines. Reverie will use this funding to advance its internal and partnered drug discovery programs towards the clinic, further develop its innovative computational discovery platform, and expand its team of scientists and engineers.

Lean manufacturing, the philosophy driving gains in productivity and quality for more than a century, is based on five core ideas:

●    Figure out a product’s value to customers

●     Map its value-stream and remove unnecessary steps

●     Set up a flow that allows it to move continuously through the remaining steps

●     Establish a pull system for production

●     Strive to perfect the process

These principles led companies to become world leaders. While the manufacturing facility has evolved in recent decades, the principles of lean manufacturing still apply. Indeed, advances in artificial intelligence and factory robotics are automating the manufacturing process even further, opening up new paths to apply lean.

This morning Citadel ID announced a combined $3.5 million raise for its income and employment verification service. The startup provides an API to customer companies, allowing them to rapidly verify details of consumer employment.

The capital came from a blend of venture firms and angels. On the firm side, Abstract and Soma VC were in there, along with ChapterOne. Brianne Kimmel put capital in as well, according to the startup. And denizens with work histories at companies like Zynga (Mark Pincus), Stripe (Lachy Groom), Carta (Henry Ward) and others also put cash into the fundraise. (The company reached out to add that Fathom Capital also put a good amount in the round.)

Nayya, the leading insurance benefits experience and management platform, today announced that it has closed $11M in Series A funding led by Felicis Ventures, with continued support from all early investors including Social Leverage, Guardian Life, one of the largest mutual life insurance companies in the US, and Cameron Ventures. Unum Business Ventures also joined the round with a venture investment from the Fortune 500 insurance company covering 39 million Americans.

Explo, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 class, which is helping customers build customer-facing business intelligence dashboards, announced a $2.3 million seed round today. Investors included Amplo VC, Soma Capital and Y Combinator along with several individual investors.

The company originally was looking at a way to simplify getting data ready for models or other applications, but as the founders spoke to customers, they saw a big need for a simple way to build dashboards backed by that data and quickly pivoted.

Arist, a text message learning platform used by organizations including DuPont, the Poynter Institute, and the State of California, today announced it has raised $1.9m from Acadian Ventures, Global Founders Capital and Craft Ventures, with additional participation from Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Emles Venture Partners, Hack VC, Rebel Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors Derek Schoettle (CEO of Cloudant) and Adam Goldstein (founder of Hipmunk), among others. Founded by Michael Ioffe, Ryan Laverty, and Maxine Anderson, Arist makes learning accessible and frictionless by delivering courses entirely via text message and WhatsApp.

Learning from Ioffe’s prior work improving access to learning in war-torn countries, the Arist team saw a different but critical need in the American workplace. The Arist platform makes it easier to create and simpler to access training. Organizations can create and launch text message courses in just minutes on any topic — from diversity and inclusion, compliance and sales enablement to safety training. Arist is particularly well-suited for reaching frontline employees who may not have laptop or LMS access, and is currently trusted by more than 50 leading companies, universities and nonprofits.

As machine learning has grown, one of the major bottlenecks remains labeling things so the machine learning application understands the data it’s working with. Datasaur, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch, announced a $3.9 million investment today to help solve that problem with a platform designed for machine learning labeling teams.

The funding announcement, which includes a pre-seed amount of $1.1 million from last year and $2.8 million seed right after it graduated from Y Combinator in March, included investments from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator  and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman.

Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator -backed Nayya is on a mission to simplify choosing and managing employee benefits through machine learning and data transparency.

The company has raised $2.7 million in seed funding led by Social Leverage,  with participation from Guardian Strategic Ventures, Cameron Ventures, Soma Capital, as well as other strategic angels.

The process of choosing an employer-provided healthcare plan and understanding that plan can be tedious at best and incredibly confusing at worst. And that doesn’t even include all of the supplemental plans and benefits associated with these programs.

Obie, a Chicago startup that’s building a commercial real estate platform, announced it has raised a seed round of funding and officially launched its product to the public.

Obie said Tuesday that it raised $2.8 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, MetaProp, FundersClub, Liquid 2 and Soma Capital. Opendoor founder JD Ross, Inkling founder Matt MacInnis and Rentlytics founder Justin Alanis also invested in the round.

The startup has built a cloud-based insurance and portfolio management platform for small- and medium-size commercial real estate funds and managers. Obie’s platform gives owners information about their assets in once place, and allows them to collaborate with property managers, leasing brokers, LPs and others who need access to the property data.

Obie also offers property and casualty insurance and says it can help customers cut premiums by 10-15%.