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Freshworks, a customer engagement software company with roots in both California in the United States and Tamil Nadu in India, is going public. Its S-1 filing paints the picture of...

Osana Salud raises $20M to build API-connected infrastructure for the LatAm healthcare industry

Osana Salud, which aims to transform the healthcare infrastructure in Latin America, has closed on a $20 million Series A round of funding led by General Catalyst. The Argentina-based, yet...

Databricks raises $1.6B at $38B valuation as it blasts past $600M ARR

Databricks this morning confirmed earlier reports that it was raising new capital at a higher valuation. The data- and AI-focused company has secured a $1.6 billion round at a $38...

Southeast Asia “omnichannel” health startup Doctor Anywhere gets $88M SGD

Doctor Anywhere, a startup that takes an “omnichannel” approach to healthcare, announced today it has raised $88 million SGD (about $65.7 million USD) in Series C funding. The round was...

Luminate aims to make hair loss from chemotherapy a thing of the past

Hair loss resulting from chemotherapy is one of the most recognizable side effects in all of medicine, and for many is an unwanted public announcement of their condition and treatment....

Heimdal pulls CO2 and cement-making materials out of seawater using renewable energy

One of the consequences of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere is that levels also rise proportionately in the ocean, harming wildlife and changing ecosystems. Heimdal is a startup working...

5 takeaways from Toast’s S-1 filing

Welcome back to IPO season. No, we won’t call it hot liquidity summer, but after an August lull, the public-offering cycle is back upon us. Last week we saw filings...

Kocomo raises millions to give people a way to co-own a luxury vacation home

Who doesn’t want a vacation home? Right. That’s what I thought. Kocomo is a Mexico City-based startup that wants to help make that dream a reality. And it’s just closed...

Brazil’s Petlove raises $150M from Riverwood, SoftBank to sell pet products and services online

Petlove&Co, a São Paulo-based digital platform for products and services for the pet market, announced today that it has raised about $150 million (R$750 million) today in a funding round...

Equity Monday: Y Combinator Demo Day Approaches

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market...

Alpaca raises $50M to rapidly scale its API-delivered equities trading business

Alpaca said this morning that it has closed a massive $50 million Series B round of capital. TechCrunch previously covered the company’s late-2019 $6 million seed round and its late-2020 $10...

Sastrify snags $7M to help SMEs manage SaaS buying

Aug 27, 2021

With so much startup activity in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space it can be a challenge for businesses to figure out which of these SaaS (SaaSes?) are actually useful and worth...

The pure hell of managing your JPEGs

Aug 27, 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris were joined by none other than TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo, in...

Forbes jumps into hot media liquidity summer with a SPAC combo

Aug 27, 2021

What a busy week in the world of media liquidity. That’s a sentence you don’t get to write often. Regardless, news broke this week that Axel Springer is buying U.S....

Politico sells, Forbes SPACs and Vice cuts

The Equity crew felt that there was enough media news out recently that we simply had no choice but to fire up a Twitter Space and have a chat....

Playbook, which aims to be the ‘Dropbox for designers,’ raises $4M in round led by Founders Fund

When Jessica Ko was head of design at Google and then Opendoor, she realized that her teams spent about 90% of their time digging around Dropbox looking for assets. In...

Picsart raises $130M from SoftBank, becomes unicorn on the back of its visual creator tools

Picsart announced this morning that it has raised a $130 million round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The new capital infusion pushes the company’s valuation north of the $1...

AI voice, synthetic speech company LOVO gets $4.5M pre-series A funding

“Voice skins” have become a very popular feature for AI-based voice assistants, to help personalize some of the more anodyne aspects of helpful, yet also kind of bland and robotic,...

A16Z leads investment in Firemaps, a marketplace for home hardening against wildfires

Wildfires are burning in countries all around the world. California is dealing with some of the worst wildfires in its history (a superlative that I use essentially every year now)...

Sugar raises $2.5M in seed funding to connect apartment residents

Sugar, a startup that aims to turn apartment buildings into “interactive communities,” has closed on $2.5 million in seed funding. A slew of investors participated in the financing, including MetaProp,...

‘No code’ process automation platform, Leapwork, fires up with $62M Series B

Copenhagen-based process automation platform Leapwork has snagged Denmark’s largest ever Series B funding round, announcing a $62 million raise co-led by KKR and Salesforce Ventures, with existing investors DN Capital...

Taktile makes it easier to leverage machine learning in the financial industry

Meet Taktile, a new startup that is working on a machine learning platform for financial services companies. This isn’t the first company that wants to leverage machine learning for financial...

Avalo uses machine learning to accelerate the adaptation of crops to climate change

Climate change is affecting farming all over the world, and solutions are seldom simple. But if you could plant crops that resisted the heat, cold or drought instead of moving...

Shares is a new stock trading app with a focus on social features

Meet Shares, a new European startup that wants to add a social twist to financial investment — in that case, the company means ‘social’ as in ‘social network’. The startup has...

Grocery delivery startup Membo is hungry to build a Europe-wide, local food producer network

Estonia-based Membo — which is backed by Y Combinator and will be presenting at the incubator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day next week — is aiming to take a slice of...

With investors like Lightspeed and The Chainsmokers, Mexican neobroker Flink raises $57M to boost financial inclusion in LatAm

Flink, a Mexico City-based neobroker, has raised $57 million in a Series B round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The financing comes just over six months after Flink...

D2C specs purveyor Warby Parker files to go public

Did you miss IPOs? I sure did. They could be coming back after a summer lull. Warby Parker, a D2C glasses company backed by over a half-billion dollars of private capital,...

Balance raises $25M in a Ribbit Capital-led Series A to grow its ‘consumer-like B2B checkout platform’

Balance, a payments platform aimed at B2B merchants and marketplaces, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Ribbit Capital. Avid Ventures participated in the financing,...

OnlyFans’ policy change is a tale as old as the internet

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Amanda Silberling on the show to...

Cybersecurity VC funding surges to a record $11.5B in 2021

The pandemic completely upended the threat landscape as we know it. Ransomware accounted for an estimated 2.9 million attacks so far in 2021, and supply-chain attacks that targeted Kaseya and...

Ai Palette raises $4.4M to help companies react faster to consumer trends

Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect...

Ramp and Brex draw diverging market plans with M&A strategies

Earlier today, spend management startup Ramp said it has raised a $300 million Series C that valued it $3.9 billion. It also said it was acquiring Buyer, a “negotiation-as-a-service” platform...

Boston’s startup market is more than setting records in scorching start to year

The global startup community is currently enjoying a period of fundraising success that may be unprecedented in the history of technology and venture capital. While this is happening around the...

Israel’s DiA gets $14M to expand AI-driven ultrasound analysis

Israel-based AI healthtech company, DiA Imaging Analysis, which is using deep learning and machine learning to automate analysis of ultrasound scans, has closed a $14 million Series B round of...

Sora’s HR automation software raises $14M Series A

HR automation software startup Sora announced this morning that it closed a $14 million Series A round of funding. Two Sigma Ventures led the financing event, putting in $10 million,...

Why global investors are flocking to back Latin American startups

The Latin America startup ecosystem is having a great year, with mega-rounds being announced at breakneck speed and new unicorns minted almost monthly. This is mostly due to the clearly...

Brazilian fintech Cora raises $116M Series B as Tiger Global, Tencent sign on as investors alongside Greenoaks

Cora, a Brazilian digital lender to small-and-medium-sized businesses, has raised $116 million in a Series B round led by Greenoaks Capital. This is a large Series B by any standards,...

ICON lands $207M Series B to construct more 3D-printed homes after seeing 400% YoY revenue growth

Creating single-family homes for the homeless using 3D printing robotics. Developing construction systems to create infrastructure and habitats on the moon, and eventually Mars, with NASA. Delivering what is believed...

Ramp raises $300M at a $3.9B valuation, makes its first acquisition

Less than five months after raising $115 million, spend management startup Ramp announced today it has raised $300 million in a Series C round of funding that values the company...

Plentific cements $100M to expand its property management SaaS

London based Plentific, which operates a marketplace SaaS platform targeting the property management space, has closed a $100 million Series C. The funding round is led by new investors Highland...

SoBanHang gets $1.5M to help small Vietnamese stores sell online for the first time

A few months ago, brothers Hai Nam Bui and Hai Long Bui were developing a bookkeeping app for small retailers in Vietnam. Called SoBanHang (or “sales book”), it would help...

Future tech exits have a lot to live up to

Inflation may or may not prove transitory when it comes to consumer prices, but startup valuations are definitely rising — and noticeably so — in recent quarters. That’s the obvious...

Pry Financials raises $4.2M to make startup accounting more approachable

Pry Financials wants to make startup finances approachable for its entire team, not just the people in charge of its accounting spreadsheets. The Y Combinator alum announced today it has...

With more cash and a launch, Vannevar Labs is reconnecting Silicon Valley to its defense industry roots

Silicon Valley was once one of the most productive regions in the country for the defense industry, churning out chips and technologies that helped the United States overtake the Soviet...

Announcing the agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS

TechCrunch Sessions is back! On October 27, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of software as a service (SaaS), and we’re thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with...

Givz raises $3M in seed funding to make donations a marketing tool for businesses

Givz, which has developed an API-powered platform that gives brands a way to convert discounts into donations, has raised $3 million in seed funding. Eniac and Accomplice co-led the financing...

Equity Monday: Stocks up, cryptos up, regulation up

Shelf.io closes huge $52.5M Series B after posting 4x ARR growth in the last year

Covering public companies can be a bit of a drag. They grow some modest amount each year, and their constituent analysts pester them with questions about gross margin expansion and...

Mobility startup Plentywaka picks up $1.2M seed, acquires Ghana’s Stabus

Lagos and Toronto-based mobility startup Plentywaka has raised a $1.2 million seed round to scale its operations on the back of leaving the Techstars Toronto accelerator program last month. Canadian-based...

Blockchain startup XREX gets $17M to make cross-border trade faster

XREX co-founders Winston Hsiao and Wayne Huang A substantial portion of the world’s trade is done in United States dollars, creating problems for businesses in countries with a dollar shortage. Blockchain...

São Paulo’s QuintoAndar real estate platform raises $120M, now valued at $5.1B

Less than three months after announcing a $300 million Series E, Brazilian proptech QuintoAndar has raised an additional $120 million. New investors Greenoaks Capital and China’s Tencent co-led the round,...

Bird shows improving scooter economics, long march to profitability

Newly reported financial data from Bird, an American scooter sharing service, shows a company with an improving economic model, and a multi-year path to profitability. However, that path is fraught...

Men are a niche demographic

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny was back, joining Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris to chat through the week’s coming and goings. But, before...

Cardiomatics bags $3.2M for its ECG-reading AI

Poland-based healthtech AI startup Cardiomatics has announced a $3.2M seed raise to expand use of its electrocardiogram (ECG) reading automation technology. The round is led by Central and Eastern European...

Indonesian D2C insurance marketplace Lifepal raises $9M Series A

Choosing an insurance policy is one of the most complicated financial decisions a person can make. Jakarta-based Lifepal wants to simplify the process for Indonesians with a marketplace that lets...

Adobe buying Frame.io in $1.28B deal

Adobe announced today it is acquiring Frame.io, a video review and collaboration platform used by over a million customers, for $1.275 billion. Founded in 2014 by the owner of a...

Role’s video role-playing platform makes a $2.75M charm attempt on the burgeoning tabletop world

Tabletop gaming is in the middle of a historic boom, despite recent restrictions imposed on in-person gatherings by COVID. The tools adopted by game masters and casual players to play...

When VCs turned to Zoom, Chicago startups were ready for their close-up

Chicago’s startup scene is finally getting the attention it long felt it deserved. By now it’s common knowledge that 2021 is shaping up to be a breakout year for the...

Bedrock modernizes seafloor mapping with autonomous sub and cloud-based data

The push for renewable energy has brought offshore wind power to the forefront of many an energy company’s agenda, and that means taking a very close look at the ocean...

One banks $40M to offer ‘all-in-one’ financial services to the middle class

One, a startup that aims to bring “all-in-one banking” to the middle class, announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding. Progressive Investment...

Crypto world shows signs of being rather bullish

Welcome back to The Exchange. Today we’re doing something fun with crypto. Sure, we could write more about how insurtech valuations are under fresh pressure after Hippo’s Q2 earnings report...

Brazil’s Kovi closes $104M Series B to make car ownership ‘more inclusive’ in LatAm

We sometimes take for granted that most anyone who wishes to become say, an Uber driver, can do so. But that assumption is a narrow view considering there are many...

RaRa Delivery gets $3.25M for its ambitious on-demand delivery plans in Indonesia

RaRa Delivery’s ambitious goal is to offer same-day deliveries in Indonesia without burning cash like many on-demand logistics providers. The company announced today it has raised $3.25 million in seed...

South Korean online secondhand marketplace Danggeun Market raises $162M at a $2.7B valuation

Danggeun Market, the publisher of South Korea’s hyperlocal community app Karrot, announced on 18 August it has raised $162 million in a Series D round of funding with a valuation...

As its startup market accelerates, Brazil could be in for an IPO bonanza

Brazil’s startup market is reaching new heights, and its domestic stock market could benefit from the boom. According to data from KPMG, Brazilian startups raised the most capital in a...

Brazil’s Nuvemshop raises $500M at a $3.1B valuation months after last raise

Just five months after raising $90M, Brazil’s Nuvemshop announced today it has raised $500 million in a round co-led by Insight Partners and Tiger Global Management. The financing values Nuvemshop...

Branch raises $48M from Lee Fixel’s Addition, Indeed to provide accelerated payments to workers

Branch, which has built a flexible workforce payments platform, announced today it has raised $48 million in Series B funding and closed on a $500 million credit facility. Lee Fixel’s...

Monte Carlo closes $60M Series C on the back of rapid ARR growth

Monte Carlo has returned to the capital well for the second time this year, adding $60 million to its accounts thanks to a new, ICONIQ Growth-led Series C. The company...

Brex buys Weav, a universal API for commerce platforms, for $50M

Fintech Brex first partnered with Weav, a developer of a universal API for commerce platforms, last summer. In March, Brex launched Instant Payouts for Shopify sellers using the startup’s technology....

informed., you want to be? Trio of European media veterans take on the problem of news economics

News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned...

Trading platform Bitpanda raises $263M at a $4.1BN valuation

It’s not even half a year since crypto exchange Bitpanda announced a $170M Series B — when, back in March, Austria’s first unicorn was being valued at $1.2 billion. Today...

Ultrahuman raises $17.5M, touting a wearable blood glucose tracker

Fitness platform Ultrahuman has officially announced a $17.5 million Series B fund raise, with investment coming from early stage fund Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures...

Revenue-based financing startup Jenfi raises $6.3M to focus on high-growth Southeast Asian companies

Many Southeast Asian digital businesses run into obstacles when seeking early-stage growth financing. They might not want to sell equity in their company, but often struggle to secure working capital...

The hyperactive late-stage market should keep the startup investing game afoot

As last week came to a close, funding news involving three major U.S. technology startups lit up on Twitter. Carta closed a $500 million Series G at a $7.4 billion...

Cisco beefing up app monitoring portfolio with acquisition of Epsagon for $500M

Cisco announced on Friday that it’s acquiring Israeli applications monitoring startup Epsagon at a price pegged at $500 million. The purchase gives Cisco a more modern microservices-focused component for its...

Equity Monday: Hacks, IPOs, and the next generation of American tech giants

BrainQ raises $40M to transform stroke patient rehabilitation with its home therapy device

If you injure your elbow, surgery can help. If you lose a leg, prostheses are available. But problems within the brain are more difficult to treat, and for stroke victims...

Crypto’s coming of age moment

Aug 14, 2021

This week Danny and Alex and Chris took to Twitter Spaces to chat about the current state of the crypto economy, and hang out with friends in a live Twitter...

Don’t give your weed dealer all your data

Aug 13, 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Our beloved Danny was back, joining Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris to chat through yet...

3 lies VCs tell ourselves about startup valuations

Scott Lenet Contributor Share on Twitter Scott Lenet is president of Touchdown Ventures. More posts by this contributor Is there a creed in venture capital? “Darth Ventures” and the efficacy...

Sequoia leads $13M investment in Aalto, an online marketplace that lets homeowners sell directly to buyers

If you’ve ever sold a house, you know what a pain it is to go through the process of listing, showing and negotiating the sale of your home. It’s so...

New York City’s enterprise tech startups could be heading for a super-heated exit wave

We lied when we said that The Exchange was done covering 2021 venture capital performance. Yesterday, we dug into preliminary Q3 data for the Chinese startup market. This morning, we’re...

Crypto tax software provider TaxBit raises $130M at a $1.33B valuation

Just five months after raising a $100 million Series A, TaxBit announced today it has raised $130 million in a Series B round of funding. The latest financing officially makes...

Construction tech startup Agora raises $33M in Tiger Global-led round amid 760% YoY ARR growth

Agora, a startup that has built a materials management platform for contractors, has raised $33 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management. 8VC, Tishman...

AppWorks closes third fund with $150M for Taiwan and Southeast Asia startups

AppWorks, the Taipei-based venture capital firm focused on Taiwan and Southeast Asia, announced today it has closed its oversubscribed third fund, raising $150 million. AppWorks Fund III’s limited partners include...

Mushroom-based meat alternative startup Fable Food raises $6.5M AUD, will launch in the US

Sydney, Australia-based Fable Food is the latest plant-based food startup to announce funding. The company, which uses mushrooms in its meat alternatives, has raised $6.5 million AUD (about $4.8 million...

Airtable makes Bayes its first acquisition to up its data visualization game

Airtable, the makers of the no code relational database, announced its first acquisition today, acquiring Bayes, an early stage visualization startup. The purpose of the purchase is to enhance the...

When the economic tide goes out, we’ll see which VCs are naked

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we were back to full strength, with Danny Natasha and Alex joined by Chris...

VCs unfazed by Chinese regulatory shakeups (so far)

China’s technology scene has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in recent months. In the wake of the scuttling of Ant Group’s IPO, the Chinese government has...

Founded by a Freshworks alum, sales commission platform Everstage gets $1.7M seed funding

Everstage founding team Vivek Suriyamoorthy and Siva Rajamani For sales representatives, commissions are source of motivation—and frustration, too. Commission structures are often complex, and become even more labyrinthine as companies...

44.01 secures $5M to turn billions of tons of carbon dioxide to stone

Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions is an important goal, but another challenge awaits: lowering the levels of CO2 and other substances already in the atmosphere. One promising approach turns the...

Jerry raises $75M at a $450M valuation to build a car ownership ‘super app’

Just months after raising $28 million, Jerry announced today that it has raised $75 million in a Series C round that values the company at $450 million. Existing backer Goodwater...

Robinhood buys Say Technologies for $140M to improve shareholder-company relations

U.S. consumer investing and trading service Robinhood announced this morning that it will acquire Say Technologies in a $140 million cash deal. Say Technologies is a venture-backed startup, having raised...

Everyone wants to fund the next Coinbase

In celebration of Coinbase’s earnings report today, investors poured a mountain of cash into one of the company’s global competitors. I’m kidding, of course, but today really is Coinbase’s earnings...

Japan’s TechnoPro acquires Indian app development studio Robosoft for $108 million

Robosoft Technologies, an India-headquartered app development studio, said on Tuesday it has reached a definitive agreement to sell the business to Japan’s IT services firm TechnoPro for $108 million. Founded...

FreshBooks reaches $1B+ valuation with $130.75M for its SMB-focused accounting platform