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ServiceMax, a company that builds software for the field-service industry, announced yesterday that it will go public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a deal valued at...

Digital lending platform Blend valued at over $4B in its public debut

Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business. And if you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may or may not have noticed the...

Visualping raises $6M to make its website change monitoring service smarter

Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million...

India poised for record VC year as unicorns head for decisive IPOs

In case you’ve not been paying attention, we’ll say it again: The global venture capital industry is on fire. The second quarter of 2021 was the largest single three-month period...

Reliance Retail acquires controlling stake in Just Dial for $469 million

Reliance Retail said on Friday it has acquired a controlling stake in 25-year-old Indian search and discovery firm Just Dial for $469 million. The Indian retail giant, which leads the...

Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst explains how to get ready to raise your next round

TechCrunch virtually sat down with venture capitalist and Cleo Capital managing director Sarah Kunst at our latest Early Stage event last week. Kunst joined us to chat about preparing for...

American Express taps startup BodesWell for expansion into financial planning

American Express is branching out into financial planning, with a little help from a seven-person startup called BodesWell. This week, the credit card giant launched a pilot of its first...

Revolut’s 2020 financial performance explains its big new $33B valuation

News broke this morning that Revolut, a U.K.-based consumer fintech player, raised a Series E round of funding worth $800 million at a valuation of $33 billion. Those figures are...

Abodu raises $20M to build prefabricated backyard homes

The need for more affordable housing has never been more urgent as a shortage in the U.S. housing market persists. Startups attempting to help address the shortage in a variety...

What impact will Apple’s buy now, pay later push have on startups?

Bloomberg broke news earlier this week that Apple, the consumer hardware giant with a rising services focus, is building a buy now, pay later (BNPL) service that will integrate with...

Play2Pay raises $13M to convert mobile user engagement into bill payment

The gamification of payments is not a new concept. A number of companies are attempting to combine gamification and payments in creative ways. And today, one such company, Play2Pay, has...

Singapore-based Tinvio raises $12M Series A to build financial services for supply chain merchants

First created to give supply chain merchants a streamlined way to communicate with buyers, Tinvio is now preparing to launch financial services, including financing and credit card issuing. The Singapore-based...

Easy Eat AI raises $5M to help Southeast Asian restaurants digitize their operations

Easy Eat AI, a Singapore-based startup that wants to “transform restaurants into technology companies,” announced today it has raised $5 million in funding. Easy Eat AI offers an operating system...

YC-backed Deskimo, an on-demand coworking space app, launches in Singapore and Hong Kong

Arcc, a coworking space in Singapore available for bookings on Deskimo Part of Y Combinator’s current batch, Deskimo wants to make finding coworking spaces easier. Its on-demand booking app is...

You can see fires, but now Qwake wants firefighters to see through them

When it comes to tough environments to build new technology, firefighting has to be among the most difficult. Smoke and heat can quickly damage hardware, and interference from fires will...

How to make the math work for today’s sky-high startup valuations

Venture capital price discipline is out the window; venture funds are looking to make faster, earlier deals; and more unicorns were minted in the last three months than during any...

Your funding round isn’t special, but you might be

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha and Danny decided it was time to chat about funding...

Acelerate raises $14.44M Series A to turn existing restaurants into cloud kitchens

Acelerate, a software company looking to help restaurants make the most out of their infrastructure, is today announcing the close of a $14.44 million Series A financing led by Sequoia...

Ex-Plaid employees raise $30M for Stytch, an API-first passwordless authentication platform

There are far fewer annoying things than managing one’s passwords. There are a bunch of companies out there to help you attempt to do that. And there’s also a number...

Backed by $5M led by General Catalyst, Evvy launches a vaginal microbiome test to support women’s health research

Another US femtech startup has joined the race to build up data-sets to support research into and understanding of a range of health issues that can affect women. Evvy has...

Cardless raises $40M to help more brands launch custom credit cards

Many consumers use their credit cards to rack up rewards to be used toward travel. But what if you’re a sports fan, and using your credit card could lead to...

Next Gen Foods to launch its plant-based chicken in the U.S. after raising a $20M seed extension from investors like GGV

Singapore-based Next Gen Foods will bring its plant-based chicken alternative to the United States after raising a $20 million seed extension. Investors included GGV Capital, agriculture and food tech-focused Bits...

Wecasa raises $17.7 million for its home care and wellness marketplace

French startup Wecasa has raised a $17.7 million funding round (€15 million). Blisce is leading the funding round with existing investors Serena, ISAI and Frédéric Mazzella also participating. The company...

Gourmey is a cell-based poultry startup working on lab-grown foie gras

Meet Gourmey, a new French startup that recently raised a $10 million founding round in equity and debt. The startup is working on meat grown in laboratories from animal cells....

Great Question gets $2.5M seed round to make customer research easier

Great Question’s user dashboard Customer research is invaluable for software companies, but there are many obstacles, like finding the right group of people to survey. Great Question wants to make...

Investment app Syfe raises $29.6M Series B led by returning investor Valar Ventures

Syfe founder Dhruv Arora Investment apps in Southeast Asia are attracting a lot of funding, and now some are raising fast follow-on rounds, too. For example, Indonesian robo-advisor app Bibit...

Zomato raises $562 million from anchor investors ahead of IPO

Indian food delivery startup Zomato said on Tuesday evening that it has raised $562.3 million from its anchor investors ahead of IPO opening on Wednesday. Zomato, which counts Ant Financial...

Mighty Buildings lands $22M to create ‘sustainable and affordable’ 3D-printed homes

Oakland-based Mighty Buildings, which is on a quest to build homes using 3D printing, robotics and automation, has raised a $22 million extension to its Series B round of funding....

Investors don’t expect the US startup funding market to slow down

Now in the opening weeks of the third quarter, The Exchange is taking a look back at the Q2 2021 venture capital market. Data indicate that it was incredibly active,...

Cadoo gets $1.5M to gamify fitness with betting challenges

Cadoo, a US-startup that’s gamifying fitness by turning it into a betting opportunity, using the prospect of winning (or losing) cold hard cash to motivate people to get off the...

ZoomInfo drops $575M on Chrous.ai as AI shakes up the sales market

ZoomInfo announced this morning it intends to acquire conversational sales intelligence tool Chorus.AI for $575 million. Shares of ZoomInfo are unchanged in pre-market trading following the news, per Yahoo Finance...

Carsome Group will acquire iCar Asia in a deal worth $200M

Southeast Asia’s car marketplace wars are going into high drive. Today Carsome Group, one of the region’s largest online used car marketplaces, said it plans to acquire listings platform iCar...

Vara raises $4.8M from investors like Go Ventures and Sequoia India’s Surge to digitize Indonesian SMEs’ payrolls

Staff management platform Vara’s team If you follow startup news from Indonesia, you know that the country’s estimated 60 million small businesses are a hot target for tech companies. BukuKas...

Q3 IPO cycle starts strong with Couchbase pricing and Kaltura relisting

Today we have new filings from Couchbase and Kaltura: Couchbase set an initial price range for its IPO, something we’ve been waiting for, and Kaltura’s offering is back from hiatus...

Eat the rich, but let them build rockets in the meantime

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic went to space (or the vicinity of space) in a PR-suffused event over the weekend. It was all rather twee, packed with maudlin riffs about childhood...

Indian financial services firm MobiKwik looks to raise $255 million in IPO

Gurgaon-based mobile wallet service firm MobiKwik plans to raise up to $255 million in an initial public offering, becoming the latest Indian startup to explore the public markets. The 12-year-old...

Equity Monday: Cybersecurity startups see deluge of capital as Microsoft looks to buy RiskIQ

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...

Dovetail, the venture studio that has worked with startups like Afterpay, is raising a new fund

Dovetail co-founders Ash Fogelberg and Nick Frandsen Based in Sydney and Auckland, Dovetail is a full-service venture studio that works closely with founders who have a great idea, but may...

Didomi raises $40 million to help you manage customer consent

Jul 9, 2021

French startup Didomi has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Elephant and Breega. The company manages consent flows for web publishers and app developers. Didomi is...

Startups have never had it so good

Jul 9, 2021

The venture capital market is racing ahead, foot on the gas, middle finger out the window, hair on fire. That’s our read of the Q2 2021 data released thus far...

Mmhmm, it’s the most ridiculous story we’ve ever heard

Jul 9, 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. Natasha...

PowerZ raises $8.3 million for its video game focused on education

French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The...

Circle is a good example of why SPACs can be useful

In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing earlier this year, other crypto companies may be looking to go public sooner than later. That appears to be the case with Circle,...

Miami twins raise $18M for Lula, an insurance infrastructure upstart

Lula, a Miami-based insurance infrastructure startup, announced today it has raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding. Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures co-led the round, which also...

Homebrew leads Z1’s effort to bring digital banking to Latin America’s teens

Z1, a Sao Paulo-based digital bank aimed at Latin American GenZers, has raised $2.5 million in a round led by U.S.-based Homebrew. A number of other investors also participated in...

Live video shopping startup Talkshoplive brings in another $6M

Five months after announcing a $3 million seed round from Spero Ventures, shopping-focused live video host Talkshoplive is back, this time with a $6 million seed extension led by Raine...

Swiss Post acquires e2e encrypted cloud services provider, Tresorit

Swiss Post, the former state-owned mail delivery firm which became a private limited company in 2013, diversifying into logistics, finance, transport and more (including dabbling in drone delivery) while retaining...

Younited Credit raises $170 million for its data-driven credit offering

French startup Younited Credit has raised a $170 million funding round. Goldman Sachs is leading the round with existing investors Eurazeo, Bpifrance and AG2R La Mondiale also participating. The company...

Indonesian edtech startup Gredu raises $4M Series A to keep teachers, parents and students engaged with one another

Many teachers and parents in Indonesia rely on WhatsApp to keep in touch, creating “multiple groups that often become messy and highly ineffective, and result in confusion or lost threads,”...

European challenger bank Bunq raises $228 million at $1.9 billion valuation

Amsterdam-based challenger bank Bunq has been self-funded by its founder and CEO Ali Niknam for several years. But the company has decided to raise some external capital, leading to the...

WellSaid attracts $10M A round for higher quality synthetic speech

WellSaid Labs, whose tools create synthetic speech that could be mistaken for the real thing, has raised a $10M Series A to grow the business. The company’s home-baked text-to-speech engine...

Investors find European unicorns reluctant to join SPAC boom

The U.S. SPAC market kept rolling along this week with news that Satellogic will go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange thanks to a merger with a blank check company....

r2c raises $27M to scale its security-focused code analysis service

This morning r2c, a startup building a SaaS service around the Semgrep open-source project, announced that it has closed a $27 million Series B. Felicis led the round, which the...

Tiger Global leads $34M investment into Unit21, a no-code fraud prevention platform

Unit21, a startup that helps businesses monitor fraudulent activities with its no-code software, announced today it has raised $34 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger...

Tune in, SPAC on, drop LSD

After selling Bread last year for over $500M, this founder just raised millions for his new fintech startup

When Daniel Simon sold Bread, a consumer purchase finance and payments startup he’d co-founded, to Alliance Data Systems for over $500 million late last year, he quickly set his sights...

Dataminr’s first ever acquisition is UK-based geovisualization platform WatchKeeper

When it comes to detecting events transpiring anywhere in the world, few companies hold a candle to Dataminr. Founded in 2009, the company has raised more than $1 billion over...

Outbrain raises $200 million ahead of its IPO

Outbrain, an adtech company that provides clickbait ads below news articles, has raised $200 million in funding — Outbrain didn’t disclose the valuation of the company for this deal. The...

Nextdoor’s SPAC investor deck paints a picture of sizable scale and sticky users

The SPAC parade continues in this shortened week with news that community social network Nextdoor will go public via a blank-check company. The unicorn will merge with Khosla Ventures Acquisition...

Meet Super.mx, the Mexico City-based insurtech that raised $7.2M from VCs and unicorn CEOs

Super.mx, an insurtech startup based in Mexico City, has raised $7.2 million in a Series A round led by ALLVP. Co-founded in 2019 by a trio of former insurance industry...

Will Didi’s regulatory problems make it harder for Chinese startups to go public in the US?

Shares of Chinese ride-hailing business Didi are off 22% this morning after the company was hit by more regulatory activity over the holiday weekend. The recently public company traded as...

Didi gets hit by Chinese government, and Pelo raises $150M

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

TravelPerk buys UK-based Click Travel in latest pandemic purchase

Business trip booking platform TravelPerk has bagged another rival — picking up UK-based Click Travel. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we’re told it’s the third —...

ManoMano raises $355 million for its home improvement e-commerce platform

Jul 5, 2021

French startup ManoMano has raised a Series F funding round of $355 million led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The company operates an e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and...

E-commerce logistics startup Locad gets $4.5M seed round led by Sequoia Capital India

Jul 5, 2021

E-commerce is booming in Southeast Asia, but in many markets, the fragmented logistics industry is struggling to catch up. This means sellers run into roadblocks when shipping to buyers, especially...

Tinybird turns raw data into realtime API at scale

Jul 5, 2021

Meet Tinybird, a new startup that helps developers build data products at scale without having to worry about infrastructure, query time and all those annoying issues that come up once...

Frame streamlines finding a therapist and builds a one-stop shop for private practices

Therapy is rapidly becoming a standard part of many people’s lives, but 2020 interrupted that trend by nixing in-person sessions and forcing therapists to migrate their entire practice online —...

Chinese cybersecurity probe validates Didi’s pre-IPO warning to investors

Shares of Chinese ride-hailing provider Didi are sharply lower this morning after news broke that its domestic regulators are investigating the newly public company. A loose translation of the probe’s...

California has no water and lots of liquidity

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny, Natasha, and Alex were on-deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit....

Swedish gaming giant acquires India’s PlaySimple for $360 million

Swedish gaming giant Modern Times Group (MTG) has acquired Indian startup PlaySimple for $360 million, the two firms said Friday. MTG said it will pay 77% of the acquisition sum...

How Robinhood’s explosive growth rate came to be

This afternoon Robinhood filed to go public. TechCrunch’s first look at its results can be found here. Now that we’ve done a first dig, we can take the time to...

Robinhood is going public and we’re very excited

It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its...

As EU venture capital soars, will the region hold onto future IPOs?

Shares of American cybersecurity unicorn SentinelOne began to trade yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. The former startup had raised nearly $700 million before its IPO. And it priced...

Robinhood files to go public after squeaking to profitability in 2020

This afternoon Robinhood, the popular investing app for consumers filed to go public. The company intends to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol “HOOD.” That Robinhood released an S-1...

Nowports raises $16M to build the OS for LatAm’s shipping industry

Nowports, an automated digital freight forwarder in Latin America, has raised $16 million in Series A funding. Mouro Capital — a venture capital fund focused on fintechs and adjacent businesses...

Codat raises $40M from Tiger for its SMB-focused API service

This morning Codat, a startup that provides APIs to link small-business fintech data to external services, announced that it has closed a $40 million round led by Tiger Global. The...

Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil’s first crypto exchange, raises $200M from SoftBank

Mercado Bitcoin, a Latin American digital assets exchange, has raised $200 million in Series B funding from the SoftBank Latin America Fund. The round values 2TM Group, Mercado Bitcoin’s non-operating...

Daylight raises millions to build a digital banking platform ‘designed for and by’ the LGBTQ+ community

Over the past year, there has been a surge of newly formed digital banks aimed at specific demographics. The banks in nearly all cases are trying to meet the needs...

For US and Chinese startups, the IPO market is increasingly a two-tier affair

The American IPO market is hot for many companies, but surprisingly cool for others. The gap between the two cohorts of private companies looking to list is becoming notable. When...

Dear economy, creators aren’t fragile plants

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha brought on Alexis Gay, a former operator at Patreon...

Former Zillow execs raise $70M seed round for Tomo, which wants to simplify the mortgage process

There are so many startups pledging to reinvent the mortgage process that it’s hard to keep up. But for anyone who has had to go through the process of applying...

Kikoff raises $30M for its hybrid consumer-credit and financial-literacy service

Kikoff, a personal finance platform aimed at helping consumers build credit, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B round. The capital is in addition to...

Ably raises $70 million for its developer platform that enables realtime features

Ably is a Pub/Sub messaging platform that companies can use to develop realtime features in their products. The company just raised a $70 million Series B funding round co-led by...

How VCs can get the most out of co-investing alongside LPs

William Kilmer Contributor Share on Twitter William Kilmer is managing partner with C5 Capital, a venture capital fund investing in the secure data ecosystem. He was formerly an operating partner...

Duolingo’s S-1 depicts heady growth, monetization, new focus on English certification

Duolingo filed to go public yesterday, giving the world a deep look inside its business results and how the pandemic impacted the edtech unicorn’s performance. TechCrunch’s initial read of the...

Forum Brands raises $27M Series A as crowded Amazon roll-up space continues to heat up

The number of startups acquiring e-commerce businesses, especially those operating on Amazon, to grow and scale is increasing as more people than ever are shopping online. The latest such startup...

Zoom to acquire German startup to bring real-time translation to meetings

As companies expand worldwide, and meet online in tools like Zoom, the language barrier can be a real impediment to getting work done. Zoom announced that it intends to acquire...

Late-stage capital is having a ‘cascading effect’ on European VC activity

Capping off our dig into the early-stage venture capital market, we’re taking a quick look at Europe this morning. Previously, The Exchange tucked into the United States’ early-stage market for...

Beeflow raises $8.3 million to save the bees AND put them to work

Bees are absolutely critical to the health of our agricultural system, ecosystem, and overall wellbeing as a species here on Earth. And yet bee populations are decreasing and extinction concerns...

SaaS-focused Acceleprise rebrands, raises $30M in new capital

TechCrunch has covered Acceleprise several times over the years, including a look at its mid-2020 accelerator startup batch from its three accelerators. The firm has long focused on business-to-business SaaS...

Orum raises $52M to help speed up intrabank transfers

Orum, which aims to speed up the amount of time it takes to transfer money between banks, announced today it has raised $56 million in a Series B round of...

Accel closes on $3B across three funds as it ramps up global investing

Accel announced Tuesday the close of three new funds totaling $3.05 billion, money that it will be using to back early-stage startups, as well as growth rounds for more mature...

Duolingo filed to go public

Duolingo, a Pittsburgh-based language learning business last valued at $2.4 billion, has officially filed to go public. The 400-person company, which we explored in great detail in our EC-1, was...

Real estate tech startup Side raises $50M more at a $2B valuation as it preps for an IPO

Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, has raised “$50 million-plus” in a funding round that doubles its...

SentinelOne’s upgraded IPO pricing is good news for Tiger, public markets and your local VC

As the second quarter races to a close, we’re down to the wire for IPOs looking to get out before June ends. One such company is SentinelOne, a cybersecurity startup...

Equity Monday: Big iPads, and Ballmer-era Google

Thursday snags $3.5M for a dating app that’s live once a week