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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 dug into the burgeoning of sports media, sports...

Synctera raises $33M Series A to pair fintechs with banks

Synctera, which aims to serve as a matchmaker for community banks and fintechs, has raised $33 million in a Series A round of funding led by Fin VC. The raise...

Coatue direct deposits $20M into Pinwheel, a payroll API for neobanks

One of the most strategically important financial relationships for neobanks is becoming the account destination for a user’s paycheck. If you’re a bank and you own that specific relationship, users...

DealHub raises $20M Series B for its sales platform

DealHub.io, an Austin-based platform that helps businesses manage the entire process of their sales engagements, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round. The round...

Divido bags $30M to take its ‘buy now, pay later’ platform to more markets

London-based Divido, a whitelabel platform for retail finance that integrates with ecommerce platforms (but can also support omni-channel) so retailers can offer consumers a ‘buy now, pay later’ option at...

Yieldstreet raises $100M as it mulls going public via SPAC, eyes acquisitions

These days, investing goes way beyond the stock market. And in recent years there’s been a growing number of startups which aim to give more people access to a wider...

Molecule.one grows its drug synthesis AI platform with a $4.6M seed round

Polish computational chemistry outfit Molecule.one has raised $4.6M to expand its quest to bring theoretical drug molecules to reality. Its machine learning systems predict the best ways to synthesize potentially...

Sprinklr’s IPO filing shows uneven cash flow but modest growth

Another week, another unicorn IPO. This time, Sprinklr is taking on the public markets. The New York-based software company works in what it describes as the customer experience market. And...

Goldman Sachs leads $202M investment in project44, doubling its valuation to $1.2B in a matter of months

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a lot in the world, and supply chains are no exception. A number of applications that aim to solve workflow challenges across the supply chain exist....

Equity Tuesday: Everyone is raising money at the same time

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...

Kushki, an Ecuador-based fintech, raises $86M to build financial infrastructure in Latam

Just about every week there’s a blockbuster round coming out of South America, but in certain countries such as Ecuador, things have been more hush hush. However, Kushki, a Quito-based...

Truebill raises $45 million for its personal finance app

Personal finance startup Truebill has raised a $45 million Series D funding round led by Accel. This comes just a few months after the company raised a $17 million Series...

Belvo, LatAm’s answer to Plaid, raises $43M to scale its API for financial services

Belvo, a Latin American startup which has built an open finance API platform, announced today it has raised $43 million in a Series A round of funding. A mix of...

Brazil’s idwall raises $38M for identity validation platform

Online fraud and identity theft is a global problem that has only been exacerbated with increased online transactions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it is estimated that Brazilian companies...

European insurtech startup Wefox grabs $650 million at $3 billion valuation

German startup Wefox has raised a $650 million Series C funding round led by Target Global. Following this funding round, the company has reached a post-money valuation of $3 billion....

Singapore-based D2C dental brand Zenyum raises $40M Series B from L Catterton, Sequoia India and other investors

Zenyum, a startup that wants to make cosmetic dentistry more affordable, announced today it has raised a $40 million Series B. This includes $25 million from L Catterton, a private...

June makes product analytics more accessible

May 31, 2021

Meet June, a new startup that wants to make it easier to create analytics dashboards and generate reports even if you’re not a product analytics expert. June is built on...

6 investors and founders forecast hockey-stick growth for Edinburgh’s startup scene

May 29, 2021

Scotland is slowly but surely drawing attention in the UK’s startup space. In 2020, Scottish startups collectively raised £345 million, according to Tech Nation, and with nearly 2,500 startups, it...

Meet Justos, the new Brazilian insurtech that just got backing from the CEOs of 7 unicorns

Here in the U.S. the concept of using driver’s data to decide the cost of auto insurance premiums is not a new one. But in markets like Brazil, the idea...

Anthropic is the new AI research outfit from OpenAI’s Dario Amodei, and it has $124M to burn

As AI has grown from a menagerie of research projects to include a handful of titanic, industry-powering models like GPT-3, there is a need for the sector to evolve —...

Doximity’s S-1 may explain why healthcare exits are heating up

There was a time when this column was more than a never-ending run of IPO coverage. Then the unicorn liquidity cycle kicked off and it’s been a long run of...

The SPAC trash ticker is counting down

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week had the whole crew aboard to record: Grace and Chris making...

Café helps hybrid organizations schedule in-office time

Meet Café, a new French startup founded by two brothers that wants to help companies switch to a hybrid remote-and-office workplace model. Café isn’t a traditional desk-booking tool. Instead, the...

Brazilian proptech startup QuintoAndar lands $300M at a $4B valuation

Fintech and proptech are two sectors that are seeing exploding growth in Latin America, as financial services and real estate are two categories in particular dire need of innovation in...

Filtered.ai closes $7M in funding to accelerate its technical hiring service

Boston-based Filtered.ai has raised a $7 million round to accelerate its hiring cadence, and built out the go-to-market model for its its engineering and developer-focused hiring service, it recently announced....

Acorns’ SPAC listing depicts a consumer fintech business with a SaaSy revenue mix

Another day, another unicorn public offering. Today it’s Acorns, a consumer fintech service that blends saving and investing into a freemium product. It’s a company that TechCrunch has covered extensively...

Homeward secures $371M to help people make all-cash offers on houses

Trying to buy a house in a competitive market is perhaps one of the most stressful things an adult can go through. Competing with a bunch of people all putting...

Wayflyer raises $76M to provide ‘revenue-based’ financing to e-commerce merchants

Wayflyer, a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce merchants, has raised $76 million in a Series A funding round led by Left Lane Capital. “Partners” of DST Global, QED Investors, Speedinvest...

Paired pulls in $3.6M to encourage more couples to get cosy with app-based relationship care

Can an app improve your romantic relationships? The founders behind Paired, a “relationship care” app for couples, believe it can. And since launching in October, with $1M to kick things...

Agicap raises $100 million for its cashflow management service

French startup Agicap has raised a new $100 million funding round led by Greenoaks. With today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of more than $500 million (€415...

Engine Biosciences expands its digital drug discovery pipeline with $43M round A

Drug discovery is a large and growing field, in which are to be found both ambitious startups and billion-dollar big pharma incumbents. Engine Biosciences is one of the former, a...

OpenAI’s $100M startup fund will make ‘big early bets’ with Microsoft as partner

OpenAI is launching a $100 million startup fund, which it calls the OpenAI Startup Fund, though which it and its partners will invest in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems...

Prismic raises $20 million for its headless CMS

Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the...

Datacy raises $2.4M to help consumers monetize their own damn data

This morning Datacy, a startup with its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, announced that it has closed $2.4 million in new funding to continue building its consumer-friendly data collection and monetization...

SpotOn raises $125M in a16z-led Series D, triples valuation to $1.875B

Certain industries were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than others, especially in its early days. Small businesses, including retailers and restaurants, were negatively impacted by lockdowns and the resulting...

Flywire’s flotation suggests the IPO slowdown is behind us

Boston-based payment processor Flywire announced its IPO pricing last night. The company sold 10.44 million shares at $24 per share, the upper limit of its $22 to $24 per share...

Cataclysms are a growth industry

Treet, with $2.8 million in seed funding, gets brands involved in the resale market

Treet, a company rethinking the resale retail market, announced the close of a $2.8 million seed round today. The financing comes from Bling Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Techstars, BABM Ventures, BBG...

Parametrix Insurance raises $17.5 million to offer cloud downtime insurance

Insurtech is picking up steam in a big way, but startup Parametrix thinks there is still plenty of room left to innovate. The company, which today announced the close of...

LatAm-focused corporate spend startup Clara raises $30M months after its last round

This morning Clara announced that it closed a new, $30 million funding round and secured a $50 million revolving debt facility. The startup, which provides corporate cards to Mexican companies,...

Glovo splurges $208M on three Delivery Hero brands in the Balkans

The high stakes game of chess (or, well, consolidation chicken) that is on-demand food delivery rolls on today with a little more territorial swapping in Europe: Barcelona-based Glovo has agreed...

Indonesian crypto exchange Pintu gets $6M Series A led by Pantera, Intudo and Coinbase Ventures

Along with the stock market, cryptocurrency is also seeing an uptick among retail investors in Indonesia. Pintu, a platform focused on first-time cryptocurrency buyers, announced today it has raised a...

Matera raises another $43 million to turn residential building management into SaaS

French startup Matera has announced that is has raised a new $43 million (€35 million) Series B funding round led by Mubadala Capital. Bpifrance, Burda Principal Investments as well as...

What Vimeo’s growth, profits and value tell us about the online video market

The spinout of video platform Vimeo from IAC completed today, with the smaller company now trading as an independent entity under the ticker symbol VMEO. If you missed the news...

Dogs of Lordstown

The lackluster performance of shares in companies that have combined with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) in recent quarters took another hit yesterday when Lordstown Motors reported its first-quarter results....

Taipei-based computer vision startup eYs3D gets $7M Series A

EYs3D Microelectronics, a fabless design house that focuses on end-to-end software and hardware systems for computer vision technology, has raised a $7 million Series A. Participants included ARM IoT Capital,...

Security startup Tessian, which uses AI to fight social engineering, trousers $65M

In the latest chunky funding round out of Europe, UK-based email security startup, Tessian, has closed $65 million in Series C funding. The startup applies machine learning to build individual...

Canvas lands $20M so tech’s biggest companies can find diverse talent

Ben Herman and Adam Gefkovicz launched Jumpstart in 2017 with a clear mission: to make the world more equitable via a more fair and balanced hiring process. The company released...

Weight-loss platform Noom bulks up on $540 million in new funding

Since the pandemic began last year, nearly 61% of adults in the United States gained weight, with the average adult surveyed gaining 15 pounds, according to a report from the...

Affirm spinout Resolve raises $60M for its B2B ‘buy now, pay later’ platform

Buy now, pay later is everywhere these days, mostly focused on the consumer. Resolve — a San Francisco-based startup in the space specializing in “buy now, pay later” capabilities for...

Interactio, a remote interpretation platform, grabs $30M after seeing 12x growth during COVID-19

Interactio, a remote interpretation platform whose customers include massive institutions like the United Nations, European Commission and Parliament along with corporates like BMW, JP Morgan and Microsoft, has closed a...

Zeta Global’s IPO filing uncovers modest growth, strong adjusted profitability

Welcome back to the working week. Are you ready to get our hands a little dirty this morning? Good. We have an IPO to catch up on, one I should...

The LatAm funding boom continues as Kaszek raises $1B across a duo of funds

Long before SoftBank launched its $2 billion Innovation Fund in Latin America, and before Andreessen Horowitz began actively investing in the region, Sao Paulo-based Kaszek has been putting money into...

In a YC ‘power’ play, Gridware girds $5.3M to save humanity from weather

You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are...

Equity Monday: Crypto’s awful weekend, Apple v. Epic, and funding rounds galore

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...

E-commerce startup Little Birdie lands $30M AUD pre-launch funding from Australia’s largest bank

Commonwealth Bank group executive Angus Sullivan and Jon Beros, co-founder and CEO of Little Birdie Melbourne-based Little Birdie, an e-commerce startup that wants to become the “new homepage of online shopping,”...

Aurora Solar aims to power the growing solar industry with a $250M round C

Aurora Solar had one of those pitches that seemed obvious in retrospect. Instead of going to a house and measuring its roof manually for a solar panel installation, why not...

As Zynga impresses, rival mobile-gaming shop Jam City looks to list via SPAC

While it would be nice to write about something other than yet another tech company looking to list via a SPAC, the deals keep dropping, so our more traditional fare...

Linkedin is the reason Apple made the M1 chip

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was good fun not only because we had the whole team...

Indonesian agritech platform TaniHub Group harvests a $65.5M Series B round

TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI...

Rakuten and Beyond Next invest $1.4M seed funding in farm-to-table startup Secai Marche

Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses...

Mio, a social commerce startup focused on smaller cities and rural areas in Vietnam, raises $1M seed

Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need...

Eano’s Stella Wu is not your typical construction tech startup founder

Renovating a home is an exciting, yet often fraught-filled, endeavor. One startup that aims to help make the process simpler, cheaper and less stressful by helping people manage the home...

Don’t tweet about $ASS

I am not a smart man. Earlier today I tweeted about $ASS, a cryptocurrency named after a dog. In this case, Australian Shepherds. And after doing that obviously stupid thing,...

Robinhood’s epic Q1 growth explains its fundraising boom

An initial analysis of Robinhood’s Q1 2021 payment for order flow (PFOF) revenues sourced from company filings shows that the free-trading unicorn had a strong start to the year. Given...

Workrise, once known as RigUp, raises $300M at a $2.9B valuation

Workrise, which has built a workforce management platform for the skilled trades, announced today that it has raised $300 million in a Series E round led by UK-based Baillie Gifford...

Kleiner spots Spot Meetings $5M to modernize walk-and-talks for the Zoom generation

Trees, those deciduous entities you can occasionally see outdoors when not locked down or strapped down at a desktop ruminating on a video call, have long been the inspiration for...

OneNav locates $21M from GV to map our transition to the next generation of GPS

GPS is one of those science fiction technologies whose use is effortless for the end user and endlessly challenging for the engineers who design it. It’s now at the heart...

Polywork gets $3.5M to blend professional and social networking

Life is complicated and so — increasingly — is work-life. That’s the premise underpinning Polywork, a new professional social network founded by Lystable/Kalo founder, Peter Johnson. It’s announcing a $3.5...

Korean proptech startup Dongnae gets $4.1M seed extension led by NFX

The real estate market in South Korea is very fragmented, which means people often have to work with dozens of brokers before they find a new home. Founded in 2020...

Philippine e-commerce enabler Great Deals raises $30M Series B led by logistics firm Fast Group

Steve Sy, CEO of Great Deals, and William Chiongbian II, CEO of Fast Group, sign the contract for the companies’ strategic partnership. Image Credits: Great Deals Founded in 2014, Great...

Liquid Instruments raises $13.7M to bring its education-focused 8-in-1 engineering gadget to market

Part of learning to be an engineer is understanding the tools you’ll have to work with — voltmeters, spectrum analyzers, things like that. But why use two, or eight for...

Netflify snags YC alum FeaturePeek to add design review capabilities

Netlify, the startup that’s bringing a micro services approach to building websites, announced today that it has acquired YC alum FeaturePeek. The two companies did not share the purchase price....

Can Squarespace dodge the direct listing value trap?

It’s Squarespace direct listing day, and the SMB web hosting and design shop’s reference price has been set at $50 per share. According to quick math from the IPO-watching group...

Construction tech upstart Assignar adds a Fifth Wall with $20M Series B

Construction technology may not be the sexiest of industries, but it is one where tremendous opportunity lies — considering it has historically lagged in productivity. And, lags in productivity means...

Spokn slurps out the BS in corporate internal comms and replaces it with audio storytelling

The podcasting world remains one of the most vibrant formats in media (and I am not just saying that since the Equity crew won a Webby yesterday for our not-that-humble...

What has four wheels and loses money?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic...

Unbounce snags Snazzy.ai to add automated copywriting to platform

Unbounce, a Vancouver startup best known for helping marketers create automated landing pages, added a new wrinkle this morning when it announced it has acquired Snazzy.ai, an early stage automated...

More funding flows into Pipe, as buzzy fintech raises $250M at a $2B valuation

At the end of March, TechCrunch reported that buzzy startup Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — had raised $150 million in a round of funding...

PhonePe in talks to acquire Indian app store Indus OS

Walmart-backed payments services firm PhonePe is in advanced stages of talks to acquire Samsung-backed Indus OS, a startup that operates an eponymous third-party Android app store, a source familiar with...

UTEC, one of Asia’s largest deep-tech investment firms, launches new $275M fund

The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), a deep-tech investment firm, announced the first close of its fifth fund, which is expected to total 30 billion JPY (or about...

Dabbel gets $4.4M to cut CO2 by automating HVAC for commercial buildings

Düsseldorf-based proptech startup Dabbel is using AI to drive energy efficiency savings in commercial buildings. It’s developed cloud-based self-learning building management software that plugs into the existing building management systems...

Finary wants to create the wealth management dashboard for the next generation

Meet Finary, a new French startup that wants to change how you manage your savings, investments, mortgage, real estate assets and cryptocurrencies. The company lets you aggregate all your accounts...

Father and son duo take on global logistics with Optimal Dynamics’ sequential decision AI platform

Like “innovation,” machine learning and artificial intelligence are commonplace terms that provide very little context for what they actually signify. AI/ML spans dozens of different fields of research, covering all...

Inside Marqeta’s fascinating fintech IPO

The IPO market is gearing up for a hot close to the second quarter and a hotter Q3. That’s The Exchange’s takeaway from recent IPO filings from Monday.com (enterprise planning...

Settle raises $15M from Kleiner Perkins to give e-commerce companies more working capital

Alek Koenig spent four years at Affirm, where he was head of Credit. There he saw firsthand just how powerful the alternative lending model could be. Koenig realized that it...

Klaviyo’s next-gen email marketing platform engorges on $320M at a $9.5B valuation

Email marketing is decades old, but it’s a category that has surprising life in it. Multiple generations of email marketing companies have come through and sustained success, from Constant Contact...

Fantasy fantasy sport Blaseball developers score $3M seed funding to go mobile

In the absence of a real baseball league, it is perhaps not surprising that a simulated one should grow popular during the troubled year 2020. But even so, the absurdist...

Insight Partners leads $60M growth round in cross-border payments startup Thunes

The world of digital payments is very fragmented, with different types of online bank accounts, digital wallets and money transfer services used in different countries. Singapore-based Thunes, a fintech focused...

Gogoro strikes deal with Yadea and DCJ to build a battery-swapping network in China

Less than a month after announcing a partnership with India’s largest two-wheeled vehicle maker, Gogoro is taking another big step in its global expansion plans. This time the market is...

Uptrust raises $2M to fight the billions of dollars wasted on useless mass incarceration

A technical violation is one of those Orwellian terms used by the U.S. government to occlude the absurd morass of process and procedure that is the modern criminal justice system...

Back Market raises $335M for its refurbished device marketplace, now valued at $3.2B

French startup Back Market — a marketplace for refurbished electronics goods — has raised a $335 million Series D funding round led by General Atlantic. Today’s funding round values the...

BukuKas gets $50M from investors including DoorDash’s Gokul Rajaram and TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus

BukuKas co-founders Krishnan Menon (left) and Lorenzo Peracchione (right) with a BukuKas user BukuKas, a startup focused on digitizing Indonesia’s small businesses, has raised $50 million in Series B funding....

Amount raises $99M at a $1B+ valuation to help banks better compete with fintechs

Amount, a company that provides technology to banks and financial institutions, has raised $99 million in a Series D funding round at a valuation of just over $1 billion. WestCap,...

Ankorstore raises another $102 million for its wholesale marketplace

French startup Ankorstore has raised a $102 million Series B funding round (€84 million). Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures are leading today’s funding round with existing investors Index Ventures,...

With $21M in funding, Code Ocean aims to help researchers replicate data-heavy science

Every branch of science is increasingly reliant on big data sets and analysis, which means a growing confusion of formats and platforms — more than inconvenient, this can hinder the...

AI-powered Jerry raises $28M to help you save money on car insurance

When Art Agrawal was growing up in India, a car ride was a rare treat, and car ownership was a dream. When he moved to the U.S. and bought his...

Fast growth pushes an unprofitable no-code startup into the public markets: Inside Monday.com’s IPO filing

At long last, the Monday.com crew dropped an F-1 filing to go public in the United States. TechCrunch has long known that the company, which sells corporate productivity and communications...

Gojek and Tokopedia merge to form GoTo Group