TechCrunch Startup News

Tree planting search engine Ecosia launched a new cross-platform browser today to increase its online footprint. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Plenty of large corporations want to join the AI revolution, but many feel it’s too early to be locked into one foundational model. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The startup is developing a technology it claims is as fast and energy efficient as 3D printing at a cost that can compete with sand casting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business banking startup Mercury, founded in 2020, is now launching a consumer banking product. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paris-based Dark Space is taking on the dual problems of debris and conflict in orbit with their mobile platform designed to launch, attach to, and ultimately deorbit uncooperative objects in space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Application programming interfaces, or APIs as they’re commonly known, are the bedrock of everything we do online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

finmid is building an embedded finance product that targets that relationship between marketplaces and sellers, and raised a Series A round to further build out its product and enter new markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quilt promises its heat pump will be a sleeker design that can be installed in more places around a room than competitors’ offerings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Layoffs usually drive attention and sympathy towards affected employees, but rarely does anyone talk about what happens to the recruiters who are sometimes also asked to leave when companies decide to cut headcount. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India is getting an electric three-wheeler passenger vehicle that charges from 0 to 100% in 15 minutes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The startup has raised $28 million to help fund a nationwide expansion of its cardboard-based cellulose building insulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simbian is a cybersecurity platform that effectively controls other cybersecurity platforms as well as security apps and tooling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The New York City-based startup has been working on a product that retrofits existing street lampposts to enable EV charging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The global demand for wood could grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the World Resources Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Travel and tourism are very much back on the map for consumers and the business world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Multiverse, the U.K. unicorn that builds apprenticeship programs for people to learn technology skills while on the job, has made an acquisition as it aims to skill up itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sprinto, a startup offering a security compliance and risk platform, has raised $20 million in new investment led by Accel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coalesce offers a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robovision has raised $42M to industrialize deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that are not tech companies at their core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As big social apps are optimizing for maximum engagement using algorithmic feeds and personalized content recommendations, Retro wants to go in the opposite direction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two years ago, Jobs for the Future, a non-profit dedicated to helping low-wage workers attain upward mobility, established a venture arm, JFFVentures, to back innovative employment tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The funding climate for AI chip startups, once as sunny as a mid-July day, is beginning to cloud over as Nvidia asserts its dominance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Full Glass Wine, a brand acquisition management startup that specializes in acquiring wine marketplaces, has raised $14 million in a Series A round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Using Quadratic, users can bring in hundreds of thousands of rows of data, write analyses in their preferred programming language and share the results with outside stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This morning Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you noticed the massive gap between consumer and business apps on your phone? While consumer apps are both beautifully designed and easy to use, business apps are simply painful to use. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All parents know that raising kids is expensive. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This morning Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures. The deal is interesting on a number of fronts including the round’s structure and how Skyflow has been impacted by growth of AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Climate-tech VC Satgana has reached a final close of its first fund, which targets to back up to 30 early-stage startups in Africa and Europe. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding round. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, Ca., expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When that startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app centered around subscription software for contact management, people wondered if something more ambitious might be around the corner. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harvesting methane from organic waste and using it to produce electricity or heat is nothing new, but the startup isn't building another anaerobic digester. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s the harsh truth behind personal care products: you’re mostly buying water and plastics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of the new venture-backed beverage startups are hoping to upend the industry by creating new drink categories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uzum, an e-commerce startup offering online shopping, fintech and food deliveries to millions of customers in Uzbekistan, has raised $114 million in funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Globally, a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, and in Kenya, that figure stands at between 20% to 40%. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

World Fund closes first €300M ClimateTech fund, seeking to follow-on and backing hardware Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Biden administration announced that six new countries had joined an international coalition to fight the proliferation of commercial spyware, sold by companies such as NSO Group or Intellexa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The company reached profitability in 2023, however, more customers began asking for web and Android capabilities so they could share Copilot with family and friends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Silence wants to shake things up when it comes to climate tech investment; The carbon accounting startup targets SMBs to help them assess the carbon footprint of their operations and products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever needed a copy of your medical imaging to take to your doctor or another healthcare provider and received the images on a CD? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov said on his channel today that the company secured $330 million in investment through bond sales last week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Poseidona is a Barcelona-based developer of sustainable food technology. It takes invasive seaweed and algal side-streams to make proteins. In this case, it's a soy protein alternative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced today that it raised $18.5 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Satellite sensors collect an incredible amount of raw data, but on-orbit compute limitations mean that operators have little way to process this data in space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the open source streaming service Apache Kafka was created in 2011 at LinkedIn, it was a different world. Most companies were still on prem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The European Union has opened its third formal investigation of a very large platform under the Digital Services Act (DSA), with China’s AliExpress earning itself the dubious honor of being the first online marketplace to face formal probe by the Commission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simulations are an essential step in physical product engineering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kolet is a new French startup created by four experienced co-founders in the French tech ecosystem that wants to make it easier to stay connected when you travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The young automotive company raised $5.4 million and added a Tesla co-founder to its board. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tavus, a four-year-old generative AI startup that helps companies create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated personalized video campaigns, has confirmed a fresh $18 million in funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barcelona-based cleantech startup SolarMente recently added Leonardo DiCaprio to its cap table, hence becoming the actor's and activist's first investment in the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Baron Capital, an investor in Indian food delivery startup Swiggy, has increased the value of its stake in the Indian firm, implying a valuation of $12.16 billion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lensrentals, a titan in the online rental service for photo, video, audio and lighting equipment, has announced its acquisition of BorrowLenses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an e-mail exchange, Babylon Micro-Farms CEO Alexander Oleson tells me “we’ll have these in every school and apartment one day.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurs Orbital, a startup founded by Ukrainian space industry veterans, has closed a new tranche of funding to accelerate the commercialization of its satellite servicing technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

These days we have a ton of geospatial data coming off the increasing numbers of satellites circling in our atmosphere, but it takes some serious processing power and engineering prowess to turn that data into something useful. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harness Wealth, which started in 2018 primarily offering financial advice to startup founders and employees, has expanded into the tax advisory space and raised a $17 million extension to its Series A round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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A travel-focused startup that the COVID pandemic could have killed has instead thrived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Groq, a startup developing chips to run GenAI models faster than conventional hardware, has an eye toward the enterprise — and public sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

MyHeritage announced today that it’s launching OldNews.com, a new website that offers access to thousands of historical newspapers, mainly from the 1800s and 1900s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Park and recreation organizations help communities thrive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paris-based cybersecurity startup Filigran is capitalizing on the success of OpenCTI to build a suite of open-source threat management products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As part of the new fund, Inspired Capital wrote a manifesto that highlights how the venture capital firm thinks, what it believes in and what it is looking for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Black Tech Nation Ventures launched in 2021 to address the funding gap for Black founders amid a wave of venture diversity initiatives after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The latest Tech News from TechCrunch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As generative AI continues to dominate the headlines, it’s hard sometimes to find actual working business use cases among the hype. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GenAI has its issues. But if there’s one thing it excels at, it’s surfacing answers from vast pools of data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyper-local and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has raised $100 million in a new funding round as it clocks an yearly growth of over 35%. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paris’ commercial court has accepted Cooltra’s offer to acquire Cityscoot. These two companies provide shared electric mopeds that you can unlock and ride to go from one place to another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uber has signed a memorandum of understanding with an Indian government-backed firm that aims to make mobility and commerce more accessible across the South Asian nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A growing roster of vertical AI startups is emerging in Southeast Asia to serve sectors ranging from seafood to finance. Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler recently made a bet on 37 of them, investing $5.1 million in total for pre-seed deals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After years of copying and pasting shopping links into spreadsheets and taking screenshots of products to share with her friends and family, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a role reversal, Xalts, a Singapore fintech startup founded 18 months ago, has acquired Contour Network, a digital trade platform set up by eight major banks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you may have realized a French peculiarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whenever you go to a conference, whether as a sales and marketing exercise, or an executive is speaking, there is a cost associated with that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1Password, the AgileBits-owned password management software developer, today announced that it has acquired Kolide, an endpoint security platform, for an undisclosed amount. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The company made advancements in its proprietary dairy seed system to leverage interactions between recombinant dairy casein and native plant proteins, with or without improved fatty acid profiles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, is testing a technology to detect when users of its GenAI chatbot ask about political topics and redirect those users to “authoritative” sources of voting information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The company's fermentation process involves the cultivation of multiple microorganisms, including mycelium, to provide nutrition, flavor and texture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The material could drastically improve the durability of existing fuel cell designs while also improving the efficiency of hydrogen production by 15%-20%. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When looking at startups within healthcare, data and AI and cybersecurity, the firm considers a number of factors like the plan for infrastructure, especially now that AI is everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The London-based wellness brand is tapping into functional mushrooms and nootropics to create a line of powder blends that it touts enhances energy, relaxation, mood and general well-being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Travel startup Layla — backed by firstminute capital, M13, Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillips, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith, and Paris Hilton — said today that it has acquired AI-powered itinerary building bot Roam Around. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bob W, a marketplace for premium short-term apartment rentals, has raised €40 million ($43 million) in a Series B round of funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GenAI might be one of the most exciting technologies today. But it’s also one of the fastest-moving — posing a challenge for enterprises keen to deploy it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Upstash announced a $1.9 million seed round almost exactly two years ago, and an idea for building a serverless data platform for data-intensive applications built with Redis and Kafka. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices