StartUp

While some U.S. investors might have taken comfort from China’s rebound, we still find ourselves in the early innings of this period of uncertainty.

Some epidemiologists

Looking for good news despite all the market gloom

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

This morning we’re hunting up “green shoots” for software companies. Green shoots is financial slang for positive signals that could point to an economic recovery — or good news amid

Since first uploading a YouTube teaser video of its tech five years ago, Magic Leap’s presence in the augmented reality industry has been controversial.

Some have lauded the team’s ambitions, while others I’ve talked to say the company’s posturing has dissuaded investors from taking chances on other AR hardware startups, which has hampered the indus

January was great. February was good. March was a mess.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re unpacking some new data concerning what happened to Silicon Valley’s venture capital market in Q1, with a special focus on private financings towards the end of the

The pandemic may feel all-encompassing at the moment, but Confluent announced a $250 million Series E today, showing that major investment continues in spite of the dire economic situation at the moment. The company is now valued at $4.5 billion.

Today’s round follows last year’s $125 million Series D. At that point the company was valued at a mere

As we get further along in the new way of working, the new normal if you will, finding more efficient ways to do just about everything is becoming paramount for companies looking at buying new software services. To that end, Comet.ml announced a $4.5 million investment today as it tries to build a more efficient machine learning platform.

The money

“If your kids aren’t sleeping, you aren’t sleeping,” says Moshi founder and CEO Ian Chambers.

As mindfulness apps grow increasingly popular among adults, Moshi is looking to bring mindfulness and meditative techniques to children. The app today announced the close of a $12 million Series B financing led by Accel, with participation from Latitude

The tech industry (and the world at large) is not experiencing temporary anxiety — the uncertainty we’re all coping with is the new normal.

Sudden shifts in behavior have made some startups targeting slow-moving, old-school industries more relevant than they could have imagined, such as those in telehealth, distance learning and remote work. Most,

Digital marketing company TapClicks announced this morning that it’s broadening its platform with the acquisition of AdStage.

AdStage first launched back in 2013 as a cross-network advertising startup, eventually expanding by automating ad campaigns and consolidating marketing data.

TapClicks founder and CEO Babak Hedayati told me that his goal is

Last week, Lightspeed Venture Partners announced that it had closed on $4.2 billion in new capital across three distinct funds — an $890 million early-stage venture fund, a $1.83 billion later-stage fund and a $1.5 billion “opportunity fund.”

With offices in the U.S., China, India, South East Asia, U.K. and Israel, the firm certainly has wide

Two months ago, seemingly out of nowhere, CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch decided it was time to depart.

Alperovitch, who served as the cybersecurity giant’s chief technology office since its 2011 debut, said he was leaving to launch a non-profit policy accelerator. CrowdStrike named Michael Sentonas, who managed the firm’s tech s

Firefly Aerospace has signed an agreement with Spaceflight Inc. that provides Spaceflight with the majority of the payload capacity aboard a Firefly launch vehicle scheduled to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California sometime in 2021. Spaceflight is a ride-share service provider for space-bound payloads, working with other companies

More departures are taking place at Bó, the digital bank developed by RBS-owned Natwest. Following the departure of Bó CEO Mark Bailie in January, the latest to seek a new opportunity is chief product officer Ollie Purdue, TechCrunch has learned.

According to sources, Purdue is joining Antler, the company builder and early-stage venture capital

Meet Libeo, a French startup that just raised a $4.4 million (€4 million) funding round led by LocalGlobe, with Breega and various business angels also participating. The company has built a service that helps you pay your providers much more easily. You no longer have to manually keep track of invoices, log into your banking interface, enter b

Philadelphia-based Fishtown Analytics, the company behind the popular open-source data engineering tool dbt, today announced that it has raised a $12.9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the firm’s general partner Martin Casado joining the company’s board.

“I wrote this blog post in early 2016, essentially saying that analysts n

As companies increasingly look to find ways to cut costs, Granulate, an early-stage Israeli startup, has come up with a clever way to optimize infrastructure usage. Today it was rewarded with a tidy $12 million Series A investment.

Insight Partners led the round with participation from TLV Partners and Hetz Ventures. Lonne Jaffe, managing director

Worldwide, there are numerous efforts underway to create a vaccine for COVID-19. Without one, we are likely to see some form of social distancing in place for the foreseeable future. And experts like Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, think it’ll take at least a year before we’ll have a vac

Env0, a startup that wants to help companies bring some order to delivery of Infrastructure as Code, announced a $3.3 million seed investment today and the release of the Beta of the company’s first product.

Boldstart Ventures and Grove Ventures co-led the round with participation from several angel investors including Guy Podjarny of Snyk.

Company

Workplace productivity software has had an insane year, with slick subscription tools popping up seemingly each new day. VCs have been backing the tools en masse, and startups are continuing to find new holes in company workflows that can be patched with a new service.

Hugo is a collaborative note-taking app focused on sharing meeting notes across

For the past month, VC investment pace seems to have slacked off in the U.S., but deal activities in China are picking up following a slowdown prompted by the COVID-19 outbreak.

According to PitchBook, “Chinese firms recorded 66 venture capital deals for t

Consumer financial services platform SoFi is making its first expansion outside of the United States with the acquisition of Hong Kong-based investing app 8 Securities.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Targeted to personal investors, 8 Securities will rebrand to SoFi Hong Kong and retain its team, who will began launching services in

Just months after graduating from Y Combinator, H1 Insights, the LinkedIn for the healthcare industry, has raised $12.9 million in a new round of funding.

“It’s a better way to connect the ecosystem,” says co-founder Ariel Katz. The company already has more than 8 million profiles for healthcare professionals in its database and is generating multi