StartUp

Snafu Records is bringing a new approach to finding musical talent — founder and CEO Ankit Desai described the Los Angeles-headquartered startup as “the first full-service, AI-enabled record label.”

It’s a world that Desai knows well, having spent the past five years working on digital and streaming strategy at Capitol Records and Universal Music G

Funko Pops. You’ve probably noticed them at your local GameStop, Hot Topic or spread out all over your co-worker’s desk. These lil’ vinyl figurines and their big ol’ heads have taken over retail shelves in the last few years. You can now find a Funko Pop! (or thirty) for just about every fandom; there are more than 8,000 different Pops, and that

Amidst the staggering rise of on-demand delivery services, the convenience store has been left relatively untouched. Until very recently.

Foxtrot, founded in 2013, is looking to reimagine the corner convenience store, offering customers the option to buy in-store or order online for delivery.

The company today announced the close of a $17 million

Route planning sounds like it’s a problem for big logistics companies like Amazon, FedEx and UPS, but in reality, it’s something every small business with more than a few mobile employees deals with. OptimoRoute, which today announced that it has raised a $6.5 million Series A round led by Prelude Ventures, is tackling exactly this problem. Built

In part two of a survey that asks top VCs about exciting opportunities in open source and dev tools, we dig into responses from 10 leading open-source-focused investors at firms that span early to growth stage across software-specific firms, corporate venture arms and prominent generalist firms.

In the conclusion to our survey, we’ll hear from:

• Gaura

Spanish startup Bnext is expanding beyond its home country. The company is currently rolling out its product in Mexico, and 170,000 people signed up to a waiting list. Bnext is going to invite those 170,000 potential users first before opening signups to everyone.

Bnext is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts. Customers can open a

Netskope has always focused its particular flavor of security on the cloud, and as more workloads have moved there, it has certainly worked in its favor. Today the company announced a $340 million investment on a valuation of nearly $3 billion.

Sequoia Capital Global Equities led the round, but in a round this large, there were a bunch of other

The once-polarizing world of open-source software has recently become one of the hotter destinations for VCs.

As the popularity of open source increases among organizations and developers, startups in the space have reached new heights and monstrous valuations.

Over the past several years, we’ve seen surging open-source companies like Databricks r

Deliverr doesn’t own a warehouse or a delivery truck, but the startup is helping e-commerce companies not named Amazon achieve Amazon-like two-day shipping. The startup does it with intelligent algorithms, and today it announced a $40 million Series C investment.

Activant Capital led the round. Other investors in the company include 8VC, GLP and

Deepnote, a startup that offers data scientists an IDE-like collaborative online experience for building their machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $3.8 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Accel, with participation from YC and Credo Ventures, as well as a number of angel investors, including OpenAI’s Greg

Snapchat’s developer platform is blowing up as a gateway to teen social app users. Hoop is the latest Snap Kit blockbuster, rocketing to No. 2 on the overall App Store charts this month with its Tinder -esque swiping interface for discovering people and asking to message with them over Snapchat. Within a week of going viral, unfunded French

This morning The Zebra, an Austin-based insurance marketplace startup, announced it has closed a $38.5 million Series C. Accel led the funding event, which was participated in by prior investors Silverton Partners, Ballast Point Ventures, and the company’s CEO Keith Melnick. Floodgate and Weatherford Capital also invested in the round.

According to

There’s a new launch startup in the mix called Astra, which has been operating in semi-stealth mode for the past three years, building its rockets just a stone’s throw from the heart of startup central in Alameda County, Calif. Astra’s approach isn’t exactly a secret — its founders didn’t set out to hide anything and industry observers have follo

Drone startup Wingcopter, working with partners Merck and the Frankfurt University of Applied Science, has completed a first flight of a new drone delivery trial designed to show the benefits of using drones instead of trucks or other road-faring vehicles for moving small cargo between two physically separate office facilities. This first flight

Early-stage European VC firm Blossom Capital is fresh from closing a $185M fund— a big jump up on its prior close. The firm makes just a handful of investments per year, mostly at the Series A stage, working very closely with founders in its portfolio, a strategy it refers to as “high conviction” investing.

One of its chosen few is Inne, a

As the insuretech space fills up, a new entrant is joining the fight.

Y Combinator -backed Goodcover is launching today to take on the likes of big insurance, as well as insurance startups like Lemonade, Jetty, Hippo and Zebra.

The company offers renters insurance in California. The twist? Goodcover returns unclaimed premiums to policy holders at

With just about one month until go-time, TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 (March 3 in Berkeley, Calif.) is going to be a true powerhouse event. Prepare to spend the day engaging with the leading innovators, makers and investors bent on shaping the future of these two game-changing technologies.

Don’t have a ticket yet? Beat the price hike at the d

Following Tier Mobility’s $60 million Series B late last year, the e-scooter rentals startup has been busy bolstering its C-suite.

The Berlin-based company is announcing that Moritz Werner has joined as chief commercial officer (CCO), and Roger Hassan has joined as chief operational officer (COO). Werner will be responsible for revenue related

Datree, the early-stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort.

Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million seed round announced in 2018.

Si

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

Casper, the well-known D2C mattress company, has lowered its IPO price range in a new S-1/A filing made public this morning. The repricing leads to a lower expected valuation for the former startup and a lower IPO raise.

The

Instamojo, a Bangalore-based startup that helps merchants and small businesses accept digital payments and sell on the web, has acquired Gurgaon-based startup GetMeAShop.

The deal is worth $5 million and includes conglomerate Times Internet making an investment in Instamojo, Sampad Swain, co-founder and chief executive of the Bangalore-based

As we have previously reported, an increasing number of startups are exploring cooperative business models where workers (and sometimes users) are owners in the company. Driver’s Seat, which participated in the first batch of the Start.coop accelerator, is one such example. 

Driver’s Seat is designed to help gig workers own and use their data so

With a fresh commitment of $5 million for its on-demand staffing and care management service for at-home healthcare and nursing facilities, Los Angeles-based Gento is looking to grow.

The new financing came from Palisades Growth Capital, and the company said it would use the money to expand nationally and invest more capital in research and

Fearing weak fundraising options in the wake of the WeWork implosion, late stage startups are tightening their belts. The latest is another Softbank-funded company, joining Zume Pizza (80% of staff laid off), Wag (80%+),  Fair (40%), Getaround (25%), Rappi (6%), and Oyo (5%) that have all cut staff to slow their burn rate and reduce their funding

Moteefe, the e-commerce platform for on-demand production of merchandise has raised $5 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is Gresham House, and Force Over Mass Capital. It brings total funding to date to $12.5 million, and will be used to expand into new geographies including Australia and LATAM. The U.K. company also plans to launch

The growing ubiquity of open-source software has been a big theme in the evolution of enterprise IT. But behind that facade of popularity lies another kind of truth: Companies may be interested in using more open-source technology, but because there is a learning curve with taking on an open-source project, not all of them have the time, money and

Everyone wants to lend to small businesses, as the fintech boom continues to bring constituent players closer together in feature-terms. Thinking broadly, the rising focus on small-business lending amongst B2B fintech and finservices companies feels directionally similar to the rise of consumer-oriented fintech startups adding banking-like

Antler is a “company builder” that emerged a couple of years ago, running startup generator programs and investing from an early stage, bringing a heady mix of technologists, product builders and operators together with its own technology stack.

Now, plenty of “company builders” have come and gone. It’s a bit like Apocalypse Now: everyone goes in th

Clear is an early-stage startup with a big ambition. It wants to build a blockchain for high-volume transaction systems like payments between telcos. Today it announced a $13 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Eight Roads with participation from Telefónica Innovation Ventures, Telekom Innovation Pool of Deutsche Telekom, HKT and

Homie has made an impression among younger, first-time home buyers in the Utah and Arizona markets for cutting out the traditional closing costs, 6% real estate commissions and arduous paperwork associated with traditional home sales. It now plans to explore opening up in three new markets and will begin a Vegas launch in March with a fresh