StartUp

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

Asana, a well-known workplace productivity company, announced yesterday it has filed privately to go public. The San Francisco-based company is well-funded, having raised more than $200 million; well-known, due in part to its

Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based startup that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions — such as back and joint pain — has closed a $90 million Series C.

The round is led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Lead Edge Capital. All of Hinge’s existing institutional investors followed on: I

Senior citizens are not early adopters of new technology; many of our 65+ friends and family might not use much tech in the first place. That said, two-thirds of America’s 50 million seniors use the internet and more than 40% own a smartphone, according to a 2017 Pew study.

So where’s the disconnect? Why are modern software companies largely n

Factories and warehouses have been two of the biggest markets for robots in the last several years, with machines taking on mundane, if limited, processes to speed up work and free up humans to do other, more complex tasks. Now, a startup out of Poland that is widening the scope of what those robots can do is announcing funding, a sign not just of

This is it, startup fans. It’s your very last chance to scoop up the few remaining tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize — the best Silicon Valley startup soiree, bar none. If you want to join this fun gathering of 1,000+ like-minded startuppers on February 7, you’d best act quickly. Exhibitor tables have long sold out. Don’t get left

LoanSnap, a new lending services technology for banks, has launched a mortgage calculator called LoanPulse for borrowers to get an accurate sense of their ability to take out loans — and at what price.

Based in Southern California, the company says that its new mortgage evaluation tool uses the same data sources that a lender would use to give

This morning Finix, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup selling payments tech to other businesses, announced that it has raised a $35 million Series B. Sequoia led the round, which also saw participation from new investors Activant Capital and Inspired Capital.

Finix did not disclose a new valuation as part of its round, and declined to share

When siblings Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi fled the war in Kosovo in 1999, arriving as refugees on the West Coast of the U.S., they would have had no idea they’d go on to launch a technology company together.

But as adults, the pair set up attacking the $6.7 billion telepresence and video communication category, which hasn’t evolved much since the o

Casting a cold eye on customer behavior and their future lifetime value has brought the Los Angeles-based startup Retina $2.5 million in new funding.

The new financing was anchored by previous seed round investor Crosscut Ventures (the Los Angeles-based venture firm), and shows how the startup ecosystem in Los Angeles is allowing for companies

Toronto-based Top Hat, a company that makes a number of software tools for teachers in higher education, today announced that it has raised a $55 million Series D funding round co-ed by Georgian Partners and Inovia Capital. All of the company’s previous investors, including Union Square Ventures, Emergence Capital and Leaders Fund, also p

I visited Boston last week and met with a number of robotics researchers, startups and established companies — more on that later — in the lead up to TechCrunch’s fourth annual TC Sessions Robotics + AI in early March. A big part of prepping for that event and my recent trip involved surveying some of the biggest funding raises from the past year.

Fintech startup N26 recently reached a new milestone as it now has five million customers. The company launched onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt five years ago.

The premise was simple. A young startup wanted to build a bank that didn’t suck. Given the company’s impressive growth rate and its 4.8-star rating in the App Store, it’s clear that N26 is on t

Workplace productivity toolmaker Asana announced late Monday that they have confidentially filed their S-1 and said in a statement that they plan to enter the public markets via a direct listing.

Direct listings enable a company to go public without issuing new shares, instead allowing existing shareholders to sell shares on the chosen exchange.

There’s yet another new rocket launch startup throwing its hat in the ring — Astra, an Alameda-based company that’s actually been operating in stealth mode (though relatively openly, often referred to as “Stealth Space Company”) for the past three years developing and testing its launch vehicle. Astra revealed its business model and progress to da

Lemonade, the homeowners and renters insurance provider that’s raised $480 million, has announced its plans to expand into pet insurance. This marks the startup’s foray into a new insurance vertical.

To be clear, Lemonade is simply announcing its plans. Right now, the company is going through the regulatory process, which will make its intentions

Azimo, the money transfer service that is HQ’d in London but has the majority of its staff based in based in Poland, has secured €20 million in debt from the European Investment Bank (EIB), the lending arm of the European Union.

The financing is supported by the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the financial pillar of the EU’s “

As esports grows and creates opportunities for gamers to level up to the pro or streamer level, there is still a huge barrier in the way. There is not a wealth of training options for gamers. If you can’t get better within the environment of the game itself, then you’ve peaked. Practice makes perfect, but what if there’s no such thing as practice?

T

Dixa, the customer engagement platform, has closed $36 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Notion Capital, with participation from existing investors Project A Ventures and SEED Capital.

The Copenhagen and now London-based startup says it will use the new capital to accelerate its product development. This will including innovating

Those looking outside of Silicon Valley as a potential hub for their startup might want to take a gander at Utah, at least that’s the kind of trend the new Silicon Slopes Venture Fund hopes to create.

The newly formed fund, put together by Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, Omniture and Domo founder Josh James and Stance co-founder turned Pelion

Rocket launch startup Firefly Aerospace has signed a new agreement with Satlantis, a maker of Earth observation and remote sensing payloads for satellite-based operation. Firefly will launch a constellation of small satellites on behalf of Satlantis that will provide high-res, multispectral imaging of Earth from low Earth orbit.

Firefly is still

As Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs cluster around the worldview that artificial intelligence is poised to change how we work, investors are deciding which use cases make the most sense to pump money into right now. One focus has been the relentless communication between companies and customer that takes place at call centers.

Call center tech has

Rocket launch startup Skyrora, an Edinburgh-based company that’s developing a new launch vehicle for small satellites, has successfully tested its new rocket engines in their first stationary ground-firings, a huge step on the way toward developing their launch vehicle. Skyrora’s rocket engines are novel not only in their use of 3D printing, but al

Trucking is currently the most popular mode of transporting freight in the U.S., accounting for around $12.5 billion of the $17 billion freight market, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. But with thousands of small and single-vehicle operators and legacy (often paper-based) systems underpinning communications, it’s also one of t

HPE announced today that it has acquired Scytale, a cloud native security startup that is built on the open-source Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) protocol. The companies did not share the acquisition price.

Specifically, Scytale looks at application-to-application identity and access management, something that is

If WeWork wanted to cement the impression that it no longer strives to be viewed as a tech company but rather as a real estate giant focused on leasing space, it would probably choose a veteran from the real estate world.

That’s just what it has done, too, according to a new story from the WSJ that says the company, which was famously forced to

Email is garbage and we’re all buried in the stuff. Actually getting someone’s attention given the constraints that digital missives present is difficult. How do you snag someone’s eye when the Internet Age’s key communication channel is a mess?

One option is to skip the inbox altogether and send something physical instead. That’s where a startup c

Small business lending is a huge market that has attracted massive attention from VC investors in recent years. Startups like Kabbage have raised more than a billion dollars in venture capital and debt to create lending platforms for businesses, and others in the space like Fundbox for lending and BlueVine for banking are trying to build new,

It’s a somewhat crude yardstick by which to measure innovation in deep tech, and the result perhaps reflects historic bias as much as it does actual leadership in innovation — but Europe leads every other continental region w