StartUp

It seems like every company making lidar has a new and clever approach, but Baraja takes the cake. Its method is not only elegant and powerful, but fundamentally avoids many issues that nag other lidar technologies. But it’ll need more than smart tech to make headway in this complex and evolving industry.

To understand how lidar works in general,

When Visa bought Plaid this week for $5.3 billion, a figure that was twice its private valuation, it was a clear signal that traditional financial services companies are looking for ways to modernize their approach to business.

With Plaid, Visa picks up a modern set of developer APIs that work behind the scenes to facilitate the movement of money.

The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) started its incubator two years ago, helping launch companies like Xnor.ai, Blue Canoe and WellSaidLabs. Their success has attracted funding from not just local Seattle VC outfit Madrona, but Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Two Sigma Ventures as well, resulting in a new $10 million fund that should help keep the

Meet Harvestr, a software-as-a-service startup that wants to help product managers centralize customer feedback from various places. Product managers can then prioritize outstanding issues and feature requests. Finally, the platform helps you get back to your customers once changes have been implemented.

The company just raised a $650,000 funding

The first cannabis startup to raise big money in Silicon Valley is in danger of burning out. TechCrunch has learned that pot delivery middleman Eaze has seen unannounced layoffs, and its depleted cash reserves threaten its ability to make payroll or settle its AWS bill. Eaze was forced to raise a bridge round to keep the lights on as it prepares

Cyral, an early-stage startup that helps protect data stored in cloud repositories, announced an $11 million Series A today. The company also revealed a previous undisclosed $4.1 million angel investment, making the total $15.1 million.

The Series A was led by Redpoint Ventures. A.Capital Ventures, Costanoa VC, Firebolt, SV Angel and Trifecta

“Revolutionary” may be an over-used adjective, but how else to describe the rapid evolution in mobility technology? Join us in San Jose, Calif., on May 14 for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020. Our second annual day-long conference cuts through the hype and explores the current and future state of the technology and its social, regulatory and economic

I was in SF last week and met with more than a dozen VCs over the course of two days. This was post the holidays, post their visits to the ski chalets in Tahoe and the island beaches, and in the smack dab of one of the most important fundraise periods of the year — the mid-to-late January to April stretch when all the backlog of startups from Q4 i

Companies keep trying to make glassholes happen. Understandably. After the smartphone and the wrist, the face is the next local battlefield for computational space, if decades of science fiction movies have taught us anything. But we’ve seen the Google Glass, the Snapchat Spectacles, The Magic Leap, the whatever that thing that Samsung just s

Lizhi, one of China’s biggest audio content apps, is debuting on Nasdaq today under the ticker symbol LIZI. It is the first of its major competitors, Ximalaya and Dragonfly, to go public (though Ximalaya is expected to also list in the United States later this year). Lizhi is offering 4.1 million shares at an IPO price of $11 per share.

Though Lizhi

Today SiteMinder, an Australian software company focused on the hotel industry, announced a $70 million (USD) round that values the company at $750 million. That’s about $1.08 billion in Australian dollars, making the firm a Down Under Unicorn, even if it’s a bit shy here in America.

According to SiteMinder, the round was “led by equity funds m

Bolt, the billion-dollar startup out of Estonia that’s building a ride-hailing, scooter and food delivery business across Europe and Africa, has picked up a tranche of funding in its bid to take on Uber and the rest in the world of on-demand transportation.

The company has picked up €50 million (about $56 million) from the European Investment Bank t

Fyllo, a digital marketing company focused on the cannabis industry, has acquired CannaRegs, a website offering subscription access to state and municipal cannabis regulations. Fyllo founder and CEO Chad Bronstein (pictured above) said his company paid $10 million in cash and stock.

Bronstein previously served as chief revenue officer at digital

Forget the consumer market for electric vehicles. It turns out delivery vehicles could be the “Trojan horse” for electric to really take off.

Korean auto giants Hyundai and Kia put more than $110 million in U.K. startup Arrival, which emerged from relative stealth today. The investment immediately makes Arrival one of Britain’s most valuable s

Getsafe, the German insurtech that offers home contents insurance via an app, has launched in the U.K., despite an increasingly competitive market for insurance in the country, and the thorny regulatory issue of Brexit.

This has seen Getsafe incorporate an independent British subsidiary based in London, in order to shield it ahead of future

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Danny and Alex were back together to riff over the latest early-stage rounds, the latest on the late-stage front and more. It was yet another stacked week, forcing us to pick and choose a bit.

Starting off,

Matera, the French startup formerly known as illiCopro, is raising an $11.2 million funding round (€10 million). The company has been building a SaaS platform to give you all the tools you need to handle property management for your residential building.

Index Ventures is leading the round, with existing investor Samaipata also participating.

Xnor.ai, spun off in 2017 from the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI (AI2), has been acquired by Apple for about $200 million. A source close to the company corroborated a report this morning from GeekWire to that effect.

Apple confirmed the reports with its standard statement for this sort of quiet acquisition: “Apple buys smaller technology c

In many countries, an aging population coupled with a low birth rate is increasing the demand for qualified caregivers. In Asia, the need is especially urgent because rapid demographic shifts and changing social structures means family members who traditionally cared for relatives are unable to because they need to work, or live far away. Homage wa

The last few years have seen many cities ban plastic bags, plastic straws and other common forms of waste, giving environmentally conscious alternatives a huge boost — among them Loliware, purveyor of fine disposable goods created from kelp. Huge demand and smart sourcing has attracted a big first funding round.

I covered Loliware early on when it

If you’re a current student and you love robots — and the AI that drives them — you do not want to miss out on TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020. Our day-long deep dive into these two life-altering technologies takes place on March 3 at UC Berkeley and features the best and brightest minds, makers and influencers.

We’ve set aside a limited number of d

Funnel, the Stockholm-based startup that offers technology to help businesses prepare — or make “business-ready” — their marketing data for better reporting and analysis, has closed $47 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is Eight Roads Ventures, and F-Prime Capital, with participation from existing investors Balderton Capital, Oxx,

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

After a short pause, we’re back on the topic of unicorn layoffs. While it’s cheery that a number of companies are chugging ahead with ARR growth powered by efficient spend, not every company has taken a similar approach. As we’ve s

NextNav LLC has raised $120 million in equity and debt to commercially deploy an indoor positioning system that can pinpoint a device’s location — including which floor it’s on — without GPS .

The company has developed what it calls a Metropolitan Beacon System, which can find the location of devices like smartphones, drones, IoT products or even

SpinLaunch, a company that aims to turn the launch industry on its head with a wild new concept for getting to orbit, has raised a $35M round B to continue its quest. The team has yet to demonstrate their kinetic launch system, but this year will be the year that changes, they claim.

TechCrunch first reported on SpinLaunch’s ambitious plans in 2

WorkBoard, a SaaS startup that provides goal setting and management software to other companies, announced today that it has closed a $30 million Series C. The new capital comes less than a year after the startup raised a $23 million Series B. WorkBoard has raised $66.6 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Andreessen Horowitz’sDavid Ulevitch le

The market for companies developing dairy substitutes is really getting frothy.

In December, the startup Perfect Day Foods announced it had raised $110 million in financing for its dairy replacement and now Califia Farms, the producer of a range of oat and almond milk products (along with a slew of coffees, juices and non-dairy snacks) has raised

When Intuit acquired Mint more than a decade ago, mobile was in a different place — as were tech-enabled financial services. There hasn’t been much progress for the personal finance tracker app category in the meantime. Mint has stumbled along with integration issues and tiresome data misclassifications. For many, the best alternative has been fir

Epsagon, an Israeli startup that wants to help monitor modern development environments like serverless and containers, announced a $16 million Series A today.

U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), a new investor, led the round. Previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and StageOne Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised

With distributed workforces all the rage in the tech community these days, startups are trying to build new tools to keep those teams connected and communicating in the ways that make folks most comfortable.

One of these companies is the Orlando, Fla.-based startup, Yac, which just raised $1.5 million in financing from a clutch of investors to