StartUp

Looking for fellow travelers to join in on its mission to transform the beverage business, the Los Angeles-based startup Bev has taken on fresh capital from a slew of strategic investors. 

The company has added Erin and Sara Foster, creative heads of Bumble BFF and Bumble Biz, to their investor and creative talent pool, along with other notable

Chatbots have had a patchy track record in the world of tech, where early efforts not only failed to deliver on the magical idea of a computer producing the exact answers you were looking for in a chat-based Q-A, they even produced surprising (and not in a good way) results instead. Things have moved along, though, and today a startup that’s b

French startup ManoMano is raising another mega round of funding. The company operates an e-commerce website for DIY, home improvement and gardening products. This time, ManoMano is raising $139 million (€125 million) with Temasek leading the round.

General Atlantic, Eurazeo, Piton Capital, Bpifrance and Kismet Holdings are also participating. The

Africa’s logistics startup space has gained another multi-million-dollar round with global backing.

Kenyan company Sendy — with an on-demand platform that connects clients to drivers and vehicles for goods delivery — has raised a $20 million Series B led by Atlantica Ventures.

Toyota Tsusho Corporation, a trade and investment arm of Japanese

After a long period of invite-only beta testing, Scroll is officially launching today, offering ad-free access to sites like BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, Salon, Slate and Vox for an introductory price of $2.49 per month.

CEO Tony Haile previously led analytics company Chartbeat, and he said he founded Scroll because of his frustration with

NASA has selected Houston-based Axiom Space, a startup founded in 2016, to build the first commercial habitat module for the International Space Station (ISS). This module will be used as a destination for future commercial spaceflight missions, potentially housing experiments, technology development and more performed by commercial space

The team behind Product Hunt is launching a new social network called YourStack, a platform aiming to connect people that are passionate about products and help them discover what things their friends love.

“It’s super simple, you just search through and create a stack of products you love,” Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover tells TechCrunch. “We wa

Using scrap silicon as its feedstock, a New Orleans-based company called Advano has raised $18.5 million to manufacture battery components to enable more powerful, smaller and longer-lasting batteries.

The technology was innovative enough to earn the Louisiana-based startup a place in Y Combinator’s famed accelerator and has now attracted the

Moons, a Mexico City-based startup that’s angling to be the Invisalign for the Latin American market, has joined the ranks of Y Combinator as part of the accelerator’s latest cohort.

The company already has $5 million in financing in the bank from an international group of investors, including Jaguar Ventures, Foundation Capital and Tuesday

Jeff Bezos’ phonewas hacked. And if the richest person in the world is vulnerable, chances are good that your startup could get hacked, too.

The good news is that, as a tiny company, you’re not a big target. But as soon as you hire your first employee, it’s time to think about adopting basic security practices to ensure that you’re less vulnerable.

Cooks Venture, the agtech company looking to revolutionize the chicken industry, has today announced the close of a $4 million funding round led by Golden West Food Group.

Cooks Venture has been working in stealth for many years, but launched onto the scene in 2018 with a plan to reshape agriculture from the ground up. And the key to that

What if it was easier to eat salad than junk food? Most diet routines take a ton of time, whether you’re cooking from scratch, making a meal kit or seeking a nutritious restaurant. But on-demand prepared food delivery companies like Sprig that tried to eliminate that work have gone bankrupt from poor unit economics.

Thistle is a different type of

Labor markets, particularly those in the tech industry, are incredibly lopsided against employees. Companies screen, interview, and negotiate with thousands of candidates per year, while employees may only go through recruiting a handful of times in their lives. Inevitably, they can select the wrong positions, pick the wrong managers to work with,

Pecan.ai, a startup that wants to help business analysts build machine learning models in an automated fashion, emerged from stealth today and announced an $11 million Series A.

The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital and S Capital. Along with a previously unannounced $4 million seed round, the company has raised a total of $15 million.

CEO

Kidtech startup SuperAwesome has raised an additional $17 million in funding, which includes a new strategic investment from Microsoft’s venture fund, M12. Others participating in the round include existing investors Mayfair Equity, Hoxton Ventures and Ibis, along with other angels.

To date, SuperAwesome has raised $37 million in outside

If parties came with an alert system, this post would qualify as Def Con 4. Now hear this — we just released the final batch of tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize, which heats up on February 7 in San Francisco. If you want to be there with more than 1,000 of Silicon Valley’s finest, act now with all due haste. Buy your ticket

The rise of design tools like Canva and the vast expanse of digital spaces where a company’s name can appear these days have created a challenge for organisations: how best to make sure that what gets used is up to date and in keeping with how you want it to be used.

Today a “brand management” startup is announcing some funding to continue building

If you didn’t see this coming, then clearly you didn’t have your eyes on the road. Bird, the LA-founded e-scooter giant, has confirmed that it is acquiring European competitor Circ, the micromobility company founded by Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame.

The deal, for which terms remain undisclosed, was first reported by FT late last week.

Securiti.ai, a San Jose startup, is working to bring a modern twist to data governance and security. Today the company announced a $50 million Series B led by General Catalyst, with participation from Mayfield.

The company, which only launched in 2019, reports it has already raised $81 million. What is attracting all of this investment in such a

Marketing and sales automation — tools that leverage the advances and data of our digital age to better identify and then interact with customers — is big business, with the whole market expected to generate some $6.6 billion in revenues for related companies by 2025.

But “companies” is the operative word here: it’s a very fragmented space, with doz

AmazeVR, the Los Angeles-based virtual reality entertainment distribution service, is taking its first steps into the world of location-based virtual reality experiences with an installation in Seoul’s Incheon International Airport.

The company, which also scored an additional $2.5 million commitment to expand its total funding to around $9

We’re counting the days (35 to be precise) until TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place on March 3 in Berkeley, Calif. But we’re also counting the days that you can save on the price of admission. The early-bird pricing ends in just three days, on January 31. Buy your ticket right here before that bird flies south, and you’ll save $150.

This

Shipamax, the London-based startup and YC graduate that is helping freight forwarders and other logistics companies automate their back-office processes, has raised $7 million.

Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Crane Venture Partners, Y Combinator and other existing investors. Shipamax says it will use the funding to

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

Today we’re taking stock of the latest from Casper, the D2C mattress company that is going public. The unicorn announced its initial IPO price range this morning, targeting a $17 to $19 per-share IPO price range — an interval that d

Satellite communications startup Kepler will manufacture its small satellites going forward at a new 5,000-square-foot facility in Toronto, Ontario, Canada . The company is working with partners, including the Canadian Space Agency and the University of Toronto, on the new facility, which will also incorporate design and development of its

InterviewBit, a Bangalore-based startup that runs an advanced online computer science program for college graduates and young professional engineers, has raised $20 million in one of the largest Series A financing rounds in the education sector.

The five-year-old startup’s Series A round was led by Sequoia India and Tiger Global. Global Founders

This morning Mural, a software startup focused on visual collaboration,¹ announced that it closed a $23 million Series A round of capital. The funds come after Mural, formerly Mural.ly, had raised just a few million dollars previously. That fact made its round interesting: How did the company raise 10 times its prior total in one round, and why

ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired Passage AI, a startup that helps customers build chatbots in multiple languages, something that should come in handy as ServiceNow continues to modernize its digital service platform. The companies did not share terms of the deal.

With Passage AI, ServiceNow gets a bushel of AI talent, which

“I want to build a business which profiles every single researcher and healthcare professional in the world and I want to sell it to industry,” says Ariel Katz, the co-founder and chief executive of H1 Insights. 

With the healthcare industry on a mission to digitize and analyze every conceivable data point it can to wring more efficiencies out of

Otter.ai, an AI-powered transcription app and note-takers’ best friend, has received a strategic investment from Japan’s leading mobile operator and new Otter partner, NTT DOCOMO Inc. The two companies are teaming up to support Otter’s expansion into the Japanese market, where DOCOMO will be integrating Otter with its own AI-based translation servi