Berlin-based startup Taxfix has raised a $65 million Series C funding round. Index Ventures is leading the round with Neil Rimer joining the board. The company started its fundraising process before the coronavirus process and managed to sign all contracts a few days ago. As the name suggests, Taxfix thinks filing taxes remains broken in
Month: April 2020
As companies look for better ways to understand how different departments work at a granular level, engineering has traditionally been a black box of siloed data. Pinpoint, an Austin-based startup, has been working on a platform to bring this information into a single view, and today it released a dashboard to help companies understand what’s
Sprout.ai, an insurtech incubated at London’s Imperial College that is applying AI to insurance claims,, has raised $2.5 million in additional seed funding. Leading the round is Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Playfair Capital, and Techstars. Founded in 2018, Sprout.ai has developed AI-based software that it says enables insurance claims to be settled within
VSCO, the popular photo editing app and Instagram rival, is the latest company to undergo layoffs attributed to the COVID-19 crisis, which has put a strain on venture-backed startups. According to a report from NPR, which was then confirmed by VSCO co-founder and CEO Joel Flory on LinkedIn, the company is laying off around 30%
Airwallex, a Melbourne-based cross-border financial startup that achieved “unicorn” status last year, announced today that it has raised a $160 million Series D. The round included ANZi Ventures, the investment arm of ANZ Bank, and Salesforce Ventures, along with returning investors DST Global, Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital and Horizons Ventures. Founded in 2015,
Previse, a fintech focused on helping suppliers get faster payment, announced that it has raised $11 million in new funding led by Reefknot Investments and Mastercard. Returning investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Hambro Perks and Augmentum Fintech also participated. Founded in 2016, Previse says it currently processes about 100,000 invoices a day, and its goal is
Houseparty, the popular video chat application acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games in 2019, has seen massive growth due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With government lockdowns keeping people from being able to visit friends and other loved ones in person, consumer demand for video chat apps has skyrocketed. This has resulted in the video conferencing
While controversy has dogged the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract since its earliest days, a report by the DoD’s Inspector General’s Office concluded today that, while there were some funky bits and potential conflicts, overall the contract procurement process was fair and legal and the president did not unduly influence the process in spite of
Some big changes are underway for London-based Medopad, a startup that builds software for medical practitioners to monitor patients remotely based on digital biomarkers — measurable indicators of the progression of illnesses, diseases or overall health that are picked up not with blood samples or in-doctor visits but using apps and wearables. The company is rebranding to
If you find voice assistants frustratingly dumb you’re hardly alone. The much hyped promise of AI-driven vocal convenience very quickly falls through the cracks of robotic pedantry. A smart AI that has to come back again (and sometimes again) to ask for extra input to execute your request can see especially dumb — when, for
Israel-based Pileus, which is officially launching today, aims to help businesses keep their cloud spend under control. The company also today announced that it has raised a $1 million seed round from a private angel investor. Using machine learning, the company’s platform continuously learns about how a user typically uses a given cloud and then
Airbnb takes on new debt as it adapts to a world without tourism, Apple announces a new entry-level iPhone and Google lowers Nest camera quality. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 15, 2020. 1. Airbnb ups its debt by $1B amid the coronavirus travel crunch Airbnb has secured commitments of $1 billion for a syndicated
Microsoft is embarking on a new sustainability initiative as part of its overall approach to support environmental protection measures, with a project it calls the ‘Planetary Computer.’ This will actually be a computing endeavor that uses aggregated global environmental data collected from a number of sources as its input, and that will seek to employe
You don’t need your Ph.D. in economics to know the economy is in rough shape right now due to the impact of COVID-19, but ServiceNow today pledged that it would not lay off a single employee in 2020 — and in fact, it’s hiring. While Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, pledged no significant layoffs for 90 days
Amazon has decided to close its six fulfillment centers in France until Monday, according to an internal document seen by Capital and Reuters. The company also said publicly that it’ll probably appeal yesterday’s court decision that restrict orders to essential goods. Yesterday, a French court ruled that Amazon hasn’t been doing enough to protect warehouse
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the manufacture of the Coventor ventilator, a new hardware design first developed by the University of Minnesota. The project sought to create a ventilator that could provide the same level of life-saving care as existing ventilator models, but with a much lower cost to help ramp
Google today is making it easier for families to find quality educational apps with the addition of a new “Teacher Approved” section to Google Play. All apps found in this section are vetted by a panel of reviewers, including over 200 teachers across the U.S., and meet Google’s existing requirements for its “Designed for Families”
Labster, a virtual science lab edtech company, today announced that it is partnering with California’s community college network to bring its software to 2.1 million students. California Community Colleges claims to be the largest system of higher education in the country. The Labster partnership will provide 115 schools with 130 virtual laboratory simulations in biology,
French startup Slite has raised an $11 million Series A round led by Spark Capital with existing investors also participating. Slite is a sort of multiplayer Evernote. It lets you collect and organize documentation, create shared documents and build a company handbook. Many companies struggle to keep a single source of truth when it comes
Credit Kudos, a U.K. fintech using open banking to provide more accurate credit scoring, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is AlbionVC, which is joined by TriplePoint, Plug & Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, and Entrepreneur First (EF). In addition, a number of fintech angels participated. They
Google is reportedly on the verge of stepping up their hardware game in a way that follows the example set by Apple, with custom-designed silicon powering future smartphones. Axios reports that Google is readying its own in-house processors for use in future Pixel devices, including both phones and eventually Chromebooks, too. Google’s efforts around its
The well-funded Japanese space startup Synspective has tapped launch provider Rocket Lab to take its first Earth observation satellite to orbit. Launch is planned for late 2020, and the company’s StriX–α craft will be the sole payload. Synspective was founded in 2018 and by mid-2019 had raised about $100 million, making it one of the
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Earlier today, PwC and CB Insights dropped a sheaf of data concerning the global and domestic Q1 venture capital market, something we’ll be yanking data points from here and there for a few days. What
Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, it’s been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom. This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a tremendous
BenevolentAI, a startup which has raised $292 million to apply AI to create drugs faster, today says it has uncovered an already approved drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, after it applied its AI platform and team to the problem. The revelation, which has now appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has already entered
A startup that created a dedicated gadget to help ensure the safety of electrical industry workers has turned their talents to addressing the need for similar workplace protections in the face of another threat: COVID-19. Vancouver-based Proxxi is launching Halo, a wrist-worn wearable device that can provide a vibration notification to alert someone of the
As recently as a year or two ago, the idea of a $900 starting price for a OnePlus device would have seemed, at best, fanciful. The company built a name for itself with a series of flagship quality devices at a mid-tier price point. It was a smart approach that served the company well, carving
With a lot of towns instituting shelter-in-place orders to restrict how people physically interact in order to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, fitness has come into its own. In places where people are still allowed outdoors to exercise, we’ve seen an explosion of independent exercising like walking, running and cycling — often
The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, today’s students and postgrads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances. Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated,
Facebook’s internal R&D group has today launched a new app that lets you keep up with your close friends via your Apple Watch. The app is called Kit, or Keep in Touch, and works using a combination of QR codes and Facebook’s existing Messenger service. According to Kit’s App Store description, you get started with
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