Una Brands, the e-commerce aggregator focused on Asia-Pacific brands, announced today it has raised $15 million for its Series A. The full-equity round was co-led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC, along with participation from returning investors and Ninjavan co-founder Alvin Teo. This news comes only five months after Una launched with a $40
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Pearpop, a marketplace for social collaborations, is expanding to Instagram after previously only being available to TikTok creators. The platform, which launched last year, allows creators and brands to buy collaborations with celebrities and larger creators. Pearpop will also become available on Twitter later this month, and on Twitch in December. The official rollout on
After Nubank filed its F-1, Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm dissected the document to learn more about the operations of one of the world’s largest startups. “With over 40 million users across Brazil, as well as Mexico and Colombia,” the fintech company’s LTV/CAC ratio is central to its success, they found. Notably, as many as
After early tests in select markets, Netflix announced today its debut lineup of exclusive mobile games will begin rolling out to all members globally on Android devices, starting this week. In July, the streaming service first confirmed its plans to enter the mobile gaming market, calling games “another new content category” for the company to
German medical device maker Ottobock today announced that it has entered into a deal to acquire Bay Area-based exoskeleton startup SuitX. The deal is one that makes sense for Ottobock, which builds its own exoskeletons, along with prosthetics and orthotics. SuitX is a spinout from UC Berkeley’s Robotics and Human Engineering Lab, founded by mechanical
Lumigo, a cloud-native application monitoring and debugging platform, today announced that it has raised a $29 million Series A funding round led by Redline Capital. Wing Venture Capital and Vertex Ventures US, together with existing investors Meron Capital, Pitango First and Grove Ventures, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to
Just days after rebranding itself, Facebook announced plans to delete a trove of the most worrisome data that the world’s biggest social network collected on more than a billion individuals. In a blog post Tuesday, Facebook’s newly named parent company Meta explained that it would close shop on its facial recognition systems and delete a
How open is the IPO market for non-unicorns? Alex Wilhelm 8 hours When Backblaze first filed to go public, TechCrunch found it a compelling company. With a central core of content to help power customer acquisition and a huge swath of customers, it was an interesting cloud storage play. But when it came to pricing,
Walmart is further investing in technology that will enable shopping via voice and chat with its latest acquisition. The retail giant announced it’s acquiring “select technology assets” from a startup called Botmock, which had developed a set of tools for designing, prototyping, testing, and deploying conversational applications across platforms. Founded in 2016, Botmock got off
Everyone’s set of teeth are different enough that orthodontics has traditionally been part artistry, part medical witchcraft. In the late 1990s, Invisalign changed the industry with customizable aligners, but it turns out that aligners only serve 30% of orthodontics patients. For the rest, there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation — until LightForce
More of the world’s economy is moving online, and that is underscored by the long list of recent fundings and acquisitions in the digital ID authentication and anti-money laundering (AML) space, including Okta’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0. Today, another startup announced it has raised capital: end-to-end due diligence platform First AML. Blackbird Ventures (which
WhatsApp will today begin beta testing a new, cloud-based version of its WhatsApp Business API, hosted on parent company Facebook’s infrastructure. With the shift to the cloud, the setup time for integrating with the API will drop from weeks to only minutes, the company claims, so businesses can more quickly transition to WhatsApp’s API platform
Electric vehicle startup BasiGo has today announced the launch of its operations in Nairobi, bringing clean energy options to Kenya’s public transport industry, currently dominated by fossil-fuel buses. The startup plans to sell locally assembled electric buses using parts from China’s EV maker BYD Automotive, the company said while announcing it had raised $1 million
Moka, a six-year-old Chinese startup that wants to make human resources management easier with software, said today it has closed a $100 million Series C round. The startup aims to automate the entire process of talent management, from hiring to retaining existing staff. For example, it can automatically collect post-interview feedback from candidates and store
Catherine D. Henry Contributor There is a heated debate on the state of the race between the United States and China to dominate in AI. But perhaps the more strategic question is whether China is building the metaverse. Built upon infrastructural technologies like AI, the metaverse refers to the vast array of digital experiences and
Opibus, the first company in Kenya to commercially future-proof diesel and gasoline vehicles by converting them to electric, is set to embark on an ambitious plan to mass produce electric buses and motorcycles after unlocking $7.5 million in pre series A round. The Swedish-Kenyan company raised $5 million in equity and $2.5 million in grants
Hello and welcome back to Max Q. It feels odd to be living in a time when companies are announcing their plans to develop commercial space stations and yet, here we are! Read on for news from Sierra Space, Blue Origin, Boeing and others on their plans for a station, called Orbital Reef. Plus this
ShopBack, the Rakuten-backed e-commerce loyalty platform, announced today it will acquire buy now, pay later startup Hoolah. Both companies are based in Singapore and operate in Southeast Asian markets. The deal was done in stock and cash, and terms were undisclosed. After the merger closes, ShopBack will own all of Hoolah, but the BNPL service’s
Instagram announced today that it’s introducing a new “Add Yours” sticker that creates public threads in Stories. The new feature essentially allows users to respond to other users’ Stories with their own following a prompt or a certain topic. The global launch comes as Instagram initially tested the feature in Indonesia and Japan last month.
When Zendesk announced it was acquiring Momentive Global Inc. (the organization behind SurveyMonkey) for $4.13 billion last week, it might have felt like a steep price to pay, but it seems that companies are willing to pay a high price to understand what users and customers are thinking — and that’s what SurveyMonkey gives Zendesk.
Google has responded to allegations contained in a recently unsealed US antitrust lawsuit that it worked covertly to stall European Union privacy legislation that could have blasted a huge hole in its behaviorial advertising business. Per the US states’ suit, a couple of years after a European Commission proposal to update the EU’s ePrivacy Directive
Switzerland-based Mictic has created a pair of wearables that turns thin air into your concert hall. Imagine a theremin without the theremin, hooked up to a clever loop station, and you’ve got the right idea. Just from the demos and descriptions, it’s the kind of startup you’d scratch your head over and talk about in
Ilia Kukharev Contributor Ilia Kukharev is the head of ASO at AppFollow and has been engaged in the localization of websites, mobile applications and ASO optimization for over a decade. The final version of iOS 15.0 was released on September 20. While there are no major changes in the OS itself, Apple touts this new
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You
As the neobanking boom has matured into a collection of large digital banks, we’re slowly getting a better picture of the economics of such business efforts. Chime was early in telling the market that it was EBTIDA positive, for example, unlike less profitable European neobanks. The upcoming Nubank IPO — technically the public offering of
As access to unique sounds is becoming a competitive advantage for social apps, Snapchat announced today it’s inked a deal with NBCUniversal to give users access to licensed audio clips from various NBCU movies and TV shows. With this latest launch, users can add audio clips from fan favorites such as “Saturday Night Live” and
OctoML, a Seattle-based startup that helps enterprises optimize and deploy their machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $85 million Series C round led by Tiger Global Management. Previous investors Addition, Madrona Venture Group and Amplify Partners also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $132 million, including
According to Facebook AI Research, the next generation of robots should be much better at feeling — not emotions, of course, but using the sense of touch. And to advance the ball in this relatively new area of AI and robotics research, the company and its partners have built a new kind of electronic skin
John S. Kim Contributor John S. Kim is the CEO of Sendbird, the leading API provider to embed chat, voice and video experiences inside of mobile apps. More posts by this contributor Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features Netflix sees gaming as a big part of its future in the battle for consumer attention.
Years ago, Americans spent most of their disposable income on food but consistent investment in retail infrastructure has changed that. Now, they only spend 6% of their household income on food and beverages. Africa still battles with this and it is not hard to see why. The continent’s retail markets are highly fragmented and mostly made up