CostCertified, a Canadian startup which provides real-time, interactive residential construction estimates, raised $8.45 million in a seed round of funding. FUSE, a Pacific Northwest venture firm which counts former Microsoft CFO John Connors and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner as venture partners, led the round. The company is also backed by Y Combinator (having participated
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Regions once overlooked by the venture capital industry are racking up impressive investment totals in recent quarters. African startups, for example, were long ignored by the global VC scene, with totals for the continent’s upstart technology companies representing a fraction of a fraction of the funds made available to other regions’ next-generation companies. But in
Video sharing platforms that offer a service in the UK have to comply with new regulations intended to protect users and under 18s from harmful content such as hate speech and videos/ads likely to incite violence again protected groups. Ofcom, the country’s comms, broadcast and — in an expanding role — Internet content regulator, has
Celonis, the late-stage processing mining startup with a gaudy $11 billion valuation, announced a new partnership today, this one with ServiceNow. Celonis co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke says that he and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott go back a long way, and that working together should provide big benefits for the two companies. “With ServiceNow, we
Increasingly, companies are being encouraged by governments to engage in carbon accounting, but of course, only a small number of companies actually do. Even those probably count only 10% of their emissions because they don’t account for the emissions of their supply chain, which, when looked at, probably accounts for 90% of their total emissions.
Move over, precision agriculture — precision apiculture is what’s on the minds of all future-focused farmers. BeeHero has been growing fast since its debut and seed round last year, and $19M in new funding means it can scale beyond its initial markets and find more uses for its one-of-a-kind collection of data collected from thousands
Marc Lore, who earlier this year stepped down from his role as Walmart’s head of U.S. e-commerce, is now backing a new startup in the e-commerce space called Wizard. Lore has taken on the roles of co-founder, chairman of the board and investor in Wizard, a B2B startup in the “conversational commerce” space which believes
Mauritius and U.K.-based investment company Juven went live today with plans to fund growth-stage technology and consumer companies in Africa. The one-year-old firm is looking to invest large checks in companies “that have proven business models, strong revenue traction and large addressable markets,” it said in a statement. Juven is one of the few investment
The founders of Tazah Technologies, a B2B agriculture marketplace in Pakistan, met while serving leadership roles at Uber subsidiary Careem. Abrar Bajwa and Mohsin Zaka bonded during long working hours as the platform dealt with COVID-19’s impact. Eventually, the two started talking about creating their own startup. When asked how they got from ride-hailing to
Anyone looking for a job, even in the past decade, knows how difficult it can be or has been — applications going into a black hole of a CRM, no response and follow-ups or the process being drug out for months. Lydia Han and Christopher Triolo started ModernLoop in December 2020 after seeing the problem
Wayve, a U.K.-based self-driving startup that is notable for its use of deep learning and cameras rather than more-costly Lidar and other sensors to guide vehicles, is gearing up for its next stage of development with a strategic backer in its pocket. Today Ocado — the online grocer that also powers online grocery systems for
While working as a software engineer in Japan, Singapore and San Francisco for the past 10 years, Ryo Chikazawa, CEO and co-founder of Autify, came to realize that there’s one common problem in the software development industry; software testing takes excessive time. Chikazawa and co-founder Sam Yamashita started Autify in 2016 in San Francisco to
SmartRyde, a Japanese online pre-booked airport transfers service platform, is a marketplace that connects travelers to local transportation operators/online travel agencies (OTAs). Sota Kimura, co-founder and CEO of SmartRyde, founded SmartRyde in 2017 after he experienced trouble getting a taxi from the airport to the hotel when he traveled abroad, Kimura told TechCrunch. SmartRyde, which
Byteboard, a service designed to replace the pre-onsite technical interview part of a company’s hiring process with a web-based alternative, will be spinning out of Google, TechCrunch learned and Google confirmed. The product was originally incubated as part of the company’s internal R&D lab known as Area 120, where it’s been led by CEO Sargun
Facebook’s hours-long outage on Monday may have hurt the company, its founder, shareholders, and many businesses that rely on the social juggernaut’s services. But for its instant messaging rivals, it was a very good day. Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov said on Tuesday that his instant messaging app added a staggering 70 million
I have worked in startups for more than half of my life, and for most of that time, I was the only Black person in the room. As a result, the lack of representation in tech isn’t abstract to me. Besides my experience, I read and talk about diversity in tech every day, so when
Ride-hailing giant Uber is facing a legal challenge over its use of real-time facial recognition technology in a driver and courier identity check system that it uses in the UK. The App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) announced the legal action Tuesday, alleging that Uber’s biometric identity checks discriminate against people of color. The union
Amid a deluge of new creator platforms, a startup called Fireside is launching today with what it believes will be a compelling proposition for professional creators in need of a more robust set of tools for content creation, distribution, measurement, and monetization. The service, which offers a platform for live and interactive shows, had been
Apr.26 — Deren Baker, Jumpshot chief executive officer, discusses Amazon.com Inc.’s plans to spend $800 million in the current quarter to reduce delivery times for top customers to one day from two. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang and Brad Stone on “Bloomberg Technology.”
It’s that time again! Today is the 28th Demo Day for Alchemist, an accelerator that primarily focuses on enterprise companies — or those that sell to other companies, primarily, rather than directly to consumers. This latest cohort comes in at 23 companies. Like the last few Alchemist batches, this one was entirely virtual — a
Appsmith, which provides open source software that helps companies quickly build internal applications, announced an $8 million Series A round of funding this morning. Unlike some upstart tech companies that we have seen in the internal application market, Appsmith doesn’t sport a no- or low-code approach. Instead, Appsmith targets traditional developers with its service, which
Snapchat is rolling out a new ‘Run for Office’ in-app tool to encourage young adults to run for local office. The company says the new Run for Office tool is designed to help younger users engage with democracy in an easy way. The goal of the tool is to tackle common barriers that young people
Sure, an insurance infrastructure startup, announced today that it has closed on $100 million in Series C funding at a $550 million valuation. New York-based Declaration Partners and European growth investor Kinnevik co-led the financing, which also included participation from WndrCo and existing backers W. R. Berkley and Menlo Ventures. The round brings the Santa
Both Anchor and Descript have made their names as being among the most significant Podcast creation platforms of recent times, but hoving into the rear-view mirror recently has been Podcastle, an all-in-one platform that can cover off recording, production and publishing, all on the one platform. It’s now raised $7 million in an early-stage funding
Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said was “no longer a photo-sharing app,” noting the company was prioritizing a shift into video amid significant competition from TikTok and YouTube. Today, Instagram is taking another step towards its larger goal of making video a more central part of the Instagram experience with news that it will now
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Founders seeking to raise their first round of capital may feel overwhelmed by the prospect. There is definitely plenty of capital out there, but there are also a lot of startups clamoring for it. To help new entrepreneurs figure out this dilemma, we invited three investors to speak at a panel titled, “How to Raise
Global users are experiencing outages on Facebook, including all social networks the company owns, which include Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. When navigating to these websites, a server error will appear — Instagram shows a “5xx server error,” which indicates that this is an issue with Facebook’s servers. Users are also unable to send messages or
As DevOps SaaS platform Esper continues to build out the category and the number of connected devices grows, the company took on another round of funding to stay ahead of demand. Just five months after announcing a $30 million Series B round, the company is back with an even bigger capital infusion — $60 million
Book sales during the pandemic went up, and it seems the amount we are reading did, too. And Inkitt, the startup that operates a free, popular platform of the same name for anyone to write and publish stories — stories that Inkitt then analyses using data science to determine which of them to take