Pipo Saude, a startup that developed a platform that sells and manages healthcare benefits for Brazilian companies, has raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding. Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital led the round, marking the first time the New York-based venture firm has led an investment in a Brazilian startup. (Although, notably, Thrive
admin
Early in the pandemic, Nick Gerard, Steven Layne, and Samantha Safer Valentine had a hit on their hands. In the era before Zoom fatigue set in, the trio launched Mainstream Live, a website and newsletter that curated live virtual events across platforms and gave people text-based reminders to check them out. “We started with the
Gupshup, a business messaging platform that began its journey in India 15 years ago, surprised many when it raised $100 million in April this year, roughly 10 years after its last financing round, and attained the coveted unicorn status. Now just three months later, the San Francisco-headquartered startup has secured even more capital from high-profile
The tyranny of the Excel spreadsheet continues, and especially in rostering staff. Nowhere is this more acutely felt in today’s COVID-pressured hospital wards, which are now depleted not just by the disease but by staff burnout from patchy-over or under-scheduling of staff hours. Two doctors realized this and decided to create a startup. Patchwork Health
For fleet managers, managing shipping crew changes across different countries is an elaborate process even in the best of times—and now is definitely not the best of times. Greywing, a Y Combinator-backed platform for automating maritime operations, launched a new solution today that it describes as an industry-first. Called Crew Change, it is used to
Monte Carlo’s Barr Moses joins the data panel at TC Sessions: SaaS. See you there! As the clock ticks down on TechCrunch’s upcoming SaaS-focused event, we’re excited to announce that Monte Carlo co-founder and CEO Barr Moses will join us. Specifically, the startup exec will be joining our data-focused panel. What does Monte Carlo do?
TikTok announced this morning it’s expanding its TikTok LIVE platform, which currently allows creators to livestream to fans while responding to viewer comments and questions and accept virtual gifts. Now, the LIVE experience will include a number of new features for creators to make it more competitive with platforms like Instagram Live, including the ability
Site reliability engineering platform Blameless announced Tuesday it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, led by Third Point Ventures with participation from Accel, Decibel and Lightspeed Venture Partners, to bring total funding to over $50 million. Site reliability engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments. Blameless, based
When it comes to health issues like menopause, fertility, pregnancy, and even early parenthood, the data tells us that people typically turn to search engines and social media for advice to ask about symptoms or concerns they have. They tend not to go to a medical practitioner, in the first instance. The suggestion, therefore, is
Twitter’s recent acquisition spree continues today as the company announces it has acqui-hired the team from news aggregator and summary app Brief. The startup from former Google engineers launched last year to offer a subscription-based news summary app that aimed to tackle many of the problems with today’s news cycle, including information overload, burnout, media
Three digits, so little time. Numbers can take on profound cultural significance, but few numbers have quite the resonance as 911, the emergency number for the United States. Few want to dial it, but when they must, it works — every single time. One industry trade association estimates that 240 million 911 phone calls are
Among Silicon Valley circles, a fun parlor game is to ask to what extent world GDP levels are held back by a lack of computer science and technical training. How many startups could be built if hundreds of thousands or even millions more people could code and bring their entrepreneurial ideas to fruition? How many
After announcing that threads were on the way earlier this year, Discord is now introducing the long-requested way to make conversations in bustling servers more comprehensible. Starting today, any server with “community” features enabled will be able to transform messages into threaded conversations. Threads are designated by their own subject name, making it easy to
Sometimes, the best missions are the hardest to fund. For the founders of RapidSOS, improving the quality of emergency response by adding useful data, like location, to 911 calls was an inspiring objective, and one that garnered widespread support. There was just one problem: How would they create a viable business? The roughly 5,700 public
With Microsoft now being an investor in OpenAI the field now more open for new insurgents into the open-source AI arena. Now a German company hopes to take on the next AI mantle and produce something akin to the success of the GPT-3 AI model. German AI startup Aleph Alpha has now raised €23 million
Following last fall’s debut of Google TV, the new user interface for Chromecast devices, Google is today giving its Google TV companion app for Android a makeover. The updated version of the mobile app for Google TV includes an updated user interface, expanded set recommendations, and more TV and movies to watch. The app in
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute heavily to the economic success of many countries, particularly those in the developing world. They are the backbone of most economies: Globally, SMEs represent about 90% of existing businesses and create more than 50% of employment. In South Africa, these businesses contribute around one-third of the country’s GDP. Last
HappyFresh, the on-demand grocery app based in Indonesia, announced today it has raised a $65 million Series D. The round was led by Naver Financial Corporation and Gafina B.V., with participation from STIC, LB and Mirae Asset Indonesia and Singapore. It also included returning investors Mirae-Asset Naver Asia Growth Fund and Z Venture Capital. The
Indian social media platform ShareChat said on Tuesday it has raised an additional $145 million and is now valued at nearly $3 billion, less than three months after it secured $502 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion. Temasek and Moore Strategic Ventures led the new tranche of investment while Mirae-Naver Asia Growth fund participated in
Online abuse, disinformation, fraud and other malicious content is growing and getting more complex to track. Today, a startup called ActiveFence, which has quietly built a tech platform to suss out threats as they are being formed and planned, to make it easier for trust and safety teams to combat them on platforms, is coming
Many have tried, but email refuses to die… although in the process it might be (figuratively speaking) killing some of us with the workload it brings on to triage and use it. A startup called Sedna has built a system to help with that — specifically for enterprise and other business customers — by “reading”
Reusable rocket startup iRocket has entered into a new partnership with NASA in its quest to reach commercialization in just two years. The partnership will give iRocket access to testing facilities and engineering support, chiefly at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The company is hoping that it will conduct its first
U.S. edtech company Duolingo released a revised IPO price range this morning, boosting its potential per-share value to $100 after initially targeting a range that topped out at $95 per share. Per the unicorn’s SEC filings, Duolingo is now targeting a $95 to $100 per share IPO price range, up from $85 to $95 per
Samsung sent out invites for its August 11 Unpacked event last week. While it’s clear this is going to be packed (somewhat ironically) even by the company’s standards, the event may well be as notable for what it doesn’t include. Namely, a slew of rumors have pointed to Samsung skipping its annual Galaxy Note update.
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
The Exchange spent a little time on Friday ruminating on the impact of then-rumored regulation in China targeting its edtech sector. News that the Chinese government intended to crack down further on the education technology market hit shares of public, China-based edtech companies. It was a mess. Then over the weekend, the rumors became reality,
Box released its new native e-signature product Box Sign on Monday, providing e-signature capability and unlimited signatures as part of Box’s business and enterprise plans at no additional cost. The launch comes five months after the Redwood City, California-based company agreed to acquire e-signature startup SignRequest for $55 million. Box CEO Aaron Levie told TechCrunch
Embedded finance — the process by which some of the more complicated, but also commoditized, aspects of financial services are built and wrapped in an API for anyone else to implement in their own products for end users — has become a huge cornerstone of how fintech is built today. Now, one of the earlier
Meet Sproutl, a marketplace for gardeners living in the U.K. The startup founded by former Farfetch executives has raised a $9 million seed round. It wants to make gardening more accessible by providing a curated list of items, relevant advice as well as inspiration. Index Ventures is leading the round in the startup with Ada
Rui Ma Contributor More posts by this contributor Factories Aren’t Dying To Take Your Order And Other Hardware Startup Follies Working With A Chinese Factory, Hardware Entrepreneur Edition China’s e-commerce and industrial ecosystem is as different from the Western world as its culture. The country took decades to earn its reputation as the Factory of