Enterprise

South Korea’s electric vehicle battery maker LG Energy Solution made a successful market debut on Thursday. The market capitalization of LG Energy stood at $98.3 billion (118 trillion KRW) at the close of trading on local stock exchanges, making it the country’s second valuable firm after Samsung Electronics. The firm’s stock price opened at 597,000

With sales teams now operating remotely, it is even harder to monitor how well they are performing. Atrium wants to make sure sales managers, sales development managers and customer success leads have the data-driven insights to be able to do that. The sales management technology company closed on $20 million in Series A funding to

Israeli startup Firebolt has been taking on Google’s BigQuery, Snowflake and others with a cloud data warehouse solution that it claims can run analytics on large datasets cheaper and faster than its competitors. Now, it is announcing a big round of funding to fuel its big data growth: Firebolt has raised $100 million in a

Quantum computing promises to unlock a new wave of processing power for the most complex calculations, but that could prove to be just as harmful as it is helpful: security specialists warn that malicious hackers will be able to use quantum machines to break through today’s standards in cryptography and encryption. Today, a startup called

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for January 25, 2022! Today our cup overflows with news. There’s simply too much going on to cover in a single newsletter, so I’ve tried to

Scratchpad, a startup that is building a tool to make it easier for salespeople to enter data into Salesforce, has expanded that mission to give access to the information it’s collecting to the whole revenue team. Apparently, investors were pleased with that expanded approach, and the company announced a $33 million Series B today. Previous

IBM reported revenue for Q3 2021 — and the news wasn’t just “good.” For a company that has seen negative or low revenue growth for almost a decade, it was great. Big Blue reported $16.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 6.5% year over year (8.6% on a constant-currency basis; the strengthening dollar is

HR tech platform Darwinbox has more than tripled its valuation to become a unicorn in a new $72 million funding round as the Indian startup leads what an investor calls the “SaaSification of Asia” trend. Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) — an investor known for backing firms such as Netflix, Meta, Spotify and Airbnb — led

Insurance broker and carrier marketplace Sayata took in $35 million in additional funds toward its Series A after raising $17 million in funds last August. Pitango Growth and Hanaco Ventures co-led the extension, with participation from previous investors Team8 Capital, Vertex Ventures, Elron Ventures and OurCrowd. The new funding follows over 10 times revenue growth

Customer service is making and breaking companies over the past two years as shopping moved online and consumers wanted more out of the traditional service companies were offering. Zingtree provides interactive contact center software that guides agents to the next best action so that they can cater to even the most discerning customer. To continue

Committing to a diverse and inclusive workplace is one thing, but following through is another. To help companies do this more effectively, Diversio is using artificial intelligence technology, data analytics and knowledgeable subject matter experts to find where the company’s process is breaking down and create a comprehensive action plan to get it back on

Workplace, the app owned and originally built by Facebook (now Meta) as a version of the social network for enterprise employees to communicate with each other, has signed up upwards of 7 million users, finding traction in particular among multinational organizations with a mix of front-line, deskless and desk-based workers, as a way for management

In what has to be considered an anticlimactic ending, IBM sold off the data assets of its Watson Health unit to private equity firm Francisco Partners today. The two firms did not share the purchase price, but previous reports pegged the value at around $1 billion. Under the terms of the deal Francisco is grabbing

I’ve worked at early-stage startups where we relied on our best guesses to shape product pipelines and develop marketing strategies. I have also held jobs at companies where we engaged directly with current and past customers to ask them what they wanted. You can probably guess which approach generated more favorable outcomes. Whether it’s done

Six weeks after buying a new refrigerator, Anand Subbaraj found himself on the phone with customer service to address strange noises coming from the appliance. Technicians would arrive only to not have the right parts or know how to fix that particular appliance. It ultimately took six calls to customer service and eight weeks for

Mustafa Suleyman has been working in artificial intelligence for 12 years, trying to figure out how to use machine learning systems and AI to do important things in the work and have impact at scale. “And over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to be at the forefront of a lot of cutting-edge applications of

Prophecy, a low-code platform for data engineering, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors SignalFire and Berkeley Skydeck as well as new investor Dig Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $31 million. At the core of the

User onboarding has been a longstanding and persistent challenge in the world of apps. Developers grapple with design and technical constraints; publishers and users might have different priorities when it comes to engaging with a service; the content of those services is changing all the time; and perhaps most of all, people are all different

Nowsta attracted venture capital for its approach to help employers better engage with their hourly workforces in this increasingly hybrid work environment. The company announced today $41 million in Series B funding in a round led by GreatPoint Ventures that brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $59 million. Joining GreatPoint in the

Even though consumer gaming constitutes a small fraction of its overall business, Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of its all-cash $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard proves that the technology corporation takes the sector plenty seriously. It is easy to think that Microsoft should have invested the money into other, perhaps more lucrative businesses in its

Big banks are under a lot of pressure to modernize their services to meet demands of consumers who now view things like mobile apps that identify who and where you are; or instant, on-demand products, as table stakes — consumers that are in turn increasingly looking at neobanks to give them a better level of

After securing a $15 million Series A in August, Walnut, a company that creates sales and marketing demo experiences, is back to announce its new round of $35 million in Series B financing. Walnut’s no-code platform enables teams to create customized product demonstrations quickly, be able to integrate them into their sales and marketing processes

Agtonomy co-founder and CEO Tim Bucher was born and raised on a farm and was deep into his own farming business when he took a computer course while at UC Davis and got hooked. It was that parallel agriculture/technology career that led him to start Agtonomy, a hybrid autonomy and tele-assist service startup that turns

Supply chain logistics — getting components and eventually finished products from A to B to C — is one of the most critical parts of running a business, not least because it is one of the most complex, involving dozens of companies, hundreds of combinations and permutations, accounting for world events outside of your business,

Daasity, an e-commerce analytics and data company, secured $15 million in Series A funding as it continues developing its approach to helping consumer brands better leverage their customer data to make smarter decisions. VMG Catalyst led the oversubscribed round and was joined by existing investors Cove Fund, Exeter Capital, 1855 Capital, Mooring Ventures, Okapi Venture

Similar to other industries embracing contract work, Lawtrades is giving legal professionals a way to become independent and run their own virtual law practices. Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia started the company in 2016 with an initial focus on startups and small businesses, trying to find product-market fit (as one does), but finding that legal

Many of us are moving around these days a lot less than we used to — because of Covid, we’re working from home instead of an office; and we are traveling and going out less. Now, as we shift back into more “normal” behavior, a startup that’s helping to better understand where and how we

Starting an e-commerce business on one of the large marketplaces, for example, Shopify, can be an easy process, but what the team at Swell began to notice was that the model could only take a business so far. Swell is working in “headless” commerce, which means it is disconnecting the front end of a website,

Retailers often build their own “orchestration” platforms for payment processing and routing, but these can be complex to maintain. Spreedly and modo play in this space, and, last year, new startup Gr4vy launched in the US to do this in an even more fleet-of-foot manner, it claimed. It raised in a $11.1M Series A last

MycoWorks, a company making a fungal-based biomaterial that can replace leather, brought in a fresh round of funding — $125 million in Series C financing — to fund a production plant for scaling the manufacture of its flagship product Reishi. CEO Matt Scullin says what his company is doing in terms of fabrics is different