Enterprise

Just over a year after launching, Landing AI secured a $57 million round of Series A funding to continue building tools that enable manufacturers to more easily and quickly build and deploy artificial intelligence systems. The company, started by former Google and Baidu AI guru Andrew Ng, developed LandingLens, a visual inspection tool that applies

H2O.ai — a startup that has developed an open-source framework as well as proprietary apps that make it easier for any kind of enterprise to build and operate artificial intelligence-based services — has seen a surge of interest as AI applications have become more ubiquitous, and enterprises beyond tech companies want to get in on

This morning IBM officially spun out its infrastructure services into a new business called Kyndryl, one that, by the way, has revenue of $19 billion out of the gate as a public company. Whatever you think of this move, Kyndryl is a substantial company, yet IBM still saw itself better off without this considerable chunk

Much of our days are built around digital experiences, and companies are increasingly looking for ways to unlock conversion and optimize fraud screening. Today, a startup that has built a real-time behavioral analytics tool is announcing funding as it sees demand for its services increase. Neuro-ID, an analytics platform capturing real-time customer behavior at scale

It’s data season, with groups like Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), CB Insights, PitchBook and Crunchbase News putting out data sets that we’re having fun exploring. This morning, we’re adding one more to our arsenal. The Exchange spent some time this week diving into the SVB “State of the Market” report for the fourth quarter. As

Kintaba, a startup from a couple of Facebook site reliability veterans, is building a product to monitor incident response across the entire lifecycle. Today the company released a new concept called heat maps, a way to look at a response from a human perspective and build an understanding of how people in your organization respond

The number of DevOps tools has increased exponentially over the last few years and, with that, the amount of data these tools can produce to help businesses improve their software development processes. But most of the time, this data simply ends up in a dashboard for some scattershot analysis. Propelo (previously known as LevelOps) wants

Google Cloud announced a major deal today with The CME Group to move CME’s futures and options markets to the cloud over a 10-year period. The deal has several components, including a $1 billion investment from Google into CME. Google would not say how much the total deal is worth, however. Philip Moyer, VP of

Data streams with continual, real-time updates of information are a critical building block of how apps and sites function today, and now a startup that has built a platform to power those data streams is announcing a growth round of funding on the back of strong growth in its business into a wider set of

As U.S. hotel occupancy hit pre-pandemic levels this summer, the hospitality industry is bracing for what is expected to be a rush of activity as people resume travel. There are some tailwinds pushing those sails: The largest population of future travelers was born after 1979, and after saving more money over the last decade they

As companies deal with a growing array of privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, they are looking for solutions that help them not only understand their customers better, but also help them comply with those laws in a less labor-intensive way. Bloutout, a member of the Y Combinator winter 2021 cohort, announced a $3 million

Battery Ventures released its State of the OpenCloud report today, providing a set of data points that pretty clearly outline the accelerated growth of cloud services in recent quarters. The report helps explain the race to invest capital into startups that we’ve been observing over the past 18 months. The pandemic pushed companies to start

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

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,

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

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.

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

Grant Lee has been living in slide decks for most of his career, but it wasn’t until he was doing some advisory work last year that relied heavily on slides that he aimed to reimagine the format. “Slides were built for a different era of work,” he told TechCrunch. “They were more of a visual

Today’s world is run on data, and the amount of it that is being produced, managed and used to power services is growing by the minute — to the tune of some 79 zettabytes this year, according to one estimate. Today, a company called Yugabyte, which has built an open-source distributed SQL database model to

Brazilian grain trading marketplace Tarken secured $3.5 million in a seed round, co-led by Monashees and Maya, to continue developing its technology that connects grain buyers and sellers and operates an artificial intelligence tool for commodity pricing. Joining them was Gilgamesh Ventures and individual investors, including Kavak founder Carlos Garcia, Ualá founder Pierpaolo Barbieri, Zap

The Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported earnings this week. As you might expect, they did just fine with a growing market that passed $45 billion worldwide, good for a mind-boggling $180 billion run rate and trailing 12 month revenue of $164 billion. Revenue grew 37% overall in

When brands sell through social media and other third-parties, they often spend millions of dollars to advertise on those platforms, yet have little or no knowledge of who their customers actually are. Social commerce startup Social Chat is out to change that. Frost Li, the former head of growth at Wish, founded the company in

Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, like back and joint pain, closed on $400 million in Series E funding to give the company a $6.2 billion valuation. Tiger Global and Coatue Management, which co-led the company’s $300 million Series D round back in January,

As companies gather ever-growing sets of data, finding issues with that data that could impact the viability of a machine learning model becomes increasingly important. Anomalo is putting machine learning to work to help solve the data viability issue automatically. Today the company announced a $33 million Series A investment led by Norwest Venture Partners

Groopit, an early stage startup from a 20-year Microsoft veteran, wants to help companies crowdsource data from information supplied by employees working in the field. Today, the company announced a $2 million pre-seed round led by Ascend.vc with participation from a group of investors that includes Voyager Capital and Vulcan Capital. The startup has raised

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned platform for those connecting with others in their fields of work and those looking for work, has been known best in recruitment for sourcing candidates and advertising job openings for permanent work. Now, to complement that, LinkedIn is opening up a new front in the job market for freelancers. Today it is

Abacus.ai wants to build an AI platform that simplifies machine learning model creation, while still leaving room for power users. Today the company announced a $50 million Series C. At the same time, it announced that the platform was expanding to include computer vision use cases. Tiger Global led the round with participation from Coatue,

AI and big data are an important part of most enterprise-scale companies now, but that very scale can make it difficult to employ them safely and ethically. Kathy Baxter at Salesforce and Nashlie Sephus at AWS have made ethical AI and data collection their business over the last few years, both sounding the alarm on

Healthcare spending accounts for almost 18% of U.S. GDP, so it’s no surprise that digital health is attracting record levels of investment. This year, VCs have flowed $14.7 billion to health tech startups, compared to $14.6 billion in all of 2020. Given the high cost of care in the United States compared to other nations,

Logicbroker, a Connecticut-based e-commerce company focused on cloud fulfillment, secured a $135 million growth round from K1 Investment Management. Its software provides drop ship and marketplace automation capabilities to brands, retailers, suppliers and third-party logistics providers. As CEO Peyman Zamani explained it, “drop ship” is a way that packages get from the seller to the