Enterprise

Apeel Sciences, a food system innovation company, is out to prevent food produced globally from ending up in the landfill, especially as pressures from the global pandemic affect the food supply chain. The company just added $250 million in Series E funding, giving it a valuation of $2 billion, to speed up the availability of

When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, you had to figure that they had some big plans for the company, and today the CRM giant announced some initial integrations that should prove useful for Salesforce customers. Rob Seaman, SVP for Slack at Salesforce sees Slack as the communications

Cisco announced on Friday that it’s acquiring Israeli applications-monitoring startup Epsagon at a price pegged at $500 million. The purchase gives Cisco a more modern microservices-focused component for its growing applications-monitoring portfolio. The Israeli business publication Globes reported it had gotten confirmation from Cisco that the deal was for $500 million, but Cisco would not confirm

The pandemic was a catalyst for showing companies looking to cut costs just how much they were spending on their software tools. New York-based Tropic’s platform not only uncovers those savings, but also brings a click-and-approve approach to buying software. Today, the company announced a $25 million Series A round of funding. Canaan Partners led

When Salesforce announced its new business video streaming service called Salesforce+ this week, everyone had a reaction. While not all of it was positive, some company watchers also wondered if there was more to this announcement than meets the eye. If you look closely, the new initiative suggests that Salesforce wants to take a bite

Houston-based ThirdAI, a company building tools to speed up deep learning technology without the need for specialized hardware like graphics processing units, brought in $6 million in seed funding. Neotribe Ventures, Cervin Ventures and Firebolt Ventures co-led the investment, which will be used to hire additional employees and invest in computing resources, Anshumali Shrivastava, Third

Talkdesk, a provider of cloud-based contact center software, announced $230 million in new Series D funding that more than triples the company’s valuation to $10 billion, Talkdesk founder CEO Tiago Paiva confirmed to TechCrunch. New investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group came on board for this round and were

Box has been in an ongoing dispute with activist investors Starboard Value over control of the board, an argument that is expected to come to a head on September 9th at the annual shareholder meeting. In an effort to show shareholders that the numbers are continuing to improve under the current leadership, Box took the

Mobile field service startup Youreka Labs Inc. raised an $8 million Series A round of funding co-led by Boulder Ventures and Grotech Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. The Maryland-based company also officially announced its CEO — Bill Karpovich joined to lead the company after previously holding executive roles with General Motors and IBM Cloud

Will Clem knows all too well about restaurant workers not showing up for a shift. At least one person would have car trouble or need to stay home with sick children, and it became a common occurrence on the weekends for the co-founder of Memphis Meats and owner of Baby Jacks BBQ in Memphis. Needing

Cart.com, a Houston-based company providing end-to-end e-commerce services, brought in its third funding round this year, this time a $98 million Series B round to bring its total funding to $143 million. Oak HC/FT led the new round of funding and was joined by PayPal Ventures, Clearco, G9 Ventures, Mercury Fund, Valedor Partners and Arsenal

Trust wants to give smaller businesses the same advantages that large enterprises have when marketing on digital and social media platforms. It came out of beta with $9 million in seed funding from Lerer Hippeau, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and Upper90. The Los Angeles-based company was started in 2019 by a group of five

Salesforce just closed a $28 billion mega-deal to buy Slack, generating significant debt along the way, but it’s not through spending big money. Today the CRM giant announced it was taking a leap into streaming media with Salesforce+, a forthcoming digital media network with a focus on video that, in the words of the company,

Ben Ofiri Contributor Ben Ofiri is the co-founder and CEO of the Kubernetes troubleshooting platform Komodor. He previously worked at Google, where he served as product lead for the company’s flagship conversational AI project, Google Duplex. I worked at Google for six years. Internally, you have no choice — you must use Kubernetes if you

As the use of AI has grown and developed over the last several years, companies like Salesforce have tried to tap into it to improve their software and help customers operate faster and more efficiently. Kathy Baxter, principal architect for the ethical AI practice at Salesforce will be joining us at TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS on

James Evans and his co-founders at CommandBar were working on a software product when they hit a wall while trying to access certain functionalities within the software. That’s when the lightbulb moment happened and, in 2020, the team shifted to building a product search engine add-on to make software easier to use. “We thought this

Correlated on Wednesday announced it raised $8.3 million in seed funding to launch its product-led growth platform for sales teams. NextView Ventures led the round and was joined by Harrison Metal, Apollo Projects, Attentive co-founders Brian Long and Andrew Jones, Cockroach Labs co-founder Ben Darnell and Atrium’s Pete Kazanjy. The round includes funding raised last

Statsig is taking the A/B testing applications that drive Facebook’s growth and putting similar functionalities into the hands of any product team so that they, too, can make faster, data-informed decisions on building products customers want. The Seattle-based company on Thursday announced $10.4 million in Series A funding, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from

One year after raising $16 million, construction technology company Buildots is back to claim another $30 million, this time in Series B funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with participation from previous investors TLV Partners, Future Energy Ventures and Tidhar Construction Group. This gives the company $46 million in total funding, Roy Danon, co-founder

In spite of the pandemic, New York City remains the center of commerce and business, and over the last decade a robust startup community has developed there. Work-Bench, the NYC VC firm that concentrates on early stage enterprise seed investments, announced its $100 million Fund 3 this morning. The company started back in 2013 when

Eshwar Belani Contributor Two decades after businesses first started deploying AI solutions, one can argue that they’ve made little progress in achieving significant gains in efficiency and profitability relative to the hype that drove initial expectations. On the surface, recent data supports AI skeptics. Almost 90% of data science projects never make it to production;

Even with all the years of work that have been put into improving how screen-based interfaces work, our experiences with websites, mobile apps, and any other interactive service you might use still often come up short: we can’t find what we want, we’re bombarded with exactly what we don’t need, or the flow is just

Marvell announced this morning it intends to acquire Innovium for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal. The startup, which raised over $400 million according to Crunchbase data, makes networking ethernet switches optimized for the cloud. Marvell president and CEO Matt Murphy sees Innovium as a complementary piece to the $10 billion Inphi acquisition last year,

It’s no secret that the technology for easy business-to-business payments has not yet caught up to its peer-to-peer counterparts, but Yaydoo thinks it has the answer. The Mexico City-based B2B software and payments company provides three products, VendorPlace, P-Card and PorCobrar, for managing cash flow, optimizing access to smart liquidity, and connecting small, midsize and

It’s often said in baseball that a prospect has a high ceiling, reflecting the tremendous potential of a young player with plenty of room to get better. The same could be said for the cloud infrastructure market, which just keeps growing with little sign of slowing down any time soon. The market hit $42 billion

Over the last couple of years, Robotic Process Automation or RPA has been red hot with tons of investor activity and M&A from companies like SAP, IBM and ServiceNow. UIPath had a major IPO in April and has a market cap over $30 billion. I wondered when Salesforce would get involved and today the company

Pet pharmacy Mixlab has developed a digital platform enabling veterinarians to prescribe medications and have them delivered — sometimes on the same day — to pet parents. The New York-based company raised a $20 million Series A in a round of funding led by Sonoma Brands and including Global Founders Capital, Monogram Capital, Lakehouse Ventures

Small and medium enterprises have become a big opportunity in the world of B2B technology in the last several years, and today a startup that’s building tools aimed at helping them manage their teams of workers is announcing some funding that underscores the state of that market. Homebase, which provides a platform that helps SMBs

Prashant Pandey Contributor Prashant Pandey is the head of engineering at Asana, a leading work management platform for teams. Prior to Asana, Prashant started and led the Bay Area team building Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service. Startups and SMBs are usually the first to adopt many SaaS products. But as these customers

One year after voice-based AI technology company ConverseNow raised a $3.3 million seed round, the company is back with a cash infusion of $15 million in Series A funding in a round led by Craft Ventures. The Austin-based company’s AI voice ordering assistants George and Becky work inside quick-serve restaurants to take orders via phone,