Fundings and Exits

Joseph Phillips and William Corbera, both of whom come from entrepreneurial backgrounds, have been friends for over a decade. Corbera co-founded RevoPay, a payments processing platform that was acquired by payments solutions firm OSG in 2022. Phillips, for his part, led the national sales team at Seamless before heading up sales at ServiceTitan, a web-based

Zyod is an Indian startup offering its tech platform to global fashion brands to help them in their entire design-to-delivery process. It has raised $18 million in a new funding round to expand its presence to more than 40 countries worldwide. The Gurugram-based startup works with Indian factories to help them manufacture fashion wear for

Yet another generative AI venture has raised a bundle of money. And, like the others before it, it’s promising the moon. Emergence, whose co-founders include Satya Nitta, the former head of global AI solutions at IBM’s research division, on Monday emerged from stealth with $97.2 million in funding from Learn Capital plus credit lines totaling

Consumer technology is hard, but few people have mastered it as well as Matt Rogers, co-founder of Nest and now Mill, his new startup that promises to turn your table scraps into planet-saving treasure. Mill burst out of the gate last year after spending some time in stealth refining its waste bin, an easy to

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad DEI? The acronym is near-poisonous now — a word that creates almost instant tension between those who embrace it and those who want it dead. A prime example of this divide was the response to startup Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang’s post on X last week. He wrote about

The majority of companies struggle to extract value from their data. Several years ago, Forrester reported that between 60% and 73% of data belonging to the average business goes unused for analytics. That’s because the data’s siloed or otherwise pigeonholed by technical and security considerations, making it difficult — if not impossible — to apply analytical tools.

Rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts are surging among U.S. teens. A recent report from the Center of Disease Control found that nearly one in three girls have seriously considered suicide, and a significant number, 13% have actually attempted it. Psychologists have various theories about what’s causing adolescent mental health crises.   Some blame the

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Elon Musk just convinced Tesla shareholders to approve his $56 billion pay package, making him the highest-paid CEO in history — assuming he can dodge a

Venture firms raised $9.3 billion in Q1 according to PitchBook data, which means this year likely won’t match or surpass 2023’s $81.8 billion total. While emerging managers are feeling the fundraising market’s frost the most, some emerging VCs like A* have enough name recognition, and a good enough track record, to still find success. A*,

Zepto has more than doubled its valuation to $3.6 billion from $1.4 billion in less than a year in a new funding round of $665 million as the Mumbai-based startup intensifies the quick commerce competition in the world’s second largest internet market. Zepto sells and delivers everything from grocery items to electronic gadgets within 10

Ali Rathod-Papier has stepped down from her role as global head of compliance at corporate card expense management startup Brex to join venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a partner and compliance officer, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Rathod-Papier and a16z declined to comment on the move. According to her LinkedIn profile, Rathod-Papier now “oversees a16z’s

As the U.S. Surgeon General is calling for a warning label on social media sites, similar to those found on tobacco products, one startup is launching a set of new tools that put the power to fight app addiction into users’ own hands. Designed for iOS, Roots offers an improvement over traditional screen-time apps by

Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In 2020, TechCrunch reported that Société Générale spent around €100 million to acquire Shine. It wasn’t a huge acquisition but it attracted quite a bit of

C12 is announcing that it recently raised an €18 million funding round ($19.4 million at today’s exchange rate). Originally founded in 2020 as a spin-off from the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, the company has been working on a unique process to create quantum computers based on carbon nanotubes. While the concept of

Pok Pok, a kids app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its

Ask any of the health-focused VCs to name one of the top AI startups and one name comes up over and over again: a company  based in Pittsburgh called Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched before OpenAI was a household name and LLMs entered the common Valley vocabulary.  In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing

Move over, Perplexity. There’s a new AI-powered search engine in town — and its creators think it can best the many, many other attempts out there. Called Genspark, the platform taps generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries. Type in a search like, “What’s the best baby formula for newborns?” and

Zal Bilimoria has been a solo general partner since 2018, and has no plans to stop. And he credits the decision to former colleague, David Lee, who started Refactor Capital with him in 2016. He said that he would not have been able to start the Burlingame-based firm without Lee, a former Google executive who

Loop, the car insurance company co-founded by Harlem Capital co-founder John Henry, has laid off staff as the company struggles with fundraising.  Henry took to Instagram to post the email his co-founder Carey Nadeau sent to impacted staff on June 16th. Nadeu also posted the letter to LinkedIn. It stated that this was the “absolute

Food technology startup Tender Food Inc. is a four-year-old startup elbowing its way into a market that is already crowded with well-known brands. It’s doing so well that it already secured a contract with Clover Food Lab’s fast-food chain in the Boston area. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company, formerly known as Boston Meats, develops plant-based alternative

When Manny Griffiths worked with a personal injury lawyer after his wife’s car accident, he was surprised by the lack of information and communication from their lawyer regarding their claim. The couple sometimes wouldn’t hear from their lawyer for months and found the entire process to be really opaque. Griffiths dug deeper and learned that

Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is finalizing a fresh fundraise of about $100 million to $125 million that slashes its valuation to $2.5 billion, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.  That’s a steep decline in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s value, which was worth $10 billion in 2019. The startup, struggling to raise from

At first, John Pasmore was excited about ChatGPT.  The serial founder had been in the artificial intelligence space since at least 2008. He recalled the days when experts declared it would take decades before the world saw anything like a ChatGPT. Fast-forward — that day has now come.  But there is a catch.  ChatGPT, one of

There has been a lot of bad news about social media startups lately. Multiple companies, including Twitter alternative Post News, and IRL have shut down. And ShareChat’s valuation has dropped more than 50% after a recent funding round. But amid the negative headlines, the recent exit of French social network BeReal looks like a bright

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Hold on to your Apple Watches, folks! At WWDC 2024, Apple finally decided to give Siri a brain transplant with something they’re calling “Apple Intelligence” (AI—get

For centuries, people chewed willow tree bark to relieve pain, but scientists at chemical firm Bayer didn’t isolate its active ingredient until the 1800s and eventually patented its modified version as Aspirin. Aspirin is just one example of a medicine derived from natural sources. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that around 40% of

Byju’s is having a hard time raising the full $200 million from its rights issues that its founder had previously claimed was oversubscribed, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. And now, India’s National Company Law Tribunal has restrained the company from proceeding with its second rights issue amid allegations of oppression and mismanagement by

Among all the young AI startups being ruthlessly pursued by VCs these days, GPTZero has already grown into profitability in its first year and a half of life, generating millions in revenue. Founded by 24-year-old Edward Tian and 26-year-old Alex Cui, who’ve been friends since high school, GPTZero offers a detection tool that helps identify

The European economy is on shaky ground, but there is a silver lining for enterprise startups: Those building tools to help businesses run their finances in more steady and predictable ways are seeing a boost.  In the latest development, AccountsIQ, a Dublin-founded accounting technology company, has raised €60 million (about $65 million) to build “the

When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway, in 2019, he knew he was not the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans to millennials scrolling through Instagram. But he found that launching after his peers ended up being a blessing in disguise in all areas but one.