Fundings and Exits

SeekOut, an 8-year-old recruiting startup that uses AI to find candidates, has cut about 30% of its workforce on Thursday, TechCrunch has learned. “Lately, we have been spending roughly $2 to earn $1, and this last fiscal year, we incurred significant cash burn,” SeekOut’s CEO Anoop Gupta and CTO Aravind Bala wrote in a letter

Pine Labs, a merchant commerce startup, has received approval from a Singapore court to merge its local entity with its Indian unit, and transfer all its assets and properties, effectively permitting the firm to shift its operations to India. Pine Labs disclosed the court order in a recent regulatory filing seen by TechCrunch. Pine Labs

When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many others wanted in, he could have ordered over 100 units.  “I had way too many people than I could handle,” Wang,

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road.  Two recent entrants — Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential — are poised to get

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. We’ve been drowning in AI news this week. Google’s I/O set the pace: At its keynote, the word “AI” came up on average once per minute

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also take your brand center stage with your own event during the most anticipated tech gathering of the year? Yes, you read that right — you

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up construction to managing residential, commercial and retail properties. But unlike his parents, Mor also had a passion for technology. His interest in tech was reinforced

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after the United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking to convert the company’s debt reorganization Chapter 11 bankruptcy Synapse into a liquidation Chapter 7, according to court documents. The trustee wrote that the need

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts, and industry leaders gather to witness the unveiling of groundbreaking technologies, engage in thought-provoking discussions, and forge invaluable connections. As we gear up

The U.S. restaurant industry is expected to pass $1 trillion in sales for the first time this year, despite wider economic pressures on consumers. Now Restaurant365, a startup building tech to manage those businesses, has raised a hot $175 million to capitalize on that growth.  The funding is being led by ICONIQ Growth, with KKR

For years, Sammy Faycurry has been hearing from his registered dietitian (RD) mom and sister about how poorly many Americans eat and their struggles with delivering nutritional counseling. Although nearly half of all adults in the country are affected by chronic conditions linked to unhealthy diets, health plans have a limited number of in-network registered

TechCrunch Disrupt, our flagship startup event held annually in San Francisco, is back on October 28-30 — and you can expect a bustling crowd of thousands of startup enthusiasts. Exciting news! We’re thrilled to unveil the near-complete agenda for the Builders Stage, the culmination of months of hard work. This is just one of six

Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from dozens of investors as part of an initial public offering that starts on Wednesday. Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Bay Pond, Mirae Asset Management, Steadview Capital, and HSBC, as well as Indian mutual funds operated by SBI, ICICI, Axis, Tata

Sona, a workforce management platform for frontline employees, has raised $27.5 million in a Series A round of funding. More than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce are reportedly in frontline jobs, which might be anything from customer service and healthcare to retail environments and hospitality. But managing this vast workforce, ensuring roles are filled and

Harness Lab isn’t founder Jyoti Bansal’s first startup. He sold AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017, the week it was supposed to go public. His latest venture has raised $425 million, per Crunchbase. On Tuesday, Harness announced $150 million in debt financing, essentially a line of credit that the company can draw on

Maad, a B2B e-commerce startup based in Senegal, has secured $3.2 million debt-equity funding to bolster its growth in the western Africa country and to explore fresh opportunities in the wider Francophone region. The seed round was led by Ventures Platform, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Reflect Ventures, Oui Capital, Launch Africa, Voltron Capital

We received countless submissions to speak at this year’s Disrupt 2024. After carefully sifting through all the applications, we’ve narrowed it down to 19 session finalists. Now we need your help to choose who will actually speak at the conference! Vote for the sessions you most want to see at Disrupt in October. You can

Buy-now-pay-later services have become so ubiquitous that BNPL may as well just be another way to say ‘debt.’ But in Mexico, where BNPL platform Aplazo operates, a large underbanked population makes BNPL more like an alternative to cash. The four-year-old Mexican fintech startup facilitates fractionated payments to offline and online merchants even when the buyer

Meesho, a leading e-commerce startup in India with about 150 million transacting users, has secured $275 million in a new funding round, the company disclosed in a securities filing. The new funding is part of a larger financing round that is likely to include secondary transactions and balloon to over $500 million, people familiar with

Back in September 2021, Cloudsmith raised $15 million in Series A funding for its cloud platform that manages companies’ software supply chains. At the time, that was the largest Series A round for a Northern Ireland company since 2005, so it definitely got something right! I was delighted to look over Cloudsmith’s deck to see

Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack also participated. The breakneck pace is more than a subtle indication that investors’ appetite for tech-focused solutions to the woes of the American industrial base

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for $1.64 billion in 2011. Chasen later developed Class, a Zoom add-on, during the pandemic to help teachers make better use of Zoom in a classroom

TabaPay has abandoned its plans to purchase the assets of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse, TabaPay confirmed to TechCrunch today. Synapse says the problem is banking partner Evolve Bank & Trust. And Evolve says it is not involved, and not to blame. Meanwhile, another player in the saga, Mercury, says Synapse’s allegations have “no merit.” Synapse’s

Here’s a tidbit of startup history that may not be widely known outside of the tech firms themselves: The first versions of popular Android apps, like Twitter, were built by Google itself. That revelation came about via a new podcast with Twitter’s former senior director of product management, Sara Beykpour, now the co-founder of the

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Yod Chinsupakul, said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. Line Man Wongnai has yet to finalize where it will launch the IPO, but a dual-listing

Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows in tall places, and now it’s back to take on more labor-intensive tasks. The Charlotte, N.C.-based company, which was part of Y Combinator’s 2019 cohort,

For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they launched the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka got their start building India’s national data platform called SocialCops. So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that they have

Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s also MyForest Foods and Fable Food. Then there’s Meati Foods, which claims it’s like no other alternative protein. The company makes cutlets and steaks from

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become part and parcel of major sports broadcasts. Replay caught the attention of Intel, which acquired the company in 2016 for a  reported $175 million, and

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months after Monzo raised £340 million ($425 million), meaning the London-based company has now raised north of $610 million in 2024, and $1.5 billion since its inception nine