Fundings and Exits

News that the SenseTime IPO is on hold leaves the stock market with just one major tech listing on the horizon: Samsara’s public debut, which is currently anticipated to price Tuesday and trade Wednesday. That makes it the perfect moment to sit back and chat through a few of the year’s biggest offerings and how

As consumers think more about what they are putting in their bodies, they are also thinking about what they are feeding their pets. Driven by the global pandemic and everyone being at home with their pets, sales topped $100 billion in 2020 in this sector. Austin-based Maev, developing human-grade raw dog food, is poised to

The 2021 IPO cycle is winding down this week as HashiCorp and Nubank priced their public debuts and listed. Happily for startup fans and the venture classes, both IPOs went well. Samsara’s IPO will come next week if current calendars hold up, but that’s pretty much it for the year. We made it to the

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Friends, we’re almost there: the end of the year that felt like a decade. This week, Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex put aside their 2021 fatigue and talked through a week full of news – and

Nuvocargo, a logistics startup out to help simplify the challenges of cross-border trade, has raised $20.5 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management. The round valued the New York-based startup at $180 million, more than double the $70 million it was valued at when it raised $12 million in April. The company says it

Amid a hectic year, the continent’s VC momentum appears set to continue in 2022 Alex Wilhelm 8 hours Europe, long viewed as a relative backwater to the U.S. startup market, has been on a tear in recent quarters and years. Akin to many startup markets around the world, Europe has seen its venture capital totals

Grocery delivery startup Tiggy is a new player in the Canadian quick commerce space, announcing Friday $6.35 million in seed funding to get its dark stores up-and-running to accommodate 15-minute deliveries. E-commerce sales are a $29 billion market in Canada, but food delivery is still nascent. Eugene Bisovka and Razmik Sukyasov co-founded Vancouver-based Tiggy in

Robust Intelligence, an AI startup that helps businesses stress test their AI models and prevent them from failing, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Tiger Global. Previous investor Sequoia, which led the company’s Series A round, as well as Harpoon Venture Capital and Engineering Capital also

First Resonance makes software for making hardware. The company’s Ion platform provides an all-in-one option for anyone who has to manage manufacturing lines, supply chains, engineering and design, among other things. Now, with $14M in new funding, the company aims to scale up its presence and make a full-court press on the hardware makers of

Pod Foods is keeping grocery shelves full of the emerging food brands that consumers are asking for and announced today $10 million in Series A funding to continue developing its digital wholesale business-to-business marketplace. We profiled the Austin-based company’s founders Larissa Russell and Fiona Lee back in 2019 when they raised $3 million in a

Digital identity startup Passbase, which offers SDKs for running remote identity checks, has raised $10 million in Series A funding as it dials up attention on crypto compliance — touting tools to help fintechs with rapidly evolving regulatory requirements. The funding is led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Lakestar, Eniac Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and

The venture capital market is on a tear, pumping capital into a host of startups around the world. It’s generally considered a great time to raise capital and build a technology-centered, disruptive business. For some, that is. While the venture capital boom of the last few years has helped a great number of founders, the

Byju’s has acquired Austria-headquartered GeoGebra, the latest in a series of purchases by the Indian edtech giant this year as it scales its online learning platform across the globe. Neither of the firms disclosed the purchase price, but a source familiar with the matter said the deal size is about $100 million and includes both

The launch sector is getting crowded. Many of the biggest players are building their own rocket engines, but space startup Ursa Major is betting that many new launch providers would rather outsource the engine than build it in-house. Six years after being founded by former SpaceX and Blue Origin propulsion engineer Joe Laurienti, the company

Finding the right therapist is never an easy task, but it gets even harder when, as a person of color or someone with disabilities, there are few or no people sharing your experience available. Therify hopes to change that with a network of providers from and catering to marginalized populations. “It just makes a ton

Nearside, the online bank for SMBs formerly called Hatch, announced today it has raised a $58 million Series B, just seven months after announcing its Series A. The latest round was led by Valar Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins; Foundation Capital; Jim Breyer, the founder of Breyer Capital; Creative Artists Agency founder Michael Ovitz;

Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) announced in a recent filing that it has received questions from the United States government regarding its anticipated combination with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). TechCrunch covered the SPAC’s planned combination with the company associated with former U.S. President Donald Trump here. We were broadly skeptical of the deal,

Here in the United States, we’re counting down to the Nubank and HashiCorp IPOs that should touch down in mere days. But those are not the only technology offerings to keep eyes on at the moment. SenseTime, a Chinese AI company, is also listing this week, providing a new window into the value of the

Stacked, a web-based platform that provides passive investment tools for retail investors interested in crypto, just announced it raised a $35 million Series A co-led by Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Bybit and BitDAO partner Mirana Ventures co-led the round alongside Alameda. Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, DRW Venture

Online grocery sales are in single digits right now, but new data suggests it will top 20% by 2026 due to more consumers getting comfortable buying their groceries this way over the past two years. JOKR, an instant grocery delivery startup based in New York and operating in the Americas, is getting out ahead of

People come together around the dinner table and the food they love, but for Umamicart founder and CEO Andrea Xu, it wasn’t always easy to find the ingredients to make the foods she grew up eating with her family. Xu’s parents are Chinese, but moved to Spain, opening up their own Chinese restaurant. She recalls

The plan is simple: First, we create a knockoff of a popular digital service. Second, we cry political persecution. Third, we raise a bunch of money with a SPAC. And then, to cap it off, we take on AWS. Got it? What’s actually funny is that I am not kidding. That is not only a

Grab, the Southeast Asian super app, announced last night that it completed its business combination with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Altimeter Growth. The result? Grab will begin trading today on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “GRAB.” And it raised a pile of money in the process. Billions, in fact. The Exchange explores startups,

What goes up must come down. And what goes SPAC must go splat? We’ll keep workshopping that. Regardless, shares of super app Grab took a pounding today after its SPAC combination was approved last night and began to trade this morning. Grab’s stock initially rose, before falling sharply as the day went on. By the

Mendel, a corporate spend management solution for enterprises in Latin America, announced today that it has secured $35 million in debt and equity.  The Mexico-based startup closed the $15 million Series A round and $20 million debt financing after participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. ALLVP and Infinity Ventures, a firm founded by a

1inch, a popular aggregator of decentralized protocols, has raised $175 million in what it calls a Series B funding round. It isn’t a traditional venture round as the company isn’t selling a stake in exchange for money. Instead, 1inch has sold $175 million worth of 1INCH tokens in a private token sales with institutional investors.

One day after announcing an amendment to its SPAC agreement, digital mortgage lender Better.com confirmed today that it is laying off roughly 9% of its nearly 10,000 person staff. Doing the math, that amounts to about 900 people. The company declined to comment beyond the following written statement from CFO Kevin Ryan: “A fortress balance

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. Today? We discussed if the era of founder-led

Spain’s Jobandtalent, a “workforce marketplace”-cum-digital temping agency which uses AI to match workers to casual labor gigs in sectors like warehousing, ecommerce and logistics, has closed a $500 million Series E round of funding led by Kinnevik and with what it bills as a “significant” follow on by SoftBank VisionFund 2. Existing investors including Atomico,

Startups are often questions: What if we did things in a new way, instead of the way we have been? Massive is a good example of the genre: What if users could pay for apps or services not with money or attention, but with their spare compute power? The general concept of distributed compute power