Fundings and Exits

Fundbox, a company that offers loans to small businesses, announced today it has raised $100 million in a Series D round at a valuation of $1.1 billion. Or more simply, the company aims to solve SMBs’ working capital needs through its credit and payments offerings. It is particularly focused on B2B-focused small businesses. “We use

GajiGesa’s earned wage access feature user flow GajiGesa, a fintech company focused on services for Indonesian workers, announced today that it has raised $6.6 million USD in pre-Series A funding. The round was led by MassMutual Ventures, with participation from January Capital, European earned wage access company Wagestream (EWA is GajiGesa’s flagship feature), Bunda Group,

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. With a holiday-impacted week behind us, we hope that you are ready for the next few weeks of busy news. Because starting in the back-half of December, the world is going to slow

When TechCrunch asks Flowrite if it’s ‘Grammarly on steroids’, CEO and co-founder Aaro Isosaari laughs, saying that’s the comment they always get for the AI writing productivity tool they’ve been building since late summer 2020 — drawing on early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API, and attracting a wait-list of some 30,000 email-efficiency seeking prosumers keen

Happy Friday! The TechCrunch crew is still in a modest period of repose thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, but we wanted you to have numbers to chew on all the same. So, this morning, we’re taking a brief look at Samsara’s IPO filing. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on

Voice AI company SoundHound is set to go public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC transaction at a nearly $2.1 billion valuation in early 2022, blank check company Archimedes and its target announced. The last time you heard SoundHound’s name might have been several years ago when it was considered a lesser-known Shazam competitor. Now

Sales of plant-based alternatives, like dairy and meat, are surging in the global market, and Perfeggt wants to do the same for the egg. The Berlin-based foodtech company is poised to debut its chicken-less egg product in the first quarter of 2022 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Today, the company announced it raised $2.8 million

Life science company Longevica said Wednesday it is launching an open research tool so scientists and research institutions can access a data set that tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is the latest effort from the biotechnology company, which is researching mechanisms of healthy aging and life extension.

It’s boom times for startups building with or atop AI functionality: The Exchange explored the rise in venture capital dollars for AI startups last week, noting that investment into the business niche set all-time records in Q4 2020, and then successively in quarters one, two and three in 2021. The Exchange explores startups, markets and

Mosaic Foods, a plant-based food company, announced Tuesday $6 million in seed funding as it continues to develop more products. The New York-based company came onto the food scene in 2019, co-founded by Matt Davis and Sam McIntire, with its line of frozen veggie bowls that includes recipes like peanut tofu bowl and butternut squash

As more of the world shifts to doing everything from their smartphones, the ability to build better iOS and Android apps has to move with it. Bitrise aims to be the go-to company closing the gap between that mobile demand and a company’s ability to get apps out faster while also balancing all of the

What is a startup? It’s a question so picked over at this point that it feels like the only answer is it depends. That’s fair. In the past, we might have said that once a private-market company earns a $1 billion valuation, it is no longer a startup. But with venture capitalists and crossover investors

Berlin-based Yababa only started its same-day grocery delivery business this summer, selling products geared towards the tastes of the capital’s sizeable Turkish and Arabic communities shortly afterwards, but in a few short months it’s closed a $15.5 million seed round of funding to fuel planned rapid expansion — both within Germany and across Europe. “Paris,

AutoCloud announced a $4 million seed round this morning. The cloud-focused startup’s investment was led by Animo Ventures, with participating checks from Uncorrelated Ventures, B Capital Group and Moxxie Ventures. AutoCloud is the commercial side of the CloudGraph open source project. The hybrid open source (OSS) and commercial combination is an increasingly popular startup method

If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have expected a different result from Paytm’s IPO. After all, the company is incredibly well-funded by investors that you know by name, and the Indian fintech giant has sufficiently scaled into a global brand. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+

Walmart-backed Flipkart is acquiring online pharmacy startup SastaSundar to enter the healthcare segment in India as e-commerce battle intensifies in the world’s second largest internet market. Flipkart said it has signed definitive agreements to acquire a majority stake in SastaSundar, but did not disclose the size of the deal. Eight-year-old SastaSundar was last valued at

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Good news, everyone: Mary Ann is back! Yes, after a short absence we have our third Friday host back where she belongs. Namely right in front of a microphone, talking to us. And

The decision by Sequoia to become a registered investment adviser (RIA) and move to a “singular, permanent structure,” in its own words, landed with a splash in the U.S. venture capital market. But perhaps it shouldn’t have made quite as many waves as it did. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every

The market for crypto-focused investing is growing rapidly. News that Paradigm put together a $2.5 billion fund the other day is a reminder of the scale of funds now available to startups looking to build on the blockchain. Andreessen Horowitz has a mega-fund in the market as well, while Coinbase Ventures is setting a blistering

Ranga Bodla Contributor Ranga Bodla is the head of industry marketing for Oracle NetSuite and responsible for driving overall strategy and go-to-market success across all of NetSuite’s industries. Funding for startups is on fire. But sometimes to get that funding, particularly after the seed round, startups need to have their financial house in order. In

In February, parents received a shock when a report from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform showed that some commercial baby foods were found to contain “dangerous levels” of toxic metals. This caused a flurry of information in the media on the impacts and what parents can do to avoid it, which included

Travel is back, at least according to experts who say travel bookings for over the Thanksgiving holiday are showing to be even higher than pre-pandemic levels. Anyone who loves travel or is that friend who always plans the best vacations, Fora has a tool for you. The company was co-founded by onefinestay’s Evan Frank, Virtuoso

Party Round is building software that it hopes will make the process of raising early-stage corporate capital far simpler than it is today. And the company just used its own service to raise $7 million. A host of names took part in the, well, party round, including Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six fund, Anish Acharya from

Brands are always looking for new ways to get in front of potential customers, but though influencer marketing has grown, it’s still not so easy for brands to find the right person. That’s where Carro comes in. David Perry and Jason Goldberg co-founded the company in 2015 and built a cross-store selling and influencer commerce

A decade ago, Vijay Shekhar Sharma flew to Hong Kong to attend an All Things D conference. At the event, he watched Silicon Valley executives Jack Dorsey and Brian Chesky talk about the firms they were building. But the conversation that would change the trajectory of his firm, One97 Communications, was an interview of Alibaba

Few companies had as good a pandemic run as Instacart. The company’s service saw huge demand gains, leading to waves of venture capital interest. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. From a late 2018 funding cycle that valued the U.S. grocery

Many real estate technology companies are developing technology that is in competition with, or could potentially replace, real estate agents. One startup that aims to help agents succeed and flourish with its technology and “bundled business services,” Place, has raised $100 million in a Series A round at a valuation north of $1 billion. Goldman

Singapore-based Deskimo, the on-demand app that lets people find co-working spaces and pay by the minute, announced today it has raised a $3 million seed round. It is also soft launching in Jakarta, bringing its total markets to three, along with Singapore and Hong Kong. Participants in the round included Y Combinator (Deskimo was part

Facily, a São Paulo-based social commerce marketplace, has quietly raised over $366 million in funding across four different rounds over the last year. Most recently, Facily closed on a $250 million Series D that was led by DX Ventures and Berlin-based Delivery Hero, with Citius as co-anchor investor. That investment values the startup at $850

Justt, a Tel Aviv-based chargeback mitigation startup, is emerging out of stealth today with $70 million in total funding. Founded in February 2020 by Roenen Ben-Ami and Ofir Tahor, Justt says it fully automates chargeback disputes on behalf of online merchants. The startup recently raised $50 million a Series B round of funding led by