Fundings and Exits

Coding education platform co-founders Tung Nguyen and Ha Nguyen Vietnam’s digital economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, but the country is facing a growing shortage of IT workers. Many kids want to study coding, but school curriculums are limited, said Tung Nguyen, the co-founder of MindX, an online/offline education platform that

Podium is back at the fundraising well this year, adding $201 million to its accounts at a $3 billion valuation (post-money). The Utah-based company, which provides software services including communications and payments tools to SMBs, last raised $125 million at a roughly $1.5 billion valuation. That deal was announced in April 2020. Podium CEO Eric

Homebase, a Ho Chi Minh City-based proptech startup that helps people buy homes, announced today it has raised $30 million in equity and debt (the ratio was undisclosed). The company’s business model is similar to Divvy Homes and ZeroDown in the United States and, in fact, Divvy Homes co-founder and former CEO Brian Ma and

The commercial real estate brokerage market in South Korea is fragmented, which makes finding a new office for tenants a challenge due to inaccurate listing information, high brokerage fee and complex paperwork. A Seoul-based proptech startup called Rsquare built a data-driven platform to digitize the process, enabling tenants to compare multiple properties and find an office.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines! Friday afternoon the Equity team took to a Twitter Space to hit on a topic that we had to cut from our regular end-of-week show, namely crypto earnings and how Wall Street

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 Friday show, a roundup of the week’s biggest and most fascinating stories from startups, venture capital and technology. Natasha and Alex along with Grace and Chris had to cut

The global venture capital market is increasingly active, but few locales are seeing the sort of investment acceleration that African startups are enjoying this year. New data indicates that African startups have already outraised all known prior years, meaning 2021 is sure to be a record. But, more importantly, the pace at which African startups

Husband-and-wife co-founders Daniel and Brenna Stitzel are developing a way for foodies to monetize their culinary creations and closed on a round of $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to officially launch Foody. The investment was led by Serena Ventures, with Goodwater Capital and a group of angel investors joining, including Patreon’s Jack Conte, former Postmates

Food and beverage startup The Naked Market bagged $27.5 million of Series A investment, led by Integrated Capital, to continue developing its line of healthier food brands. The company was founded in 2019 by Harrison Fugman, Alex Kost and Tim Marbach, who created a “fast fail” method to develop new foods that includes an end-to-end

With record venture capital totals, record numbers of startups worth $1 billion or more, and eye-watering revenue multiples available for private and public technology companies alike, you could be forgiven for having concern that we’re heading for a dot-com-style correction. The believers are not convinced. And for good reason, it turns out. The Exchange explores

Less than six months after raising $8 million in seed funding, Chilean proptech startup Houm has raised $35 million in a Series A round led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Goodwater Capital. Fifth Wall also participated in the financing, along with existing backers OneVC, Elad Gil, Liu Jang and new investors Fen Ventures, Broadhaven

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today we spoke about the revolution within agriculture otherwise known as vertical farming. Alex and Natasha spoke to Hardware

After spending more than a decade building out its expense management platform, Expensify went public today, listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker “EXFY.” Early returns have been positive, as the company revised its original listing price up — and still saw its shares rise 40% on its first day of trading. We’ve written a

Cacheflow this morning announced its exit from stealth and a seed round worth $6 million. The startup is a wager that the software buying experience of today is antiquated — and a rising source of frustration. So, Cacheflow is building a hybrid buying service and financing solution to make it simpler. On the money side

Fashion commerce firm Nykaa rose as much as 89% on its Indian market debut Wednesday, gaining a valuation of $13 billion in the nation’s first women-led unicorn listing. Shares of FSN E-Commerce Ventures, which operates the Nykaa brand, opened at 2,018 ($27.2) Indian rupees and went as high as 2,129, up from its initial public

The unprecedented rush of venture capital into startups is having an interesting knock-on effect: “Venture capital investors are racing to pay more to buy smaller pieces of startups that are less profitable than before,” writes Alex Wilhelm, who studied Silicon Valley Bank’s State of the Markets Report Q4 2021. Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available

Sweetgreen, a fast-casual restaurant chain that attracted ample venture capital during its life as a private company, set early terms for its IPO this morning. The well-known salad-slinger expects to sell stock in its public market debut at a range of $23 to $25 per share. Inclusive of shares reserved for its underwriting banks, Sweetgreen is

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You

Alpha JWC co-founders Jefrey Joe and Chandra Tjan. Image Credits: Alpha JWC Alpha JWC, the Jakarta-based venture capital firm, announced today it has closed its third fund at $433 million. The company says this makes it Southeast Asia’s largest VC fund for early-stage startups and that it was oversubscribed, with an initial target of $250

As venture capital totals grow in Latin America, the region is about to see its leading champion go public. Nubank’s IPO is coming into closer focus after the Brazilian neobank filed privately to list its shares in both the United States and its home market, later releasing a public IPO filing. One investor in the

The global meat substitute market was valued at $4.51 billion two years ago and is expected to double by 2027, attracting startups, like alternative meat food tech company AKUA, that aim to solidify a prominent place in the up-and-coming industry. Former technology journalist Courtney Boyd Myers co-founded AKUA with Matthew Lebo, who was an adviser

Julia Niiro is on a mission to create a food supply chain that connects small farmers directly to consumers. Niiro started MilkRun, a subscription service delivering weekly grocery staples sourced from small, local farms, in 2018 after becoming a small farmer herself in Portland, Oregon. She had purchased a meat-processing company and was working with

HashiCorp filed go public this week, becoming the latest addition to our growing roster of expected fourth-quarter IPOs. The cloud infrastructure unicorn presents an interesting mix of open source and proprietary code, with recurring revenues and a nascent hosted product. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. And have fun! This week our very own Mary Ann was off — we send her our best, as she is a living saint — so Natasha and Alex and Grace and

Products developed to manage artificial intelligence data are still largely fragmented, solving one problem at a time for developers, but not the entire life cycle. Enter Sama, a company providing high-quality training data that powers AI technology applications. CEO Wendy Gonzalez said the company is developing the first end-to-end AI tool for training data through

Of all the startup markets in the world, fintech in Latin America is one of the hottest. Capital is flowing into the region’s financial technology companies at a slicing pace, leading to a wave of startups that are building private-market value at a simply astounding rate. The sheer volume of capital flowing into LatAm fintech

You may have visited some quick-service restaurants or other retailers in the past few months and noticed signs posted with shortened hours or not being open on a certain day. Dubbed “The Great Resignation,” the mass exodus of hourly workers over the past 18 months has now resulted in a competition for talent. So much

Paytm has raised $1.104 billion in India’s largest-ever anchor round as part of its initial public offering, which is also shaping up to be the nation’s largest, as the poster child of the Indian startup ecosystem moves closer to listing in the public markets. Blackrock, GIC, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Birla MF are among

Fresh water is one of the many resources increasingly being affected by climate change, which in turn affects businesses that rely on this abundant but still limited natural resource. Waterplan, armed with a $2.6 million seed round, is looking to analyze and track not just how a company’s water use affects the local environment, but

When marketers Paul Benigeri and Geoffrey Woo were at their former companies, in food tech and e-commerce infrastructure, respectively, they experienced how manual and repetitive digital marketing workflows were, especially as the number of disparate and unintegrated marketing tools grew. With the goal of making their own lives easier, they formed Archive.ai in March to