Fundings and Exits

Una Brands, the e-commerce aggregator focused on Asia-Pacific brands, announced today it has raised $15 million for its Series A. The full-equity round was co-led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC, along with participation from returning investors and Ninjavan co-founder Alvin Teo. This news comes only five months after Una launched with a $40

Lumigo, a cloud-native application monitoring and debugging platform, today announced that it has raised a $29 million Series A funding round led by Redline Capital. Wing Venture Capital and Vertex Ventures US, together with existing investors Meron Capital, Pitango First and Grove Ventures, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to

More of the world’s economy is moving online, and that is underscored by the long list of recent fundings and acquisitions in the digital ID authentication and anti-money laundering (AML) space, including Okta’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0. Today, another startup announced it has raised capital: end-to-end due diligence platform First AML. Blackbird Ventures (which

ShopBack, the Rakuten-backed e-commerce loyalty platform, announced today it will acquire buy now, pay later startup Hoolah. Both companies are based in Singapore and operate in Southeast Asian markets. The deal was done in stock and cash, and terms were undisclosed. After the merger closes, ShopBack will own all of Hoolah, but the BNPL service’s

As the neobanking boom has matured into a collection of large digital banks, we’re slowly getting a better picture of the economics of such business efforts. Chime was early in telling the market that it was EBTIDA positive, for example, unlike less profitable European neobanks. The upcoming Nubank IPO — technically the public offering of

Salted, a Los Angeles-based startup creating digitally native quick-service restaurant brands, brought in a new round of $16 million in Series A funding to continue its nationwide expansion. The company was founded seven years ago by CEO Jeff Applebaum, but a focus on providing healthy QSR brands and going after the $325 billion food delivery

Hello, and welcome to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. And have a good time. This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a host of topics from the public and private markets alike. In our

As startup funding increases around the world, The Exchange has poked its head into markets as far-flung as Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Wherever we looked, we’ve found venture capital flowing in record quantities. The story has been largely the same inside the United States, with Boston having a solid year, along with

Edtech unicorn Udemy priced its IPO at $29 per share, the upper end of its IPO range. Using a simple share count, the company was worth around $4 billion at its IPO price and a few hundred million more if a full -diluted share count is employed in our valuation calculations. For edtech, the Udemy

Allbirds is a tech-enabled shoe company that raised a series of venture capital rounds since mid-2015, per Crunchbase data. And it’s going public. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. The company’s IPO would be something we’d cover regardless of how it

Swap, a São Paulo-based BaaS startup, announced today it has raised $25 million in a Series A led by Tiger Global Management. The financing was “heavily oversubscribed,” according to the company, which has now raised $28 million since its October 2018 inception. Endeavor, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, partners of DST Global, ONEVC, Global Founders Capital

If you make some software and sell it online, you can make lots of money. Thanks to low-cost distribution, it’s possible to write one bit of code and sell it many times, generating fat margins in the process. Throw in a larger industry trend toward recurring pricing as opposed to single-shot sales, and you have

Wavemaker Impact’s founders: (from left to right) Quentin Vaquette, Doug Parker, Marie Cheong, Paul Santos, and Steve Melhuish Wavemaker Partners doesn’t just want to invest in climate tech and sustainability startups. It also wants to help build them. Today, the Singapore-based firm announced the launch of Wavemaker Impact, a venture builder that identifies potential business

Paytm, one of India’s most valuable startups, is seeking to raise as much as $2.4 billion in what is shaping to be the biggest initial public offering in the country at a valuation of $20 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by TechCrunch. Paytm filed the paperworks for

It’s early in the Wednesday trading session, meaning that we’re waiting on the first trades of Rent the Runway stock on the public markets. But what we do know is that the company priced at $21 per share, giving it a valuation of $1.33 billion using a simple share count, and around $1.47 billion on

Based in Hong Kong, Finverse’s ambitious goal is to enable open banking throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The startup recently came out of stealth mode with $1.8 million in seed funding, and is now live in four markets (Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam) with connections to 30 banks. Founder and chief executive officer Stephane

It felt like something of a coming-of-age party for the Chicago startup scene, a city that has long held a leading position in the larger Midwest market, when Sprout Social went public. The company would go on to become a breakout IPO success, pricing at $17 per share in the closing days of 2019 to

Rent the Runway is expected to price its IPO later today and trade tomorrow morning, provided that all things go as planned. Udemy is also on the way to the public markets. Allbirds, too. And this week, Sweetgreen threw its hat into the ring. Sweetgreen is a food chain best known for salads that are popular

Chalo, a startup that is digitizing bus commutes in India and which recently raised $40 million in a financing round, has acquired Amazon-backed app-based office commute bus aggregator Shuttl in an all-cash deal, the two said on Tuesday. Chalo founder and chief executive Mohit Dubey said the acquisition of Shuttl, which operates thousands of buses

Seems like the goal of every startup is to exit via IPO, and if you can’t do that, by way of acquisition. In many cases, a sale gives a founder the opportunity to pay back investors and reward long-time employees, but what happens after the ink dries on the contract, and the reality of being

Welcome to the week! Sure, the technology and business worlds are busy digging through a deluge of Facebook-focused reporting ahead of the social media company’s earnings report, but we have other work to do. Namely, the Braze IPO filing. The New York City-based company focuses on customer engagement software. We’ll get into what that means

Meet Wefight, a French startup that has developed more than a dozen apps to help people suffering from chronic illness. Using a basic chatbot interface, people can ask questions and get answers about their illness. The startup recently raised a $11.6 million (€10 million) funding round from Digital Health Ventures, Impact Partners, as well as

Hello, and welcome to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. And have a good time. This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a bevy of topics from around the world of startups and technology more

When you file to go public, you want folks to like the numbers. You do not want people to mock the numbers. The most extreme version of this obvious truism was WeWork’s first run at the public markets. It filed, everyone found its results to be ridiculous, and the IPO eventually got yanked. A more

When news broke that former U.S. President Donald Trump had conceived of a media and technology company and intended to take it public via a blank-check company, you would have been forgiven if you immediately began to wonder how quickly you could short the stock. Pick a reason: Right-leaning social networks have largely flopped; the

Shares of Snap are off just over 20% this morning, a huge cut to the valuation of the social networking company. In one sense, the post-earnings drop is an indictment of the company’s business. On the other, Snap’s stock has merely retreated to midyear levels and remains far above the historical price range it found

Foodology has been whipping up its restaurant brands in cloud and virtual kitchens in Colombia and Mexico since 2019, and with a new infusion of capital, hopes to scale that across Latin America. The Bogotá-based company closed on $15 million in Series A funding in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Base Partners. Existing

XanPool, a payment infrastructure provider that facilitates faster crypto and fiat settlements, announced today it has raised a $27 million Series A led by Valar Ventures. The round included participation from CMT Digital, Wise founder and chairman Taavet Hinrikus and existing investors Gumi Gryptos and Antler. The funding brings XanPool’s total raised since it was

Mahendra Ramsinghani Contributor Mahendra Ramsinghani is the founder of Secure Octane Investments, investing in cloud infrastructure and security startups. When he is not investing, he is busy writing blogs and books. His third book “The Resilient Founder” will be released in 2022. More posts by this contributor Pandemic reset leads investors to focus on resilience,

Three months after announcing a $4 million seed round, Venezuelan delivery super app Yummy is back with an $18 million Series A round that will accelerate the company’s proposed expansion throughout Latin America. Anthos Capital led the latest round, with additional participation from JAM Fund, whose founder Justin Mateen was an investor in the seed