Fundings and Exits

If you’ve been working in the French tech ecosystem, you may remember a startup called AppGratis. The app discovery and promotion startup basically had to stop operating overnight following a long and nasty fight with Apple. From the team that brought you AppGratis, Batch is a customer engagement platform that has been operating under the

Online education company Udemy this morning set an initial IPO price range for its upcoming debut. The San Francisco-based edtech unicorn — backed by Learn Capital, Insight Partners and Norwest, among others — expects to price its IPO between $27 and $29 per share. The company could be valued at more than $4 billion at

Aging is inevitable, but Modern Age wants to help you do it in a way that is healthier. Melissa Earner, former vice president at Amazon and COO at Glossier, is behind the company, which is announcing $27 million in Series A funding led by Oak HC/FT. Longevity has a personal component for her: As she

There are many in the world of AI who worry about its implications. One of those people is Navrina Singh, a former product manager for Qualcomm, then Microsoft, who saw firsthand at Microsoft how a Twitter bot it developed in 2016 as an experiment in “conversational understanding,” was, to quote The Verge, “taught to be

BluePallet, an online marketplace connecting manufacturers with the chemical industry, announced today that it has raised $5 million in a funding round led by Vinmar Ventures, a subsidiary of petrochemical manufacturer Vinmar International.  The startup also announced today that it has become the first industrial commerce platform to “officially” operate on Alibaba.com. This means that

Mage, developing an artificial intelligence tool for product developers to build and integrate AI into apps, brought in $6.3 million in seed funding led by Gradient Ventures. Co-founders Tommy Dang and Xiaoyou Wang started the company at the end of 2020 after working together to build internal low-code tools at Airbnb. While collaborating with product

The people who work on shipping vessels are vital to world trade, but they still experience a lot of arcane hiring processes. Many lack transparency about important things like pay or even the working conditions of they ships they will spend months on. Maritime recruitment platform Seafair was created to solve these problems. It vets

It’s been an active four quarters for technology IPOs. If you rewind the clock to Q4 2020, we’ve seen megawatt public debuts from tech shops of all sorts. Airbnb recovered from COVID-19-induced lows to list, while Roblox delayed its IPO and went out with a direct listing. DoorDash went public. C3.ai had an explosive offering

The necessity of animal testing is a sad one for the process of drug discovery, but there’s seemingly no good alternative to mice, even though they’re not particularly accurate human analogues. Quris claims to have the first real option in its combination of AI with data from a “patient on a chip” that provides remarkably

January 2020 seems like a long time ago: Billie Eilish swept the Grammy Awards, Tesla’s market cap made it America’s most valuable car company, and Visa announced plans to purchase Plaid for $5.3 billion. A year later, the credit card giant balked at the deal after it attracted regulatory scrutiny, but Ryan Lawler reports that

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Or, as in today’s episode, talk our way through some big breaking news from the technology world so that we can better understand just what is going on. Danny and Alex got together late Friday on a

Continuing our series of interviews with leading technology luminaries, The Exchange recently caught up with Visionary Founder/CEO at Large Unicorn as its IPO priced and began to trade this week. After a rapid-fire series of S-1 filings, Large Unicorn priced above its own expectations, raising more capital than it had likely anticipated during the lead-up

There may be plenty of funding for some startups these days. But plenty of companies will tell you otherwise. VC Lab, an accelerator for venture capital firms, wants to create investors who will back the rest of the world. A basic hurdle to this goal is the standard paperwork you need to set up a

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was one of our strongest shows yet, with a wide diversity of news items that were genuinely fun (and complicated) to chew through. And even though we started off kind of grumpy, we laughed

MagicCube, a mobile security startup, has raised $15 million in a round led by Mosaik Partners. Bold Capital, Epic Ventures, card-reader/POS hardware maker ID Tech and unnamed individual investors in the fintech space also participated in the financing, which brings the Santa Clara-based startup’s total funding raised to $30 million since its 2014 inception. Put

Andy Stinnes Contributor Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, leads early-stage investments in cloud businesses and serves as active board member and adviser, offering operational support for portfolio companies based on his 20+ years in executive roles in business software. More posts by this contributor Seed is not the new Series A

Sitting here waiting for GitLab to actually start trading, I’m still digesting the company’s IPO price. When we first caught up with GitLab’s IPO filing, TechCrunch did a little math magic and decided that it wasn’t unlikely that the company would manage to secure a $10 billion valuation in its debut. At that price point,

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? Fashion. Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the world of fashion resale and rental. It’s no small

Update: The round in question was $135 million, not $100 million as originally noted. I apologize for the mistake! What do you call AI these days? ML in a suit. ML, or machine learning, is a big market today. That is thanks to modern corporations accreting data like hoarders and data science maturing as a

Matik, which has created automated data-driven software for customizing Google Slides or PowerPoint presentations, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Menlo Ventures, BoxGroup and Oceans Ventures also participated in the financing, which brings the San Francisco-based startup’s total raised to just over $23 million since its

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) has been making headlines all over the place this year — from Square’s planned acquisition of Afterpay to Affirm going public. Still, Latin America remains an under-penetrated market in the increasingly crowded space. Nelo, a startup founded by former Uber international growth team leads, began offering buy now, pay later

The Exchange is digging into the Chinese venture capital market this week, but getting folks to chat about business and China on the record is turning out to be slightly harder than we anticipated. More on that later this week. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or

Carving out 45 minutes or an hour for a workout can be difficult between work, home and daily life. Digital fitness and wellness company FitOn was created to provide 15- or 20-minute workouts aimed at getting people moving in whatever time they can make. The company closed on an $18 million Series B round of

As last week came to a close, NerdWallet filed to go public. Given the late hour, our S-1 dive had to wait until today. The NerdWallet IPO comes at an interesting time. The company provides financial product recommendations to both consumers and SMBs, meaning that it dabbles in the same market that fintech startups play

The potential for telehealth across Africa is vast and promising as mobile connectivity  deepens, and innovations that could potentially bridge the doctor-patient ratio gap increase according to a Deloitte report. One company that is planning to drive the wave of telemedicine across the continent, as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, is mPharma, a Ghanaian health

Pets continue to be big business, and Alpha Paw is the latest to draw investor attention. The Austin-based company raised $8 million in Series A funding, led by Nordic Eye, after bootstrapping for the past three years. CEO Ramon van Meer took over the company in 2018 via an acquisition and is working with his

Dave Mullen Contributor Dave Mullen is an investor at SVB Capital, where he focuses largely on fintech, proptech and insurtech. Dave was previously an investor with Wells Fargo’s principal investment arm and is currently the proptech vertical lead for the EVCA. Venture-backed fintechs raised a record $30.8 billion in the second quarter of this year,

Productfy Inc., a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that aims to build “DeFi for traditional finance,” has raised $16 million in a Series A round of funding led by CM Ventures. Existing backers Point72 Ventures, 500 Startups and Envestnet | Yodlee also participated in the financing, which brings its total raised since its 2018 inception to nearly

The founders of Upmesh were building a game on top of Twitch’s API when they realized something about another group of livestreamers. Even though selling through Facebook Live has been gaining popularity in Southeast Asia for years, many vendors are still going through their comments afterward and using pen-and-paper to collect orders. Upmesh was created

Many of the problems we face today in biology and agriculture have been faced before — but not by humans. Somewhere in nature there is a microscopic creature that accomplishes naturally and efficiently what chemists and bioengineers are struggling to do at all — and Pluton Biosciences claims to have pioneered a way to find