Fundings and Exits

Bees are absolutely critical to the health of our agricultural system, ecosystem, and overall wellbeing as a species here on Earth. And yet bee populations are decreasing and extinction concerns are growing. Beeflow, a startup that today announced the close of a $8.3 million Series A round, is looking to both save the bees and

As the second quarter races to a close, we’re down to the wire for IPOs looking to get out before June ends. One such company is SentinelOne, a cybersecurity startup backed by Insight Venture Partners, Redpoint, Tiger Global Management, Data Collective and Anchorage Capital, among others. SentinelOne raised an ocean of capital while private, including

Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, has raised “$50 million-plus” in a funding round that doubles its valuation to $2 billion. The latest financing comes just three months after the San Francisco-based startup raised $150 million in a Series D funding round

Thursday, a dating app that wants to solve problems created by, well, too much time spent using dating apps, had raised a £2.5 million (~$3.5M) seed investment — a few months after launching (in May) its single-matching service in London and New York (and racking up over 52k downloads). Last Thursday (June 17) it says

The pandemic has spurred interest in saving and investment apps around the world, especially ones geared toward newer investors. In Southeast Asia, startups in this space that have raised funding over the past few months include Ajaib, Bibit and Stashaway—and that’s just a (very) partial list. Now Infina, which calls itself the “Robinhood of Vietnam,”

Indian online learning platform Unacademy is in advanced talks to acquire Rheo TV, a less than two-year-old startup founded by two former Unacademy employees, according to three sources familiar with the matter. The current deal values Rheo TV, a startup that has built a platform to help professional game streamers live stream their gameplays and

Like other financial sectors in Latin America, the retail investing space is getting a facelift by local tech startups that are cashing in on the untapped potential for democratizing asset management in the region. One of those startups is Chilean-based Fintual, which today announced a $15 million round led by Kaszek Ventures, the largest fund

API Holdings, which operates the giant healthcare startup PharmEasy, said on Friday it has reached an agreement to acquire a 66.1% stake in Thyrocare, which runs a diagnostic lab chain, for about $613 million in what is the first ever acquisition of a publicly listed firm by an unicorn startup in the world’s second most

Hey Equity fam, we have a small clip of extra for you today. After our live show — listen to the recording here, it was good fun — we got to take a few questions from the audience, audio that was not included in the main episode as we didn’t have the time. But we’ve

Earlier this week, The Exchange wrote about the early-stage venture capital market, with the goal of understanding how some startups are raising more seed capital before they work on their Series A, while other startups are seemingly raising their first lettered round while in the nascent stages of scaling. The expedition was rooted in commentary

Years ago, U.S. ride-hailing giant Uber and its Chinese rival Didi were locked in an expensive rivalry in the Asian nation. After a financially bruising competition, Uber sold its China-based business to Didi, focusing instead on other markets. The two companies are coming head-to-head again, however, as Didi looks to list in the United States.

Mercuryo, a startup that has built a cross-border payments network, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding. The London-based company describes itself as “a crypto infrastructure company” that aims to make blockchain useful for businesses via its “digital asset payment gateway.” Specifically, it aggregates various payment solutions and provides fiat and

Stock in many American companies, like Amazon, Alphabet or Tesla, can host hundreds or thousands of dollars per share. Fractional trading, or buying part of a single share through a brokerage, makes them more accessible—at least to people within the United States. Investors in other countries, however, often have to pay high fees through interactive

Visa has announced plans to acquire Tink for €1.8 billion, or $2.15 billion at today’s exchange rate. Tink has been a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interface (API). Today’s move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned

A lot of startups were built to help people make all-cash offers on homes with the purpose of gaining an edge against other buyers, especially in ultra-competitive markets.  Accepti.inc is a Denver-based company that is attempting to create a new category in real estate technology. To help scale its digital mortgage lending platform, the company

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive Danny, Alex, and a bunch of the TechCrunch crew took on the recent happenings in the world of bitcoin. In a break from our regular format, we recorded live from a Twitter

Making the choice to adopt, or to find an adopting family, is a legally complex, emotionally taxing, expensive and time-consuming process. PairTree aims to make one part at least considerably easier and faster with its online matching platform where expectant mothers and hopeful adopters can find each other without the facilitation of an agency or

Lower, an Ohio-based home finance platform, announced today it has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round led by Accel. This round is notable for a number of reasons. First off, it’s a large Series A even by today’s standards. The financing also marks the previously bootstrapped Lower’s first external round of funding

Viva Republica, the Seoul-based fintech company behind Toss, a super app with more than 40 financial services, announced today it has raised $410 million at a post-money valuation of $7.4 billion. The new funding was led by Alkeon Capital, an American investment firm, and included participation from new investors like Korea Development Bank, and returning

When SoftBank announced its first Vision Fund back in 2017, TechCrunch gawked at the size of the fundraising vehicle and its $100 million minimum check size. Noting a few of its early deals, we wrote that “the party is just getting started.” Little did we know how accurate that quip would become. The Vision Fund

Kredivo announced today it has secured another $100 million debt facility from Victory Park Capital (VPC). This doubles the Indonesian digital lending and credit platform’s total warehouse financing facility from VPC to $200 million. The first round was closed in July 2020. Kredivo is operated by Singapore-based fintech FinAccel. This is the largest loan facility

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

The Exchange is back after its brief hiatus. Anna and I have some really neat stuff planned, so stick with us every morning this week. — Alex Building a consumer-facing fintech company is expensive. And if you want to build one in a sector crowded by both incumbent companies and richly funded startups, it can

MFast founders Phan Thanh Long and Phan Thanh Vinh MFast, a mobile app that lets Vietnamese users in remote areas access financial services, announced it has raised a $1.5 million pre-Series A today. The round was led by Do Ventures, with participation from JAFCO Asia.  Launched in 2019 by fintech company Digipay, MFast says it

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Every company is a fintech.”  But these days, that’s becoming more and more true as an increasing number of companies that are not even in the financial services space seek to add a fintech component to their offering. A group of startups poised to benefit from this shift are those

Databases run the world, but database products are often some of the most mature and venerable software in the modern tech stack. Designers will pixel push, frontend engineers will add clicks to make it more difficult to drop out of a soporific Zoom call, but few companies are ever willing to rip out their database

eqtble founders (from l to r): Ethan Veres, Gabe Horwitz and Joseph Ifiegbu “People are the backbone of any organization. People are more important than the product. Without people, you don’t have a product,” says Joseph Ifiegbu, who is Snap’s former head of human resources technology and also previous lead of WeWork’s People Analytics team.

Chaos and crisis are sisters, and none more so than when you dial for emergency help. A call to 911 in the United States and urgent numbers globally spins off a number of additional calls to emergency response teams, ambulances, hospitals and other actors who need to coordinate action to save your life. Theoretically, everyone

Privacy tech continues cooking on gas. To wit: Non-tracking search engine DuckDuckGo has just revealed that it beefed up its balance sheet at the back end of last year with $100 million+ in “mainly secondary investment” — from a mix of existing and new investors. Its blog post name-checks Omers Ventures, Thrive, GP Bullhound, Impact America

When Richard Joffe moved his family to Australia in 2019, he said applying for home insurance “was like traveling back in time 30 years.” “I found the sign-up process painful, the fine print was confusing and the insurance company was totally reactive, not proactive. They never contacted me aside from my renewal,” he told TechCrunch.