Fundings and Exits

Another proptech is considering raising capital through the public arena. Knock confirmed Monday that it is considering going public, although CEO Sean Black did not specify whether the company would do so via a traditional IPO, SPAC merger or direct listing. “We are considering all of our options,” Black told TechCrunch. “We pioneered the real

Ajaib, the Indonesian investment app, has added $65 million to its Series A, bringing the round’s new total to $90 million. The extension was led by Ribbit Capital, the fintech investor that also led Robinhood’s $3.4 billion funding last month. Ajaib is Ribbit Capital’s first investment in Southeast Asia. The extension will be used to

If you browse Instagram, you are probably familiar with the term “link in bio.” Links aren’t allowed in post captions, and users are only allowed one URL in their bios, so many create a simple website with multiple links for their followers. Linktree, one of the most popular “link in bio” services with more than

This morning, well-known robotic process automation (RPA) unicorn UiPath has filed to go public. The company’s S-1 filing comes after it raised billions of dollars while private, making it amongst the best-funded startups in history. Over the last year, for example, the company’s rapid-fired fundraising included its Series E and Series F rounds of capital, both

At this point, if you aren’t going public via a direct listing, traditional IPO or SPAC, are you even a growthy business? Every CEO I talk to at a startup that’s doing more than Series B-level revenue tells me that SPACs are circling, hungry for a deal so they won’t have to return collected capital

One of the biggest pain points for startups and small businesses is keeping up with back office tasks such as bookkeeping and managing taxes. QuickBooks, it seems, just doesn’t always cut it. Three-time co-founders Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold, and Jessica McKellar formed Pilot with the mission of affordably providing back office services to startups and

Robotic process automation platform UiPath added its name to the list of companies pursuing public-market offerings this morning with the release of its S-1 filing. The document details a quickly growing software company with sharply improving profitability performance. The company also flipped from cash burn to cash generation on both an operating and free-cash-flow basis

While new headless commerce platforms are emerging all the time, Swell CEO Eric Ingram told me that it remains “really hard to do something new in e-commerce.” Specifically, he told me that most headless platforms (which offer back-end infrastructure separate from the front-end shopping experience) allow businesses to build a faster shopping experience, but they’re

When TechCrunch covered UIPath’s Series A in 2017, it was a small startup out of Romania working in a little known area of enterprise software called robotic process automation (RPA). Then the company took off with increasingly large multibillion dollar valuations. It progressed through its investment rounds, culminating with a $750 million round on an

Benitago Group, a startup looking to build a big portfolio of Amazon brands, is announcing that it has raised $55 million in new funding — $3 million in equity and $52 million across multiple credit lines for acquisitions. “We want to take these brands and growth them and run them a lot more efficiently,” said

What happens to hot fintech startups that have benefited from a rise in consumer trading activity if regular folks lose interest in financial wagers? That’s the question facing Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms that have ridden an upward cycle. Each has performed well in recent quarters: Robinhood by securing huge payment-for-order-flow revenues, while Coinbase’s

Ryu Games, a startup that helps developers add cash tournaments to their mobile games, announced this morning it has raised $2.3 million in a seed round. The funds came from a number of investors, including Side Door Ventures, MGV Capital, Velo Partners and Citta Ventures. In addition, 500 Startups participated in the round. To see the

Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than $50 million in new funding. Notably, two of the main investors are not venture capital firms but instead are two large tech companies: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre and San Francisco-based software

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, the Equity team brought on Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia and Hustle Fund General Partner Elizabeth Yin to talk about equity crowdfunding. It’s been about a week since the SEC increased the equity

Ketch, a startup aiming to help businesses navigate the increasingly complex world of online privacy regulation and data compliance, is announcing that it has raised $23 million in Series A funding. The company is also officially coming out of stealth. I actually wrote about Ketch’s free PrivacyGrader tool last year, but now it’s revealing the

Airwallex, the fintech company for cross-border businesses, announced today it has added $100 million more to its Series D round, bumping its valuation up to $2.6 billion. The extension was led by Greenoaks, with participation from Grok Ventures and returning investors Skip Capital and ANZi Ventures. Co-founder and chief executive officer Jack Zhang told TechCrunch

Today Bloomberg reported, and Axios confirmed that Robinhood has filed privately to go public. The well-financed Robinhood is an American fintech company that provides zero-cost trading services to consumers. Private IPO filings have become common in recent quarters, making Robinhood’s decision to file behind closed doors before showing its numbers to the public unsurprising. That

ServiceNow became the latest company to take the robotic process automation (RPA) plunge when it announced it was acquiring Intellibot, an RPA startup based in Hyderabad, India. The companies did not reveal the purchase price. The purchase comes at a time where companies are looking to automate workflows across the organization. RPA provides a way

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

Indonesia-based fintech Pluang announced today it has raised $20 million in a pre-Series B round led by Openspace Ventures, with participation from Go Ventures and other returning investors. The company offers proprietary savings and investment products that allow users to make contributions starting from 50 cents USD. Go Ventures, the investment arm of Gojek, also

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here. Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and

Barely more than seven months after its most recent funding announcement, Yotpo is revealing that it has raised another $230 million in a Series F round that values the company at $1.4 billion (post-money). “Our round, in my eyes, it’s all about celebrating the future of e-commerce,” co-founder and CEO Tomer Tagrin told me. “Brands

Fireblocks has raised a $133 million Series C funding round led by Coatue, Ribbit and Stripes. The company provides several products that let you store, transfer and issue digital assets. In particular, Fireblocks provides custody to institutional investors — it currently stores $400 billion in cryptocurrencies. BNY and SVB Capital are also participating in today’s funding

Amid all the news of the last few days, you might have missed that eToro, an Israeli consumer stock-trading service, is going public in the United States via a SPAC. Don’t worry about the SPAC bit: If you want a rundown of the deal itself, Mary Ann has you covered. What matters for our purposes

The B2B payments space has been on fire for a while, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only fueled mass adoption of digitizing finances. In regions like Latin America, the need for innovation in the sector is even more paramount than in the United States with so many people still relying on outdated processes. One Mexico

Snowflake announced earlier this month that it would give up its dual-class shareholder structure, a corporate governance setup that often gives founders and executives superior voting rights, typically involving 10 times as many votes for their own shares as others receive. The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes

Offerpad is the latest proptech company to go public via a SPAC merger. The Phoenix, Ariz.-based company announced Thursday its plans to go public by merging with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company in a deal valued at $3 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second, or early third, quarter of 2021. The combined

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This time around we had whatever passes for a quiet week as far as news volume. But that still meant we had to cut stuff and

The paradox of connected computing is how much information is made available to us in just a few clicks or taps — but also how this ocean of available data can overwhelm and lap over a particular bit of intel the moment we need to lay our fingers back on it. Fire up a web

Recently public unicorn Upstart announced earnings that blew the socks off of Wall Street this week. After closing on Wednesday at around $61 per share, Upstart wrapped Thursday worth $115 per share. It turns out that all the blather we’ve had to endure about artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade is coming true, at