Fundings and Exits

When this editor first met Jeremy Conrad, it was in 2014, at the 8,000-square-foot former fish factory that was home to Lemnos, a hardware-focused venture firm that Conrad had cofounded three years earlier. Conrad —  who as a mechanical engineering undergrad at MIT worked on self driving cars, drones and satellites — was still excited

When Cisco bought AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before the IPO, the company sent a clear signal it wanted to move beyond its pure network hardware roots into the software monitoring side of the equation. Yesterday afternoon the company announced it intends to buy another monitoring company, this time snagging internet monitoring solution

Warehouse Exchange, a startup that describes itself as the Airbnb of warehouse space, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding. The company was founded Jonathan Rosenthal (CEO of Saybrook Management) and Dan Pimentel (previously CFO/COO of startup Hub TV). They recently brought on former eHarmony CEO Grant Langston as the Warehouse Exchange’s chief executive. Langston

What does a global mindset look like in a world where most of us no longer travel? And what does it mean to be local when everyone is connected? Those are the first questions we had in mind when we read GGV Capital’s Twitter bio, which asserts that the investing shop with offices in five

Data, the cliche goes, is the new oil of the digital economy. But Truth{set} co-founder and CEO Scott McKinley wants to know: “Why does no one care about the quality of that fuel?” That’s an issue McKinley saw in his seven years as an executive at Nielsen, where he said he realized that most marketing

With the U.K. government set to accelerate trials of e-scooter rentals in a bid to reduce crowding on public transport and support social distancing during the coronavirus crisis, Europe’s e-scooter companies are gearing up to be ready. The latest move sees Sweden-headquartered Voi Technology recruit Richard Corbett to head up its U.K., Ireland and Benelux

UK-based AI chatbot Babylon Health — which last year raised $550M at a $2BN+ valuation — has led a $30M Series B in US-based Higi, which owns and operates 10,000+ FDA-cleared health kiosks. Higi, which was founded back in 2012 per Crunchbase, has built out a nationwide network of “health stations” located at retail locations

Student loans are both a trillion-dollar debt category and also one of the most popular mini-verticals out there in fintech startup investing right now. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies in the space, and they all mostly do one of two things: either they help students think through their student loan options before

Aircall has raised a $65 million Series C round (€60.2 million) with DTCP leading the round, Adam Street participating and existing investors eFounders, Draper Esprit, Balderton and NextWorld injecting more money in the company. Overall, Aircall has raised $106 million. Aircall is building a software-as-a-service company around phone calls. You could use it to operate

Scott Orn Contributor Scott runs operations at Kruze Consulting, a fast-growing startup CFO consulting firm. Kruze is based in San Francisco with clients in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York. Bill Growney Contributor Bill Growney, a partner in Goodwin’s Technology & Life Sciences group, focuses his practice on advising technology and other startup

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. This is a messed-up edition, because we are both hosting Equity Monday on Tuesday (because that makes sense) and our normal host Alex Wilhelm is on vacation, leaving (editor’s note: poor and massively underpaid) managing editor Danny Crichton to wake

Real estate is one of those classic industries we always talk about in Silicon Valley: multi-trillion dollars in scale in terms of assets and transaction volume, but still relying on good ole’ pen and paper to get anything actually done. A huge number of companies have launched to digitize all aspects of real estate, from

M17 Entertainment announced today that it has sold its online dating assets to focus on its core live streaming business in Asia and other markets. Paktor Pte, which operates Paktor dating app and other services, was acquired by Kollective Ventures, a venture capital advisory firm. The value of the deal was undisclosed. In its announcement,

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. First, a big thanks to everyone who took part in the Equity survey, we really appreciated your notes and thoughts. The crew is chewing over what you said now, and we’ll roll up the best feedback into show

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. A cluster of related companies recently caught our eye by raising capital in rapid-fire fashion. TechCrunch covered a few of them, and I read coverage of others. Looking back through my notes and the media

Facilities management looks to be having a bit of a moment, amid the coronavirus pandemic. VergeSense, a US startup which sells a ‘sensor as a system’ platform targeted at offices — supporting features such as real-time occupant counts and foot-traffic-triggered cleaning notifications — has closed a $9M strategic investment led by Allegion Ventures, a corporate

Skyflow, a Mountain View-based privacy API company, announced this morning that it has closed a $7.5 million round of capital it describes as a seed investment. Foundation Capital’s Ashu Garg led the round, with the company touting smaller checks from Jeff Immelt (former GE CEO) and Jonathan Bush (former AthenaHealth CEO). For Skyflow, founded in

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. There’s a famous old post going around Twitter this week by entrepreneur and developer David Heinemeier Hansson (@DHH). DHH is a critic of certain elements of the startup world, especially wild valuations. This entry from

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Startups in the Midwest are optimistic despite the fact that a fair number of companies in the region are suffering from economic impacts stemming from COVID-19, recently collected data shows. The global pandemic has shaken

The COVID-19 pandemic is making life worse for many startups, but not all. Those benefiting are often taking advantage of the market updraft to add more capital to their accounts. Robinhood, for example, saw usage of its consumer fintech product rise rapidly. Then the company raised a Series F worth $280 million at a new,

This morning, Coalition announced that it has closed a $90 million Series C. The funding comes around a year after the cybersecurity insurance startup raised a $40 million Series B that TechCrunch covered at time. The startup’s new, larger funding round was led by Valor Equity Partners and included participation from Greyhound Capital and Felicis, along

Arculus, the Ingolstadt, Germany-based startup that has developed a “modular production platform” to bring assembly lines into the 21st century, has raised €16 million in Series A investment. Leading the round is European venture firm Atomico, with participation from Visionaries Club and previous investor La Famiglia. Arculus says it will use the injection of capital

This might seem like the worst time to be building an event software business, but it seems to be working for Bevy.com, which just announced that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Derek Andersen explained that the company had already started moving into virtual events when the conference business ground to

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Yesterday afternoon, Vroom, an online car buying service, filed to go public. Based on its SEC filing, Vroom is a highly-successful private company in fundraising terms that has attracted over $700 million during its life

A famous investor published notes today concerning its startup investments, detailing where they excelled and where they struggled. To understand why we care about this particular investor’s results, a little context helps. The investor in question is Japanese telecom giant and startup benefactor SoftBank, which reported its fiscal year’s results this morning. SoftBank’s investments are

A few housekeeping notes. First, the main, long-from Equity episodes still drop every Friday, so if you are behind, check your podcast feed. Also, we’re running a listener survey which you can find here, in the last ep’s shownotes. And finally, I am off next week, so Danny Crichton will take over Equity Monday for

Dathena, a Singapore-based company that provides AI-based data protection and privacy solutions, announced it has raised a $12 million Series A. Part of the funding will be used to expand Dathena’s co-sell partnership with Microsoft in the United States, which is targeted to Azure Cloud and Microsoft 365 customers who need to comply with new

Q2 2020 is the least-certain quarter I’ve ever covered Alex Wilhelm 7 hours Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. After spending perhaps more time than we should have recently trying to figure out what’s going on with the public markets, let’s

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Are you a regular Equity listener? Take our survey here! We talk about it on the show, and it’s embedded below in case you don’t want to click a link. From home once again this week, Danny, Natasha,

With the global economy still sorting itself out in the face of the pandemic, we’re hearing about fewer new venture capital funds these days. However, today is an exception, as Cathay Innovation has raised a $550 million second fund, which is about double the size of its first fund and, according to its leader Denis