Fundings and Exits

Gojek has paid $30 million to take a minority stake in Blue Bird, one of the largest taxi operators in Indonesia, according to Bloomberg, which first reported that the deal was in progress last month. Gojek’s stake in Blue Bird is worth $30 million. The taxi operator’s holding company disclosed in a regulatory filing earlier

PullRequest, a startup that provides code review as a service, announced today that it was buying Moonlight, an early stage startup that has built an online platform for hiring remote developers. The companies did not share the terms. Lyal Avery, founder and CEO at PullRequest, says that he bought this company to expand his range

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Late last week two Boston-based companies raised big rounds. The size of the two investments — each over the $100 million mark — and their rapid succession made them stand out. The pair of investments

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After having a good time with NEA’s Rick Yang last week, we thought we’d bring on another venture capitalist. So this week Danny and I had Elliott Robinson from Bessemer swing over for the show. As it turned

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. As I write to you, SaaS and cloud stocks are busy setting fresh all-time highs and as we’ve seen, venture interest in modern software companies is pushing more money into the sector. But despite it appearing

Venture capital has been flooding the various subverticals under the robotics umbrella in recent years, and the construction space is one of the largest beneficiaries. Last November, we surveyed 13 of the top robotics-focused VCs to find out which areas of robotics are exciting them most going into 2020. One of the most common areas

GumGum is announcing that it’s raised $22 million from existing investors, including Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, NEA spinout NewView Capital and Upfront Ventures — money that CEO Phil Schraeder said he’ll use to pursue a more aggressive acquisition strategy. This Series D comes nearly five years after GumGum raised a $26 million Series C. Schraeder

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest,

Following the departure of it CTO last month, Tandem Bank, the U.K. challenger bank co-founded by fintech veteran Ricky Knox, has lost another key member of its team, this time seeing chief product officer Matt Ford departing for a career in venture. Ford joined Santander InnoVentures, the venture capital arm of the Spanish incumbent bank,

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re exploring Airbnb’s march to the public markets. The popular DIY hospitality startup promised last year that it would go public in 2020. That timeline means that its 2019 performance will be included

Marketing startup Habu is emerging from stealth today and announcing that it has already raised $15 million in Series A funding. The company comes out of super{set}, the startup studio created by Krux founders Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya. In fact, Chavez is Habu’s chairman, Vaidya serves as CTO and their former Krux colleague Matt

A/O PropTech is a European VC that officially launched last week after raising €250 million in what it describes as “permanent capital” to invest in companies disrupting the €230 trillion real estate industry. This approach sees the firm structured more like a corporation with various shareholders, rather than a traditional venture capital fund with a

Following TechCrunch’s coverage of 500 Startups’ 25th batch (and numbers 24, 23, 22, and 21, in case you wanted to go back in time), today we’re saying hello to  the accelerator’s 26th cohort. 500 Startups, in case you weren’t aware, is a seed-stage accelerator and a collection of venture funds. The group, now with a

Infosys is a huge consulting organization based in India, which works with clients as they implement complex software integrations. Today, the company announced it was buying Simplus, a Salesforce integration consultant, for $250 million. The company, which is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, launched in 2014 and has raised almost $50 million, according to

Oxx, a relatively new European venture capital firm founded by Richard Anton and Mikael Johnsson, has raised $133 million to back “Europe’s most promising SaaS companies” at Series A and beyond. Headquartered in London and Stockholm, the VC is pitching itself as a dedicated SaaS-focussed fund, and will invest broadly across software applications and infrastructure.

You’ve been busy. I’ve been busy. But people are talking about Slack all over Twitter, so let me catch us both up. All the ruckus concerning Slack and its publicly traded stock appeared to kick off with a Business Insider story, which had the following headline: Slack just scored its biggest customer deal ever, as

Starling Bank, the U.K.-based challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, has raised another £60 million from its existing investors, Merian Global Investors and Harry McPike’s JTC. The investment brings the total raised by Starling to £323 million and follows two funding rounds of £105 million in aggregate led by Merian in 2019. Boden

This morning Carta, a startup that helps private companies manage equity, announced it has created an investing vehicle called Carta Ventures. The well-funded unicorn wants to invest in young startups that it sees building off of its data-driven perspective into the world of private companies, helping to foster an ecosystem around its core products and

With Casper’s public offering earlier this week, we’ve closed the book on the first two venture-backed IPOs of note in 2020. Casper, joined by One Medical, carried over $870 million of private capital, venture and otherwise, across the finish line. Even though each IPO featured an unprofitable tech-enabled business that had posted sub-30% growth and

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was something fun. First, we were back as a group in the San Francisco studio, which is always fun. Even better, we had NEA’s Rick Yang on hand to chat with Danny and Alex about

Snafu Records is bringing a new approach to finding musical talent — founder and CEO Ankit Desai described the Los Angeles-headquartered startup as “the first full-service, AI-enabled record label.” It’s a world that Desai knows well, having spent the past five years working on digital and streaming strategy at Capitol Records and Universal Music Group.

SpaceX looks likely to take its burgeoning Starlink business and spin it out, seeking to bring that satellite internet project to public markets via an IPO. That’s according to SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell, who made the remarks during a JPMorgan Chase investor conference, as reported by Bloomberg. SpaceX has been launching batches of

Forescout, the network security company that has been publicly traded since 2017, announced today it was going private again. Private equity firms Advent International and Crosspoint Capital are acquiring the company in an all-cash purchase of $1.9 billion. The two private equity firms will pay $33 per share, which represented a premium of 30% over

This morning The Zebra, an Austin-based insurance marketplace startup, announced it has closed a $38.5 million Series C. Accel led the funding event, which was participated in by prior investors Silverton Partners, Ballast Point Ventures, and the company’s CEO Keith Melnick. Floodgate and Weatherford Capital also invested in the round. According to Melnick, the company

In part two of a survey that asks top VCs about exciting opportunities in open source and dev tools, we dig into responses from 10 leading open-source-focused investors at firms that span early to growth stage across software-specific firms, corporate venture arms and prominent generalist firms. In the conclusion to our survey, we’ll hear from:

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Spotify is buying The Ringer to boost its sports podcast content Spotify is doubling down on its podcast strategy with a

Instamojo, a Bangalore-based startup that helps merchants and small businesses accept digital payments, establish presence and sell on the web, has acquired Times Internet-owned Gurgaon-based startup GetMeAShop. The deal is worth $5 million and includes Times Internet making an investment in Instamojo, Sampad Swain, co-founder and chief executive of the Bangalore-based startup, told TechCrunch in

Homie has made an impression among younger, first-time home buyers in the Utah and Arizona markets for cutting out the traditional closing costs, 6% real estate commissions and arduous paperwork associated with traditional home sales. It now plans to explore opening up in three new markets and will begin a Vegas launch in March with

Infor announced today that Koch Industries has bought the company in a deal sources peg at close to $13 billion. Infor, which makes large-scale cloud ERP software, has been around since 2002 and counts Koch as both a customer and an investor, so the deal makes sense on that level. Koch was lead investor last

Dixa, the customer engagement platform, has closed $36 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Notion Capital, with participation from existing investors Project A Ventures and SEED Capital. The Copenhagen and now London-based startup says it will use the new capital to accelerate its product development. This will including innovating with regards to