Startups

Planet42, a South Africa-based car subscription company that buys used cars from dealerships and rents to customers via a subscription model, has raised $30 million in equity and debt. The investment — which co-founder and CEO Eerik Oja called a bridge round — is a prequel to a larger Series A round next year. It

Zepto, a Mumbai-based startup that operates a 10-minute instant grocery delivery service, has more than doubled its valuation to $570 million from $225 million less than two months ago as it expands into newer cities. Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund led the $100 million Series C round in Zepto, the two said Monday. Glade Brook, Nexus,

Jamie Viggiano Contributor Jamie Viggiano is the chief marketing officer at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in consumer, SaaS and infrastructure businesses. More posts by this contributor 5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire To be effective, each element of your brand’s ethos must be authentic. Your values

With supply chains in the automotive industry continuing to be disrupted due to Covid-19, demand has surged in the used-car market. Today, one of the startups that’s seeing a lot of growth as a result of that is announcing a big round of funding to further tap the opportunity. Cars24, a startup out of India

Hevo Data, a SaaS startup that is helping firms collate troves of data they generate and accumulate to make better use of them, has raised $30 million in a new financing round following a strong year of growth. Sequoia Capital India led the San Francisco and Bangalore-headquartered startup’s $30 million Series B round. A number

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. As we entered 2021, I wrote about the big question on every startup’s mind for 2021: How will a cataclysmic event such as a pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? Well, spoiler

As capital continues to flood the startup market, I keep thinking about the activation energy needed to not only start a company, but remain in charge of one. This type of scaling strategy looks more human than a check — after all, venture doesn’t fix all things — in fact, it can even complicate the

Gen Z isn’t satisfied with the social media they grew up with, so they’re building the apps that they want to use. A “social branding” app for creative teens and twenty-somethings, Tagg is announcing a $2 million seed round today from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Facebook’s former VP of International Growth Ed Baker, TripAdvisor founder

The fees investment banks charge to underwrite IPOs can gobble several points from a public company’s gross proceeds, but new competition is giving some firms a chance to hold on to more of that sweet debut money. This week, Nubank paid just 1.6% of the $2.6 billion it raised to its underwriters. As Bloomberg reported,

Capital may help someone take the jump into entrepreneurship, but what about the activation energy to let them think that big in the first place? To Cory Levy, the latter has always been more important. The entrepreneur behind First Text, a low-friction service that connects founders to investors, launched Z Fellows last year to test

Instant grocery — where urban-dwelling consumers buy food and other essentials and can get them delivered in 15 minutes or less — continues to be a big business, and one of the juggernauts in the space is now raising a big round of funding to meet that opportunity: Gopuff is in the process of raising

Indian edtech giant Byju’s, the nation’s most valuable startup, is in talks to go public in the U.S. by merging with a blank check company led by Churchill Capital, a person familiar with the matter said. Byju’s, currently valued at about $21 billion, is seeking a valuation of over $45 billion and looking to raise

When it comes to online payments, the front end of the system has seen a massive amount of disruption in the last several years, with companies like Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Square and others building APIs that make it very simple for online merchants to integrate easy payment services into their checkout flows. But when it comes

After months of NFT mania and Facebook’s recent name change to Meta, it’s fair to say that “metaverse” chatter has reached a fever pitch. And while crypto investors are buying up avatars and digital swaths of land in hopes that a digital universe will spring up around these projects, it’s unclear which projects — if

Olist, a Brazilian e-commerce marketplace integrator, confirmed it is now valued at $1.5 billion after securing $186 million in Series E funding, led by Wellington Management. The new round follows quickly behind a $23 million Series D extension the company announced in April, led by new investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management to bring its total

If you think of Pabio as “Stitchfix for furniture, in Europe,” you’re probably pretty close to the mark. The company started in Switzerland a couple of years ago with a mission to stop people from buying disposable Ikea stuff for a two-year stint in an apartment, replacing it with well-styled, well-thought-out interior design suggestions and

I’ve visited Brinc’s headquarters the last few times I’ve been to Hong Kong, and been impressed with the range of different startups the accelerator works with. I knew the organization primary through its consumer hardware companies — a primary focus when it was founded, back in 2014. Brinc has expanded its scope a fair bit

Most people have experienced the internet only through Web 2.0: online applications, the social web and software as a service form the fabric of our lives. But even as other technology rapidly evolves, basic web infrastructure has remained largely unchanged since the turn of the millennium. Lately, many have championed web3 as the internet’s next

Agricultural microinsurance startup IBISA announced that it has raised a seed round of €1.5 million – approximately $1.70 million. The round was led by London-based specialized investor Insurtech Gateway, with participation from Rockstart’s AgriFood fund and others. Microinsurance typically refers to offering coverage to low-income people against a specific class of risks. In IBISA’s case,

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Happy December everyone. We’re officially nearing the end of the year, and what a year it’s been. Despite the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, I think it’s pretty safe to say that this has been a watershed 365 days for the space industry. I can’t wait to

“Our Notus algorithm identified you as the most impactful journalist for our audience.” As a slight narcissist — as all writers are — I saw this line in a cold email and had two immediate thoughts: first, is the founder just saying this because they want me to write about their funding round, and second,

Steven R. Rogers Contributor Steven R. Rodgers is executive vice president and general counsel of Intel Corporation, where he serves on the senior executive team and oversees the company’s legal, government and trade groups. The U.S. patent system, which should fuel invention, is increasingly being abused to hinder innovation. It desperately needs reform, and there’s

Looks like Better.com CEO Vishal Garg’s behavior is catching up to him. This morning, employees were notified via email by the Better board of directors that Garg would be taking time off effective immediately after the “very regrettable events over the last week.” The move came, according to an employee who wished not to be

E-commerce in Africa is growing fast and its potential remains enormous as more people get connected to the internet. Across sub-Saharan Africa 303 million people, about 28% of the population, are connected to the mobile internet, according to the 2021 GSMA mobile economy report, and this number is expected to rise to 40% in three

Scott Lenet Contributor More posts by this contributor 3 lies VCs tell ourselves about startup valuations Is there a creed in venture capital? Venture capitalists frequently say that valuing startups is “more art than science.” If that’s true, then it’s absurdist art, because most seed-stage businesses have no value. In fact, seed-stage startups — companies

Software consultant Andrew Drach’s two companies Callentis and Solwey demonstrate his entrepreneurial skills, but his clients also value his educational background, as we learned through TechCrunch’s survey to identify the best software consultants for startups. Telling us why her company picked Solwey, eDiscovery Assistant’s Kelly Twigger cited “Andrew’s Ph.D. and analytical background related to data,”

Instant grocery delivery continues to be a very frothy market, but today comes news of a major funding round for one player in it that investors believe will still be standing after the hype has died down. Flink, the Berlin-based startup that sells food and other essentials at supermarket prices and aims to deliver them

Tim Berners-Lee’s startup, Inrupt, has raised about $30 million in its Series A financing round, a source familiar with the matter said. Forte Ventures led Inrupt’s new round, the two said Thursday, but both declined to disclose the size of the deal. The round saw participation from “all existing investors,” including Akamai Technologies and Glasswing

As I wrote earlier this year, Deed‘s mission is a clearcut one: take the employee giving/charity/volunteer program that many big companies have, and make it better. Give it a proper home — one with a modern UI, built-in community management tools, and that hooks into your workflow (read: Slack) so as to not be forgotten.

Resolve, which specializes in “buy now, pay later” capabilities for B2B transactions, announced today that it has raised $25 million in equity funding. The investment comes just months after the company secured a combined $60 million asset and equity financing. Insight Partners led its latest round, which also included participation from existing backers Initialized Capital,