Startups

While the rocket launch sector is quickly becoming crowded, the same can’t be said for companies developing suborbital spaceplanes. This means there’s plenty of room to grow for startups like Dawn Aerospace, which has now completed five test flights of its Mk-II Aurora spaceplane that is designed to fly up to 60 miles above the

Flink, a Mexico City-based neobroker, has raised $57 million in a Series B round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The financing comes just over six months after Flink raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Accel. Existing backers Accel, ALLVP, Clocktower and new investor Mantis Venture Capital (founded by The

Last month, MaxAB, the Egyptian B2B e-commerce platform that serves food and grocery retailers, raised one of the largest Series A on the continent, to the tune of $40 million. Today, it has raised a $15 million extension from existing investors — RMBV, IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream Capital, Rise Capital, Endeavour Catalyst, Beco Capital

It was once common practice for doctors to visit sick patients in their homes: In 1930, 40% of all consultations were house calls. By 1980, that figure was less than 1%. Today, urgent care centers occupy Main Street storefronts and 33% of all medical expenditures occur in hospitals. It’s clear that the additional overhead is

Sara Mauskopf Contributor Sara Mauskopf is the CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a child care and education marketplace helping millions of parents across the United States. More posts by this contributor The inevitable takedown of the female CEO Elana Berkowitz Contributor Elana Berkowitz is a founding partner of Springbank Collective, which invests in early stage

With COVID-19 disrupting the entire manufacturing supply chain including semiconductor shortages, companies across multiple industries have been struggling to seek a procurement solution that can rebalance the gap between supply and demand. CADDi, a Tokyo-based B2B ordering and supply platform in the manufacturing and procurement industry, helps both procurement (demand side) and manufacturing facilities (supply

Sumi Das Contributor Sumi Das is a partner at CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, where he leads healthcare tech and consumer fintech investments. Prior investments include Robinhood, Stripe, Convoy, Albert, Aye Finance, Next Insurance and Strive Health. Nina Gerson Contributor Nina Gerson is a vice president at CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, where she co-leads

Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital, where she looks to invest in technologies that are streamlining analog industries while also improving lives and livelihoods. Among the companies she has backed, for example, are Shiru, which is leveraging computational design to create enhanced proteins to help feed the world; and AllStripes, which aggregates and

XREX co-founders Winston Hsiao and Wayne Huang A substantial portion of the world’s trade is done in United States dollars, creating problems for businesses in countries with a dollar shortage. Blockchain startup XREX was launched to help cross-border businesses in emerging markets perform faster transactions with products like a payment escrow service and crypto-fiat exchange platform.

Servicing one’s car personally is a time-consuming, expensive and painstaking process. It’s a cycle that can lead to more expensive repairs and safety issues down the line, and no car owner likes that. Egypt and Dubai-based auto tech startup Odiggo is a platform addressing this problem. It allows car owners to get the help they

Disrupt is right around the corner, and this year the show is packed to the brim with incredible panels and conversations, an absolutely stacked Startup Battlefield cohort of companies launching on our stage, investor insights and a virtual expo hall full of exciting new products and services in the Startup Alley. We can’t wait! Literally.

Manav Garg Contributor Manav Garg is CEO and founder of Eka Software Solutions and is founding partner of SaaSboomi and Together Fund. Software-as-a-Service is one of the most important sectors in tech today. While its transformative potential was quite clear before the pandemic, the sudden pivot to distributed workforces caused interest in SaaS products to

If you’re a founder who finds yourself in a meeting with a VC, try to remember two things: You’re the smartest person in the room. Investors are looking for a reason to say “yes.” Even so, many entrepreneurs squander this opportunity, often because they direct questions or fail to understand their BATNA (best alternative to

Rutter, a remote-first company, is developing a unified e-commerce API that enables companies to connect with data across any platform. On Friday the company announced it was emerging from stealth with $1.5 million in funding from a group of investors including Haystack, Liquid 2 and Basis Set Ventures. Founders Eric Yu and Peter Zhou met

As one of four general partners at Andreessen Horowitz who are now investing the venture firm’s third crypto fund, a $2.2 billion vehicle, Arianna Simpson is very focused on how to return that capital and much more to the firm’s limited partners. Toward that end, she has been more focused of late on startups that

Todd Graham Contributor Todd Graham is vice president at Venrock, a pioneering venture capital firm established in 1969. Wash, rinse, repeat: A startup is founded, first product ships, customers engage, and then a larger company’s corporate development team sends a blind email requesting to “connect and compare notes.” If you’re a venture-backed startup, it would

Open-source business intelligence company Metabase announced Thursday a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Expa and NEA joined in on the round, which gives the San Francisco-based company a total of $42.5 million in funding since it was founded in 2015. Metabase previously raised $8 million in Series A funding

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Can I hire an

Patrick Frank Contributor Patrick Frank is the co-founder and COO of PatientPartner, a platform that connects pre-surgical patients with fully recovered patients who went through the same surgery. Frank has worked in consumer technology across industries including retail banking, law, real estate and healthcare. When you enter the health tech industry as a new startup,

MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency business that counts founder Moxie Marlinspike of the encrypting messaging app Signal as its earliest technical advisor, has raised $66 million in Series B funding from a long list of investors, including Alameda Research, Berggruen Holdings, BlockTower Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Vy Capital, and earlier backers General Catalyst and

Danggeun Market, the publisher of South Korea’s hyperlocal community app Karrot, announced on 18 August it has raised $162 million in a Series D round of funding with a valuation of $2.7 billion. (By the way, Danggeun means carrot in Korean.) This round funding was led by DST Global, with additional participation from Aspex Management,

Growth marketing is often misconceived as a set of tactics when it’s much more: It is a process that startups need to put in place in their early days that will scale as their customer base and internal teams grow. This is where British growth agency Ascendant shines, Robyn Weatherley, head of marketing at Thirdfort,

Unbundling financial data through APIs and driving data-driven insights with value-add products in Africa keeps getting more exciting as major players continue to raise more money for scale. Less than a year after its $3 million seed round, San Francisco- and Africa-based fintech Pngme has snapped up another $15 million for its financial data infrastructure

Many Southeast Asian digital businesses run into obstacles when seeking early-stage growth financing. They might not want to sell equity in their company, but often struggle to secure working capital loans from traditional financial institutions. That’s where Singapore-based Jenfi comes in, providing revenue-based financing of up to $500,000 with flexible repayment plans that co-founder and

Nuro doesn’t have a typical Silicon Valley origin story. It didn’t emerge after a long, slow slog from a suburban garage or through a flash of insight in a university laboratory. Nor was it founded at the behest of an eccentric billionaire with money to burn. Nuro was born — and ramped up quickly —

If you injure your elbow, surgery can help. If you lose a leg, prostheses are available. But problems within the brain are more difficult to treat, and for stroke victims rehabilitation is largely left to the body’s own repair mechanisms. BrainQ aims to change that with a device that stimulates the damaged part of the

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy Contributor Sukhinder Singh Cassidy founded theBoardlist, a premium talent marketplace that helps diverse leaders get discovered for board and executive opportunities. A technology executive and entrepreneur, board member and investor, she has 25 years of experience founding and helping to scale companies, including Google, Amazon and Yodlee. More posts by this contributor

Kiddom, a platform that offers a digital curriculum that fits the core standards required by states, announced today that it has raised a $35 million Series C round led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Owl Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Outcomes Collective. The financing came nearly three years after Kiddom’s Series B, a $15 million

Karl Laughton Contributor Karl Laughton is president & COO of Insightly, which makes scalable CRM software that enables companies to go beyond transactions and grow lasting customer relationships. Nearly three in 10 employees (29%) would quit their job if they were told they were no longer allowed to work remotely, according to a recent survey.

Although older adults are one of the fastest-growing demographics, they’re quite underserved when it comes to consumer tech. The global population of people older than 65 will reach 1.5 billion by 2050, and members of this cohort — who are leading longer, active lives — have plenty of money to spend. Still, most startups persist