Startups

Shipamax, the London-based startup and YC graduate that is helping freight forwarders and other logistics companies automate their back-office processes, has raised $7 million. Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Crane Venture Partners, Y Combinator, and other existing investors. Shipamax says it will use the funding to double in size over the

NASA has selected Houston-based Axiom Space, a startup founded in 2016, to build the first commercial habitat module for the International Space Station (ISS). This module will be used as a destination for future commercial spaceflight missions, potentially housing experiments, technology development and more performed by commercial space travellers taking rides up to the ISS

AmazeVR, the Los Angeles-based virtual reality entertainment distribution service, is taking its first steps into the world of location-based virtual reality experiences with an installation in Seoul’s Incheon International Airport. The company, which also scored an additional $2.5 million commitment to expand its total funding to around $9 million, made the announcement last week. The

Bizongo, one of the largest business-to-business online marketplaces for packaging needs in India, has raised $30 million in fresh funding round as it looks to widen its footprint in the nation and serve more categories. The new financing round, Series C, was led by Switzerland-based hedge fund Schroder Adveq, which manages assets worth $10 billion.

We’re down in Sunnyvale, Calif., where Alchemist Accelerator is hosting a demo day for its most recent batch of companies. This is the 23rd class to graduate from Alchemist, with notable alums including LaunchDarkly, MightyHive, Matternet and Rigetti Computing. As an enterprise accelerator, Alchemist focuses on companies that make their money from other businesses, rather

Los Angeles is one of the most desirable locations for commercial real estate in the United States, so it’s little wonder that there’s something of a boom in investments in technology companies servicing the market coming from the region. It’s one of the reasons that CREXi, the commercial real estate marketplace, was able to establish

The startup community has lost another moral leader today. Leila Janah, a serial entrepreneur who was the CEO and founder of machine learning training data company Samasource, passed away at the age of 37 due to complications from Epithelioid Sarcoma, a form of cancer, according to a statement from the company. She focused her career on

If a thousand companies make their own smart light bulb, do a thousand companies also have to design a light switch app to control them? Kraftful, a company out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 class, doesn’t think so. Kraftful builds the myriad components that an IoT/smart home company might need, puzzle piecing them together into

Schwark Satyavolu Contributor Schwark Satyavolu is a general partner at Trinity Ventures where he makes early-stage investments in fintech, security and AI. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Yodlee (YDLE) and Truaxis, both of which were acquired. Previously, he held senior executive positions at LifeLock and Mastercard. He is an inventor on 15 patents. More posts

Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup based in Mountain View, is laying off staff in its Bay Area and New York offices, the company’s CEO announced on the site today. Like other startup leaders being pushed by investors to focus more heavily on cash flow, CEO Adam D’Angelo wrote that the layoffs and “organizational changes” were

As the number of drones proliferates in cities and towns across America, government agencies are scrambling to find ways to manage the oncoming traffic that’s expected to clog up their airspace. Companies like Airmap and KittyHawk have raised tens of millions to develop technologies that can help cities manage congestion in the friendly skies, and

It’s one thing to develop a working machine learning model, it’s another to put it to work in an application. Cortex Labs is an early stage startup with some open source tooling designed to help data scientists take that last step. The company’s founders were students at Berkeley when they observed that one of the

Back in September, Betaworks put out a call for startups to participate in its latest “camp,” this one focused on audio. Danika Laszuk, the head of Betaworks Camp, told me at the time that the startup studio was looking for companies that are trying to build “audio-first” experiences for smart speakers and wireless headphones, or

[embedded content] Memphis Meats, a developer of technologies to manufacture meat, seafood and poultry from animal cells, has raised $161 million in financing from investors, including Softbank Group, Norwest and Temasek, the investment fund backed by the government of Singapore. The investment brings the company’s total financing to $180 million. Previous investors include individual and

Substack announced today that it has built support for multiple authors into its service. The company provides a publishing tool that blends blogs and email newsletters into a single entity, with a focus on subscription monetization. The day’s updates also include a number of publisher-friendly tools, like shared access and homepage features closer to those

Two co-founders of Google Pay in India are building a neo-banking platform in the country — and they have already secured backing from three top VC funds. Sujith Narayanan, a veteran payments executive who co-founded Google Pay in India (formerly known as Google Tez), said on Monday that his startup, epiFi, has raised $13.2 million

Lime is hoping to achieve profitability this year by laying off about 14% of its workforce and ceasing operations in 12 markets, Axios first reported. “Financial independence is our goal for 2020, and we are confident that Lime will be the first next-generation mobility company to reach profitability,” Lime CEO Brad Bao said in a

This week we’ve covered layoffs at unicorns both inside the Vision Fund and out. This afternoon we add two more to our list: Oyo and Rappi. The staff reductions are surprising — and not. They are surprising, as Oyo (India-based, low-cost hotels) and Rappi (Latin America-focused e-commerce) were bright lights in the Vision Fund’s crown.

A cannabis company won a CES award for 2020. Called Keep, the desktop storage device features biometric security to secure cannabis products, and looks good while doing it. The CTA gave them an Innovations Award Nominee in October and then weeks later told the company they were unable to use the word “cannabis” when exhibiting.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm and Danny Crichton on hand to dig into the news, with Chris Gates on the dials and more news than we could possibly cram into 30 minutes. So we went

PayU is acquiring a controlling stake in fintech startup PaySense at a valuation of $185 million and plans to merge it with its credit business LazyPay as the nation’s largest payments processor aggressively expands its financial services offering. The Prosus-owned payments giant said on Friday that it will pump $200 million — $65 million of

At CES 2020, one of the more well-represented gadget categories was definitely consumer robots – but none was more adorable than MarsCat, a new robo-pet from industrial robot startup Elephant Robotics. This robot pet is a fully autonomous companion that can respond to touch, voice and even play with toys, and it’s hard not to

Lewis Hower Contributor Lewis Hower connects Silicon Valley Bank and VC/startup communities as a Managing Director with SVB Startup Banking. More posts by this contributor Manage your angel investors, or they’ll manage you Anu Shukla had found the perfect VP of Engineering to help her build her latest startup, a company called RewardsPay. By that

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. ClassPass, finally a unicorn, raises $285 million in new funding ClassPass launched in 2013 to give people an easier way to

Over the past several years, surgical has become one of the hottest — and best funded — categories in robotics. That’s thanks, in no small part, to the massive success of companies like Intuitive. Virtual Incision Corporation has also had a pretty solid fundraising streak since its 2006 founding. Today the Lincoln, Neb. startup announced

While Microsoft cloud services such as SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 are used widely by large organizations, the products don’t come standard with an enterprise-grade control layer. That’s where AvePoint, a Microsoft independent software vendor (ISV), comes in. Today, the company announced a $200 million Series C investment. The round was led by TPG

Quantum computers are, by default, hybrid machines that combine the exotic properties of the quantum world with a classical computer that, essentially, manages it. A lot of the focus in the industry has gone into the actual quantum processors, but as those machines get more powerful, the classical part — and the process of converting

Startup founders, set your sites on TC Sessions: Robotics+AI, which takes place on March 3, 2020. This annual day-long event draws the brightest minds and makers from these two industries — 1,500 attendees last year alone. And if you really want to make 2020 a game-changing year, grab yourself a demo table and showcase your

Japanese startup FPV Robotics is leveraging drone technology to address a growing global need: inspecting aging infrastructure in an effort to avoid major issues like unexpected bridge collapses. FPV Robotics CEO and founder Masaki Komagata showed me his company’s production Waver drone, which is debuting for the first time ever at CES 2020 in Las

The Guild, a nearly four-year-old, Austin, Texas-based startup that turns apartments into comfortable short-term accommodations for business and other travelers, has landed $25 million in Series B funding from some of its earlier investors, including Maveron and Convivialite, along with real estate companies like the Nicol Investment Company, which owns some of the buildings in