Elementary, an artificial intelligence machine vision company, closed on $30 million in Series B funding to continue developing its manufacturing quality and inspection tools. We last profiled the Pasadena-based company last June when it raised $12.7 million in a financing round led by Threshold Ventures. Elementary’s tools enable customers to create no-code inspection routines and
Fuzey, a London-based company providing what it calls a “digital one-stop shop” for small businesses and independent contractors, raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by byFounders with participation from Flash Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Ascension and a group of angel investors, including Index Ventures’ venture partner Stephane Kurgan and Amplo VC
New research examining what happens after Internet users in Europe land on an ad-supported website and express their “privacy choices” — using a flagship ad industry consent management platform which is supposed to allow them to control the types of ads they receive (i.e. non-tracking vs “personalized”) — has raised fresh questions over the IAB
A digital mobile overdraft facility christened Fuliza, by Kenya’s biggest telco Safaricom Plc, is giving the country’s popular loan apps a run for their money barely three years after its launch. Fuliza allows Safaricom customers to access unsecured credit by overdrawing on M-Pesa – the telecommunication company mobile money wallet that allows its users to
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
The Exchange joked earlier this week that Christmas had come early thanks to a particular SPAC deck providing us with some good fun. Ha. Little did we know what was coming. Social hub Reddit filed to go public, TechCrunch reports. You know what that means: It’s time to ask questions. The Exchange explores startups, markets and
In addition to announcing coming changes to its For You feed, TikTok today announced a handful of updates to its lineup of camera and editing tools, including new features for its popular Green Screen effect tool, as well as other updates to video enhancements and sound effects. Among the updates, one highlight is the update
Continual, a startup that aims to bring operational AI to the modern data warehouse-centric data stack, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Amplify Partners, with Illuminate Ventures, Essence, Wayfinder and Data Community Fund also participating in the round. With this announcement, Continual is also opening up its service
Enterprise SaaS for measuring company carbon emission is hot. Only recently Planetly was acquired by OneTrust for an undisclosed amount. And there are plenty of other startups in the space such as Plan A, Watershed, and Emitwise, all with their own take on the market. Now France-based Sweep, which targets carbon management in large enterprises
Many brands are using the messaging app Discord to forge a sense of community among their fans. If the fast-food chain Wendy’s can have a Discord with over 60,000 members, why not a viral platform like TikTok? TikTok teased on Twitter that it was making a Discord server, but then confirmed the news on its
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
Working together at Uber’s risk team, Yifu Diao and Ming Fang came to realize that with the hypergrowth the company was seeing came fraud challenges. Diao’s first project at the company after starting in 2014 was building a rules engine called Mastermind to fight fraud. That engine, he says, allowed risk analysts to build and
Instagram is rolling out a new “Profile Embed” feature that allows users to embed a miniature version of their profile into a website. The new feature will allow users to further integrate their Instagram profiles into websites such as blogs and portfolios. The social media giant says the feature is currently only available in the
Supply chains are made up of a web of carbon-intensive activities, and trying to nail down which company is contributing pollution along the way has been difficult to parse. CarbonChain, an early-stage startup based in London from some supply chain veterans, wants to make it easier to account for carbon every step of the way.
Climate change is affecting the way farmers grow their crops, and Phytoform, which knows all about the harsh United Kingdom growing conditions, is out to make crops more impervious. The biotechnology company with headquarters in London and Boston announced $5.7 million in funding, led by Eniac Ventures, to scale its artificial intelligence genome editing technology
French startup Voodoo has announced that it plans to make a significant investment in blockchain-powered mobile games. The company estimates that it represents a $200 million investment over the coming years. 2021 has been an important year for crypto gaming, with Axie Infinity popularizing the play-to-earn model. Some companies, such as Mythical Games, raised massive
TikTok announced this morning it’s taking a new approach to its “For You” feed — the short-form video app’s main feed, powered by its algorithmic recommendations. The company already detailed how its algorithm works to suggest videos based on users’ engagement patterns within its app, but admits that too much of a particular content category
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
French startup La Belle Vie announced that it has raised a $28.2 million (€25 million) Series B round led by Left Lane and Quadrille Capital, with existing investor Capagro also participating. The company operates an online grocery store in the Paris area. Online grocery delivery services and so-called quick-commerce startups are quite trendy. In fact,
Snap announced today that it paid over $250 million to more than 12,000 creators this year on Spotlight, its TikTok clone. Unlike Snapchat’s friend-to-friend, ephemeral messaging, Spotlight allows users to reach a wide audience. Since last year when Spotlight launched, Snap says that creators are posting three times as often now. It’s no secret that
Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, has been raking in money this year. It started the year with a $160 million Series E on a $2 billion valuation and ended it with a $278 million Series F on a $5 billion valuation, more than doubling the company value in less than 12 months. Greenoaks led the
Controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of some 10 billion images by scraping selfies off the Internet so it can sell an identity-matching service to law enforcement, has been hit with another order to delete people’s data. France’s privacy watchdog said today that Clearview has breached Europe’s General Data Protection
Disney+ is the latest streaming app to add support for Apple’s SharePlay, the iOS 15 feature that offers a co-viewing experience over FaceTime video calls on iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV devices. First announced during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June, SharePlay rolled out with the iOS 15.1 update, soon offering co-viewing experiences
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
Kalendar AI, a San Francisco-based startup that’s been building on top of GPT-3‘s language model — developing a SaaS for automating lead generation and sales outreach to make it easier for companies to get initial meetings with prospective customers — has raised $3.2 million in pre-seed funding from 500 Startups; The Lean Startup author, Eric
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. Lately, many have championed web3 as the internet’s next phase, but the term encompasses so much territory, conversations can be diffuse and there are valid concerns that its complexity
The List joins the social commerce movement with a new app connecting consumers with global luxury brands and retailers to offer a personalized discovery and shopping experience. Focused on sourcing hard-to-find items, the app launch is buoyed by $3.5 million in seed funding backed by a group including American Designer and Rachel Zoe, who is
UBQ Materials, which claims it has developed a plastic-like material made from 100% unsorted household waste, has raised a $170 million funding round led by TPG Rise, TPG’s global impact investing platform, made through TPG Rise Climate, the firm’s dedicated climate investing fund, and The Rise Funds, its multisector impact investing fund. The financing round
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Check back from now until the end of December for more! Less than two weeks left until Christmas! Got your shopping done? No? Yeaaaah me neither. Want to buy someone a great gadget but don’t want to break
South Korean startup Kakao Entertainment announced today it has acquired Wuxiaworld, an Asia fantasy fiction platform, via its serialized fiction app subsidiary Radish to bolster the mobile storytelling business. The transaction size is $37.5 million. Wuxiaworld, which has grown through word-of-mouth, claims it is now the largest English-language Asia fantasy platform in the U.S. in terms of