Crunch Hype

As concerts and live events return to the physical world stateside, many in the tech industry have wondered whether some of the pandemic-era opportunities around virtualizing these events are lost for the time being. San Francisco-based FlyMachine is aiming to seek out the holy grail of the digital music industry, finding a way to capture […]

As regulations around ESG change, private players might not have to comply, but they should adapt to position themselves to effectively operate in a new regulatory environment.

South Korea’s LG Chem has earmarked ₩6 trillion ($5.2 billion) over the next four years to build out its battery materials business. The investment comes as automakers and state regulators set targets to transition away from internal combustion engine vehicles, in a shift that will likely be the most transformative to the mobility industry since […]

When it comes to tough environments to build new technology, firefighting has to be among the most difficult. Smoke and heat can quickly damage hardware, and interference from fires will disrupt most forms of wireless communications, rendering software all but useless. From a technology perspective, not all that much has really changed today when it […]

Superhuman worked to optimize and refine their product early to create a version of "growth hacking" that would not only help the company attract users, but serve them best and retain them, too.

After operating in beta for a year, Nooks, a virtual workspace space targeting distributed teams, has attracted thousands of users and millions of dollars in venture capital. The Stanford student-led upstart has raised a $5 million seed round led by Tola Capital, with participation from Floodgate and investors such as Julia and Kevin Hartz (CEO […]

Do low startup revenues compared to their valuations indicate that there are many houses of cards set to fall in time? The answer is maybe, but probably not. Let's discuss why the math can work.

In 2020 and 2021, we all became well-acquainted with nasal swabs. But small sticks we stuck up our noses, it turns out, were harder to come by than anyone could have predicted. A May 2020 survey of 118 labs in the US found that 60 percent reported limited swab supplies – making lack of swabs […]

Cybereason, a US-Israeli late-stage cybersecurity startup that provides extended detection and response (XDR) services, has secured $275 million in Series F funding. The investment was led by Liberty Strategic Capital, a venture capital fund recently founded by Steven Mnuchin, who served as U.S. Treasury Secretary under the Trump administration. As part of the deal, Mnuchin will […]

Twilio, a company best known for its tools that help developers build text message/phone call-powered apps, is branching out into a new category: live streaming. This morning the company announced Twilio Live, a platform meant to help developers more easily integrate live video/audio features into their apps. Details are still a bit light, but here’s […]

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is hardly new, but this sector — pretty much the default business model for B2B and B2C startups — just keeps growing along with a rapidly expanding ecosystem. TC Sessions: SaaS 2021, a day-long focused look at the current state and future generations of SaaS, takes place on October 27, and it’s designed […]

Aidoc, an artificial intelligence company that develops triage and analysis software, is about to double its funding. On Tuesday, the company announced a round of $66 million. Before that the company had raised about $67 million in its five-year lifetime. Aidoc develops “decision support” software based on artificial intelligence. This software can read images like […]

Microsoft today launched Windows 365, a service that gives businesses the option to easily let their employees access a Windows 10 desktop from the cloud (with Windows 11 coming once it’s generally available). Think game streaming, but for your desktop. It’ll be available for business users (and only business users), on August 2, 2021. Announced […]

As mobile developers build apps, they push them out into the world and problems inevitably develop, which engineers have to scramble to fix. Mobile.dev, a new startup from a former Uber engineer, wants to flip that story and catch errors before the app launches. Today, the company emerged from stealth with a beta of their […]

I’m a postdoc engineer who started STEM OPT after failing to get selected in the H-1B lottery. A colleague suggested I apply for an EB-1A green card, but I have not won any major awards. Tell me more?

The Tusk Ventures portfolio is impressive, if not intimidating. It includes Lemonade, FanDuel, Coinbase, Latch, Bird and many, many more. We’re lucky to be joined by Tusk co-founder and general partner Jordan Nof for an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live, and even luckier that he’s bringing Wheel co-founder Michelle Davey along with him. Wheel […]

Today a new software company from two former Nutanix executives called DevRev emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round from Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures and several industry luminaries. The company, which aims to bring the coding and revenue processes closer together, already has 75 employees working on the new software platform, which they […]

Reserve Bank of India has indefinitely barred Mastercard from issuing new debit, credit, or prepaid cards to customers in the South Asian market over noncompliance with local data storage rules. The South Asian market’s central bank said the new restrictions will go into effect on July 22. “Notwithstanding lapse of considerable time and adequate opportunities […]

There are far fewer annoying things than managing one’s passwords. There are a bunch of companies out there to help you attempt to do that. And there’s also a number of companies that want to go a step further and eliminate the password completely. One such company, Stytch, just raised $30 million in a Series […]

Unybrands is the latest e-commerce aggregator to pick up a significant investment, this time closing $300 million in growth capital from Crayhill Capital Management.

Earlier this year, Amazon launched Build It, a fun little program that lets customers preorder concept devices. Think about it like Indiegogo or Kickstarter, where the company will only actually make the product if enough people buy-in via preorder. Obviously Amazon has a significantly larger ability to absorb a misstep than your average first-time hardware […]

Another US femtech startup has joined the race to build up data-sets to support research into and understanding of a range of health issues that can affect women. Evvy has today launched an at-home test kit for the vaginal microbiome. The user returns their swab to the startup for analysis — and gets detailed information […]

Proper’s tech-enabled service is designed to execute those specific real estate accounting-related processes and apply automation to those that are repetitive.

Many consumers use their credit cards to rack up rewards to be used toward travel. But what if you’re a sports fan, and using your credit card could lead to a virtual conversation with a player on your favorite team? Thanks to San Francisco-based Cardless, that opportunity may be less of a stretch than you […]

Castor is on a mission to make every clinical trial faster and patient-focused.

Life insurance — financial protection you buy against your death — may not read like the liveliest of industries on paper. But a life insurance startup that believes it can turn that stigma around, by infusing the concept with gamification and a push towards wellness and health — and change the life insurance industry in […]

Singapore-based Next Gen Foods will bring its plant-based chicken alternative to the United States after raising a $20 million seed extension. Investors included GGV Capital, agriculture and food tech-focused Bits x Bites, food and beverage company Yeo Hiap Seng, entrepreneur and “Blitzscaling” author Chris Yeh and English footballer Dele Alli. Returning investors include Temasek, which […]

Financial services-as-a-service — where entities like neobanks, retailers and others can create and sell their own financial products by way of a few lines of code and APIs — has been one of the bigger trends in the world of fintech in recent years, with embedded finance on its way to being a $7.2 trillion […]

Anyone, an audio app that’s building a ‘marketplace for advice’ one five-minute phone call at a time, is launching new versions of its iOS and Android apps today* and beginning to large-scale onboarding after operating in a limited closed beta for the past six months. The app — which was founded around 18 months ago […]

Pratilipi, an Indian startup that operates an online storytelling platform to enable writers to share their work in various formats, said on Wednesday it has raised $48 million in a new financing round led by Krafton. South Korean gaming giant Krafton led the Series D round for the seven-year-old Bangalore-based startup, bringing its to-date raise […]

French startup Wecasa has raised a $17.7 million funding round (€15 million). Blisce is leading the funding round with existing investors Serena, ISAI and Frédéric Mazzella also participating. The company has been building a marketplace for home care and wellness. Over the past few years, Wecasa has kept adding new verticals. The startup originally specialized […]

Last year we covered BestDoctor’s series A round when the Russian insurtech startup raised $4.5 million for its online medical insurance platform for corporates, which also offers telemedicine services to employees. It’s now closed a $26 million Series B round from Winter Capital Partners, alongside Swedish investor VNV Global and UNIQA Ventures, the corporate VC […]

Meet Gourmey, a new French startup that recently raised a $10 million founding round in equity and debt. The startup is working on meat grown in laboratories from animal cells. In particular, the company is focusing on poultry and aims to convince chefs that they should use the company’s products in their restaurants. “We’ve been […]

Customer research is invaluable for software companies, but there are many obstacles, like finding the right group of people to survey. Great Question wants to make building and talking to their own panels accessible to all companies, no matter their size. The startup, which was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2021 program, announced today that […]

Ask anyone who runs a fulfillment/warehouse robotics company what companies’ top motivation is for embracing automation and they’ll probably cite labor shortages or shipping speeds. The looming truth of the matter boils down to one word: Amazon. And while it’s true that smaller businesses are feeling the worst crunch, no one is immune to the […]

Investment apps in Southeast Asia are attracting a lot of funding, and now some are raising fast follow-on rounds, too. For example, Indonesian robo-advisor app Bibit raised $65 million in May just four months after a $30 million growth round. Now Singapore-based Syfe is announcing that it has closed a $30 million Series B, only […]

Revel is turning to an app that gamifies energy use to keep its fleet of more than 3,000 electric mopeds charged without putting a strain on New York City’s power grid. Electricity is the key ingredient for the Brooklyn-based startup, which has more recently expanded beyond shared electric mopeds and into e-bike subscriptions, fast-charging infrastructure […]

Eucalyptus is serving more than 200,000 patients across four demographic-focused brands: contraception and fertility, skincare, men’s health and sexual wellness.

Using a medley of technologies in a digital operations toolbox helps businesses achieve key performance indicators through hyperautomation.

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If you’ve done any online shopping in the last little while, there’s a good chance you’ve run into services like Affirm and PayPal’s Pay in 4. They allow you to purchase something and pay for it later by splitting up the total cost of the item into several installments.

The next time you're on a plane, searching for a Wi-Fi connection while soaring thousands of feet above the ground, don't look for the Gogo name. The longstanding standard of in-flight internet, Gogo Commercial Aviation, has been rebranded to Intelsat.

Masten Space Systems, a startup that’s aiming to send a lander to the moon in 2023, will develop a lunar navigation and positioning system not unlike GPS here on Earth. Masten’s prototype is being developed as part of a contract awarded through the Air Force Research Laboratory’s AFWERX program. Once deployed, it’ll be a first-of-its-kind […]

Swedish electric aviation startup Heart Aerospace has received its biggest order to date: 200 of its inaugural ES-19 electric aircraft from aviation giant United Airlines and its regional airline partner Mesa Air Group. The deal, which includes an option of purchasing up to 100 additional aircraft, was announced together with a $35 million Series A […]

If you’re tired of sending brilliant takes into the Twitterverse only to be met with wave after wave of reply guys, a new Twitter feature could give you some relief. Starting today, anyone on Twitter will be able to adjust who can reply to individual tweets after they’ve been sent. Previously, you could limit who […]

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

One of the great things about editing all of our deep-dive EC-1 startup profiles is that you start to notice patterns across successful companies. While origin stories and trajectories can vary widely, the best companies seem to come from similar places and are conceived around very peculiar themes. To wit, one common theme that came […]

Indian food-delivery startup Zomato said on Tuesday evening that it has raised $562.3 million from its anchor investors ahead of its IPO opening on Wednesday. Zomato has already secured nearly 45% of the $1.3 billion it plans to raise through the IPO, the 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered startup revealed in a filing to local stock exchanges. The […]

With the finance world now leveraging tech to conduct business, financial services regulators are also developing new tech to monitor markets, supervise institutions and for administration.

The online chat platform Discord is buying Sentropy, a company that makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate. Discord currently uses a “multilevel” approach to moderation, relying on an in-house human moderation team as well as volunteer mods and admins to create ground rules for individual servers. A Trust and Safety […]