StartUp

Chattermill, the London startup that offers what it calls a “customer understanding” platform that uses machine learning to gain scalable insights into customer feedback, has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is DN Capital, alongside Ventech and btov Partners. Silicon Valley Bank also participated, in addition to a number of

During the days when Snapchat’s popularity was booming, investors thought the company would become the anchor for a new Los Angeles technology scene.

Snapchat, they hoped, would spin-off entrepreneurs and angel investors who would reinvest in the local ecosystem and create new companies that would in turn foster more wealth, establishing LA as a

Cobee, a Spanish fintech startup that has developed an employee benefit management app and accompanying card, has closed €2.1 million in “pre-Series A” funding.

The round was co-led by Speedinvest, and Target Global. Other backers include Chris Bouwer (co-founder of Adyen) and existing investors Encomenda Smart Capital, BStartup (Banco Sabadell),

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a fun combination of early-stage and late-stage news, with companies as young as seed stage and as old as PE-worthy joining our list of topics.

Danny and Alex were back on hand to chat once again. Just in

Amazon may have a market cap of more than $1 trillion, but Finbarr Taylor, CEO of Y Combinator-backed startup Shogun, said the e-commerce giant is “kind of dropping the ball.”

Specifically, he argued that the experience of shopping on Amazon — not what happens after you buy something, but browsing the website itself — is pretty bad, full of spo

Target Global, the pan-European venture capital firm headquartered in Berlin, has raised a new €120 million early-stage fund, following what it claims was only 3 months of fundraising.

Dubbed “Early Stage Fund II”, the new vehicle will see the firm continue to back early-stage tech companies across Europe and Israel, leading and co-leading seed and

Robotics and automation tools are now foundational parts of warehouses and manufacturing facilities around the world. Unlike many other robotics and AI use cases, the technology has moved well beyond the theoretical into practice and is used by small suppliers and large companies like Amazon and Walmart.

There’s no doubt that automation will t

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HealthJoy, a platform designed to make it easier for employees to use their healthcare benefits, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Health Velocity Capital. Returning investors also participated, including U.S. Venture Partners, Chicago Ventures, Epic Ventures, Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones. This brings HealthJoy’s total funding so

Autonomous air mobility company Volocopter has added to the Series C funding round it announced in September 2019. The German electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft maker announced €50 million ($54 million at today’s exchange rate) in funding at the time, and the C round has now grown to €87 million ($94 million) thanks to new l

Customer engagement platform Leanplum today announced that it has raised a $27 million extension to its 2017 $47 million Series D round. This additional funding was led by previous investors Norwest Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures. Kleiner Perkins, Canaan and Launchub also participated in this round, which the company says it will use to

As Indian startups begin to make inroads in the world of SaaS, Microsoft has taken notice. The American tech giant today launched 100X100X100, a program aimed at business-to-business SaaS startups.

Microsoft said Monday that 100X100X100 will bring together 100 companies and 100 early and growth startups. Each committed company will spend $100,000

Tier, the European e-scooter rentals startup that operates in 55 cities across 11 countries, has topped up its funding for the second time in four months.

The Berlin-based company has extended its Series B round to over $100 million, up from $60 million disclosed in October. The additional capital is a mix of equity and debt financing provided by

Before it was worth $7.6 billion, the original idea for Robinhood was a stock-trading social network. At my kitchen table in San Francisco in 2013, the founders envisioned an app for sharing hot tips to a feed complete with a leaderboard of whose predictions were most accurate. Once they had SEC approval, they pivoted toward the real money maker:

[Editor’s note: Want to get this weekly review of news that startups can use by email? Just subscribe here.] 

How well do Robinhood’s financials stack up against incumbent online brokerages? While we wait for the seven-year-old company’s long-planned IPO, Alex Wilhelm examined Morgan Stanley’s big $13 billion purchase of E-Trade for fresh data c

Electriphi, a provider of charging management and fleet monitoring software for electric vehicles, has joined the scrum of startups looking to provide services to the growing number of electric vehicle fleets in the U.S.

The San Francisco-based company has just raised $3.5 million in seed funding from investors, including Wireframe Ventures, the Urb

ChartHop, a startup that aims to modernize and automate the organizational chart, announced a $5 million seed investment today led by Andreessen Horowitz.

A big crowd of other investors also participated including Abstract Ventures, the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, CoFound, Cowboy Ventures, Flybridge Capital, Shrug Capital, Work Life Ventures and

Financial services startups raised less money in 2019 than they did in 2018 as VC firms looked to back late stage firms and focused on developing markets, a new report has revealed.

According to research firm CB Insights’ annual report published this week, fintech startups across the world raised $33.9 billion* in total last year across 1,912

Tock, a six-year-old, Chicago-based culinary reservation service, has never had the kind of brand-recognition that other companies in the space have enjoyed, from publicly traded OpenTable to Resy, the New York-based company that was founded in 2014 and acquired last year for undisclosed terms by American Express.

That’s because Tock has

Six months ago or thereabouts, a group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google and Amazon Web Services had an idea.

Data is valuable for helping developers and engineers to build new features and better innovate. But that data is often highly sensitive and out of reach, kept under lock and key by red

HungryPanda, a food delivery service for Chinese communities in cities around the world, announced today it has raised $20 million in funding. The round was led by investors 83North and Felix Capital and will be used on hiring, product development and global expansion, particularly in the United States. The startup, which did not disclose its

Tyler Haney, the founder and chief executive of activewear label Outdoor Voices, has stepped down, the company confirmed for us this afternoon.

The Business of Fashion, which first reported the news, said the transition follows a previously unreported capital injection from Outdoor Voices’ investors at a lower valuation than previous rounds. It s

New companies have to be security-savvy, but also scrappy

One of the questions I frequently ask startup founders is how much they’re spending on security. Unsurprisingly, everyone has a different answer.

Startups and small companies are invariably faced with the prospect that they’re either not spending enough or are spending too much on something t

A few days ago, Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein published an interesting piece digging into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) startups, and, more specifically, how those companies perform as businesses. Core to the argument presented is that while founders and investors are wagering “that AI businesses will resemble t

Got your sights set on attending TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on May 14 in San Jose? Spend the day with 1,000 or more like-minded founders, makers and leaders across the startup ecosystem. It’s a day-long deep dive dedicated to current and evolving mobility and transportation tech. Think autonomous vehicles, micromobility, AI-based mobility a

LinkedIn has cornered the market when it comes to putting your own professional profile online and using it to network for jobs, industry connections and professional development. But when it comes to looking at a chart of the people, and specifically the leadership teams, who make up organizations more holistically, the Microsoft-owned network