StartUp

Lately, the venture community’s relationship with advertising tech has been a rocky one.

Advertising is no longer the venture oasis it was in the past, with the flow of VC dollars in the space dropping dramatically in recent years. According to data from Crunchbase, adtech deal flow has fallen at a roughly 10% compounded annual growth rate over the

Shyft is announcing it has raised $15 million in Series A funding to make the moving process less painful — specifically in the situations where your employer is paying for the move.

Other startups are looking to offer concierge-type services for regular moving — I used a service called Moved last year and liked it. But Shyft co-founder and CEO

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 pursuing other aud

Octi has created a new social network that uses augmented reality to connect the act of seeing your friends in real life with viewing digital content, like their favorite YouTube videos and Spotify songs.

When I wrote about the startup in 2018, it was building AR technology that could do a better job of recognizing the human body and movement. Last

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re taking a moment to discuss the amount of money going into startups building OKR software. After covering WorkBoard’s recent round, I’ve noticed OKR software and services everywhere, even in Twitter ads that I somehow

Startup productivity tools have never been better, but that’s led to employees being more passionate than ever about the tools they want to use themselves. PMs don’t want to use Jira, engineers don’t want to mess with Trello and keeping everyone happy can mean replicating processes again and again.

Montreal-based Unito is building software that

TriggerMesh, a startup building on top of the open-source Kubernetes software to help enterprises go “serverless” across apps running in the cloud and traditional data centers, has raised $3 million in seed funding.

The round is led by Index Ventures and Crane Venture Partners. TriggerMesh says the investment will be used to scale the company and

Finding the right product/market fit is challenging for any company, but it’s just a little harder for hardware startups.

I recently visited the San Francisco offices of Nebia to chat with co-founder and CEO Philip Winter, whose eco-friendly hardware startup has received funding from Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Fitbit CEO

Back in August, we flagged a filing for you that we found interesting, one for a now 2.5-year-old, 40-person Redwood City, Calif.,-based startup called Bear Robotics that’s been developing robots to deliver food to restaurant customers. The filing listed a $35.8 million target; Bear Robotics founder and CEO John Ha now tells us the final close, b

Descartes Labs, a well–funded startup based in New Mexico, provides businesses with geospatial data and the tools to analyze it in order to make business decisions. Today, the company announced the launch of its Descartes Labs Platform, which promises to bring its data together with all of the tools data scientists — including those with no b

Party on, startuppers. We’ve just printed up a fresh batch of tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7. If you haven’t snagged yours yet, don’t wait, because tickets to this event fly off the proverbial shelf. Buy your ticket right now.

Our annual winter soiree features 1,000 of Silicon Valley’s brightest m

Farming is one of the oldest professions, but today those amber waves of grain (and soy) are a test bed for sophisticated robotic solutions to problems farmers have had for millennia. Learn about the cutting edge (sometimes literally) of agricultural robots at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI on March 3 with the founders of Traptic, Pyka and FarmWise.

Trapt

ServiceNow announced today that it has acquired Loom Systems, an Israeli startup that specializes in AIOps. The companies did not reveal the purchase price.

IT operations collects tons of data across a number of monitoring and logging tools, way too much for any team of humans to keep up with. That’s why there are startups like Loom turning to AI t

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

Thundra, an early-stage serverless tooling startup, announced a $4 million Series A today led by Battery Ventures. The company spun out from Opsgenie after it was sold to Atlassian for $295 million in 2018.

York IE, Scale X Ventures and Opsgenie founder Berkay Mollamustafaoglu also participated in the round. Battery’s Neeraj Agarwal is joining the c

Supersonic aviation startup Boom is making progress on its XB-1 demonstrator aircraft, the airplane that will prove out its tech and pave the way for construction of its future production commercial supersonic passenger jets. The Denver-based startup has partnered with Flight Research, Inc., a company that specializes in flight testing and

Front is raising a $59 million Series C funding round. Interestingly, the startup hasn’t raised with a traditional VC firm leading the round. A handful of super business angels are investing directly in the productivity startup and leading the round.

Business angels include Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian President

Placer.ai, a startup that analyzes location and foot traffic analytics for retailers and other businesses, announced today that it has closed a $12 million Series A. The round was led by JBV Capital, with participation from investors including Aleph, Reciprocal Ventures and OCA Ventures.

The funding will be used on research and development of new

One of the biggest opportunities in the new space economy lies in taking the connectivity made possible by ever-growing communications satellite constellations and making that useful for things and companies here on Earth. Startup Skylo, which emerged from stealth today with a $103 million Series B funding announcement, is one of the players

Electric scooter operator Skip is gearing up to appeal San Francisco’s decision to deny the company a permit to operate in the city. When the Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced the permit grantees in September, it came as a surprise to Skip, which had previously received a permit to operate as part of the city’s pilot program.

Ahead

Blossom Capital, the early-stage VC firm co-founded by ex-Index Ventures and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown, is announcing a second fund, less than 12 months since fund one closed.

The new fund, which is described as “heavily oversubscribed,” sits at $185 million. That’s up from $85 million first time around.

Blossom’s remit remains broadly the same: t

Good morning, friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Equity’s regular, long-form shows still land each and every Friday, including this entry from just a few days ago.

This morning, coming to you early from the frozen tundra of the American East Coast, it’s Tuesday. That’s because yes

Small Door, a veterinary services membership startup, today announced the grand opening of its NYC location at 15 Seventh Ave. Small Door soft-launched the space in November of 2019.

The vet startup first came onto the scene in April of 2019 with a $3.5 million seed round led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Primary Venture

LumApps, the cloud-based social intranet for the enterprise, has closed $70 million in Series C funding. Leading the round is Goldman Sachs Growth, with participation from Bpifrance via its Growth Fund Large Venture.

Others participating include Idinvest Partners, Iris Capital, and Famille C (the family office of Courtin-Clarins). The round brings

This morning FloQast, an LA-area startup, announced that it closed a $40 million Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners. The company also told TechCrunch in an interview that it raised a $20 million inside round between today’s investment and its 2017 Series B. Including today’s infusion, the firm has raised a little over $90 million.

The small

Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular games, will now be an official high school sport and college sport, thanks to an LA-based startup called PlayVS.

The company has partnered with Epic Games to bring competitive league play to the collegiate and high school level. This also marks PlayVS’s entry into colleges and universities.

PlayVS launched

Seattle’s Female Founders Alliance, which runs the Ready Set Raise accelerator for women and non-binary founders, has acquired New York’s Monarq, an incubator with similar goals and origins. The latter will be integrated into the former, but it seems to be a happy collaboration rather than a consolidation of necessity.

Monarq was founded three

As the total cost of cybercrime reaches into trillions of dollars and continues to rise, an Israeli firm called Intezer — which has built a way to analyse, identify and eradicate malware by way of an ordering system similar to what’s used when mapping out DNA — has raised $15 million to double down on growth.

The funding, a Series B, is being led