StartUp

Anyline, the Vienna-based provider of optical character recognition (OCR) technology that developers use to build OCR functions into their websites and apps, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The company has also unveiled plans for a U.S. expansion.

Leading the round is Berlin-based VC firm Project A, with participation from Anyline’s exis

Codagenix, a company developing vaccines and viral therapies for illnesses ranging from the flu and respiratory viruses to dengue fever, has raised $20 million in a new round of financing.

The company’s new investment round was led by Adjuvant Capital, with additional participation from Euclidean Capital and Topspin Partners .

Codagenix will use

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.

Keep Labs decided to

Oviva, the health tech startup that provides a digital solution for Type 2 diabetes treatment in Europe, has raised $21 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is MTIP, with participation by new investor Earlybird, and existing investors AlbionVC, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures and Partech.

Oviva says the new capital will be used to

Oscar Health, the upstart healthcare insurance company and technology developer, expects to have roughly 400,000 members insured under its healthcare plans, who collectively will bring in roughly $2 billion in revenue for the company by the end of 2020, according to slides of a presentation from the JP Morgan Healthcare conference seen by

For Silicon Valley’s potential startup millionaires, compensation packages staked on future promises of wealth are where the action is. But what happens when these employees get laid off or have to leave before an exit?

When Wouter Witvoet left a startup that he had joined as employee #4, he felt relatively prepared, having set aside $50,000 to

Seventy-five-million-dollar-funded legal services startup Atrium doesn’t want to be the next company to implode as the tech industry tightens its belt and businesses chase margins instead of growth via unsustainable economics. That’s why Atrium is laying off most of its in-house lawyers.

Now, Atrium will focus on its software for startups

E-commerce phenom and D2C bright light Casper has filed to go public.

The New York-based company that raised nearly $340 million while private, according to Crunchbase data, expects to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CSPR.” Its S-1 filing includes a $100 million placeholder figure for its possible capital raise.

The

One of the enduring truths of big companies is that they aren’t innovative. They are “innovative” in the marketing sense, but fail to ever execute on new ideas, particularly when those ideas cannibalize existing products and revenues.

So it often takes a real competitor to force these incumbent, legacy businesses to evolve in any meaningful way.

You better move fast if you want to party with us and 1,000 of your closest startup entrepreneur and investor friends. We just released a fresh round of tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7. Tickets are limited, and they fly off the shelf faster than you can say seed funding. Don’t get shut out — buy

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

A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Positive adjusted EBITDA, or something close to it.

That’s the message from scooter unicorn Lime, which announced this week that it was cutting about 14% of its staff and closing a

Google announced today that it is buying AppSheet, an eight-year-old no-code mobile-application-building platform. The company had raised more than $17 million on a $60 million valuation, according to PitchBook data. The companies did not share the purchase price.

With AppSheet, Google gets a simple way for companies to build mobile apps without

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

Today we’re working to figure something out, namely the tradeoffs that D2C unicorn (and soon to be public company) Casper faces as it seeks to balance growth and profitability. And then we’re going to stack it next to its most o

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 a bit over; sorry about that.

For the first time, this year Delta Air Lines had a large presence at CES. The carrier used much of its space to highlight the “parallel reality” screens developed by Misapplied Sciences and Sarcos Robotics, which brought its latest Guardian exoskeleton. At the show, I sat down with COO Gil West, an industry veteran with years of experience at a nu

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton, which was a lot of fun.)

What was on

Just Spices, the German-founded spice mix brand, is disclosing €13 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Five Seasons Ventures and Coefficient Capital, with Bitburger Ventures also joining.

A direct to consumer play, Just Spices offers two main product lines: Spice Mixes and “IN MINUTES”.

The first consists of various spice blends, with

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

Today we’re continuing our series on companies that have reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold, or are about to. ExtraHop is the company of the day, a Seattle-based firm that deals with cloud analytics

The tours and experiences market is projected to be worth $183 billion this year, and today a startup that has made inroads into the space through bootstrapping is announcing its first outside investment.

ToursByLocals — which sources local guides in some 162 countries, then helps tourists search and book them for either individual or small group t

Scoodle, a U.K.-based startup that, in its own words, wants to help tutors become influencers, is disclosing $760,000 in pre-seed funding.

Backing the round is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, alongside Tiny VC, IFG Ventures and a number of unnamed angels. Scoodle is also the first ed tech company to join the University of Oxford’s accelerator, O

Tradeshift — the startup which set out to disrupt the traditional arena of supply chain payments and marketplaces when it first appeared in 2008 — has today announced a new funding round of $240 million in equity and debt, raised from a combination of existing and new investors.

The funding will be used to help accelerate its growth and, it says,

Skyqraft, a Swedish startup using AI and drones for electricity power-line inspection, has picked up $505,000 in early backing.

Leading the round is “startup generator” and investor Antler, with participation from a number of angels, including Claes Ekström and Tomas Kåberger.

Founded in March 2019 and launched that September, Skyqraft provides

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 which

Google has been on a long-term mission to build inroads into the world of e-commerce by working more closely with brick-and-mortar retailers, and now it looks like it plans to extend that work a little further. The search giant is acquiring Pointy, a startup out of Dublin, Ireland, which has built hardware and software technology to help physical

Jolt, an education startup that describes itself as an alternative to traditional MBA courses, has raised $14.1 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Hillsven Capital and Octopus Ventures. It brings Jolt’s total funding to $23.3 million in three years.

The company plans to use the additional

Equinix announced today that it is acquiring bare metal cloud provider Packet, the New York City startup that had raised over $36 million on a $100 million valuation, according to PitchBook data.

Equinix has a set of data centers and co-location facilities around the world. Companies that may want to have more control over their hardware could use

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 in its seed

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 statement to Tec