World Fund closes first €300M climate tech fund, seeking to follow on and back hardware

After a three-year fund-raise, World Fund has finally closed a €300 million first fund, €50 million short of it’s target in 2021, but still a considerable number given a background of war and economic uncertainty. The VC originally emerged from the founders of the Ecosia independent search engine, where search enquiries funded the planting of trees.

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Liquid Death is just one of many VC-backed beverage startups ready to disrupt Coke and Pepsi

Venture-backed beverage startups continue to pop

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Investors’ pledge to fight spyware undercut by past investments in US malware maker

Cyber investors announced commitments to fighting spyware, but at least one firm previously invested in an exploit maker

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GoStudent, the online learning platform, says it’s now profitable

GoStudent — the online tutoring marketplace last valued at $3.2 billion — has carved out a position for itself as one of the biggest and more popular startups to come out of Vienna, Austria, with 11 million families and 23,000 tutors on the platform. Now it’s adding another distinction to the list: it is profitable. The company’s CEO Felix Ohswald told TechCrunch that the company is now in the black across its global footprint.

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Fireworks.ai open source API puts generative AI in reach of any developer

Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days. While the majority of the focus remains on the model vendors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, or the bigger companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon, there are in fact, a lot of startups trying to attack the generative AI problem in a variety of ways.

Fireworks.ai is one such startup. While lacking the brand name recognition of some of these other players, it boasts the largest open source model API with over 12,000 users, per the company. That kind of open source traction tends to attract investor attention, and the company has raised $25 million so far.

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Musical toy startup Playtime Engineering wants to simplify electronic music making for kids

Troy Sheets began making music at 15 years old in his home studio with a keyboard synthesizer, drum machine, and 4-track cassette recorder—an impressive setup for a high school sophomore. However, it’s rare for young, up-and-coming musicians to have access to advanced equipment (other than a free app on their phone). And most adolescents can’t afford it. Plus, for someone starting out, a synthesizer can be confusing to use.

That’s why Sheets decided to develop the $199 Blipbox, an affordable kid-friendly synthesizer designed for ages three and up.

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Furnished rental startup Blueground defies proptech woes with $560M in revenue, a new $45M raise

Alex Chatzieleftheriou founded Blueground in 2013 after being frustrated with the dearth of short-term furnished apartments in Europe. He had been traveling as a consultant for McKinsey, living almost exclusively in hotel rooms for months.

“One time the company had to pay up to €15,000 for a hotel room in Amsterdam. And there wasn’t enough space nor a kitchen to cook,” he said. “I tried renting apartments for a month or more. But it was difficult, and landlords weren’t open to buying furniture. So I had created a business that would solve my problem.” 

Some years later, at the height of the pandemic, business was booming for his startup’s category – short-term, furnished apartment rental companies – as people roamed the world while working from home.

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Buy now, pay later on a Porsche? Zaver now has $30M to make it a reality

Zaver, a Swedish B2C buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A to $20 million. Total investment to date stands at $30 million.

In Europe, Zaver competes on BNPL with Klarna, PayPal, and incumbents such as Santander and BNP Paribas.

However, Zaver’s schtick is it claims it can assess the risk on BNPL cart sizes of up to €200,000 in real time due to its risk assessment algorithms. Other BNPL providers rarely fund anything beyond €3,000, at least in Europe.

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ChowNow snaps up YC-backed POS platform Cuboh and is laying off staff

ChowNow, the online ordering platform and marketing service for local restaurants, acquired Cuboh, a Y Combinator-backed point-of-sale (POS) platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps into one place.

This marks ChowNow’s first acquisition, which will help strengthen its POS integration solution and help restaurants tackle orders across multiple services.

However, as part of the acquisition, ChowNow laid off around 30 employees, bringing the total workforce to 300. Meanwhile, Cuboh’s entire 30-person team — including marketing, sales, product and engineering — is transitioning to ChowNow.

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Deal Dive: Iron Sheepdog is fixing short-haul trucking from the bottom up

Will Lawrence, the co-founder and CTO of Iron Sheepdog, likes to say that sometimes building something simple is actually really hard. Building simple-to-use technology for the short-haul trucking industry is Iron Sheepdog’s goal. That approach is also why the company thinks it has been able to see a level of adoption from the industry its competitors haven’t.

The Williamsburg, Virginia-based company’s software looks to make the short-haul trucking space, which largely involves outsourcing short-haul jobs to truckers booked through brokers, more seamless and efficient. Companies can track their contracted trucks through Iron Sheepdog, giving them more transparency into where trucks are, how long a job takes and how much to pay. The truckers themselves get an easy-to-use app that helps them accept jobs and get paid online.

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Zomato pilots new service for last-mile deliveries across corporate parks

Zomato appears to be trialing a new service wherein the company is ensuring last mile delivery for office goers through a stationed team.

The service seems to be an attempt to streamline deliveries inside tech and corporate parks to ensure timely deliveries and save rider’s time. It also reduces the hassle for an employee in collecting the food as many offices do not allow delivery partners beyond the reception area.

As spotted in Gurugram, Zomato has set up a micro hub at an office premise where the delivery partners can deliver the food. Then, a “walker” picks up the food parcel and hands it over to a customer on their respective floor or exact location. 

It’s likely Zomato has made some arrangements with such corporate parks to whitelist these last-mile delivery partners. Moreover, Zomato is promising “no calls from delivery partners”, and dedicated “walkers” for each floor.

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Seso is building software to fix farm workforces and solve agriculture’s HR woes

Migrant workers are a critical labor force for U.S. farms, but getting them here on proper H-2A visas can be complicated, and the compliance surrounding these employees is taxing for farms. Seso was founded five years ago to help streamline that process and now looks to expand into a one-stop-shop HR platform for the agriculture industry.

Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked for his advice on whether or not her organic farm should expand. Despite demand for her harvests, Guirguis, whose entire career has involved job creation and the labor market, told her expanding wouldn’t be smart because the industry’s labor shortage would make hiring enough workers hard.. That inspired Guirguis to found Seso to automate the H-2A visa process to help fix that issue and help farms stay compliant. Once he started talking to potential farm customers, he realized that farms could use a lot more help with their HR beyond just finding workers.

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Exclusive: Deeptech startup Planys raises $4 Mn

Deeptech startup Planys Technologies has raised $4 million in its ongoing pre-Series A round.

The fresh investment tranche has come after a gap of more than two years for the Chennai-based firm.
The board at Planys Technologies has passed a board resolution to issue 8,471 CCPS at an issue price of Rs 41,600 each to raise Rs 35.23 crore, its regulatory filing accessed from the Registrar of Companies shows.

Himalaya Finance, Golden Birch Investments, Krishna Defence, Impact India Investments, SiriusOne Capital, and several individuals including Ashish Ramesh Kacholia, Shalini Chhabra, and Puneet Gupta participated during the new investment tranche.

The company also approved its MSOP pool of 1,445 equity shares amounting to Rs 6 crore (as per the valuation report) in February, a separate filing shows.

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Jobs for the Future’s new $50M fund looks to invest in underrepresented founders

Two years ago, Jobs for the Future (JFF), a non-profit dedicated to helping low-wage workers attain upward mobility, established a venture arm, JFFVentures, to back innovative employment tech.

In a move implying that the launch went well, JFFVentures today unveiled its second fund, JFFVentures Fund II, with a target of $50 million. $15 million has been raised so far.

The new fund — furnished in part by the Autodesk Foundation, the Workday Foundation and the American Council on Education — will target founders building HR, education and workforce solutions that “enable economic mobility for workers in middle to low-wage jobs,” said JFFVentures Fund managing partner Sabari Raja.

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Four-year-old Wiz Freight posts Rs 1,243 Cr revenue in FY23

Digital supply chain startup Wiz Freight’s growth has been explosive in the last two reported fiscal years as its scale skyrocketed to Rs 1,243 crore in FY23 from Rs 18 crore in FY21. However, the Tiger Global-backed company needed to power it with higher expenses to chase scale and posted a loss of Rs 90 crore in FY23 against Rs 8 crore profits in FY22.

On a year-on-year basis, Wiz Freight’s revenue from operations surged 3.8X to Rs 1,243 crore in FY23 from Rs 327 crore in FY22, its consolidated financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies show.

Founded in 2020, Wiz Freight provides a platform for exporters and importers to book and manage their cross-border shipments.

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M2P Fintech posts Rs 440 Cr revenue in FY23, losses mount 3.35X

Application programming interface (API) infrastructure platform M2P Fintech (formerly Yap), registered a remarkable 10.5X increase in its operating scale in the last two reported fiscal years, zooming to Rs 440.7 crore in FY23 from Rs 41.89 crore in FY21.

On a year-on-year basis, M2P’s revenue from operations surged 2.26X to Rs 440.7 crore in FY23 from Rs 194.74 crore in FY22, its consolidated financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies show.

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EarliTec Diagnostics raises $21.5M to help diagnose autism earlier

One in 36 children in the U.S. has autism, according to the CDC. Research shows that the earlier a child gets diagnosed, the better their developmental outcome will be. EarliTec Diagnostics just raised fresh capital to expand its system that helps clinicians diagnose children as young as 16 months old.

The Atlanta-based startup’s FDA-authorized approach involves a child watching short videos and social interactions on a screen for 12 minutes while the device, using AI, tracks the child’s eye movements. According to EarliTec, children with autism won’t focus on the video the same way that kids without autism will.

The startup raised a $21.5 million Series B round co-led by Nexus NeuroTech Ventures, a venture firm focused on backing companies creating solutions for brain disorders, and Venture Investors, a Midwestern venture fund that invests in healthcare companies. The startup’s tech is currently used by eight clinicians across six states in the U.S.

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Paddy Cosgrave returns as Web Summit CEO after resigning over Israel/Gaza controversy

Paddy Cosgrave, the co-founder of the Web Summit tech conference, is returning to his role as CEO after resigning in October over controversial statements he made about the Israel/Gaza war last year on social media. Rumors of his return began to surface over the weekend; Cosgrave confirmed the move in a post on X today.

Notably, in his announcement, Cosgrave does not make any mention of the politicized remarks he made that led to his departure less than six months ago (with the social media posts he wrote at the time deleted as well). Instead, Cosgrave goes for de-escalating, announcing plans for a shift in focus to “smaller” groups.

“As Web Summit becomes bigger, our aim should be to make it smaller for our attendees. More intimate. More convivial. More community focused,” he writes.

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Kiki World, a beauty brand that uses web3 for customer co-creation and ownership, raises $7M from a16z

If you think that choosing a nail polish color or which ingredients go into your face cream can’t have anything to do with blockchain, think again.

Kiki World, a beauty startup launched last year, wants consumers to co-create products and co-own the company with the help of web3 technology.

On Tuesday, LA-based Kiki announced that it raised a $7 million seed round from the Andreessen Horowitz crypto fund and The Estée Lauder Companies’ New Incubation Ventures, along with other backers such as OrangeDao and 2Punks Capital.  

Kiki co-founder Jana Bobosikova said she believes that being a loyal user of a brand in the Web 2.0 world can be a net negative experience. “You probably have watched a lot of creators on TikTok recommend it to you. You probably recommended it to all your friends. And what do you get for that? Just more retargeted ads,” she said.

Kiki is flipping that model by allowing its community members to vote on the features they want before the beauty products are made. As a reward, voters earn points toward free products and receive digital tokens in the company.

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Guesty snaps up $130M at $900M valuation to help property managers list on Airbnb and beyond

Travel and tourism are very much back on the map for consumers and the business world. Now, to underscore that surge, one of the startups building software in the space has closed a big round of funding. Guesty, a platform that lets accommodation managers manage their business online, including on platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo, has raised $130 million.

Sources confirmed to TechCrunch that the Series F values Guesty at around $900 million post-money.

The company, based out of New York with roots in Israel, says its revenue has increased 5x in the last three years, and it expects to turn profitable this year. The company did not specify actual revenue figures.

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Tech upskilling startup Scaler lays off 150 employees

Tech upskilling startup Scaler has laid off around 150 employees citing long-term growth and sustainability. This is the first instance of layoffs at the Bengaluru-based company since its inception in 2019.

“At Scaler, we’ve always believed that education is a primary human need, and tech education, more so. It is imperative that we look at how we operate for long-term growth and sustainability. As part of this, we have designed a new way of working to be able to achieve sustainable growth while delivering the best learning experience and outcomes for our learners – something that we’ve always been committed to,” said Scaler cofounder Abhimanyu Saxena, in a statement.

“As part of this restructuring, we identified some functions/roles, primarily in marketing and sales, in the company that we had to part ways with…,” Saxena added.

Saxena further added that this was not a performance-driven decision and the firm assures all those affected are provided with the necessary support to ensure a smooth transition.

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