Virtual physical therapist Hinge Health lays off 10% of its workforce

Hinge Health, a nine-year-old company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, cut approximately 10% of its workforce on Thursday, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

The company said people who were laid off worked across various functions; according to employees posting on LinkedIn, some were engineers. Before the layoffs, Hinge had more than 1,700 employees, according to a LinkedIn estimate.

“As we continue to reimagine musculoskeletal care, we are also committed to building a long-term sustainable business,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

“To accelerate our path to profitability, speed up decision making, and better focus our investments, we have made the decision to realign our organization. We are incredibly grateful for all our departing team members’ contributions and are focused on supporting them through this transition.”

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API startup Noname Security nears $500M deal to sell itself to Akamai

Noname Security, a cybersecurity startup that protects APIs, is in advanced talks with Akamai Technologies to sell itself for $500 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Noname was co-founded in 2020 by Oz Golan and Shay Levi and is headquartered in Palo Alto but has Israeli roots. The startup raised $220 million from venture investors and was last valued at $1 billion in December 2021 when it raised $135 million in a Series C led by Georgian and Lightspeed. While the sale price is a significant discount from that valuation, the deal as it currently stands would be for cash, the person said. The deal is not final and could change or not happen at all.

Other investors who have backed Noname include Insight Partners, ForgePoint, Cyberstarts, Next47 and The Syndicate Group.

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5C Network raises $3 Mn in a new round

Medical diagnostics platform 5C Network has raised Rs 25.5 crore (approximately $3 million) from Redwood India Healthcare Fund in a new round. This is the first investment for the firm this year.

The board at 5C Network has passed a special resolution to issue 2,72,241 CCSPS at an issue price of Rs 936.67 each to raise Rs 25.5 crore, its regulatory filing accessed from the Registrar of Companies shows.

For background, the Bengaluru-based company has raised the proceeds after a gap of more than 17 months.  5C Network last raised $4.6 million in its Series A round led by Celesta Capital in Oct 2022.

As per the startup data intelligence platform TheKredible estimates, the company has been valued at around $30 million (post-money).

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Paraform raises $3.6M seed round to connect startups with recruiter networks

Layoffs usually drive attention and sympathy toward affected employees, but rarely does anyone talk about what happens to the recruiters who are sometimes also asked to leave when companies decide to cut headcount. Indeed, tech firms cut up to half of their recruitment teams when they were laying people off in droves back in 2022 and 2023.

Paraform, a recruitment platform aimed at startups, feels there’s an opportunity in tapping the pool of laid-off recruiters who have since branched out to start their own business, and helping startups source talent and access a broader talent network. To fund that effort, the company recently raised a $3.6 million seed round led by A*, a venture capital firm founded by Kevin Hartz — the co-founder of Everbrite and Xoom, and Airbnb’s first investor.

“During the 2022 and 2023 wave of tech layoffs, we saw 100,000 recruiters laid off, driving many recruiters to go independent and start their own recruiting business,” John Kim, CEO of Paraform, said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “This has left many independent recruiters with valuable skill sets and high-quality networks available and open to new ways of working.”

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Finmid raises $24.7M to help SMBs access loans through platforms like Wolt

Berlin-based finmid — one of the many startups building embedded fintech solutions, in its case targeting marketplaces that want to provide their own payment and financing options — has raised €23 million ($24.7 million) in a Series A round to further build out its product and enter new markets. The round values the company at €100 million ($107 million), post money.

Marketplaces — typically two-sided businesses that bring together retailers or other third-party providers with customers to buy their products or services — are very classic targets for embedded finance companies, not least because they host a lot of transaction activity already, so it makes sense for them to build in more functionality around that to improve their own margins.

Players like Airwallex, Rapyd, Kriya, and many more are among those building for that opportunity. But finmid believes it has the potential to lock in more business specifically in its home region. Small and medium-sized businesses in Europe typically look to banks to borrow money. The rise of fintech has opened the door to SMBs accessing more, varied sources of financing than ever before, and an increasing number are doing so.

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Kickstarter launches preorders for completed campaigns

Once a Kickstarter campaign is complete, you need to turn to a creator’s own page to preorder the products — that is, until now. Today, Kickstarter announced that it is (finally!) including preorder functionality as part of its core platform once the campaign is over. It calls the feature “late pledges,” and the platform says it’s planning to make it available to all creators “soon.”

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Screen Skinz raises $1.5 million seed to create custom screen protectors

Clay Canning had an idea while in high school: smartphone screen protectors that featured logos, right on the screen.

He later connected with Rashaun Brown, who was working in sports and licensing at the time, and the idea for Screen Skinz was born.

“We both understood the opportunity and complemented each other’s weakness,” Brown, the company’s CEO. “In December 2022, I resigned from my job to pursue building Screen Skinz with Clay full time.”

Now, Screen Skinz can officially announce the closing of a $1.5 million seed round led by South
Loop Ventures and Abo Ventures.

The company produces custom, patent-pending phone screen protectors that feature personalized logos or slogans that are visible when the phone screen is black and then disappear when the phone is in use. Customers can create their own designs or pick from the company’s existing catalog.

Phone accessories have always been a massive market, with the global screen protector market alone worth an estimated $51 billion as of 2023.

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a16z promotes Jennifer Li to help lead the new $1.25B Infrastructure fund

Powerhouse venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is promoting Jennifer Li to general partner after six years at the firm. She’s being tapped to help invest the new $1.25 billion Infrastructure fund managed by longtime a16z general partner Martin Casado

The Infrastructure fund is part of the fresh $7.2 billion that the Silicon Valley VC giant just raised. Li has been an investing partner on the Infrastructure team for a while, which means she was already writing checks and taking board seats. But her promotion puts her in rarified air: making her the 27th general partner at the firm, and she’s hit this career milestone while in her early 30s.

While that may sound like a lot of GPs, a16z currently has over 500 employees. Plus she’s one of only four GPs on the Infrastructure team.

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Ibotta’s IPO opens sharply higher, hinting at warming public-market interest in tech shares

Ibotta began its path as a public company on Thursday by opening at $117 per share, a big increase from its IPO price of $88, itself an increase from its proposed range of $76 to $84 per share.

Update: Shares of Ibotta closed at $103.25 yesterday, up 17%. The company has given up some ground to $97.38 per share today, lower, but still comfortably above its IPO price.

And this pop is despite boosting the size of its offering earlier in the week, with existing shareholders expanding their sale by just under 1 million shares.

Shares are not continuing to climb in early trading, but are holding steady above its IPO price, at around $100 at the time of writing.

The company left money on the table “for investors who are very bullish on it [expanding] its third-party platform beyond just Walmart,” which has become a key partner for Ibotta and represents much of its current revenue, said Nicholas Smith, a senior research analyst at pre-IPO research company Renaissance Capital. Given that it started trading far above its IPO price today, some critics may argue that it left too much money on the table, and could have raised more for itself.

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Climate-focused deeptech startup Ecozen raises $30 Mn

Climate-focused deeptech startup Ecozen has raised $30 million in a mix of debt and equity from Nuveen Global Fund and other existing equity investors, and new debt support from InCred Credit Fund and International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC).

In January last year, the Pune-based startup secured $25 million led by Nuveen. It has raised around $70 million across debt and equity to date.

Ecozen plans to expand its current offerings and extend its market reach to Africa and Southeast Asia, the company said in a press release.

Ecozen offers climate-smart deep tech solutions and core technology stacks including motor controls, IoT, and energy storage that leverage solar power. The company has two core products Ecotron and Ecofrost.

The company claims to have grown 5X over the last two years, with profits growing 3X as well. Ecozen anticipates doubling its revenue in the current fiscal year, and plans to leverage its advanced tech stack to enter new segments. 

Ecozen added that these solutions will decarbonise sectors like milling, mobility, retail and industry, just as the company’s pumping and cooling solutions did for agriculture.

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Former BharatPe CPO Ankur Jain to launch new startup Jivi.ai

Ankur Jain, the former chief product officer of fintech company BharatPe, is set to launch his new startup in the field of AI healthcare.

“Ankur Jain’s Jivi.ai is expected to go live with its public launch this month,” said one of the sources requesting anonymity. “The founding team consists of professionals and research scholars from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Yale.”

Jain left BharatPe in July last year after serving more than three years at the company where he was responsible for the complete product life cycle and innovation.

Jivi.ai will be the second startup for Jain who also co-founded travel tech startup Instalocate.

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Campus, a community college startup, receives $23M Series A extension led by Founders Fund

Although many students in the United States enter community colleges intending to transfer to four-year universities, only 16% of those students receive bachelor’s degree’s within 6 years. But Campus, an online alternative to traditional community colleges, has an approach that aims to change that. 

Many adjunct professors at the nation’s top universities, including UCLA, Princeton and NYU, earn such low salaries that a quarter of them qualify for some form of government assistance. At the same time, the cost of education has been skyrocketing.

“I got obsessed with the idea of giving everybody access to these amazing professors” at a price that most students can afford, said Campus founder Tade Oyerinde.

Investors seem to be obsessed, too: The company announced Tuesday that it raised a $23 million Series A extension round, led by Founders Fund, with 8VC participating. 

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Playruo lets you try game demos from your web browser

It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing. The appeal is clear: The game you’re playing runs in a data center near you, and the video output is directly streamed to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is relayed back to the data center.

When it works, it’s an amazing experience. It’s a flexible, easy way to play games across multiple devices without buying new hardware. That’s why many companies have launched services that let you play games remotely — there’s Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Google’s now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming service.

But the vast majority of people still play video games on their own, local devices. A French company called Shadow tried something different by bringing your entire computer to the cloud: It isn’t just cloud gaming, it’s cloud computing. You can access Windows in the cloud and install anything you want. But Shadow hasn’t become a mainstream service either.

Fergus Leleu, Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Yannis Weinbach — three former employees at Shadow — decided to leave the company and try something different with their new startup, Playruo. Instead of letting you play your games in the cloud, their new company lets you play game demos in the cloud.

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Swiggy, the Indian food delivery giant, seeks $1.25 billion in IPO after receiving shareholder approval

Swiggy, an Indian food delivery and instant commerce startup, plans to raise $1.25 billion in an initial public offering and has secured approval from its shareholders. The company disclosed its IPO plans in a filing to the local regulator.

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup plans to raise $450 million through the issuance of new shares and offer $800 million of shares from existing backers in the IPO, it wrote in a filing to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. It competes with publicly-listed Zomato and Zepto, a StepStone Group-backed unicorn.

The Indian startup ecosystem has been eagerly anticipating Swiggy’s public debut, which is slated for later this year. Swiggy counts Prosus, Accel, SoftBank and Invesco among its backers. It was last valued at $10.7 billion in a funding round unveiled in early 2022. Some of its investors, including Invesco and Baron, have since publicly marked up the valuation of Swiggy to over $12 billion.

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Rubrik’s shares end trading up almost 16% on the company’s public debut

Rubrik shares hit the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, debuting at $38 a share. The cybersecurity company priced its shares at $32 apiece Wednesday night, just a hair over its initial target range of $29 to $31 after raising $752 million. This share price gives Rubrik a fully diluted valuation of $6.6 billion, up 88% from its last primary valuation of $3.5 billion in 2019.

The stock settled at $37 a share at the end of trading on Thursday.

Rubrik sells cloud-based security software to enterprise customers and has 1,700 customers with contracts worth more than $100,000 and 100 customers who pay the company more than $1 million a year. The Silicon Valley startup was founded in 2014 and has raised more than $550 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase data.

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CRED’s competitor CheQ secures $4.5 Mn

B2C credit management platform CheQ has raised Rs 35 crore or $4.2 million in its extended seed round from new and existing investors. The funding for the Bengaluru-based firm came after a gap of 18 months.

The board at CheQ has passed a special resolution to issue 12,952 Seed1 cumulative convertible preference shares at an issue price of Rs 26,989 each to raise Rs 35 crore, its regulatory filing accessed from the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows.

3one4 Capital invested Rs 12.49 crore while Venture Highway Fund and Multiply Ventures pumped in Rs 6.24 crore and Rs 2.08 crore, respectively. Individual investors including Lloyd Dizon Balajadia, Madhav Prakash Sehth, Vishal Gupta, and Deepk Tuli have collectively put in Rs 14.2 crore.

As per filings, the company will use these funds for growth, expansion, marketing, and general corporate purposes as decided by the board.

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FirstCry to withdraw IPO papers, may refile with latest financials

Brainbees Solutions, the parent company of kids-focused omnichannel retailer FirstCry, is reportedly going to withdraw its $500 million IPO within four months of filing a draft red herring prospectus with the regulator: Security Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

According to a Reuters report, the firm has planned to pull back IPO papers as SEBI raised questions over key metrics it disclosed to investors.

As per SEBI’s new rule introduced in 2022, an IPO-bound company must share all key business metrics that it has shared with prospective investors in the last three years.

The report further said that FirstCry may refile IPO papers soon with the latest financials (three quarters of FY24: March 2023 to December 2023).

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Ethiopian plastic upcycling startup Kubik gets fresh funding, plans to license out its tech

Kubik, a plastic upcycling startup, has raised a $1.9 million seed extension, months after announcing initial equity investment. The startup’s latest investment is from African Renaissance Partners, an East African venture capital firm; Endgame Capital, an investor with a bias for technologies around climate change; and King Philanthropies, a climate and extreme poverty investor.

The fresh capital comes as the startup scales its operations in Ethiopia following the launch of its factory in Addis Ababa, where it is turning plastic waste into interlocking building materials like bricks, columns, beams and jambs. Kubik co-founder and CEO Kidus Asfaw, told TechCrunch that the startup intends to double down on its operations in Addis Ababa, as it lays ground for Pan-African growth from 2025.

Kubik’s approach involves upcycling plastic waste into “low-carbon, durable, and affordable” building materials using proprietary technology, which Asfaw says they will out-license for faster Pan-African growth, and eventually global growth.

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Seam wants to make customer data accessible to every business user

As data access becomes increasingly tied to business success, making data available to all business users, regardless of their data-wrangling skills, has grown in importance. The founders of Seam, an early-stage startup, experienced the need to make data more accessible firsthand when they were at Okta, and decided to launch a company to solve this problem, especially as it relates to customer data.

On Tuesday, they announced a $5 million seed to make their vision a reality, and that they are making the product available to the public for the first time.

“We’re building what we’re calling the AI interface for customer information. And our mission is really to give anyone regardless of their technical ability, what we’re calling business users, the opportunity to use data to answer any questions they have,” said company CEO and co-founder Nicholas Scavone.

The way they are doing that is via a generative AI prompt interface that lets people ask questions about customer data and get answers back without understanding SQL queries. “Our solution to this is really to build kind of an end-to-end system that gives you a simple chat interface where you can have a conversation with your data in natural language, specifically around the sales and marketing systems,” he said.

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A pair of Airbnb alums is bringing intelligence and automation to data protection

When Julie Trias and Elizabeth Nammour were working together at Airbnb on the company’s data team, they had to deal with data spread across a variety of sources, and that growing sprawl led to challenges in keeping data safe. The founders’ own frustration with the existing crop of data protection options motivated them to launch a company and build the automated data protection tool they wanted.

On Tuesday, that startup, Teleskope, announced a $5 million seed investment.

“We tested a bunch of different tools to help us understand, protect, delete and redact data at Airbnb, but what we came to realize is that there wasn’t that tool that could help developers do this automatically,” Trias told.

That’s not to say there were no solutions, but the ones that existed like data classification tools generated a lot of false positives and had scaling issues. “There wasn’t a tool that could help you go from detection to actual remediation, which is redacting the data, isolating the data or taking any sort of action on the data.” The solution Teleskope has built enables customers to connect to their various data sources, identify sensitive data across a variety of data stores in an automated way and isolate or delete it when necessary.

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Renda, which provides order fulfillment for businesses in Africa, takes in $1.9M

The logistics industry in Nigeria, like any informal sector, struggles with poor infrastructure and other inefficiencies, making it difficult for businesses — both large and small — to move and store goods.

Many startups have tackled middle-mile and last-mile delivery challenges, but one untapped area is providing an end-to-end fulfillment solution. Renda, a three-year-old startup, fills this gap by simplifying order fulfillment and retail distribution for businesses in Africa. It has secured a $1.9 million pre-seed round, money it will use to improve its offerings; to expand into more cities in Nigeria and Kenya, the two markets where it’s currently present; and grow its partnership network across these markets. 

Ingressive Capital, a pan-African early-stage VC, led the round’s $1.3 million equity portion. Other participants included Techstars Toronto, Magic Fund, Golden Palm Investments, Reflect Ventures and Vastly Valuable Ventures. Additionally, Founders Factory Africa and SeedFi contributed $600,000 in debt funding.

The startup aggregates and provides access to end-to-end infrastructure that optimizes order fulfillment for businesses. Its solution allows them to access flexible storage, monitor and manage inventory, process and fulfill orders, manage deliveries and returns, and receive and reconcile cash on delivery in real time.

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