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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How Y Combinator’s founder-matching service helped medical records AI startup Hona land $3M

Y Combinator is renowned in Silicon Valley for a lot of reasons, but there’s one service that has quietly become one of its most powerful: an online founder-matching tool.

“I think this is the most valuable digital product that YC has built (i.e. more valuable than Bookface, etc.). It’s astonishing how many founders I meet who met each other on the YC co-founder matching platform,” tweeted seed investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi. (Bookface refers to YC’s famed online collection of how-to startup advice for its program participants.) 

Recent Y Combinator grad Hona is an example, although its founders’ meet-cute story is a bit more exciting than just using that tool.

Hona is a GenAI medical records startup. It integrates into multiple electronic records systems and then summarizes a patient’s medical records, helping doctors prep for the patient’s visit. 

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Despite recent successes, IPO market still won’t fully open until 2025

This year already proved that startups are willing to go public in a less-than-ideal market — and get rewarded for it, too. But bankers, lawyers and investors said the recent IPO successes aren’t enough to foster more than a dozen tech IPOs this year.

“I don’t think we will have the floodgates open like I might have thought,” Greg Martin, co-founder and managing director at Rainmaker Securities, told TechCrunch. “The trickle was delayed; I thought it would happen sooner in Q1. Because of that, I think the floodgates can’t open til 2025, but we could have a healthy flow of 10 to 15 companies for the year.”

Jeremy Glaser, a lawyer and co-chair of Mintz’s venture capital and emerging companies practice, said that despite how the recent IPOs have performed thus far, people need more data than just a few weeks, or a month, of trading to feel confident.

Looking at how Klaviyo and Instacart are performing today shows why people remain cautious. Klaviyo is currently trading at a $5.94 billion market cap, down from its $9.2 billion IPO price. Instacart is faring better, but still trading under its initial IPO price of $9.9 billion. It’s currently trading at $9.47 billion.

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CitiusTech’s revenue crosses Rs 3,500 Cr in FY23; profit tanks 85%

B2B health tech platform CitiusTech has grown steadily over the past few fiscal years. The company recently claimed that it clocked $500 million revenue during FY24 which seems plausible considering its FY23 numbers. 

CitiusTech’s revenue from operations grew 40% to Rs 3,499 crore in FY23 from Rs 2,499 in FY22, its consolidated financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) show. 

CitiusTech is a healthcare technology service and solutions provider which offers consulting, engineering, manufacturing and data oriented softwares to large hospitals and healthcare organizations. The sale of its software development, implementation, and support services comprised 97% of the company’s total revenue while the remaining income came from the sale and maintenance of software licenses. 

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Sequoia’s Jess Lee explains how early-stage startups can identify product-market fit

Founders at the early stages of building their startups may have already created a strong solution, identified a gap in the market, or may simply have an inescapable and driving motivation to build their own business. Ideally, they have a good combination of all three. But do they have product-market fit? And what actually is product-market fit, anyway?

The investors at Sequoia, one of the world’s biggest venture capital firms, have come up with a very handy framework to answer those two questions. It distills the landscape into three archetypes.

“Hair on Fire” roughly means that your startup addresses an urgent problem. A security startup, for example, might fit here, especially if it can win initial business on the back of parachuting in to fix a breach or other problem already in progress. Or, think of the wave of companies that offered services to businesses and users when they were suddenly sheltering in place and working from home during the peak of Covid-19.

“Hard Fact” translates as a startup that solves an existing problem better than what’s already out there. Square, which emerged as a new point of sale product in a seemingly old and saturated market, is a good example of this.

Lastly, “Future Vision” relates to deep tech, moonshots, and products out of left field. These would include quantum startups, but also those building flying cars or even autonomous vehicles that would ply our roads (or any of the tech that will be needed to make such vehicles).

In sum, the theory goes like this: Startups all, more or less, fit into one of these three archetypes, so identifying which archetype a company fits in can help it focus and develop.

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India’s Oyo, once valued at $10 billion, seeks new funding at 70% discount

Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is negotiating with investors to raise a new round of funding that could cut the Indian firm’s valuation to $3 billion or lower.

The startup is engaging with investors, including Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, for the new funding, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The new funding round is likely to see some secondary transactions as well that will value the startup at as low as $2.5 billion, the sources added.

The proposed terms, if they materialize, would represent a steep drop from the peak valuation of $10 billion at which Oyo raised a funding round in 2019. A valuation of $3 billion or less would also be lower than the amount of capital Oyo has raised against equity and in debt over the years.

The deliberations for the new funding are ongoing, and its terms may still change, or a round may not materialize, the sources cautioned.

The cut in valuation is hardly a surprise. SoftBank, which owns more than 40% of Oyo, internally cut the valuation of Indian Startup to $2.7 billion in 2022. Oyo said at the time that there was “no rational basis” for the markdown of its valuation.

Oyo – which counts SoftBank, Airbnb, Peak XV Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners among its backers – disputed the “rumors,” asserting there wasn’t any “concrete transaction.” Khazanah didn’t respond to a request for comment. The terms about the proposed valuation haven’t been previously reported.

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Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all, if private-market investment doesn’t perk up in the coming quarters, we could be on track for yet another year of declines in total startup investment in 2024.

Some startups are working to combat the slowdown, including Intently, which is rolling out a new service this week called Founder AI. The service’s premise is simple: It will go through your personal data, understand who you know, sort those connections based on their own background in terms of what they have built and craft a few recommended paths to warm investor intros from your existing founder network.

The goal is to identify the best ways to reach the most pertinent investors, as most folks won’t make too many introductions for you. That’s why you want to ensure you are aiming at targets who might come good.

Under the hood, the service is a bit more complex; so much so that Intently CEO and co-founder Slava Solonitsyn told TechCrunch that his team built Founder AI first as a services business to ensure that they understood what founders have, need and want, only to later productize that work with the help of AI.

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Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

Instant payments company TabaPay has abandoned its plans to purchase the assets of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse, TabaPay confirmed to TechCrunch today. Synapse says the problem is banking partner Evolve Bank & Trust. And Evolve says it is not involved, and not to blame. Meanwhile, another player in the saga, Mercury, says Synapse’s allegations have “no merit.”

Synapse’s counsel declared in bankruptcy court on Thursday that the deal would not be moving forward, Fintech Business Weekly’s Jason Mikula shared on LinkedIn. A spokesperson for TabaPay confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday afternoon that the company had “pulled out,” adding that TabaPay had sent “termination notice of the purchase agreement this morning based on failure to meet the purchase agreement closing conditions.”

Synapse CEO and co-founder Sankaet Pathak, however, believes that TabaPay can still be convinced to stay in the deal. He told that his “understanding is that TabaPay is still interested in doing the acquisition, but Evolve has failed to meet their closing condition for TabaPay to be able to close.” 

That closing condition is that Evolve Bank & Trust must fully fund its FBO accounts and has thus far failed to do so, according to Pathak. FBOstands for “For Benefit Of” account, and is defined as “a bank or investment account that is set up to receive funds on behalf of a third party or beneficiary.”

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