Equity Monday: New unicorns kick off the week as India get cross with Starlink
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. With a holiday-impacted week behind us, we hope that you are ready for the next few weeks of busy news. Because starting in the back-half of December, the world is going to slow […]
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Upbound nabs $60M to grow its open source Crossplane multi-cloud management project
Companies today want to avoid the lock-in they faced in the past with a single vendor. As a result, they are hedging their bets with a multi-cloud strategy, but this creates a new problem around finding a single tool for managing it all. That’s where Upbound comes in with its open source Crossplane multi-cloud management tool. […]
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Flowrite is an AI writing productivity tool that wants to help you hit inbox zero
When TechCrunch asks Flowrite if it’s ‘Grammarly on steroids’, CEO and co-founder Aaro Isosaari laughs, saying that’s the comment they always get for the AI writing productivity tool they’ve been building since late summer 2020 — drawing on early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API, and attracting a wait-list of some 30,000 email-efficiency seeking prosumers keen […]
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Jefa raises $2 million for its challenger bank for women in LATAM
Fintech startup Jefa has raised a $2 million seed round to build a challenger bank with a product specifically designed for women living in Latin America and the Caribbean. The company has managed to attract 115,000 women on its waitlist and participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield last year. Investors in Jefa include The Venture Collective, […]
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IoT data collector Samsara’s IPO will be fun to watch
Happy Friday! The TechCrunch crew is still in a modest period of repose thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, but we wanted you to have numbers to chew on all the same. So, this morning, we’re taking a brief look at Samsara’s IPO filing. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on […]
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Rensource-spinoff Sabi closes $6M bridge round, expands B2B retail platform outside Nigeria
Nigeria’s informal trade sector, worth over $244 billion, has more than 40 million micro, small and medium businesses. Most of these businesses operated offline until a few years ago when startups brought about digitization by providing infrastructure and a gamut of e-commerce and financial services. One-year-old Sabi — a spinoff from Rensource, an African energy […]
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Perfeggt brings in first capital to shell out plant-based egg alternative
Sales of plant-based alternatives, like dairy and meat, are surging in the global market, and Perfeggt wants to do the same for the egg. The Berlin-based foodtech company is poised to debut its chicken-less egg product in the first quarter of 2022 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Today, the company announced it raised $2.8 million […]
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Longevica takes in $2.5M as it launches open research resources to examine life extension
Life science company Longevica said Wednesday it is launching an open research tool so scientists and research institutions can access a data set that tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is the latest effort from the biotechnology company, which is researching mechanisms of healthy aging and life extension. […]
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In a crowded global market, Canadian AI startups’ fundraising results stand out
It’s boom times for startups building with or atop AI functionality: The Exchange explored the rise in venture capital dollars for AI startups last week, noting that investment into the business niche set all-time records in Q4 2020, and then successively in quarters one, two and three in 2021. The Exchange explores startups, markets and […]
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Financial flash mobs meet fundraising memes
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. And this week, it was all about […]
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