Climate change is affecting farming all over the world, and solutions are seldom simple. But if you could plant crops that resisted the heat, cold or drought instead of moving a thousand miles away, wouldn’t you? Avalo helps plants like these become a reality using AI-powered genome analysis that can reduce the time and money […]
Shares is a new stock trading app with a focus on social features
Meet Shares, a new European startup that wants to add a social twist to financial investment — in that case, the company means ‘social’ as in ‘social network’. The startup has been developing its product under the radar for a few months already. It is also moving at a fast pace. It has assembled a team […]
Grocery delivery startup Membo is hungry to build a Europe-wide, local food producer network
Estonia-based Membo — which is backed by Y Combinator and will be presenting at the incubator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day next week — is aiming to take a slice of the premium end of grocery shopping in Europe and a bite out of supermarket giants’ continued dominance of the traditional weekly food shop. On-demand food […]
With investors like Lightspeed and The Chainsmokers, Mexican neobroker Flink raises $57M to boost financial inclusion in LatAm
Flink, a Mexico City-based neobroker, has raised $57 million in a Series B round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The financing comes just over six months after Flink raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Accel. Existing backers Accel, ALLVP, Clocktower and new investor Mantis Venture Capital (founded by The […]
D2C specs purveyor Warby Parker files to go public
Warby Parker has two main sales channels, largely attractive economics, falling losses and rising adjusted profitability. You could even argue it handled the pandemic well. So what’s it worth?
Balance raises $25M in a Ribbit Capital-led Series A to grow its ‘consumer-like B2B checkout platform’
Balance, a payments platform aimed at B2B merchants and marketplaces, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Ribbit Capital. Avid Ventures participated in the financing, in addition to existing backers Lightspeed Ventures, Stripe, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, SciFi VC and UpWest. Other individual investors that put money in the round […]
OnlyFans’ policy change is a tale as old as the internet
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Amanda Silberling on the show to help us parse through OnlyFans‘ precedent-setting move to ban sexually explicit content on its service. The decision was a bolt from the blue for […]
Cybersecurity VC funding surges to a record $11.5B in 2021
The pandemic completely upended the threat landscape as we know it. Ransomware accounted for an estimated 2.9 million attacks so far in 2021, and supply-chain attacks that targeted Kaseya and SolarWinds have increased fourfold over 2020, according to the European Union’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, which recently warned that the more traditional cybersecurity protections are no longer […]
Ai Palette raises $4.4M to help companies react faster to consumer trends
Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect to see trends land on store shelves much more quickly. Founded in 2018, Ai Palette uses machine learning to help companies spot trends in real […]
Ramp and Brex draw diverging market plans with M&A strategies
From a high level, all of the recent deal-making in corporate cards and spend management shows that it’s not enough to just help companies track what employees are expensing these days.