Pluton Biosciences looks to nature for cutting-edge biotech solutions, raising $6.6M seed

Many of the problems we face today in biology and agriculture have been faced before — but not by humans. Somewhere in nature there is a microscopic creature that accomplishes naturally and efficiently what chemists and bioengineers are struggling to do at all — and Pluton Biosciences claims to have pioneered a way to find […]

Welcome debuts a smarter city guide app on iOS, backed by $3.5M led by Accel

When you’re exploring a city — whether one you’re visiting on your travels or your own — there are a number of tools that can help you find out where to go, what to see and what to do, like Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor and others. But a startup called Welcome thinks that today’s set […]

Twitter invests in avatar startup Facemoji

Avatar startups have come and gone over the past few years, but the future that many of the entrepreneurs behind them originally imagined has proven more or less accurate. Apple is increasingly interested in avatar representations through Memoji, Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be a metaverse company and platforms like Roblox, where users enter a […]

Mark Cuban-backed Otto raises $4.5M to turn car equity into credit

Otto, a fintech startup which aims to allow people to tap into their vehicle’s equity for access to credit, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round of funding. The Dallas-based company is building a mobile platform that will essentially let people borrow against their vehicles at the same interest rate as standard credit cards. […]

Medley, the coaching platform for personal and professional development, gets $3.7M led by A16Z

Medley, the group coaching platform that focuses on both personal and professional development, announced the close of a $3.7 million seed round led by A16Z today Connie Chan and Anne Lee Skates of Andreesen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Aglaé Ventures, Foundation Capital, Ciara Wilson, Jen Rubio, Dara Treseder (Peloton). and Sanyin Siang […]

Solo.io reaches $1B valuation with $135M Series C investment

When you think about service meshes, a somewhat esoteric cloud native tool designed to stitch different microservices together, you might not think it’s the most lucrative side of the Kubernetes led cloud native market, but you would be wrong. Today, Solo.io, a Cambridge, Massachusetts service mesh startup, announced a $135 million Series C at a […]

Tekion, the automotive retail platform headed by a former Tesla CIO, just tripled in value

A year ago, we told you about the opportunity that former Tesla CIO Jay Vijayan was chasing. His plan? To pull car dealers into the 21st century with a snazzy end-to-end automative SaaS platform like the one he helped develop inside Tesla. Customers could use it to order a car to their precise specifications; dealers […]

Podcastle raises $7M for its all-in-one platform for podcast production and publishing

Both Anchor and Descript have made their names as being among the most significant Podcast creation platforms of recent times, but hoving into the rear-view mirror recently has been Podcastle, an all-in-one platform that can cover off recording, production and publishing, all on the one platform. It’s now raised $7 million in an early-stage funding […]