Category Archive

Seoul-based education technology startup Mathpresso announced today that it has raised $14.5 million in Series B funding. The company’s flagship app is Qanda, which provides students with math and science help and tutoring. Participants in the round include Legend Capital, InterVest, NP Investments and Mirae Asset Venture Investment. This brings Mathpresso’s total funding so far to $21.2 million. Its previous …

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a state-run firm that offers train ticketing and catering services in India, more than doubled on its first day of trading in what was the best public debut for a local firm in two years. The firm, the fourth public company to come out of Indian Railways, sold 20.1 million shares, or a …

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos hopped on the line with prominent investor, entrepreneur, thought leader, and Techstars co-founder Brad Feld to discuss the latest edition of his book “Venture Deals”, his advice to founders and investors, and his …

Valued at $535 million, autonomous retail startup Standard Cognition has emerged as a soon-to-be tech giant and the best hope for merchants to compete with Amazon Go. Cashierless checkout is poised to transform brick-and-mortar commerce, and shop owners fear having to battle Amazon’s technology alone or partner with it, exposing data it could use against them. The $86 million-funded Standard …

Southeast Asian real estate portal 99.co has agreed to form a joint venture with iProperty. As part of the deal, iProperty owner REA Group will invest $8 million of working capital into the venture, expected to be finalized by the second quarter of 2020. 99.co and REA Group, a real estate-focused digital advertising conglomerate that is listed on the Australian …

Group Nine — the digital media company formed by the merger of Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker — just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire women’s lifestyle publisher PopSugar. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reports that it’s an all-stock transaction that values PopSugar at more than $300 …

Missing out on a month’s rent because you can’t find a tenant is a huge loss. Searching for someone to fill a home takes work, while property managers are incentivized to price your place too high leading to costly vacancies. But new startup Doorstead wants to take on the risk and the work for you. It acts as a property …

In a wide-ranging conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last week, Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann made light of the company’s lack of IPO documents. The San Francisco-based on-demand delivery business was expected to publicly file its IPO prospectus in September in preparation for a fall exit, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch this summer. September, …

Alteryx, a publicly traded analytics company, announced this morning that it has acquired Feature Labs, a machine learning startup that launched out of MIT in 2018. The company did not reveal the terms of the deal. Co-founder and CEO Max Kanter told TechCrunch at the time of the launch, that company had been based on research at MIT that looked …

AI Medical Service, a Tokyo-based company developing AI-based software to help detect gastric cancer, announced today that it has raised a $42.9 million Series B. Investors include Globis Capital Partners, World Innovation Lab and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. The funding will be used for clinical trials of its software, which looks for signs of cancer in real-time during endoscopies, …

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Publisher adtech startups Taboola and Outbrain merge in $850M deal to take on Google and Facebook The content recommendation rivals — who are, shall we say, …

Notion Capital today announces a new $150M fund in a bid to bolster its claim to being the go-to investor for European B2B tech. Launched ten years ago after the $700M exit of MessageLabs by co-founders Ben and Jos White, this new fourth fund will continue its previous focus on Series A SaaS and enterprise tech, but will now come …

Halle Tecco is no stranger to conception struggles. The Rock Health founder and former CEO has been public about her journey on social media, including two rounds of IVF, eventually leading to a healthy baby girl. Now, she wants to help others make babies, too. To get there, Tecco has joined a class of new fertility tech companies that have …

Mutiny, a personalized marketing startup for businesses that sell to other businesses, is taking the stage today at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, where it’s announcing new funding and new features. CEO Jaleh Rezaei told me that she and co-founder Nikhil Mathew created Mutiny to solve a problem they saw as early employees at HR services company Gusto — trying to personalize …

Think Jack Dorsey’s jobs are tough? Well, Tom Chavez is running six startups. He thinks building businesses can be boiled down to science, so today he’s unveiling his laboratory for founding, funding and operating companies. He and his team have already proven they can do it themselves after selling their startups Rapt to Microsoft and Krux to Salesforce for a …

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. WeWork withdraws its S-1 filing, will delay its IPO The move was widely expected, but The We Company (which owns WeWork) made it official yesterday, with …

Aero, a new air travel startup backed by Garrett Camp’s startup studio Expa, is officially announcing the appointment of its first CEO: Uma Subramanian, who previously launched Airbus’ helicopter service Voom.Flights. The startup is also revealing that it’s raised a total of $16 million in funding. In addition to Expa, GGV Capital also invested. Aero said its goal is to offer …

Berlin-based recruitment chatbot startup Jobpal has closed a €2.5 million (~$2.7M) seed round of funding from InReach Ventures and Acadian Ventures. The company, which was founded back in 2016, has built a cross-platform chatbot to automate candidate support and increase efficiency around hiring by applying machine learning and natural language processing for what it dubs “talent interaction”. The target customers …

Fintech startup Bnext has raised a $25 million funding round. The Spanish company is building a banking product and has managed to attract 300,000 active users. DN Capital, Redalpine and Speedinvest are leading today’s funding round. Existing investors Founders Future and Cometa are also participating. Other investors include Enern, USM and Conexo. When you open a Bnext account, you get …

WeWork’s parent organization The We Company just announced that it’s withdrawing the S-1 filing for its IPO. The coworking company has had a turbulent month since the filing went public, around both the general state of its finances and the behavior of co-founder/CEO Adam Neumann. As a result, Neumann stepped down down as CEO last week (he will continue to serve as …

Amboss, the Berlin-based ‘medtech’ startup that originally offered a learning app for students but has since pivoted to a knowledge platform for medical professionals, has raised €30 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Partech’s growth fund, with Target Global acting as a co-investor. Existing investors, Cherry Ventures, Wellington Partners and Holtzbrinck Digital, also participated. Launched in …

DeadHappy, a U.K.-based insurtech startup that wants to offer more flexible life insurance and remove the taboo surrounding death, has raised £4 million in Series A funding. Backing comes from e.ventures, alongside the company’s seed investor Octopus Ventures. Founded in 2017, DeadHappy claims to be the UK’s “first fully digital pay-as-you-go life insurance provider”. It offers flexible life insurance policies …

This morning, Peloton (NASDAQ: PTON), the tech-enabled stationary bicycle and fitness content streaming company, raised $1.2 billion in its NASDAQ initial public offering. Despite dropping more than 10% in its first day of trading — ultimately closing down 11% at $25.84 per share — the IPO was a bona fide success. Peloton, once denied (over and over again) by VC …

App Annie, a go-to source for mobile app market data and analytics, is expanding its platform with the acquisition of mobile analytics provider Libring. The deal will allow App Annie to present its mobile app market data side by side with advertising analytics data, in order to paint a more complete picture of an app’s performance and revenue. Already, App …

Most people just guess how to price their vacation rental based on minimal research, or take platforms like Airbnb’s suggestions that just want to maximize their own revenue. Beyond Pricing aligns itself with home owners, taking 1% of bookings to optimize their rates on a daily basis. As you might expect of a startup that costs 1% to often earn …

The modern office worker is heavily engaged with expenses. From buying SaaS products and purchasing team lunches to securing freelancers for outsourced work, employees need access to purchasing power on behalf of their companies on a regular basis. Unfortunately, offering that purchasing power is fraught with difficulty. Companies want to manage their cash carefully to ensure audit compliance and prevent …

As any CFO can attest, corporate finance is extraordinarily complicated. From tax preparation, to financial controls, to cash flow estimation and more, the finance department of any major company often has to turnaround sophisticated analyses with extreme attention to detail — and quick. Most of the time, businesses outsource at least part of those financial functions to the big four …

$1.5 trillion. That’s the amount of outstanding student loan debt held by American citizens according to the New York Fed. It is an astronomical sum, and has led to much hand-wringing about whether there is a coming bubble in U.S. higher education. What’s even worse than the scale of the debt load though is the fact that for millions of …

Exercise bike company Peloton priced its initial public offering this evening at $29 per share. As part of the IPO, Peloton is offering 40 million Class A common stock to the public. Peloton was expected to price its IPO between $26 to $29 per share, so this falls on the higher end. With Peloton selling 40 million Class A shares, …

Vox Media announced yesterday that it’s acquiring New York Media, making it the new owner New York Magazine, as well as digital offshoots like The Cut and Vulture. The companies said Vox Media’s chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff will continue to lead the combined organization, while New York Media CEO Pam Wasserstein will become president and join the Vox board …