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Equity podcast: 2017 IPO recap and who will go public in 2018?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week the crew — Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, Alex Wilhelm — were joined by Barrett Daniels, the CEO of Nextstep Advisory, an IPO shop that helps companies go public. Guess what we talked about? Yes, we went back through the biggest debuts… Read More
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Theranos gets $100 million in debt financing to carry it through 2018, with some caveats
Theranos has secured $100 million in debt financing. Yes, someone gave the blood testing company known for handing out questionable test results money. First reported by Business Insider, the company reportedly told investors it had secured the money from Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based private equity firm that was acquired by Softbank earlier this year. Of course, this is… Read More
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Scaleworks announces pre-holiday surprise with Keen IO acquisition
Scaleworks, a private equity firm based in San Antonio, Texas, apparently couldn’t wait until after the holidays to share the news of its latest purchase. The firm announced it was acquiring Keen IO in a Medium blog post yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company was available for comment beyond the blog post, but Keen has raised close to $30 million since it… Read More
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Unbound raises $2.7 million for women’s sexual wellness
Unbound, a sexual wellness startup for women, recently raised $2.7 million from Founders Fund, Slow Ventures, Arena Ventures, SoGal Ventures and others. Founded by Polly Rodriguez of Women of SexTech, Unbound aims to empower women to own their sexuality. “Raising money is always hard but it took an exceptional amount of resilience,” Rodriguez said. Unbound’s bread and butter… Read More
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Inside ‘Fin,’ the elite human/AI assistant
“I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter. For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email, or speak a request and a real person… Read More
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Amazon acquires connected camera and doorbell startup Blink
Amazon has acquired Blink (via Slashgear), a startup founded in 2014 that builds connected Wi-Fi home security cameras, as well as a new video doorbell introduced earlier this week. The company got its start via a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $1 million for its totally wireless home monitoring system. Amazon has already made forays into connected home video cameras and even home… Read More
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Daimler acquires majority stake in French Uber competitor
Daimler has acquired a majority stake in Chauffeur Privé, a French app that provides ride hailing services in Paris, Lyon and the Côte d’Azur (via Tech.eu). The ownership stake means that Daimler now has controlling interests in a number of smaller Uber competitors, particularly operating in Europe and MENA, including MyTaxi and Careem. The automaker also intends to complete its… Read More
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China’s Didi Chuxing raises $4B more for AI, international expansion and electric vehicles
China’s Didi Chuxing, the country’s top ride-hailing company, said today that it has raised $4 billion in new capital to support a range of new initiatives including international expansion. The company has already raised $13 billion from investors that include Alibaba, Tencent and Apple, and it said that this newest round will go towards developing its artificial intelligence… Read More
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Chip, the chatbot savings app, raises over £1M in crowdfunding with plans to apply for a banking license
Chip, the chatbot app that plugs into your bank account and lets you automatically save for a rainy day, has raised nearly £1.1 million on equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. The fund raise, which is part of a larger £2.4 million funding round, forms part of plans for the London-based startup to apply for a banking license. Read More
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Passport, the technology business for city transit systems, raises $43 million
Passport, company that’s managing much of the technical aspects of how people pay to use public transportation resources in cities like London, Miami and Los Angeles, has just raised $43 million. The money, from Bain Capital Ventures, will go to help the company expand its payment and transaction services nationally and internationally. Read More
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Ooma acquires AI-powered video camera platform Butterfleye for its home security service
Ooma, the company that’s probably still best known for its VoIP platform, today announced that it has acquired Butterfleye, an AI-powered video camera and security platform that produces a smart security camera for home and business use. Ooma plans to integrate Butterfleye’s camera into its Ooma Home security solution, but the company will also continue to sell the camera under… Read More
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PayPal backs pan-European savings deposit marketplace Raisin
Raisin, the savings deposit marketplace that lets you shop for a better interest rate across Europe, has picked up backing from PayPal. Described as a “strategic investment,” the new funding round remains undisclosed. Read More
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Mobike lands investment from Line to grow its bike-sharing service in Japan
Dock-less bike rental company Mobike is teaming up with messaging app firm Line to boost its presence in Japan. Line, which is Japan’s most popular messaging app with 71 million users in the country, is making an undisclosed investment in Mobike Japan, the Chinese firm’s entity in the country. The deal will see the Mobike service integrated into the Line app the same way that it… Read More
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Bio-programming toolkit maker Asimov launches with $4.7M from Andreessen Horowitz
Biotech is one of today’s many hot tech frontiers, but one thing holding it back is that it’s significantly less amenable to traditional computing techniques than other areas. A new startup is working on bridging the gap between the digital and the biological by creating a set of computer-aided biology design tools. It’s a prescient enough idea that it has attracted $4.7… Read More
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Stitch Fix is crashing after its first-ever earnings report
Stitch Fix’s first earnings report is not going well for the company, as its shares went into a tailspin after a significant run up over the past month following its IPO when it delivered its results its most recent fiscal quarter. Stitch Fix, a personalized apparel company that ships a box of recommended items that users can buy or send back, closed up just 1% on its first day of… Read More
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SendBird raises another $16M to help developers add chat functions to a service
If you go to any company’s website these days, you’re probably starting to see some chat functionality more and more often — and for good reason, as it’s a quick way for those companies to get in touch with their potential customers. And SendBird, which launched in February this year out of Y Combinator, has tried to quietly begin eating up this space by giving… Read More
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Convercent raises $25M to keep companies out of ethical quandaries
Convercent, a company that provides ethics and compliance software to businesses, today announced that it has raised a $25 million funding round led by Rho Ventures. Additional investors include Sapphire Ventures and Tola Capital. The idea behind Convercent is to give businesses the tools to, in MBA-speak, “operationalize ethics.” Read More
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Dgraph raises $3M for its open-source distributed graph database, hits 1.0 release
Dgraph is an increasingly popular open-source distributed graph database that uses a version of Facebook’s GraphQL as its default query language. Today, the company announced that it has raised $3 million in funding from (this includes a $1.1 million seed round raised last year). In addition, the company announced that its flagship database has hit the 1.0 stage. Read More
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dYdX is a decentralized protocol for cryptocurrency derivatives
While some financial derivatives like futures trading are slowly coming to Bitcoin, we’re still a long time away from these financial products being widely available for the entire cryptocurrency asset class. So dydX is building a decentralized protocol for derivatives, built on the Ethereum blockchain and the 0x protocol. The protocol lets you take out peer-to-peer short sells, long… Read More
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