Sawyer, a two-year-old startup that aims to become the OpenTable of children’s activities, has raised $6 million in new funding led by Advance Venture Partners. Others that contributed to the round include Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 3311 Ventures, Female Founders Fund and earlier backer Collaborative Fund, as well as unnamed investors from the company’s $1.5 million seed round. Read More
from TechCrunch
San Francisco-based startup Juvo wants to help mobile users in emerging markets improve their financial standing by combining data and identity to provide micro-loans. It’s an ambitious goal, and to help achieve it, the company has raised $40 million in funding led by NEA and Wing Venture Capital. Read More
from TechCrunch
Helpling, the Rocket Internet-founded company that lets you book a range of home services online, has raised further funding. This time around, the undisclosed backing — which I understand to be “several million” Euros — comes from Unilever Ventures, the venture arm of Unilever, in what can undoubtedly be described as a strategic investment. Read More
from TechCrunch
As e-commerce giants like Amazon continue expanding their on-demand offerings, retailers are struggling to keep up. CommonSense Robotics wants to make near-instantaneous deliveries accessible to smaller businesses with micro-fulfillment centers that can be built inside existing retail spaces. The company announced today that it has raised $6 million in seed funding from Aleph VC and… Read More
from TechCrunch
TechCrunch Disrupt alum UnifyID has the clear goal of changing the way we think about authentication. Instead of entering a username and password as the only line of defense to our computer systems, it wants us to rely on other data that comes from the phone in our pockets. That smartphone has a number of sensors in it like an accelerometer and a GPS, and using the kinds of data it gather… Read More
from TechCrunch
Didi Chuxing, the ride-sharing company that forced Uber out of China, has expanded its increasingly global empire after it made an undisclosed investment in Taxify, an Uber-like service that operates in Europe and Africa. Four-year-old Taxify is headquartered in Estonia — three of its founders are ex-Skype — and today it operates in 18 countries, including Hungary, Romania,… Read More
from TechCrunch
Carspring, the London and Berlin used car buying platform founded by Rocket Internet, has picked up £5 million in Series B funding. Backing the round are Rocket Internet itself, along with Channel 4’s Commercial Growth Fund, which offers media in the form of TV advertising in return for equity. Read More
from TechCrunch
Following sexual harassment allegations that led to the resignation of 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure, it’s now emerged that the troubled VC firm has abandoned its Canada fund. According to reports in The Globe and Mail and BetaKit, the saga made it difficult to move forward with the next phase of 500 Canada, where it had a profit-sharing relationship. The firm was in the process… Read More
from TechCrunch
Snap, the Snapchat parent, closed the day down just 1% after the first phase of the dreaded lockup expiration, which meant that some insiders are now eligible to sell shares. The anticipation of a big selloff had been putting downward pressure on the stock for weeks, but it appears that enough of that fear was already built into the stock price to withstand day one. But while venture… Read More
from TechCrunch
We’re taking a look at the IPOs of tech’s biggest players. Next up is Google, which went public in 2004. At the time, the firm frankly told investors that it was “not a conventional company,” and it did “not intend to become one.” For Google, the unconventional attitude worked. But before its IPO more than 10 years ago, the company’s future was… Read More
from TechCrunch