TechCrunch Startup News

Autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai is forming a strategic joint venture with Sany Heavy Truck, a subsidiary of Chinese heavy equipment manufacturer Sany Heavy Industry, to create an autonomous truck brand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Switchboard, a collaboration app that combines features of videoconferencing and digital whiteboarding, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round that values the company at $200 million post-money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cordial, a cross-channel marketing and data management platform, today announced that it closed a $50 million Series C funding round led by NewSpring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Proving that there’s room in the robotic process automation (RPA) market for another vendor, RPA Supervisor today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Dawn Capital with participation from S16vc and existing investor MMC Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Charles Onu’ cousin was both born with birth asphyxia and later developed a hearing condition, the seed for Ubenwa, an audio biometric company geared at identifying neurological disorders in infants, was also planted.   Onu, CEO and co-founder, said he hopes Ubenwa will change the way physicians provide care to infants.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Insightly Analytics helps engineering teams stop problems before they happen, like slow release cycles, bottlenecks and uneven workload distribution that can lead to employee burnout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

World Fund, a newcomer in climate-VC land, is taking the lead in a $128 million round for IQM, with hopes the Finnish quantum computing company will one day deliver carbon cuts by the megatonne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Kristy Kim started TomoCredit in early 2019, she was on a mission to help international students more easily obtain credit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Buy now, pay later” (BNPL) startups have gained traction by targeting consumers, but BNPLs for businesses are also starting to take off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Digit, the bipedal robot developed by Agility Robotics, will continue to evolve and improve, including the addition of a head and some digits of its very own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the software industry, observability tools provide businesses insights on the health of their production apps. At best, observability tools can flag when apps are performing under par and help identify the root causes of issues. But rarely is it this simple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

15Five — an early mover in the world of building technology to help motivate teams, and to improve performance management for execs overseeing those teams — has raised $52 million in a round of growth funding that it will be using to expand its own performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Opendoor opened the door, so to speak, to the idea of applying technology to the concept of house flipping to both scale the opportunity and make it considerably more efficient. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Conversational commerce isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, with countless companies using live chats, messaging apps, chatbots, voice assistants and more to encourage consumers to part with their cash. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pandemic has triggered more demand for online shopping and fueled many smaller retailers to establish their own online offerings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The credit card market has become increasingly crowded, with consumer fintech startups like locked in a fierce competition to differentiate their offerings through branding, rewards programs and even crypto compatibility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Privacy is a core concern in crypto. Once you know a crypto wallet address corresponds to a certain individual, you can track all the transactions that individual has made through their wallet on any public blockchain, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Some cryptographers think the solution to crypto’s privacy concerns lies in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

When Andrew Hines started Canvas Medical in 2015 he couldn’t have predicted that telehealth would go from niche to norm or that a pandemic would inspire entrepreneurs to launch a new fleet of digital health startups that needed fresh infrastructure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Medusa aims to offer APIs beyond the standard marketplaces ones for merchants to build more advanced features like fulfillment, subscriptions or a wholesale channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What started as a pet project to electrify food trucks in the San Francisco Bay area — an enterprise inspired by the cacophony of generators that greeted Ben Parker every day during his lunch break at Tesla — has evolved into a much larger, complex and potentially more lucrative undertaking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hormonal healthcare can be intimidating, since it touches on the most intimate parts of our lives. Kindly Health wants to make it accessible to more people, with a combination of at-home diagnostic tests (including semen tests and tests for polycystic ovary syndrome), telehealth consultations and supplements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Deci, a startup company with 50 employees who are developing a platform to build and optimize AI-powered systems, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series B financing round led by Insight Partners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

DeltaStream, which is developing a streaming database platform geared toward enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a seed round led by New Enterprise Associates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uprise takes in a user’s full financial picture, including overlooked aspects like employer benefits, and offers recommendations on where to funnel money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Edge computing is seeing an explosion of interest as enterprises process more data at the edge of their networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices