TechCrunch Startup News

The global legal services industry was worth $849 billion dollars in 2017 and is expected to become a trillion dollar industry by the end of next year. Little wonder that Steno, an L.A.-based startup, wants a piece. Like most legal services outfits, what it offers are ways for law practices to run more smoothly, including […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The right question is almost never whether to buy software or build it internally. Instead, banks have often worked to walk the difficult but smarter path right down the middle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s time again to start warming up your pitching arm. Our next Pitchers & Pitches session takes place next week on September 2. Register today! Pitchers & Pitches sessions combine critique and competition with a focus on helping early-stage startup founders create an iron-clad, 60-second pitch. Here’s how it works. Everyone is welcome to attend, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcast...

Meet Fondeadora, a fintech startup based in Mexico City that wants to build a full-stack neobank. The company just raised a $14 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Founded in 2018, the company already manages 150,000 accounts and is adding $20 million in deposits every month. Mexico represents a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

When Brynne McNulty Rojas moved to Bogotá, Columbia four years ago, she encountered a fragmented real estate industry that lacked a central database for consumers to find or compare homes. Rojas was struck by the magnitude of the problem; she was also inspired by the opportunity. Rojas and business partner Sebastian Noguera homed in on […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

Narrative has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding and is launching a new product designed to further simplify the process of buying and selling data. I’ve already written about the company’s existing marketplace and software for managing data transactions. With the new Data Streams Marketplace, the process should be simpler than ever — not […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...

Like any successful founder, Andrew Grauer had bright, long-term ambitions for Course Hero from the moment he launched it in 2006. He started the business to create a place where students could ask questions and get answers similar to Chegg, which launched 15 months before Course Hero . But as he slowly built it, he […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Finix, a startup that provides payments-related services to other companies, announced it has extended its Series B financing with a $30 million investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and American Express Ventures. The fintech startup has now raised over $96 million in venture capital. According to CEO and co-founder Richie Serna, $90 million of that […] Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Eden, the office management platform founded by Joe du Bey, is today announcing the launch of several new enterprise software features. The company, which offers a marketplace for office managers to procure services like office cleaning, repairs, etc., is looking to offer a more comprehensive platform. The software features include a COVID team safety tool […] Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

This morning MURAL announced that it has raised $118 million in an outsized Series B. The visual collaboration startup provides a whiteboard-like digital environment that allows for users to cooperate and brainstorm. MURAL announced that it had raised $23 million earlier this year, though that investment closed in 2019. The $23 million round was a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

In 2010, TV show host Conan O’Brien was abruptly asked to give up the time slot he’d been handed just six months earlier by his longtime employer NBC. Instead, he famously gave the network the figurative finger, taking his act to the basic cable network TBS later that same year and — embraced by legions […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SugarCRM announced this morning it has acquired customer intelligence startup, Node. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but the deal has closed. While Sugar gains a ton of AI expertise, it also adds a customer prediction element to the platform such as figuring out the customers most likely to convert or most likely […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...

George Sehremelis is building what he calls a “social news network,” with the aim of combatting the spread of misinformation and fake news online. “My goal has always been make an impact on the 2020 election,” Sehremelis told me — a tall order, particularly when the big social networks are struggling to solve these same […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The promise of SaaS has always been about taking tedious, expensive manual tasks and finding a way to build a platform to automate them. Cobalt.io is doing that with pentesting, the process of testing an application for security vulnerabilities before it goes out the door. Today, the startup announced a $29 million Series B led […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...

DoorDash is announcing that customers can now order groceries through the DoorDash app from partners including Smart & Final, Meijer and Fresh Thyme. Additional stores like Hy-vee and Gristedes/D’Agnostino are supposed to be added in the next few weeks. Through these partnerships, DoorDash says it has a delivery footprint covering 75 million Americans in markets […] Learn more about your ad choice...

In a turn of fortune, Airbnb today announced that it has filed to go public, albeit confidentially. The move puts the home-sharing service on a path to a public offering sooner rather than later, and comes after reports that the company was prepping an IPO filing this month. Those same reports indicated that Airbnb could […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Finmark, a member of Summer 2020 Y Combinator cohort, is not your typical YC startup. In fact company co-founder Rami Essaid has already built Distil, a security startup and saw it through to exit when he sold the company to Imperva last year. As he pondered what to do next, he took a quick turn […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator is a technological marvel that sets a new standard for the genre. But to recreate a world that feels real and alive and contains billions of buildings all in the right spots, Microsoft and Asobo Studios relied on the work of multiple partners. One of those is the small Austrian startup […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Movable Ink, a company that helps businesses deliver more personalized and relevant email marketing, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series funding. The company will be 10 years old in October, and founder and CEO Vivek Sharma told me that it’s always been “capital efficient” — even with the new round, Movable […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The uptick in robotics funding continues this week with a big round for Calgary, Alberta’s Attabotics. The warehouse fulfillment startup announced a $50 million Series C, led — interestingly enough — by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Canada’s largest pension plan. It’s a pretty hot moment for robotics and automation investing, as more industries […] Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

A 20-month-old startup in India founded by a group of banking veterans that has built a mobile-first credit card and is improving the experience users have with credit cards has secured $10 million in a new financing round. Pune-based FPL Technologies’ $10 million Series A financing round was funded by Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

Autonomous vehicle startup AutoX announced the public launch of of its self-driving taxi service in Shanghai today. Called simply RoboTaxi, AutoX’s offering already faces competition from Didi, China’s largest ride-hailing platform, which launched its own robo-taxi pilot program in Shanghai at the end of June. AutoX’s RoboTaxis will first be available in Jiading District, starting […] Learn more a...

By all accounts, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of robotics and automation by months, if not years. The reasons are fairly clear — robotics don’t call in sick, nor are they disease vectors in the same manner as their human counterparts. As food production and agriculture are looking to be among the biggest […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You could Zoom call into your science class, or you could conduct a lab experiment in virtual reality. During the coronavirus pandemic, the latter has never felt more full of potential. The global need for learning solutions beyond Zoom is precisely why Labster, a Copenhagen-based startup that helps individuals engage in STEM lab scenarios using […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

This morning Cube announced that it has closed a Seed round worth just over $5 million. The software startup, focused on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) work, raised $3.8 million of the total recently, with remaining $1.25 million having come in an earlier Pre-Seed round. Christina Ross, Cube’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch that she […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...