TechCrunch Startup News

Cadoo, a US-startup that’s gamifying fitness by turning it into a betting opportunity, using the prospect of winning (or losing) cold hard cash to motivate people to get off the couch, has collected $1.5 million in seed funds from Sam & Max Altman’s Apollo VC and the student-focused Dorm Room Fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brooklyn-based Looking glass today announced the release of a pair of second-gen holographic displays. Following up on late-last year’s release of the entry-level Portrait, the startup is offering new versions of the Looking Glass 4K and 8K systems, which sport 15.6- and 32-inch displays, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sourcegraph, a late stage startup that wants to bring the power of search to code, announced a $125 million Series D investment today on a $2.625 billion valuation, a 3x growth from its previous valuation in December 2020, according to the company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oakland-based Mighty Buildings, which is on a quest to build homes using 3D printing, robotics and automation, has raised a $22 million extension to its Series B round of funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pretty soon, people won’t have to provide a fingerprint or a driver’s license to prove their identity — if VU has its way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Based in Sydney and Auckland, Dovetail is a full-service venture studio that works closely with founders who have a great idea, but may lack technical backgrounds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netskope, focused on Secure Access Service Edge architecture, announced Friday a $300 million investment round on a post-money valuation of $7.5 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning r2c, a startup building a SaaS service around the Semgrep open-source project, announced that it has closed a $27 million Series B. Felicis led the round, which the company said was a pre-emptive deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As companies look for ways to respond to incidents in their complex micro services-driven software stacks, SREs or site reliability engineers are left to deal with the issues involved in making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Younited Credit has raised a $170 million funding round. Goldman Sachs is leading the round with existing investors Eurazeo, Bpifrance and AG2R La Mondiale also participating. The company offers several credit products to European consumers. It also has a diversified distribution strategy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WellSaid Labs, whose tools create synthetic speech that could be mistaken for the real thing, has raised a $10M Series A to grow the business. The company’s home-baked text-to-speech engine works faster than real time and produces natural-sounding clips of pretty much any length, from quick snippets to hours-long readings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lacuna Technologies, a startup that helps cities create and enforce transportation policies by building and managing open-source digital tools, has raised $16 million in a Series A round, bringing the company’s total investment to $33.5 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Planet, which operates a network of around 200 satellites that provides Earth imaging, as well as analytics of the data derived from that observation, is going public in a merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) dMY Technology Group IV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

China has ordered app-store operators to remove the app of Didi from their stores, the latest as tension escalates between the nation’s largest ride-hailing giant and local regulators. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

E-commerce is booming in Southeast Asia, but in many markets, the fragmented logistics industry is struggling to catch up. This means sellers run into roadblocks when shipping to buyers, especially outside of major metropolitan areas, and managing their supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Tinybird, a new startup that helps developers build data products at scale without having to worry about infrastructure, query time and all those annoying issues that come up once you deal with huge data sets. The company ingests data at scale, lets you transform it using SQL and then exposes that data through API […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Edtech startup Microverse has tapped new venture funding in its quest to help train students across the globe to code through its online school which requires zero upfront cost, instead relying on an income-share agreement which kicks in when students find a job. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LA-based game studio Singularity 6 has banked more funding as it scales itself up and readies for the launch of its debut title. The startup tells TechCrunch, they’ve raised $30 million in a Series B bout of funding led by FunPlus Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Email has the highest return on investment than any other marketing channel because you have a captive audience who has opted-in to you communicating with them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Codat, a startup that provides APIs to link small-business fintech data to external services, announced that it has closed a $40 million round led by Tiger Global. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Australian rocket launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies is betting that bigger isn’t always better. The company has developed a small launch vehicle it calls Eris, a 25 meter (82 foot) rocket that can deliver payload of up to 215 kilograms (474 lbs) to sun synchronous orbit. Now, it’s raised a $61 million AUD ($46 million […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fresh off the heels of a $650 million Series E funding round, 3D printed rocket startup Relativity Space is now preparing to increase production capacity by a factor of ten, with the opening of a 1 million square-foot factory headquarters in Long Beach, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As companies expand worldwide, and meet online in tools like Zoom, the language barrier can be a real impediment to getting work done. Zoom announced that it intends to acquire German startup Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions or Kites for short, to bring real-time machine learning-based translation to the platform. The companies did not share the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has announced that he is stepping back of his full-time role at the company. During the first seven years of the company, he was the startup’s Chief Executive Officer. In 2016, Crowley moved to an executive chairman position. He’s also been running the Foursquare Labs R&D group since then. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, has raised “$50 million-plus” in a funding round that doubles its valuation to $2 billion. The latest financing comes just three months after the San Francisco-based startup raised $150 million in a Series D funding round […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...