Qapita, a Singapore-based fintech that provides capitalization table and employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) management software, has raised $5 million in pre-Series A funding. The round was led by MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Endiya Partners and angel investors including Avaana Capital founder Anjali Bansal and Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar. Vulcan Capital and East Ventures, […]
One after another, Chinese tech giants have announced their plans for the auto space over the last few months. Some internet companies, like search engine provider Baidu, decided to recruit help from a traditional carmaker to produce cars. Xiaomi, which makes its own smartphones but has stressed for years it’s a light-asset firm making money […]
Dott has raised a new $85 million Series B funding round — this round is a mix of equity and asset-backed debt financing. Belgium-based investment company Sofina is leading the investment. Dott is a micromobility startup that is better known for its colorful electric scooters that you can find across several European cities. The company […]
Singapore-based fintech Hashstacs Pte Ltd (STACS) announced today it has raised $3.6 million USD in pre-Series A funding. The company develops blockchain platforms that can work with financial institutions’ existing infrastructure, and its core technology is also used in GreenSTACS for environmental, social and governance (ESG) investments. The round was led by Wavemaker Partners, which […]
Indonesian startup CoLearn started as a chain of physical tutoring centers and was in the process of shifting to a hybrid offline-online model when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The team sensed that remote learning would permanently change how students want to be tutored and decided to focus completely on its app, which launched in August […]
Fintech startup Payhawk has raised a $20 million funding round. QED Investors is leading the round with existing investor Earlybird Digital East also participating. Payhawk is building a unified system to manage all the money that is going in and out. Essentially, companies switching to Payhawk can replace several services they already use and that […]
Facebook reveals its Clubhouse competitor, Parler will return to Apple’s App Store and a helicopter flies on Mars. This is your Daily Crunch for April 19, 2021. The big story: Facebook announces new audio products Yes, these products include new Clubhouse-style Live Audio Rooms, as well as the ability for podcasters to share long-form audio, […]
Surprise! It’s another Apple Event. Gone are the days of getting a few weeks’ notice before these events now that they’re entirely virtual (at least until 2022, most likely). Instead, the company just dropped the news last week. Thankfully, there have been plenty of rumors leading up to tomorrow’s big event — and perhaps even […]
Druva, a software company that sells cloud data backup services, announced today that it has closed a $147 million round of capital. Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), a group that manages Quebec’s pension fund, led the round, which also saw participation from Neuberger Berman. Prior investors including Atreides Management and Viking Global […]
It’s been a strange few years for Fitbit. After defining the fitness tracking space, the company was a bit late to the smartwatch trend, but was still able to ride that wave to a rebound. But while watches have received most of the press the now Google-owned company has garnered in recent years, bands still […]
Facebook is deepening its relationship with music company Spotify and will allow users to listen to music hosted on Spotify while browsing through its apps as part of a new initiative called “Project Boombox,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Facebook is building an in-line audio player that will allow users to listen to songs […]
Facebook today officially announced a suite of new audio products — an indication that it’s taking the threat from Clubhouse and other audio platforms more seriously. The company is doing more than just building its own take on Clubhouse, however, it’s also announcing tools that allow podcast creators to share long-form audio, a new Spotify […]
Geico, the second-largest auto insurer in the U.S., has fixed a security bug that let fraudsters steal customers’ driver’s license numbers from its website. In a data breach notice filed with the California attorney general’s office, Geico said information gathered from other sources was used to “obtain unauthorized access to your driver’s license number through […]
Venture capital is a networks business — from networks of founders to the web of investors and angels and gossamer threads of potential customers, talent and service providers. The density of those networks determines success: Find just the right person to fit a role or a slot on a cap table, and a startup might […]
The era of cloud gaming hasn’t arrived with the intensity that may have seemed imminent a couple years ago when major tech platforms announced their plays. In 2021, the market is still pretty much nonexistent despite established presences from nearly all of tech’s biggest players. Microsoft has been slow to roll out its Xbox Cloud […]
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is opening an investigation into a crash involving a Tesla that authorities say was operating with no one behind the wheel, which left two men dead on late Saturday evening outside of Houston. The 2019 Tesla Model S went off the road after it failed to negotiate a slight […]
On the heels of Clubhouse’s latest fundraise, Reddit today officially unveiled its Clubhouse rival Reddit Talk following a recent report from Mashable that revealed the company had been developing audio-based social networking features. Like many of the newly launched Clubhouse clones, Reddit’s voice chat experience hasn’t deviated much from Clubhouse’s overall design where speakers sit […]
