Startups

Odyssey, a mushroom-based functional energy beverage maker, raised another $6 million in an equity investment to give it $14 million in total funding since launching its first drink two years ago. Odyssey's products tap into the health benefits of Lion’s Mane and Cordyceps mushrooms to pr

In the midst of a funding downtime last year, and with conditions getting tougher for fund managers raising capital as backers (limited partners) enhanced their focus on strategy and track record, some new African and Africa-focused funds still emerged, with several of the existing ones receiving f

Could 2024 be the year for fintech IPOs? Quite possibly, according to F-Prime Capital's State of Fintech 2024 report. F-Prime — a VC firm with over $4.5 billion in assets under management that tracks the performance of emerging, publicly traded and privately held financial technology com

Upstash announced a $1.9 million seed round almost exactly two years ago, and an idea for building a serverless data platform for data-intensive applications built with Redis and Kafka. That doesn't feel like that long ago, but a lot has changed in the data landscape since then. Fast-forward to

Plaid has named Jennifer (Jen) Taylor, who most recently served as Cloudflare's chief product officer, as its first president. The move is notable in that it comes just months after the fintech startup hired former Expedia CFO Eric Hart to serve as its first chief financial officer. The hiring

To build a fusion power plant, engineers are forced to make some difficult choices. Do they go with the simpler design and then, while in operation, force the plasma to behave so it doesn't snuff itself out? Or do they opt for a complex design that's challenging to build but leads to happie

Smart water bottle-maker Larq this week announced that it has been acquired by filtration giant, Brita. More specifically, Brita GmbH, the German company founded in 1966, which spun off and sold its North/South American wing to Clorox in 1988. Brita GmbH maintains the brand in the rest of the world

Attentive.ai, a startup building vertical software for landscaping and construction services in the U.S., has raised $7 million in a new funding round as it looks to enhance its AI-led offerings and expand them to more businesses. Led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, the all-equity Seri

Under scrutiny from activists — and parents — OpenAI has formed a new team to study ways to prevent its AI tools from being misused or abused by kids. In a new job listing on its career page, OpenAI reveals the existence of a Child Safety team, which the company says is working with pla

Sophie Alcorn, attorney, author and founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley, California, is an award-winning Certified Specialist Attorney in Immigration and Nationality Law by the State Bar Board of Legal Specialization. Sophie is passionate about transcending borders, expanding opport

The world's electricity infrastructure is awash in transformers, the bits of equipment that change voltage as electricity courses through the grid. They're present at nearly every point, from power plants to phone chargers. For the most part, they've been unchanged since they were first

Job searching is a drag by any measure. Entering the same information into applications over and over even more so. It feels like a process that is ripe for a digital update, and Simplify, an early-stage startup, is trying to do that by combining questionnaires, job scraping, job matching, auto fil

Fresh on the heels of its $40 million fundraise, streaming media company Plex is today announcing its expansion into a new business: a movie rentals storefront. The addition, which will initially be offered to U.S. customers, will give the streamer another means of generating revenue beyond its sub

Polycam, an app that uses a smartphone’s sensors to capture 3D scans of objects, is raising cash from prominent investors, including Adobe and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Polycam today announced that it closed an $18 million Series A round led by Left Lane Capital with participation from