Startups

Digital mortgage lender Better.com continues to lay off staff, and seemingly in as callous a way as possible. Indeed, whereas most companies try to avoid repeated layoffs, the outfit — which gained notoriety by laying off about 900 employees over Zoom on December 1, 2021 — has since bee

Eviation’s Alice electric aircraft took off for the first time yesterday, teasing a future in which regional flights of hundreds of miles will be done with zero emissions and a lot less noise. It’s still a ways off, but today’s demonstration shows it’s at least just a matter

Despite the boom of education technology investment and innovation over the past few years, founder Julia Stiglitz, who broke into the edtech world as an early Coursera employee, thinks there's a lot of room to grow. Her new startup, CoRise, sells expert-led programming to people who want to up

For many non-technical sales teams at product-led growth companies, it's difficult to sift through reams of data to find out the best way to engage with potential paying customers. That's a problem that HeadsUp, a conversion engine for product-led sales, wants to solve. The San Francisco-ba

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their drea

Michael Haddix Jr. is a former college basketball player who was pre-med until he discovered investing after finishing his undergrad studies. After being exposed to it, Haddix says he got “really excited” about investing and went on to get an MBA from Columbia Business School so that he could w

E-commerce roll-up startup Flora emerged from stealth mode with $9 million in seed funding from an investor group that included Lux Capital, Correlation Ventures, Climate Capital and Gokul Rajaram. Also known as an aggregator, the company acquires and grows brands — in Flora's case, focu

Money continues to flow into new venture capital funds. For example, in the past month, Runa Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Razor's Edge Ventures, First Star, OurCrowd, Northzone, Janngo Capital and Kapor Capital all announced new funds. Now it's Scale Venture Partners' turn, announcing it sec

Autonomous ride-hail and shuttle service May Mobility and transit tech provider Via are launching a small fleet of wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicles in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Via, which started as an on-demand shuttle service before acquiring Remix, and May have been partnering for years

During a family trip to India, Jagadeesh Ambati was shocked by how broken the local recycling system had become. After complaining about it to his wife, she challenged him to make a change. He did, eventually, founding EverestLabs to develop an AI system to help recycling facilities recover more wa

Higher education, at its best, aims to be less elitist and more accessible to people from all walks of life. Today, a startup called Ocelot is announcing a big round of funding to build more tools to help in that effort. The company, which provides an AI-based platform to facilitate easier communic

Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) across Africa make up the bulk — over 90% — of businesses in the continent but are still marginalized in accessing credit from formal institutions because of the nature of their operations; for instance, many often lack the kind of colla

Meet Roundtable, a new startup backed by eFounders that wants to bring community-driven angel investments to European startups. The company has built a platform that simplifies the administrative, legal and financial challenges that come with angel investments. Roundtable could be particularly usef

French startup Stockly is raising a $12 million Series A round (€12 million) from Eurazeo, Daphni and several business angels. The company pools together the inventory of several e-commerce websites. When a retailer is out-of-stock on a popular item, they can still accept the order and process th