Startups

When I started getting involved in clean tech 1.0 financing back in 2005, “climate change” was some future event. Hurricane Katrina had just happened, and many experts viewed it primarily as a failure of the government to take care of its weakest citizens in the face of a natural disaster, not

As I wrote earlier this year, Deed‘s mission is a clearcut one: take the employee giving/charity/volunteer program that many big companies have, and make it better. Give it a proper home — one with a modern UI, built-in community management tools and that hooks into your workflow (read: Sla

First Resonance makes software for making hardware. The company’s Ion platform provides an all-in-one option for anyone who has to manage manufacturing lines, supply chains, engineering and design, among other things. Now, with $14 million in new funding, the company aims to scale up its pres

After the resounding success of several crowdfunding campaigns for its gamified smart bird feeder, Bird Buddy has raised an $8.5 million seed round. Its first product will ship in a few months, but it’s just the start of what the company hopes will be a new approach to using tech to better en

Robust Intelligence, an AI startup that helps businesses stress test their AI models and prevent them from failing, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Tiger Global. Previous investor Sequoia, which led the company’s Series A round, as well as Harpoo

Ikigai, a startup based on research out of MIT, wants to make it simple to build workflows with humans involved. Whereas traditional robotic process automation (RPA) is about building bots for repetitive tasks, this company wants to make it easier to build workflows where humans have to make a deci

Tradeshift — the late-stage startup tackling supply chain financing — has announced a $200 million funding round in equity and debt from a combination of existing and new investors, including Koch Industries, the giant industrial conglomerate. Also participating were IDC Ventures, LUN Partners,

Mio, a startup that helps enterprise teams collaborate across messaging services like Zoom Chat, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Cisco’s Webex, today announced that it has raised an $8.7 mlion Series A funding round. The round was led by Zoom and Cisco Investments. In total, Austin-based Mio, whic

Resolve, which specializes in “buy now, pay later” capabilities for B2B transactions, announced today that it has raised $25 million in equity funding. The investment comes just months after the company secured a combined $60 million asset and equity financing (the majority of which was asset,

Vercel, the well-funded front-end development platform from the team behind Next.js, today announced that it has acquired Turborepo, a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos, an increasingly popular way for organizing source code into a single repository that includes

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new chapter for virtual learning, giving a boost of attention to existing tools and spurring the creation of new services and use cases as students of all ages were ordered to stay home and stay out of classrooms. Today, one of the startups that’s been a str

Petra emerged from stealth this week, announcing a $30 million Series A. The round, led by DCVC, brings the robotics company's funding up to $33 million, with additional participation from ACME Capital Congruent Ventures, 8VC, Real Ventures, Elementum Ventures and Mac Venture Capital. “We'

As many edtech companies benefited from the disruption of the pandemic, attracting wads of cash from investors globally, it did feel like African startups were left out. Well, not anymore: Two-year-old startup uLesson announced today that it closed a $15 million Series B round. The investment, whic

Embedded finance — where companies tap into APIs to integrate banking and other financial tools without having to build everything themselves from the ground up — has been one of the major trends in fintech in the last decade. Today, one of the biggest startups building those APIs and t