Startups

You're going to be judged on the first thing you launch — everyone is. Explaining that it's just your minimum viable product (MVP) and it's not ready yet is sometimes fine, but I've seen many times where that's the dealbreaker in itself. Why? Because your idea of minimal is fa

The idea for Sono Motors, the company that wants to power every electric vehicle using solar power, started nine years ago in a Munich basement when two entrepreneurial 18-year-olds starting spitballing solutions to society’s dependence on fossil fuels. Jona Christians and Laurin Hahn, Sono M

Zoom is great and all, but talking to a lot of two-dimensional humans on computer screens is hardly the future we were all dreaming of. PORTL agrees, and under the catchy slogan “if you can’t be there, beam there,” has carved out a new slice of the market, where you can holographi

An electric vehicle is, essentially, just “software on wheels”, and requires lots of moving parts, not physical but, of course, virtual. That software needs to continually optimize the performance, efficiency and safety of the EV it's running. But a problem has arisen: Not enough au

Party Round is building software that it hopes will make the process of raising early-stage corporate capital far simpler than it is today. And the company just used its own service to raise $7 million. A host of names took part in the, well, party round, including Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven

The drug development space is continuing to attract more and more investment. On Thursday, another major player, Generate Biomedicines, announced a $370 million Series B round.  Generate Biomedicines is touting a platform-based approach to drug development, but with its own spin: a focus on protei

Platforms that bring more automation to the working environment, and platforms that are empowering more people to get involved in building tools to help themselves work, have equally seen a huge rise in usage in the last year and a half. Today, a company that ties both of those trends together R

Doorvest this morning announced a $39 million funding event, including $14 million worth of equity financing and a $25 million credit facility. The latter makes sense given the startup’s business model, namely helping consumers buy and manage rental properties. M13 led the round (not to be co

EasyHealth, a startup focused on navigating the Medicare experience, announced a $135 million Series A round on Thursday. EasyHealth has a simple purpose: to help enroll, and follow-up with (more on this later), people eligible for Medicare. But the bigger picture is that the company is aiming to f

London-based Gravitiq is the latest e-commerce roll-up company, or aggregator, that has attracted a large amount of initial funding. It is buying and scaling Amazon marketplace brands in the digitally-native, consumer e-commerce healthcare sector. The company announced today $55 million of seed inv

A week ago, we were discussing iRobot's smart home ambitions as they pertain to the company's work with Amazon. The company has been highlighted these plans bit by bit over the past couple of years, in the hopes of unlocking Roomba's potential as a kind of smart home missing link. Today

Startups geared toward men’s sexual health have been doing a brisk trade for a few years now. But while the early wave of tech businesses mostly aimed to provide (easier) access to pharmaceuticals for treating health issues like erectile dysfunction (e.g. Roman), perhaps also offering hormone

Millions of small businesses globally, especially in emerging markets, have stayed offline for the better part of the past decade. Due to that, most of them still rely on scribbles using pen and paper or ledgers for bookkeeping and storing important information. In Nigeria, some go to the extent of

Warsaw-based Packhelp has been riding the boom in e-commerce and on-demand delivery to scale a business that helps even the smallest brands wrap their wares in eye-catching custom packaging, whe counting giants like H&M and Uber Eats among its customers, too. Since being founded back in 2015 &#