Startups

Meet Defacto, a new French startup that wants to improve the credit infrastructure for small and medium companies. The startup wants to offer credit products using an API. It automatically analyzes your revenue to give you an answer in real time. Defacto is an embedded finance product, meaning that

Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures has doubled down its bet on Velocity, which operates a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer businesses in India, just months after it first backed the Bangalore-based startup. The one-and-half-year-old Velocity said on Wednesday it

Singapore-based Deskimo, the on-demand app that lets people find co-working spaces and pay by the minute, announced today it has raised a $3 million seed round. It is also soft launching in Jakarta, bringing its total markets to three, along with Singapore and Hong Kong. Participants in the round i

You've launched a few paid acquisition channels and are now starting to see your first leads trickle in. Maybe you've even set up a drip campaign to convert these leads into paid subscriptions. Amazing! But when you start ramping up, having a growth marketing tech stack (which we'll ref

Two of the country’s biggest retailers, Walmart and Walgreens, recently announced they are launching their own financial services. This makes sense. The pandemic has resulted in a shift in consumer behavior that now favors contactless and digital banking options, and with one in four U.S. adu

In the first half of 2021, global venture funding shattered the previous six-month record — set in the second half of 2020 — by more than $100 billion. The market was flooded with new startups, and one after another made headlines for deals that were previously unheard of: a $70 million seed ro

Lambda School, a buzzy coding bootcamp that has landed over $122 million in known venture capital to date, is rebranding to Bloom Institute of Technology, according to a blog post from CEO Austen Allred. The company is also updating its tuition payment options to introduce an outcomes-based loan. T

As the crypto world continues to heat up, developers are clinging to the Ethereum network despite its general struggle to meet the stresses of a global network’s transaction load. To speed and cheapen transactions on Ethereum, developers are looking toward so-called Layer-2 (L2) blockchains,

Remote and hybrid working are the order of the day, and now a startup called AnyDesk that helps enable that to be pulled off smoothly — regardless of the architecture of a company’s network, or where a person happens to be working — is announcing a round of $70 million to fuel its

Facily, a São Paulo-based social commerce marketplace, has quietly raised over $366 million in funding across four different rounds over the last year. Most recently, Facily closed on a $250 million Series D that was led by DX Ventures and Berlin-based Delivery Hero, with Citius as co-anchor inves

Businesses have struggled to establish diverse, equitable and inclusive (DEI) work environments for some time now, but the events of 2020 put a spotlight on just how bad most organizations are at building impactful DEI efforts. After COVID-19 resulted in staggering unemployment trends across the U.

As funding pours into mental health tech, one thing remains relatively unchanged: complex insurance billing. Now, even that medieval process is starting to attract startup interest — from companies that scan claims for errors, to others looking to simplify filing itself.  Nirvana Health is o

It’s been quite a week for data center industry consolidation in the U.S. Two companies, CyrusOne and CoreSite, announced deals valued at $15 billion and $10 billion, respectively. It is unusual to see two companies in the same industry announce such large acquisitions on the same day, but th

New macaroni and cheese brand Goodles launched Tuesday after its parent company, Gooder Foods, raised $6.4 million to carve out a niche in the $4.4 billion dry noodles category. The food is high on the list of comfort foods, but has been advertised specifically to children for decades, despite the