Headspace and Ginger are merging to form Headspace Health

Meditation app Headspace this morning announced plans to merge with on-demand mental health service Ginger. Barring unforeseen regulatory roadblocks, the two companies will combine to form Headspace Health. The new organization would sport a combined value of $3 billion and a headcount of more than

Last-mile robotic delivery firm Coco raises $36M

Los Angeles delivery robot startup Coco this week has announced $36 million in funding. The Series A was led by Sam Altman, Silicon Valley Bank and Founders Fund, with participation from Sam Nazarian, Ellen Chen and Mario Del Pero. It brings the company’s total funding up to around $43 millio

Myelin launches second venture fund to target North America, Europe, Latin America

Venture capital firm Myelin on Wednesday launched its second fund, Myelin II, that will invest in some 40 early-stage technology companies in North America, Europe and Latin America. The firm was started in 2020 by serial entrepreneurs Matías Nisenson, Martin Varsavsky and Alec Oxenford, who lead

Xiaomi reports record 64% revenue growth, acquires Deepmotion for $77.3 million

Xiaomi reported a second-quarter net income of $1.28 billion on revenue of $13.56 billion following the Chinese technology giant’s strong surge in smartphone market share globally. During the quarter that ended in June, Xiaomi said it saw a 64% year-on-year growth in revenue, and its net inco

BreachQuest emerges from stealth with $4.4M to modernize incident response

BreachQuest, an early-stage startup with a founding team of cybersecurity experts building a modern incident response platform, has emerged from stealth with $4.4 million in seed funding. The investment was raised from Slow Ventures, Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey and Tinder co-founders Sean Rad an

MaxAB gets an extra $15M, acquires YC-backed Moroccan startup WaystoCap

Last month, MaxAB, the Egyptian B2B e-commerce platform that serves food and grocery retailers, raised one of the largest Series A on the continent, to the tune of $40 million. Today, it has raised a $15 million extension from existing investors — RMBV, IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream

Vietnam after-school learning startup Marathon raises $1.5M pre-seed round

Marathon Education was created after its founders realized after-school education in Vietnam hadn't evolved much since they were kids. Some of the most popular tuition centers in big cities teach hundreds of students at once. “They're packed like sardines and that really has not changed i

Ai Palette raises $4.4M to help companies react faster to consumer trends

Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect to see trends land on store shelves much more quickly. Founded in 2018, Ai Palette uses machine learning to hel

Ramp and Brex draw diverging market plans with M&A strategies

Earlier today, spend management startup Ramp said it has raised a $300 million Series C that valued it at $3.9 billion. It also said it was acquiring Buyer, a “negotiation-as-a-service” platform that it believes will help customers save money on purchases and SaaS products. The round and deal w

Fika Ventures nearly triples its assets under management: ‘It’s definitely a crazy time’

Fika Ventures is a five-year-old, LA-based seed-stage fund that has been funding mostly business-to-business startups, as well as fintech companies and a sprinkling of healthcare IT startups — as long as they don’t involve hardware or FDA approval. The firm’s investors apparently

Bankers chase Byju’s for IPO, valuation pegged up to $50 billion

Nearly every top investment bank is chasing Byju's and nudging the most valuable Indian startup to seriously explore the public markets as soon as next year. Most banks have given Byju's a proposed valuation in the range of $40 billion to $45 billion, but some including Morgan Stanley have

NoRedInk raises $50 million Series B to help students become better writers

“In order to become a better writer, read your written words out loud.” That's one of the first, and best, writing tips I ever received. I always found the advice ironic because it required me to change the medium of my writing to become a better writer. Still, all these years later, itR

testRigor scores $4M seed to turn a list of actions into a QA testing script

Imagine typing out a series of steps in plain English that would reflect a list of actions a human QA tester would undertake to test an app, then turning that list into an automated testing script. That’s exactly what testRigor, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2021 cohort, has done. Today

Sora’s HR automation software raises $14M Series A

HR automation software startup Sora announced this morning that it closed a $14 million Series A round of funding. Two Sigma Ventures led the financing event, putting in $10 million, with prior investors completing the round. The round comes after Sora raised a $5.3 million seed round in July 2020.