E-commerce startup Little Birdie lands $30M AUD prelaunch funding from Australia’s largest bank

"attachment_2156280" aria-describedby="" style="width: 1024px">Commonwealth Bank group executive Angus Sullivan and Jon Beros, co-founder and CEO of Little Birdie. Image Credits: Little Birdie Melbourne-based Little Birdie, an e-commerce startup that wants to become the “new homepage of online sho

Seed-stage accelerator Flat6Labs closes $13.2M fund for startups in Egypt

Investment activities in Egypt continue to gain steam, not for startups only but also the funds backing them. Today, seed accelerator Flat6Labs announced the second close of its Egypt fund to support early-stage startups and provide follow-up investment. The fund had a target for EGP50 million (~$3

Aurora Solar aims to power the growing solar industry with a $250M round C

Aurora Solar had one of those pitches that seemed obvious in retrospect. Instead of going to a house and measuring its roof manually for a solar panel installation, why not use aerial scans and imagery of the whole region? That smart play earned them a $20 million A round, a $50 million B round and

Nigeria’s Mono raises millions to power the internet economy in Africa

In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa. It has closed $2 million in seed investment toward that

Develop a buyer's guide to educate your startup’s sales team and customers

Every company wants to be innovative, but innovation comes with its share of difficulties. One key challenge for early-stage companies that are disrupting a particular space or creating a new category is figuring out how to sell a unique product to customers who have never bought such a solution. T

Mental health app Wysa raises $5.5M for ’emotionally intelligent’ AI

It's hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you'll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence. Wysa is an AI-powered mental health app designed by To

Embedded finance will help fill the life insurance coverage gap

An estimated 41 million Americans say they need life insurance but have yet to purchase coverage. Despite this awareness among consumers, the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association estimates a $12 trillion coverage gap, with about 50% of millennials planning to purchase coverage within t

Snap acquires AR startup WaveOptics, which provides tech for Spectacles, for over $500M

Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the

Decentralized Komorebi Collective launches to back female and nonbinary crypto founders

As decentralized currencies have taken off in recent months, there’s been renewed attention around DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as a means of bringing together groups of investors who can deploy capital as a unit while voting collectively on those investments. In the spiri

Indonesian agritech platform TaniHub Group harvests a $65.5M Series B round

TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia's largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures,

Rakuten and Beyond Next invest $1.4M seed funding in farm-to-table startup Secai Marche

Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses to bundle products from different farmers into the same order. The company

Mio, a social commerce startup focused on smaller cities and rural areas in Vietnam, raises $1M seed

Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Social commerce company Mio is taking advantage of that gap by bu

factory14 raises $200M to jump into the Amazon marketplace roll-up race

It doesn’t feel like a week goes by at the moment that another startup doesn’t emerge armed with a huge wallet of cash to pursue a strategy of consolidating and then scaling promising brands that have built a business selling on marketplaces like Amazon’s. In the latest developmen

In the race for tech talent, the US should look to Mexico

The global tech sector is booming, and as technologies like cloud and AI accelerate their growth, the demand for tech talent outpaces supply globally. Specifically, the U.S. tech sector has seen unprecedented growth in recent years, with four tech firms reaching a $1 trillion market cap by the begi