Startups

Given the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of students have switched to online learning. So whereas edtech used to be somewhat of an also-ran in the venture stakes, it has now become one of the hottest spaces on the planet. It's therefore of little surprise that funding rounds are foll

Open banking enables bank-to-bank payments, meaning that (in theory) merchants should be able to accept payments without having to hand over fees to Visa or Mastercard or other payment providers, such as Stripe. The challenge, however, isn’t just implementing open-banking based payments as a

Eat Just, the plant-based food startup, is launching a new Asian subsidiary through a partnership with Proterra Investment Partners Asia. The agreement includes building Eat Just’s first factory in Asia, which will be based in Singapore. As part of the deal, Proterra, which focuses on agri-te

A startup that is aiming to digitize millions of neighborhood stores in Bangladesh just raised the country's largest Series A financing round. Dhaka-headquartered ShopUp said on Tuesday it has raised $22.5 million in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Flourish Ventures. For both the ve

On Friday, former Tiger Global Management investor Lee Fixel registered plans for the second fund of his new investment firm, Addition, just four months after closing the first. According to a report on Friday by the Financial Times, the outfit spent last week finalizing the fundraising for the $1.

Before the 2016 election, Vice Ventures founder and general partner Catharine Dockery was bullish about the future of recreational cannabis in the United States. “We saw quite a bit more optimism around national legalization, with the feeling that a wave of states legalizing recreational use

U.K.-based Pimloc has closed a £1.4 mlion (~$1.8 mlion) seed funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners. Existing investor Speedinvest and other unnamed shareholders also participated in the round. The 2016-founded computer vision startup launched a AI-powered photo classifier service called Ph

Propseller, a Singapore-based real estate agency that combines a tech platform with in-house agents to close transactions more quickly, announced today it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. The round included investment from Iterative; Hustle Fund; XA Network; Rapzo Capital; Lazada co-founder

In 2018, Leslie Feinzaig, the founder of Female Founders Alliance, launched a free, equity-free accelerator for women called Ready Set Raise. The goal was to provide under-networked female founders the coaching and connections needed to raise money. This year, as funding for female founders drops t

Alibaba Group said today it will spend about $3.6 billion to take a controlling stake in Sun Art, one of China's largest big-box and supermarket chains. After the transaction is complete, Alibaba Group will own 72% of Sun Art. As in other countries, COVID-19 lockdowns increased demand for onlin

Editor's note: Get this free weekly recap of technewss news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. The four-year vesting schedule that the typical startup uses today is a problem waiting to happen. If one founder ends up quitting a year or two b

The Equity crew this week chewed through a trio of media stories, each dealing with private companies and their successes. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Axios was growing rapidly and near profitability. The paper also broke news that Morning Brew might exit to Business Insider for

Pear, the eight-year-old, Palo Alto, California-based seed-stage venture firm that has, from its outset, attracted the attention of VCs who think the firm has an eye for nascent talent, staged its seventh annual demo day earlier this week. Although it was virtual, one of the startups has already si

PearPop a new Los Angeles-based company, is on its way to racking up nearly 25,000 users in less than a month, and has already landed seed funding from the firm Rocket One Capital. The company’s premise is simple. Allow fans to bid for shared screen time with their favorite TikTok celebrities