Vendease gets $3.2M to help hotels and restaurants buy food supplies in Africa

Vendease, an online marketplace that allows restaurants and other food businesses to buy supplies straight from manufacturers and farms, has raised a seed round of $3.2 million, the company confirmed to technewss. The news is coming seven months after technewss announced that the company, founded

Hera is a new calendar app for people with a lot of virtual meetings

Meet Hera, a new calendar app that wants to turn the calendar into the main work interface. Hera helps you schedule meetings more easily with natural language processing and lets you share availabilities in an email or any messaging app. The startup is also going to build integrations with your oth

Indian edtech Teachmint valued at $500 million in $78 million funding

As scores of Indian edtech startups populate their catalogs with live and recorded courses to reach and serve students in the world’s second-largest internet market, a handful of new-age firms are beginning to explore different approaches to tackle the challenge. Teachmint, one such startup t

Billie, a buy now, pay later specialist for the B2B market, raises $100M on a $640M valuation

Buy now, pay later services like Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay and many others have seen their businesses grow in huge leaps, as consumers buying goods increasingly turned to alternatives to credit to delay paying for them in full. Now a Berlin-based startup called Billie that has built a similar servic

Wefight answers questions about chronic illness with its virtual assistant

Meet Wefight, a French startup that has developed more than a dozen apps to help people suffering from chronic illness. Using a basic chatbot interface, people can ask questions and get answers about their illness. The startup recently raised an $11.6 million (€10 million) funding round from Digi

Brazilian insurtech Justos raises $35.8M in Ribbit Capital-led Series A

Justos, a startup that says it will be the first insurance company in Brazil to use data when determining rates, has raised a $35.8 million Series A round of funding led by Ribbit Capital. SoftBank's Latin American Fund and GGV participated as new investors, in addition to existing backers Kasz

Elon Musk rolls back newest ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta due to software issues

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company has temporarily pulled back the latest version of the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta software less than a day after its release. “Seeing some issues with 10.3, so rolling back to 10.2 temporarily,” Musk tweeted on Sunday. ̶

India’s Groww valued at $3 billion in $251 million funding

Groww has tripled its valuation to $3 billion in just six months as the Indian fintech startup looks to broaden its offerings and help more millennials start their investment journey in the world's second largest internet market. Iconiq Growth led the Bangalore-based startup's $251 million

Stripe backs India’s Clear in $75 million funding

Stripe has made its second investment in India, just days after disclosing the first. One of the world's most valuable startups has backed Bangalore-based SaaS fintech firm Clear, the two said Sunday evening. The 10-year-old Indian startup, formerly known as ClearTax, said it has raised $75 mil

5 changes social-audio apps should consider making now

As social-audio apps like Clubhouse, Beams, Pludo, Racket and Quest have gained popularity in the last year, more marketers, product teams and up-and-coming competitors are beginning to explore the strategies that are making and breaking the user experience in this space. On one side, these product

How intensive modding ushered in China's computer revolution

In my previous essay on technewss, I examined the profound challenges that confronted the computer engineers trying to fit tens of thousands of Chinese characters in a memory system designed to handle a much smaller alphanumeric symbolic system. The engineering daring that led to the first Chinese

The return of text is inevitable

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week's startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. On Equity this week, we discussed the value of the written word. You can imagine that the resulting argument is inherently biased, considering we are three jou

Employees are designing the workplace of the future

Why do we go to the office? This is not a rhetorical question. Do we go to be around other people and work collaboratively? Do we go because it's a dedicated location that allows us to focus on our work in a unique way? Do we go because we believe it's necessary to be “seen”? Do we go b

The rapidly changing investor calculus on China’s tech giants

As wave after wave of regulatory crackdowns have dominated China tech news in 2021, one can be excused for losing track of what is being regulated, who is doing the regulating and what exactly the regulations are. From fintech to data management to education, the rules of the game are being rewritt