Activ Surgical raises $45 million Series B round to give surgeons eagle eyes

Activ Surgical, a Boston-based digital surgery company, announced a $45 million Series B round on Thursday. The round comes during a critical year for Activ Surgical. It's in the process of developing new tools that give surgeons the ability to see otherwise invisible structures, and has plans

BGV closes fourth fund with $110M aimed at immigrant enterprise AI, cross-border startups

Silicon Valley-based venture capital (VC) firm Benhamou Global Ventures, known as BGV, closed its fourth fund with $110 million to support global enterprise companies. The new fund is 60% larger than its third fund and will be invested similarly, in seed and Series A startups focused on what genera

Reachdesk wraps up $43M to expand its B2B gifting marketplace

Gifting has become a major lever in the world of building business relationships in the last 20 months. With in-person meetings reduced to a trickle, sending a gift to a colleague or business associate has become a more personalized way to reward, curry favor or just keep in touch beyond the basics

Facebook Messenger releases cross-app group chats, further integrating with Instagram

Facebook Messenger is releasing a bundle of products this morning — most notably, including cross-app group chats. Last year, the company introduced cross-app messaging between Messenger and Instagram, but now, users will be able to start group chats among Instagram and Messenger contacts. Ot

CodeSee launches OSS Port open source project to help developers visualize code base

The larger a coding project gets, and the more people become involved, the harder it becomes to get a big picture view of how the entire project fits together, and this is especially true for distributed teams. Today, CodeSee, an early-stage startup that wants to help development teams understand t

Alloy raises $100M at a $1.35B valuation to help banks and fintechs fight fraud with its API-based platform

Alloy, which has built an identity operating system for banks and fintechs, announced Thursday that it has raised $100 million at a $1.35 billion valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the Series C round, which comes just over one year after New York-based Alloy raised $40 million in a Series B

Spotify rolls out podcast polls and Q&As to creators and users worldwide

Spotify earlier this year began beta testing new features to make podcasts more interactive through the use of listener polls and Q&As. Today, the company says these features will become publicly available to all creators through its podcast creation app, Anchor. To use the new options, creator

Ola Electric raises $200 million at $3 billion valuation

Ola Electric said on Thursday it has raised over $200 million in a new financing round at a valuation of $3 billion, up from $1 billion two years ago, as it looks to scale its electric vehicle manufacturing business in the South Asian market. Falcon Edge Capital led the financing round, the Bangalo

Tiger Global backs India’s OfBusiness at $3 billion valuation

OfBusiness, a commerce startup that sells industrial goods and provides small businesses with credit, has doubled its valuation in less than two months to $3 billion, a top executive told technewss. Tiger Global led the six-year-old startup's $207 million Series F round, and SoftBank and Alpha

Matternet’s automated drone-docking station makes its real-life debut in Switzerland

No one knows exactly how drone delivery will fit into the future of logistics, but one thing is for sure: The aircraft aren’t going to drop off important payloads directly onto someone’s lawn. Matternet’s Station, an automated landing space and payload control tower, may be the so

DNA-based data storage platform Catalog raises $35M

"speakable-summary" style="font-weight: 400;">Conventional electronic media like flash drives and hard drives require energy consumption to process a vast amount of high-density data and information overload and are vulnerable to security issues due to the limited space for storage. There is also an

Spudsy bags $3.3M to turn 'ugly' sweet potatoes into snacks

Spudsy, a brand that upcycles imperfect sweet potatoes and turns them into plant-based snacks, announced Thursday that it raised $3.3 million in Series A funding in a round led by KarpReilly and Stage 1 Fund. With the new funding, the company has raised a total of $6.5 million since the company was

Empathy raises $30M for a personal assistant that helps with the practical and emotional process of bereavement

Death is one of the hardest things to cope with in life, both from an emotional and organizational standpoint. And what’s worse is that the latter of these is inevitably compounded by the fact that those left behind are grieving and focused on that. Unsurprisingly, tech that is being built to

Elevation Capital, General Catalyst lead $12M round into health insurance startup Loop Health

Loop Health aims to be the “Oscar Health of India” and targets the country's health insurance gap with its approach to primary care and insurance. The Pune-based company is also the latest startup to raise funding in this area, bringing in $12 million in Series A funding in a round co-led b