Geothermal home heating gets a $30 million boost from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures

There’s a low-energy solution to home heating and cooling sitting right underneath most houses, but until recently no one has been able to tap it at a low enough cost across a broad swath of the country. That solution is geothermal energy, using the earth’s own heat to provide temperatu

TigerGraph raises $105M Series C for its enterprise graph database

TigerGraph, a well-funded enterprise startup that provides a graph database and analytics platform, today announced that it has raised a $105 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Tiger Global and brings the company’s total funding to over $170 million. “TigerGraph is lea

Fictiv nabs $35M to build out the ‘AWS of hardware manufacturing’

Hardware may indeed be hard, but a startup that’s built a platform that might help buck that idea by making hardware a little easier to produce has announced some more funding to continue building out its platform. Fictiv, which positions itself as the “AWS of hardware” — pr

SeedFi closes on $65M to help financially struggling Americans get ahead

Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and struggle to get out of a debt cycle. One startup is developing financial products targeted toward this segment of the population, with the goal of helping them build credit, save money, access funds and plan for the future. That s

Certific, a health tech startup from the founder of TransferWise, aims to be the rails for certified home testing

Certific, a health tech startup co-founded by TransferWise’s Taavet Hinrikus, is breaking cover today with the launch of what it claims is the first “certified” remote COVID-19 testing service. The British-Estonian company is using techniques borrowed from the worlds of fintech an

Peak AI nabs $21M for a platform to help non-tech companies make AI-based decisions

One of the biggest challenges for organizations in modern times is deciding where, when and how to use the advances of technology, when the organizations are not technology companies themselves. Today, a startup out of Manchester, England, is announcing some funding for a platform that it believes

Epic Games takes its Apple App Store fight to Europe

Epic Games has taken its fight against Apple’s App Store rules to the European Union, where it’s lodged a complaint with the bloc’s antitrust regulators. In a blog post today the maker of the popular online game Fortnite said it’s extending to Europe its battle for what it d

vArmour, the multi-cloud security startup, raises $58M en route to IPO

Enterprises have been loading more of their operations into cloud — and, more often than not, multi-cloud — environments over the last year, creating vast networks of services that can be complex to manage. Today, vArmour, a startup that provides ways to manage in real time and ultimate

Sinch acquires Inteliquent for $1.14B to take on Twilio in the US

After raising $690 mlion from SoftBank in December to make acquisitions, the Sweden-based cloud communications company Sinch has followed through on its strategy in that department. Today the company announced that it is acquiring Inteliquent, an interconnection provider for voice communications in

Dixa acquires Elevio, the ‘knowledge management’ platform helping brands improve customer support

Dixa, the Danish customer support platform promising more personalised customer support, has acquired Melbourne-based “knowledge management” SaaS Elevio to bolster its product and technology offerings. The deal is said to be worth around $15 million, in a combination of cash and Dixa sh

Jet co-founder Nate Faust is building a more sustainable e-commerce experience with Olive

Nate Faust has spent years in the e-commerce business — he was a vice president at Quidsi (which ran Diapers.com and Soap.com), co-founder and COO at Jet (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion) and then a senior vice president at Walmart. Over time, he said it slowly dawned on him that it’s

Zolve raises $15 million for its cross-border neobank aimed at global citizens

Tens of thousands of students and professionals move out of India each year to pursue higher education and for work. Even after spending months in a new country, they struggle to get a credit card from local banks, and end up paying a premium to access a range of other financial services. Banks in

Daily Crunch: Axiom Space raises $130M

A space startup connected to the International Space Station raises $130 million, Atlassian releases a new version of Trello and bitcoin briefly passes $50,000. This is your Daily Crunch for February 16, 2021. The big story: Axiom Space raises $130M Founded in 2016, Axiom Space is w

Justice Through Code is a free coding program for those impacted by the criminal justice system

People who have spent time in jail or prison often face barriers to accessing stable jobs, housing and financial services. These types of barriers are a key driver of recidivism for the more than 600,000 people who are released from prison each year. Between 2005 and 2014, an estimated 68% of peopl