Biotech

When COVID-19 closed down most of society in 2020, Kian Sadeghi, like many of his then-classmates at the University of Pennsylvania, found himself holed up in his bedroom. He prefers it that way.  During those months at home in Brooklyn, Sadeghi filled eight spiral notebooks with research on genet

MFB Fertility, the creator of a suite of at-home pregnancy-related hormone tests, announced a $9.7 million Series A round this week. The round follows several milestones for the company, including an FDA premarket approval for a progesterone urine test and the rollout of a mobile app. It also gives

Agricultural microinsurance startup IBISA announced that it has raised a seed round of €1.5 million — approximately $1.70 million. The round was led by London-based specialized investor Insurtech Gateway, with participation from Rockstart's AgriFood fund and others. Microinsurance typic

The $19.7 billion acquisition of speech-to-text specialist Nuance by Microsoft, announced earlier this year, has attracted the attention of the U.K.’s active antitrust watchdog — which said today it’s taking a first look to assess whether there are reasons to be concerned about th

Breakout Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed- and Series A-stage venture firm that funds what it calls creative biosciences startups, has closed the second fund in its five-year history with $112.5 million in capital commitments. Both of its funds, including a $60 million debut effort that we wrot

Instant grocery delivery continues to be a very frothy market, but today comes news of a major funding round for one player in it that investors believe will still be standing after the hype has died down. Flink, the Berlin-based startup that sells food and other essentials at supermarket prices an

It’s been five years since the founding of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Science program (not CZI itself, which is a year older), which has proven to be quite a generous patron of cutting-edge biotech science and research, and far from winding down, the organization is stepping on th

Nabla Bio, a Boston, Massachusetts based startup, announced a $11 million seed round on Monday. The company, founded in May 2020, is looking to enter the increasingly competitive space of antibody design, and manufacturing.  Nabla Bio, in essence, is an antibody design platform. The company is wor

Almost exactly one year ago, Timnit Gebru, one of the leaders of Google’s ethics in AI team and one of the foremost experts in that topic, was fired after sending an email of concern to her team. Now she has set up shop herself with a brand new research institute, DAIR, focused on the topics

Swiggy, India's top food-delivery startup, will invest $700 million in its express grocery delivery service Instamart, significantly intensifying the competition for quick commerce in the world's second largest market. The SoftBank-backed startup, which initially launched Instamart in two I

One of the reasons artificial intelligence is such an interesting field is that pretty much no one knows what it might turn out to be good at. Two papers by leading labs published in the journal Nature today show that machine learning can be applied to tasks as technically demanding as protein gene

A majority of restaurants and grocery stores still order food from distributors via voicemail and pay with paper checks, without paper trails or the ability to access order history. Pepper wants to change that. The New York-based company developed an ordering system specifically for food distributo

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving-slash-holiday weekend. It’s more than a little mind-boggling that we’re reaching the end of 2021, but that only means one thing: TC Sessions: Space is almost here! You can still join us for the two-day event;

Sales of plant-based alternatives, like dairy and meat, are surging in the global market, and Perfeggt wants to do the same for the egg. The Berlin-based foodtech company is poised to debut its chicken-less egg product in the first quarter of 2022 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Today, the com