funding
AppDirect raises $100M to expand its financing program for tech businesses
AppDirect, a San Francisco- and Montreal-based platform for buying, selling and managing tech through a network of IT advisors, has raised $100 million from CDPQ to expand its financing program…
Anecdotes lands $25M to expand its governance, risk management and compliance business
Governance, risk management and compliance — GRC for short — remains one of the most active startup areas in terms of VC investments. According to Tracxn, the private market data…
AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI, now valued at $520M, raises $73.6M
As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with GenAI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up. It might seem like…
AI is all the rage — particularly text-generating AI, also known as large language models (think models along the lines of ChatGPT). In one recent survey of ~1,000 enterprise organizations,…
Y Combinator-backed Intrinsic is building infrastructure for trust and safety teams
A few years ago, Karine Mellata and Michael Lin met while working at Apple’s fraud engineering and algorithmic risk team. Both engineers, Mellata and Lin were involved with helping to…
Medallion, a platform for artists to connect directly with fans, raises $13.7M
Medallion is a platform for artists to have a dedicated digital hub for promoting album releases, tour dates and merch drops, as well as selling digital collectibles and sharing exclusive…
PaintJet is building big industrial robots for big industrial paint jobs
Construction may well prove to be the next major focus for robotics investment. Here in the States, the $2 trillion industry employs around eight million people — that’s nearly one…
Okta snatches up security firm Spera, reportedly for over $100M
Okta, the identity and access management company, is acquiring security firm Spera. Anticipated to close during the fiscal first quarter beginning in early February, the Spera acquisition will build on…
Startup Breakr raises more capital, pays $3.5M to creators
We last wrote about Breakr — a platform that connects record labels, artists and brands with social media influencers to run mass campaigns in a programmatic way — when it closed…
2023 proved to be a challenging year on the ransomware front after a brief lull in 2022. According to data from cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis, victims had paid ransomware groups…
SimSpace raises $45M to simulate tech stacks for cyber training
SimSpace, a startup that creates digital replicas of organizations’ tech and networking stacks for cybersecurity training, has raised $45 million in a funding round led by L2 Point Management. Bringing…
Clearlake and Insight reach $4.4B deal to take software maker Alteryx private
Alteryx, an Irvine, California-based software company developing data science and analytics products, today announced that it’s agreed to be acquired by private equity firms Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners…
Snowflake goes all in on data clean rooms with Samooha acquisition
Snowflake is buying Samooha, a startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration suite, the companies announced this morning — adding to the list of big tech acquisitions leading up to the…
Featured Article
Seed-stage investors react to higher hurdles for Series A funding
The hurdle for Series A funding is a lot higher than it was a year ago — and investors in seed-stage companies are having to respond. They don’t have much choice if they want their startups to survive. When the market abruptly turned in the spring of 2022, late-stage companies were the first to feel…
Companies are increasingly curious about AI and the ways in which it can be used to (potentially) boost productivity. But they’re also wary of the risks. In a recent Workday…
Palace intrigue might be dominating the news cycle around OpenAI, but the AI startup — and its co-branded accelerator programs — are chugging along uninterrupted, so the PR team tells…
Circuit City, angling for a comeback of sorts, hopes to raise $25M
At the risk of dating myself, I’m old enough to remember the days when Best Buy had a formidable rival in superstore chains: Circuit City. A cross between an appliance…
Verve Motion, a startup building a robotic “exosuit” designed to help workers complete physically demanding tasks in factories and other like environments, today announced that it raised $20 million in…
Developers are embracing AI — some surveys suggests, at least. The Q&A site Stack Overflow polled devs on their attitudes toward code-generating AI tools and found that the vast majority…
Gig marketplace Jitjatjo raises $30M to grow into new markets
Jitjatjo, a gig marketplace through which businesses can book workers with as little as an hour’s notice, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round…
Tribe Capital eyes leading $75M-plus funding in India’s Shiprocket
Tribe Capital is in talks to lead a $75 million to $100 million funding round into the logistics aggregator Shiprocket, according to a person familiar with the matter. This is…
ContactMonkey lands $55M investment to grow its email software for internal comms
Email is quite profitable, as it turns out. Or rather, email communications software is. Today, Toronto-based ContactMonkey, a platform that lets companies create, send and track internal comms from Outlook…
Rhythms launches out of stealth to make successful team habits replicable
A new company, Rhythms, wants to help organizations improve their productivity by using AI to identify the working patterns of top-performing teams. Rhythms, which integrates with a business’ existing internal…
Opal Security, which helps companies manage access and identities, raises $22M
VC investment trends in the cybersecurity market suggest a sector in decline — at least within the context of recent months. According to Crunchbase, cybersecurity deal count fell during Q3…
Vast Data lands $118M to grow its data storage platform for AI workloads
Vast Data, to make an obvious pun, is raising vast sums of cash. The New York-based startup, which provides a scale-out, unstructured data storage solution designed to eliminate tiered storage…
Liquid AI, a new MIT spinoff, wants to build an entirely new type of AI
An MIT spinoff co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus aims to build general-purpose AI systems powered by a relatively new type of AI model called a liquid neural network. The…
Titan AI leverages generative AI to streamline mobile game development
Generative AI is attracting a significant level of investment, including in the gaming space. Titan AI, a new mobile games studio, raised more than $500,000 in pre-seed funding led by Berkeley…
Sona launches its music streaming platform and marketplace to reward fans for buying ‘digital twins’ of songs
Sona is a new web3 streaming protocol that uses DeFi primitives (decentralized finance basic building blocks) to put the financial power back into artists’ hands with its rewards model, auctions…
A recent report from Pitchbook shows that ‘mega-deals’ could be inflating AI startup funding totals, giving a misleading picture of the sector’s health.
Rightbot, which is developing robots to unload freight, lands investment from Amazon
Rightbot, a startup developing suction-based robots that can unload truck-transported freight in a range of sizes, has raised $6.25 million in a funding round led by Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund…
