Series A

Anti-bot startup Kasada raises $7M in Series A from CIA’s venture fund In-Q-Tel

Anti-bot startup Kasada raises $7M in Series A from CIA’s venture fund In-Q-Tel

Kasada, an anti-bot startup we profiled earlier this year, has raised $7 million in its Series A led by In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm of the intelligence community. The Sydney and Chicago-based company helps to fight online bots using its proprietary anti-bot platform Polyform. Bots don’t just pummel websites with Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Samasource raises $14.8M for global AI data biz driven from Africa

Samasource raises $14.8M for global AI data biz driven from Africa

AI training data provider Samasource has raised a $14.8 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures. The San Francisco headquartered company delivers Fortune 100 companies with the inputs they need for machine learning development in fields including autonomous transportation, e-commerce and robotics. And it does so with a Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Meet Dongtu, the Giphy of China

Meet Dongtu, the Giphy of China

With its own universe of homegrown social networks, e-commerce platforms and search engines, the Chinese internet is a world apart from its counterpart in the U.S. But in some areas, the two countries are surprisingly similar. That’s particularly true of people’s love for GIFs . Some feelings are better expressed in Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Opera’s Africa fintech startup OPay gains $120M from Chinese investors

Opera’s Africa fintech startup OPay gains $120M from Chinese investors

Africa focused fintech startup OPay has raised a $120 million Series B round backed by Chinese investors. Located in Lagos and founded by consumer internet company Opera, OPay will use the funds to scale in Nigeria and expand its payments product to Kenya, Ghana and South Africa — Opera’s CFO Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Eigen nabs $37M to help banks and others parse huge documents using natural language and ‘small data’

Eigen nabs $37M to help banks and others parse huge documents using natural language and ‘small data’

One of the bigger trends in enterprise software has been the emergence of startups building tools to make the benefits of artificial intelligence technology more accessible to non-tech companies. Today, one that has built a platform to apply power of machine learning and natural language processing to massive documents of Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Modus

Trulia founder Pete Flint backs real estate startup Modus

The founders of Seattle-based Modus cold emailed Pete Flint, the founder of Trulia and a current managing partner at the venture capital firm NFX, for months to no avail. In a last ditch effort, Alex Day, Jai Sim and Abbas Guvenilir sent one more message to the investor who’s real Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Founder’s guide to the pre-IPO secondary market

Founder’s guide to the pre-IPO secondary market

Ryan Conner is a corporate attorney at Atrium part of the General Counsel Group representing early-stage startups. The increase in activity in the pre-IPO secondary market means that founders, early employees, and investors are receiving liquidity much sooner in a company’s lifecycle than ever before. For most startups and privately Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Brad Feld: what founders need to know about recent changes in VC deal terms

Brad Feld: what founders need to know about recent changes in VC deal terms

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos hopped on the line with prominent investor, entrepreneur, thought leader, and Techstars co-founder Brad Feld to discuss the latest edition of his book Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
Dashboard Week 2

Startup says ‘Sober is the new black’

Maveron, Slow Ventures and Female Founders Fund have invested $10 million in a startup that claims it’s carving a new path to sobriety. Tempest offers a $647 eight-week virtual “sobriety school” to help people, particularly women and “historically oppressed individuals,” get sober. The program is led by the company’s founder Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago
India’s Fyle bags $4.5M to expand its expense management platform in US, other international markets

India’s Fyle bags $4.5M to expand its expense management platform in US, other international markets

Fyle, a Bangalore-headquartered startup that operates an expense management platform, has extended its previous financing round to add $4.5 million of new investment as it looks to court more clients in overseas markets. The additional $4.5 million tranche of investment was led by U.S.-based hedge fund Steadview Capital, the startup Read more…

By Aakash Kothari, ago