All posts tagged: raises

As pet owners turn to mobile insurance apps, Lassie raises $25M Series B led by Balderton

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We last wrote about Lassie, a pet health app and insurance provider, when it closed an €11 million Series A round in 2022. It’s growth had been spurred by the boom in pet ownership during the pandemic (nearly half of all European households now own a pet, and and owners spend €23.5 billion on them annually) and when pet owners turned to mobile apps to maintain their pet’s health. This turned out to be a big driver of pet insurance companies such as ManyPets (UK) and Dalma (France). Lassie has now raised €23 million in a Series B funding led by Balderton Capital. Previous investors including Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital and Philian (H&M Chair Karl-John Persson) also participated in the round. That means Lassie has now raised a total of €36.5 million. The funding will be used to develop Lassie’s team and products such as its in-app sale of health products for pets, and expand beyond its core bases of Germany and Sweden. The app features online courses, and other information on preventative health …

Paris-based startup studio Hexa raises some funding to launch even more startups

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You might not be familiar with Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that has launched dozens of B2B software companies, but some of its portfolio companies have become well-known unicorns, such as Front, Aircall and Spendesk. And it turns out that Hexa itself could be considered as a startup as the company just raised a funding round of $22 million in fresh capital (€20 million). This isn’t the first time Hexa raises outside capital. But it’s the company’s first round since 2016. “We’ve got a few family offices investing, but we’ve mostly got local entrepreneurs investing like Luc Pallavidino (Yousign), Adrien Van Den Branden (Canyon), Paul Vidal (Collective) and Arnaud Schwartz (Marble),” Hexa co-founder Thibaud Elzière told me. In other words, Hexa is raising from its own community of founders and friends. And this is just a first step as the company promises that there will be more funding in the coming months. “This marks our initial close, and we anticipate a subsequent round in the new year. Our aim is to welcome even more family …

Mozaic raises $20 million to build payment splitting solution for creators

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Creators often work with different collaborators for different projects. And splitting payments with others is one of the biggest challenges for creators. Mozaic (previously Jammber) is trying to solve this problem through its range of solutions including APIs and Chrome extensions. The company has raised a $20 million Series A round of funding from Volition Capital. Mozaic has raised more than $27 million to date from investors like Rise of the Rest, Maverick Nashville and music industry executive Joe Galante. The startup was founded by CEO Marcus Cobb and SVP of Growth Rachel Knepp in 2015 with an aim to develop tools to handle different parts of the music business ranging from credits management to ticketing. Cobb told TechCrunch that, while initially the company decided to focus on the B2B aspects of music, Mozaic decided to pivot to creating a collaborative payments product using its experience in music project management in 2020 due to the pandemic. “To test potential product/market fit, we put together a PowerPoint sales deck in about 2 days and cold-called 200 …

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup, quietly raises an additional $43M

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Neuralink, the Elon Musk-founded company developing implantable chips that can read brain waves, has raised an additional $43 million in venture capital, according to a filing with the SEC. The filing published this week shows the company increased its previous tranche, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, from $280 million to $323 million in early August. Thirty-two investors participated, according to the filing. Neuralink hasn’t disclosed its valuation recently. But in June, Reuters reported that the company was valued at about $5 billion after privately-executed stock trades. Founded in 2016, Neuralink has devised a sewing machine-like device capable of implanting ultra-thin threads inside the brain. The threads attach to a custom-designed chip containing electrodes that can read information from groups of neurons. Brain-signal-reading implants are a decades-old technology. But Neuralink’s ostensible innovation lies in making the implants wireless and increasing the number of implanted electrodes. In May, Neuralink received FDA approval for human clinical trials after having its application previously rejected, and opened up its first human trials for recruitment under an investigational device exemption …

naval success raises hopes of advantage against Russia this winter

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War in wintertime is especially challenging militarily. Troops have to deal with the risk of frostbite while vehicles can’t always move over muddy or frozen terrain. It’s no wonder then that wars tend to move much more slowly during the colder months. Cold weather can also open up opportunities that either side in a conflict can try to exploit. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, temperatures around -40ºC gave the much smaller Finnish force an advantage, forcing significant losses on the Soviets that significantly undermined their military reputation. Being agile, changing tactics, and having the right equipment for the weather are even more vital when the temperature drops. This winter, Russia is expected to open up attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as it attempted to do in 2022, writes Lancester University’s professor of international security Basil Germond. Russia may find it more difficult this time around to undermine Ukraine’s energy supply, partly because of Ukraine’s successful attacks on its Black Sea fleet. This has pushed the Russian fleet away from its base …

DoorFeed raises another €7M for its platform allowing large-scale investors to hoover-up family homes

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Institutional real estate investors have historically struggled to buy up tonnes of family homes (the so-called ‘Single Family rental sector’) so they can turn us all into rental slaves and lock millions to a rentier economy. A few startups are trying to ease the ‘pain’ of these rapacious harbingers of hyper capitalism. Immo Capital, a platform for managing residential real estate portfolios has raised $90.7 million. Bricklane is another platform for rental housing (raised £6 million out of London). And Casafari in Spain/Portugal has raised $20.5 million. Into this market has launched DoorFeed, founded by James Kirimy, an early Uber UK employee. It’s secured a new funding round of €7 million Seed extension round led by Motive Ventures (backed by Private Equity firm Apollo, owners of Yahoo! and thus TechCrunch), with participation of Stride VC and Seedcamp. The firm previously raised a €3.5 million seed led by Stride and Seedcamp in 2021, and a €1.5 million debt financing by BPI France in 2022. In simple terms, DoorFeed provides the data platform and operations for investment …

Uber-for-parcels startups Relay raises $10M Seed round to scale in the UK

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Incumbents in the parcel deliveries space usually have fixed daily routes from suburban depots. But since most parcels are fairly lightweight, this is a bit of a hammer to crack a nut. So it makes sense to “Uber-ise” local deliveries. Indeed, in Asia, the ‘asset free’ delivery model of using mini depots instead of large owned depots has proliferated. That model is scarcer in Europe, however. Thus, Relay, which has a delivery platform for e-commerce companies has raised a $10 million seed round, led by Project A Ventures of Berlinm and Prologis Ventures in the US. Relay’s end-to-end parcel delivery service — which includes the first, middle and last miles — uses urban-based ‘pitstops’ and couriers, meaning it has less overheads compared to suburban area depots and sorting centres, it claims. The company says its routing platform matches couriers to routes and combines deliveries and returns in one route, not unlike Uber’s model. It also says customers can end up with a next-day service. Local couriers are entitled to sick and holiday pay, as well as …

FrontEdge raises $10M in debt, equity from TLG, Flexport to facilitate trade for African exporters

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In the dynamic landscape of African international trade, a prevalent challenge looms large: A mere 30% of trade volumes find financial intermediaries in banks. This glaring gap in financing disproportionately impacts small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as their larger counterparts absorb the lion’s share of the limited available capital.  The opportunity to reshape African trade becomes apparent when considering the annual value of international trade volumes — a staggering $1.2 trillion. More importantly, this untapped market underscores the need for startups that can take advantage. One of them is FrontEdge, a Lagos-based fintech that has recently raised $10 million in debt and equity seed round (the former contributing over 70%) to enable the growth of African cross-border trade. Founded in 2021 by Moni Alli, FrontEdge provides SME exporters and importers with the working capital and software tools needed to facilitate their cross-border and international transactions. Over the past decade, the former McKinsey consultant had ideated solutions to close the SME financing gap in Africa, drawing on a career focused on digital transformations for tier-one banks, …

Generative AI startup AI21 Labs raises cash in the midst of OpenAI chaos

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One AI startup’s undoing is another’s opportunity. Case in point: today, AI21 Labs, a company developing generative AI products along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT, closed a $53 million extension to its previously-announced Series C funding round. The new tranche, which had participation from new investors Intel Capital and Comcast Ventures, brings AI21’s total raised to $336 million. The startup’s valuation remains unchanged at $1.4 billion. Ori Goshen, AI21 Labs’ co-founder and CEO, said that the cash infusion will be put toward product development and growing the startup’s headcount. (Perhaps a few of those new hires will come from OpenAI, given the string of departures there — if they don’t jump ship for Microsoft.) “We’re extremely grateful for the support of our investors who believe in our deep technology expertise,” Goshen said in a press release. “Mass deployment of AI requires deep understanding of high-performance language models that can deliver better value and impact. Our approach is about designing AI with purpose, making it significantly more efficient than building from scratch, and much …

Indy raises $44 million to simplify taxes and paperwork for freelancers

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French startup Indy has recently closed a new funding round of $44 million (€40 million) with BlackFin Capital Partners leading the round. Indy started as an automated accounting platform for freelancers and other self-employed people. But the company has been slowly iterating on its product to become an all-in-one platform for freelancers, from accounting to company creation, tax preparation, invoicing and (soon) business banking. It’s an interesting example of the positive effects of bundling in a software-as-a-service company. And it could inspire other entrepreneurs addressing a highly fragmented market of potential customers. As long as you’re running a company without any employee, Indy wants to offer all the administrative and finance tools that you need to run your business. It’s designed for freelancers, self-employed people, doctors, architects, lawyers, etc. Other investors in the recent funding round include La Maison and iXO. Indy closed its funding round this summer. While the startup didn’t want to share its valuation, the company said that it’s higher than the company’s valuation after its previous €35 million funding round ($38.3 …