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Showing posts from May, 2021

Singapore-based D2C dental brand Zenyum raises $40M Series B from L Catterton, Sequoia India and other investors

Zenyum , a startup that wants to make cosmetic dentistry more affordable, announced today it has raised a $40 million Series B. This includes $25 million from L Catterton, a private equity firm focused on consumer brands. The round’s other participants were Sequoia Capital India (Zenyum is an alum of its Surge accelerator program ), RTP Global, Partech, TNB Aura, Seeds Capital and FEBE Ventures. L Catteron Asia’s head of growth investments, Anjana Sasidharan, will join Zenyum’s board. This brings Zenyum’s total raised so far to $56 million, including a $13.6 million Series A announced in November 2019 . In a press statement, Sasidharan said, “Zenyum’s differentiated business model gives it a strong competitive advantage, and we are excited to partner with the founder management team to help them realize their growth ambitions.” Other dental-related investments in L Catteron’s portfolio include Ideal Image, ClearChoice, dentalcorp, OdontoCompany, Espaçolaser and 98point6. Sequoia re

ChargerHelp co-founder, CEO Kameale C. Terry is heading to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

Thousands of electric vehicle charging stations will be built around the country over the next decade. ChargerHelp! , founded in January 2020 by Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis, wants to make sure they stay up and running. The idea for the on-demand repair app for EV charging stations came to Terry when she was working at EV Connect , where she held a number of roles including director of programs and head of customer experience. She noticed long wait times to fix non-electrical issues at charging stations due to the industry practice to use electrical contractors. “When the stations went down we really couldn’t get anyone on site because most of the issues were communication issues, vandalism, firmware updates or swapping out a part — all things that were not electrical,” Terry said in an interview with TechCrunch earlier this year. After Terry quit her job to start ChargerHelp!, she joined the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, where she developed a first-of-its-kind EV Network T

June makes product analytics more accessible

Meet June , a new startup that wants to make it easier to create analytics dashboards and generate reports even if you’re not a product analytics expert. June is built on top of your Segment data. Like many no-code startups, it uses templates and a graphical interface so that non-technical profiles can start using it. “What we do today is instant analytics and that’s why we’re building it on top of Segment,” co-founder and CEO Enzo Avigo told me. “It lets you access data much more quickly.” Segment acts as the data collection and data repository for your analytics. After that, you can start playing with your data in June. Eventually, June plans to diversify its data sources. “Our long-term vision is to become the Airtable of analytics,” Avigo said. If you’re familiar with Airtable , June may look familiar. The company has built a template library to help you get started. For instance, June helps you track user retention, active users, your acquisition funnel, engagement, feature

By working with home entrepreneurs, Jakarta-based DishServe is creating an even more asset-light version of cloud kitchens

Cloud kitchens are already meant to reduce the burden of infrastructure on food and beverage brands by providing them with centralized facilities to prepare meals for delivery. This means the responsibility falls on cloud kitchen operators to make sure they have enough locations to meet demand from F&B clients, while ensuring fast deliveries to end customers. Indonesian network DishServe has figured out a way to make running cloud kitchen networks even more asset-light. Launched by budget hotel startup RedDoorz’s former chief operating officer, DishServe partners with home kitchens instead of renting or buying its own facilities. It currently works with almost 100 home kitchens in Jakarta, and focuses on small- to medium-sized F&B brands, serving as their last-mile delivery network. Launched in fall 2020, DishServe has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Insignia Ventures Partners. RedDoorz raises $70M to expand its budget hotel network in Southeast Asia

For startups, trustworthy security means going above and beyond compliance standards

Oren Yunger Contributor Share on Twitter Oren Yunger is an investor at GGV Capital , where he leads the cybersecurity vertical and drives investments in enterprise IT, data infrastructure, and developer tools. He was previously chief information security officer at a SaaS company and a public financial institution. More posts by this contributor Winning enterprise sales teams know how to persuade the Chief Objection Officer 6 CISOs share their game plans for a post-pandemic world When it comes to meeting compliance standards, many startups are dominating the alphabet. From GDPR and CCPA to SOC 2, ISO27001, PCI DSS and HIPAA, companies have been charging toward meeting the compliance standards required to operate their businesses. Today, every healthcare founder knows their product must meet HIPAA compliance, and any company working in the consumer space would be well aware of GDPR, for example. But a mistake many high-growth companies make is that they treat compli

The exit effect: 4 ways IPOs and acquisitions drive positive change across the global ecosystem

Laura González-EstĂ©fani Contributor Share on Twitter Laura González-EstĂ©fani is the founder and CEO of TheVentureCity , an international, operator-led venture acceleration model designed to make the global entrepreneurial ecosystem more diverse, international and accessible to fair capital. More posts by this contributor Miami won’t be the next Silicon Valley because we don’t need another one For many VCs, the exit is the endgame; you cash in and move on. But as we know, the startup world is evolving, and that means the impact of investment is no longer limited to how much money is made. As investors, we’re looking further into what each investment means to human beings, at interlinking our mission with our money. And yet, one of the events that generates the most momentum for long-term impact — the successful exit of a portfolio company — is not being harnessed. When leveraged properly, an exit can be the beginning of a firm’s true impact, especially when we’re ta

6 investors and founders forecast hockey-stick growth for Edinburgh’s startup scene

Scotland is slowly but surely drawing attention in the UK’s startup space. In 2020, Scottish startups collectively raised £345 million, according to Tech Nation, and with nearly 2,500 startups, it has the highest number of budding tech companies outside London. Venture capital fundraises are also consistently on the rise every year. Scotland’s capital Edinburgh boasts a beautiful, hilly landscape, a robust education system and good access to grant funding, public and private investment. It’s also one of the top financial centers in the U.K., making it a great place to begin a business. So to find out what the startup scene in Edinburgh looks like, we spoke to six founders, executives and investors. The city’s tech ecosystem appears to have a robust space for machine learning, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, fintech, travel tech, oil, renewables, e-commerce, gaming, health tech, deep tech, space tech and insurtech. Use discount code SCOTLANDSURVEY to save 25% off an annual o

3 views on the future of meetings

More than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, early-stage startups across the world are re-inventing how we work. But founders aren’t flocking to build just another SaaS tool or Airtable copycat — they’re trying to disrupt the only thing possibly more annoying than e-mail: the work meeting. On an episode of this week’s podcast, Equity hosts Alex Wilhelm, Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas discussed a flurry of funding rounds related to the future of work. Rewatch, which makes meetings asynchronous, raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz , AnyClip got $47 million in a round led by JVP for video search and analytics technology, Interactio, a remote interpretation platform, landed $30 million from Eight Roads Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Storm Ventures , and Spot Meetings got Kleiner Perkins on board in a $5 million seed. We connected the dots between these funding rounds to sketch out three perspectives on the future of workplace meetings. Part of our reasoning was t

Extra Crunch roundup: first-check myths, Miami relocation checklist, standout SaaSy startups

This may seem like a great time to launch a SaaS startup, but the landscape is crowded with well-designed applications that promise “blazingly fast and delightfully simple” experiences, according to seed-stage investor John Chen of Fika Ventures. Most SaaS startups will fail, but not because of a sour marketing campaign or server downtime. The majority of these companies will fall victim to what Chen calls “the myth of frictionless onboarding.” Despite the hype about ease of use, enterprise companies always ask customers to abandon familiar tools so they can learn something new. “Just like with a new fitness program, participants feel good after completing the workout, but it takes a lot of activation energy to start and hard work to get there,” Chen notes. Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription Instead of putting the onus on customers to roll up their sleeves, he suggests that SaaS s