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Amsterdam-based startup VanMoof has raised a $128 million Series C funding round. The company designs and sells electric bikes that are quite popular in some markets. It now wants to become the world’s leading e-bike brand by iterating at a faster pace. Asia-based private equity firm Hillhouse Investment is leading the round, with Gillian Tans , the former CEO of Booking.com, also participating. Some existing investors also put some more money on the table, such as Norwest Venture Partners, Felix Capital, Balderton Capital and TriplePoint Capital. Today’s Series C represents a big jump compared to the company’s Series B. Last year, VanMoof raised a $40 million Series B. Overall, if you add it all up, the startup has raised $182 million in total. If you’re not familiar with VanMoof’s e-bikes, TechCrunch reviewed both the most recent S3 and X3 models. On paper, they are identical. The VanMoof X3 features a smaller frame and smaller wheels. VanMoof X3 e-bike review: Transportati

After a 17-hour marathon through nearly 200 startup pitches, the Equity team was fired up to get back on Twitter and chat through some early trends and favorites from the first day of Y Combinator’s demo party. We’ll be back on the air tomorrow, so make sure you’re following the show on Twitter so you don’t miss out. What did Natasha and Alex  chat about? The following: First Impressions: We started by going through top-line numbers, geographic breakdown, and how the accelerator is doing when it comes to the representation of diverse founders. The last bit had a tiny bit of progress, but diversity continues to be an issue in YC’s batches – even as cohort size grows. We also chatted about what startups pitching can work on: like better mics, which are cheap and good. Our early favorites: Metaphor, Lumify, Alex’s favorite duo Indian real estate plays, Akudo, Reframe, and Playhouse. And some  hmmm moments, including our thoughts on Writesonic, which Natasha has a potentially para

In the customer service industry, your accent dictates many aspects of your job. It shouldn’t be the case that there’s a “better” or “worse” accent, but in today’s global economy (though who knows about tomorrow’s) it’s valuable to sound American or British. While many undergo accent neutralization training, Sanas is a startup with another approach (and a $5.5M seed round): using speech recognition and synthesis to change the speaker’s accent in near real time. The company has trained a machine learning algorithm to quickly and locally (that is, without using the cloud) recognize a person’s speech on one end and, on the other, output the same words with an accent chosen from a list or automatically detected from the other person’s speech. Image Credits: Sanas.ai It slots right into the OS’s sound stack so it works out of the box with pretty much any audio or video calling tool. Right now the company is operating a pilot program with thousands of people in locations from the USA

Y Combinator kicked off its fourth-ever virtual Demo Day today, revealing the first half of its nearly 400-company batch. The presentation, YC’s biggest yet, offers a snapshot into where innovation is heading, from not-so-simple seaweed to a Clearco for creators. The TechCrunch team stuck to its tradition of covering every single company live (but, you know, from home,) so you’ll find all of the Day 1 companies here . For those who want a sampling of standouts, however, we’re also bringing you a host of our favorites from today’s 1-minute pitch-off extravaganza. As reporters, we’re constantly inundated with hundreds of pitches on a daily basis. The startups below caught our picky attention for a whole host of reasons, but that doesn’t mean other startups weren’t compelling or potential unicorns as well. Instead, consider the below to be a data point on which startups made us do a double-take, be it due to the size of the market opportunity, the ambition exhibited by the founding team

On the heels of Heroes announcing a $200 million raise earlier today, to double down on buying and scaling third-party Amazon Marketplace sellers, another startup out of London aiming to do the same is announcing some significant funding of its own. Olsam , a roll-up play that is buying up both consumer and B2B merchants selling on Amazon by way of Amazon’s FBA fulfillment program , has closed $165 million — a combination of equity and debt that it will be using to fuel its M&A strategy, as well as continue building out its tech platform and to hire more talent. Apeiron Investment Group — an investment firm started by German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer — led the Series A equity round, with Elevat3 Capital (another Angermayer firm that has a strategic partnership with Founders Fund and Peter Thiel) also participating. North Wall Capital was behind the debt portion of the deal. We have asked and Olsam is only disclosing the full amount raised, not the amount that was rais

Even as hundreds of millions of people in India have a bank account, only a tiny fraction of this population invests in any financial instrument. Fewer than 30 million people invest in mutual funds or stocks, for instance. In recent years, a handful of startups have made it easier for users — especially the millennials — to invest , but the figure has largely remained stagnant. Now, an Indian startup believes that it has found the solution to tackle this challenge — and is already seeing good early traction. Nishchay AG , former director of mobility startup Bounce, and Misbah Ashraf , co-founder of MarsPlay (sold to Foxy), founded Jar earlier this year. The startup’s eponymous six-month-old Android app enables users to start their savings journey for as little as 1 Indian rupee. Users on Jar can invest in multiple ways and get started within seconds. The app works with Paytm (PhonePe support is in the works) to set up a recurring payment. (The startup is the first to use UPI 2.0’

Heroes , one of the new wave of startups aiming to build big e-commerce businesses by buying up smaller third-party merchants on Amazon’s Marketplace, has raised another big round of funding to double down on that strategy. The London startup has picked up $200 million, money that it will mainly be using to snap up more merchants. Existing brands in its portfolio cover categories like baby, pets, sports, personal health and home and garden categories — some of them, like PremiumCare dog chews, the Onco baby car mirror, gardening tool brand Davaon and wooden foot massager roller Theraflow , category best-sellers — and the plan is to continue building up all of these verticals. Crayhill Capital Management, a fund based out of New York, is providing the funding, and Riccardo Bruni — who co-founded the company with twin brother Alessio and third brother Giancarlo — said that the bulk of it will be going towards making acquisitions, and is therefore coming in the form of debt. Raising

Apna, a 21-month-old startup that is helping millions of blue- and gray-collar workers in India upskill themselves, find communities and land jobs, is inching closer to becoming the fastest tech firm in the world’s second-largest internet market to become a unicorn. Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to lead a $100 million round in Apna , according to four sources familiar with the matter. The proposed terms value the startup at over $1 billion, the sources said. The round hasn’t closed yet, so terms of the deal may change, some of the sources cautioned. If the round materializes, Apna will become the youngest Indian startup to attain the much-coveted unicorn status. The startup, which launched its app in December 2019, was valued at $570 million in its Series B financing round in June this year. It will also be the third financing round Apna would have secured in a span of less than seven months. India poised for record VC year as unicorns head for decisive IPOs T

Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. To do so, the company is designing its glasses with quality lenses and frames in range of styles, while still keeping the pricing affordable. The startup — whose name is a reference to the slang term for glasses, “cheaters,” — was founded by Jennifer Farrelly , whose background includes work in advertising and sales at companies like Uber and Virool. She said the idea to make a better set of readers came to her because she found herself frustrated by the current options on the market. “It all started a few years ago. My friends were posting on social media these really depressing comments and posts like: ‘I’m old and turning into my parents, this is awful.’ And I [though

Founded in 2012, Whoop is far from a household name in the world of fitness trackers. But over the years, the company has attracted its share of converts. It hasn’t had any issue attracting venture capital over the years, either. Last time we checked in on the Boston-based company was in late-2019, when it raised $55 million. Now it’s back with a massive $200 million raise . The Series F round brings Whoop’s total funding to nearly $405 million — a pretty massive investment for a company of its size. The round, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, puts the valuation at a jaw-dropping $3.6 billion valuation. Additional investors include IVP, Cavu Venture Partners, Thursday Ventures, GP Bullhound, Accomplice, NextView Ventures and Animal Capital. They join a long list of former backers, including the National Football League Players Association, Jack Dorsey and a number of professional athletes. The company’s targeting of athletes marks a strong contrast with leading consumer wearables li

Amsterdam-based challenger bank Bunq is updating its service with a handful of new features. In addition to Dutch, German and French bank account numbers, existing and new users in Spain can now get a Spanish IBAN. European IBANs are supposed to work across Europe. Your employer or internet provider can’t force you to get a local IBAN. And yet, that’s rarely the case. When you move to another European country, chances are the first thing you do is that you open a local bank account. While European fintech companies have teamed up to create a lobbying effort called ‘Accept my IBAN’ , some challenger banks, such as Bunq, are adding the ability to get local bank account numbers as an intermediary fix. Bunq users can also choose to associate IBANs from multiple European countries with their account. You have to pay a one-time fee of €9.99 every time you add a new local IBAN. Bunq is also drawing inspiration from Revolut , Wise , Vivid Money and others as you’ll soon be able to receive

If you’re in India, the Philippines, Russia or Vietnam, Amazon Prime and Gorillas are probably not that much use to you. Comparable to DoorDash Drive or Lalamove (Malaysia), Dostavista is a “crowdsourced” same-day delivery service. Founded in Russia, the startup initially figured out a way to appeal to gig economy workers in countries such as the ones above by creating a game where players would be asked to deliver virtual items, before pivoting to the real thing. That left-of-field thinking has seen it expand to countries not typically touched by the bigger delivery startups. Now the Amsterdam HQ-d startup is rebranding as “ Borzo ” to bring its operation in 10 different countries under one. At the same time, it has raised $35 million in a Series C funding round led by UAE-based investor Mubadala . Also participating were VNV Global, RDIF, Flashpoint Venture Capital and others. The demand for affordable, same-day delivery of goods was obviously accelerated by the pandemic, and no le

Duped buyer says he feels "burned" after apparent hack of Banksy website. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3Bp8PcT

Some users panicked after 125,000 emails were sent mistakenly warning of changed security settings. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3t0hWxw

Databricks this morning confirmed earlier reports that it was raising new capital at a higher valuation. The data- and AI-focused company has secured a $1.6 billion round at a $38 billion valuation , it said. Bloomberg first reported last week that Databricks was pursuing new capital at that price. The Series H was led by Counterpoint Global, a Morgan Stanley fund. Other new investors included Baillie Gifford, UC Investments and ClearBridge. A grip of prior investors also kicked in cash to the round. The new funding brings Databricks’ total private funding raised to $3.5 billion. Notably, its latest raise comes just seven months after the late-stage startup raised $1 billion on a $28 billion valuation . Its new valuation represents paper value creation in excess of $1 billion per month. The company, which makes open source and commercial products for processing structured and unstructured data in one location, views its market as a new technology category. Databricks calls the tec

Software billing startup Octane announced Tuesday that it raised $2 million on a post-money valuation of $10 million to advance its pay-as-you-go billing software. Akash Khanolkar and his co-founders met a decade ago at Carnegie Mellon University and since then went off in different directions. In Khanolkar’s case, he ran a cloud consulting business and saw how fast companies like Datadog and Snowflake were coming to market and dealing with Amazon Web Services. He found that the commonality in all of those fast-growing companies was billing software using a pay-as-you-go business model versus the traditional flat-rate plans, Khanolkar told TechCrunch. However, he explained that monitoring consumption means that billing becomes complicated: companies now have to track how customers are using the software per second in order to bill correctly each month. Seeing the shift toward consumption-based billing, the co-founders came back together in June 2020 to create Octane, a metered bil

Quip is on a mission to be the go-to platform for both personal and professional oral care, and a new $100 million cash infusion is giving the New York-based company fuel to do it. The new round from Cowen Sustainable Investments (CSI), labeled a Series B, follows the company reaching profitability in April 2020 and gives Quip more than $160 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2015. Its last publicly announced raise was $40 million in 2018. The company showcased its service at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley in 2015. At that time, Quip was best known as a subscription-based toothbrush replacement service , but over the years has steadily taken on more of the $435 billion global oral healthcare market by adding other products like flossers , mouthwash, gum, smart electric toothbrushes and, most recently, a virtual orthodontist-enabled clear aligner service launched in April. Quip raises another $40 million for dental care products and services Comp

Walnut raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Eight Roads Ventures, to continue developing its sales experience platform. Founders Yoav Vilner and Danni Friedland started the company in July 2020. Vilner told TechCrunch that while at a previous company, he was building a category called technology marketing in Israel. He realized that company sales people often ran into problems when it was time to demonstrate their product — the product would break, or they would have to ask another department to open something or add a feature, none of which happened instantaneously, Vilner added. He and Friedland’s answer to that problem is a no-code platform for teams to create customized product demonstrations quickly, be able to integrate them into their sales and marketing processes and then generate insights from the demos. Walnut engagement example. Image Credits: Walnut “We let the sales and marketing teams replicate the SaaS product in our cloud environment, which is disconne

Kevala , the startup that collects and analyzes energy grid infrastructure data for utility companies, renewable energy providers, EV charging companies, regulators and other energy industry stakeholders, has raised $21 million in a Series A round. The company says it will use the funds to grow its team from 60 employees to around 100 by the end of 2021 and increase the deployment of its grid analytics tools.  Kevala’s Assessor Platform, its interactive cloud-based grid analytics toolbox, allows a range of energy industry stakeholders to leverage massive quantities of data the company has collected from public sources, as well as from its clients, in order to predict and plan for things like “extreme weather events, renewable energy adoption and increasing demand from vehicle, building and industry electrification,” according to a statement released by the company.  Today, there is a greater range of energy sources and receptors than ever before. There’s also more extreme weather co