Fundraising

Lightspeed doubles down on Wheelocity as it pivots to rural India commerce

While India’s urban population is shifting from mom-and-pop stores to quick commerce platforms, its rural side — home to more than 800 million people — still heavily relies on offline businesses for daily consumption. Wheelocity aims to transform that untapped market to let people living beyond the top 200 cities of the country easily shop online. […]

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SpaceX alums find traction on Earth with their Mars-inspired methane-to-CO2 tech

A trend has emerged among a small group of climate tech founders who start with their eyes fixed on space and soon realize their technology would do a lot more good here on Earth. Halen Mattison and Luke Neise fit the bill. Mattison spent time at SpaceX, while Neise worked at Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Laboratory

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Brazilian fintech Tako emerges from stealth with sizable seed round led by a16z and Ribbit Capital

Running payroll is hard in any country, but perhaps especially so in Brazil thanks to consistently changing laws and extremely influential unions that make it significantly harder to get it right. Fernando Gadotti struggled with this as the co-founder and CEO of DogHero, LatAm’s version of Rover. When Gadotti left the company in 2022, after

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Open source projects draw equity-free funding from corporates, startups, and even VCs

A dearth of funding for vital open source technologies is leading to a swath of support from startups, unicorns, corporations, and even venture capital firms. Last year, Bloomberg launched its FOSS (free and open source software) fund, committing up to $90,000 per year to various projects. And in October, Indian financial services company Zerodha launched

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Led by a founder who sold a video startup to Apple, Panjaya uses deepfake techniques to bite into video dubbing

There’s a big opportunity for generative AI in the world of translation, and a startup called Panjaya is taking the concept to the next level: a hyperrealistic, gen AI-based dubbing tool for videos that re-creates a person’s original voice speaking the new language, with the video and the speaker’s physical movements automatically modifying to match

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SocialCrowd raises $2.5M seed round as interest in future of work software remains

Back in February, when TechCrunch spoke to Raphael Akinsipe, he described his company SocialCrowd as a “Fitbit but for work.” As CEO and co-founder, he explained that the product allows companies to set goals for employees and then reward them when those expectations are met.  “For example, we had a restaurant incentivize their staff by

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MoradaUno wants to make it easier to rent apartments in Mexico

Renting in Latin America is restrictive. Most landlords require three months of rent as a deposit and a guarantor that owns property in the same city to co-sign the lease. Santiago Morales, the co-founder and CEO of proptech MoradaUno, said this dynamic makes 40% of prospective renters ineligible. His company wants to get more tenants

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Research Grid raises $6.4M to automate clinical trial admin

Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn’t mind the work, but there was one thing she consistently hated: administrative tasks.  “I think most people do, especially in research,” she told TechCrunch. She would rather be analyzing data or building relationships with patients, she said. “But I was spending so much time

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How a box on a roof helped Transaera land $8.2 million in funding

Transaera co-founder and CEO Sorin Grama may not have expected his startup to end up on the roof of a warehouse, but he’s happy to have landed there. Over the summer, the company installed a massive ventilation system, known as a dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS), which dehumidifies fresh air coming into the warehouse, allowing

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