Fundraising

Eyewa now has 150 stores selling eyeglasses in the Middle East and just raised $100M to add 100 more

Helping consumers find the perfect glasses is a booming global business, spawning giants like Warby Parker in the U.S. and Lenskart in India. In the Middle East, this market is producing its own rising powerhouse: Eyewa. Eyewa, based in Dubai and Riyadh, sells a wide range of eyewear products, including prescription glasses, sunglasses, blue light […]

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Roon raises $15M to replace ‘Dr. Google’ with real doctors sharing videos about illness treatments

Vikram Bhaskaran was leading creator partnerships at Pinterest when his father started showing early symptoms of ALS, a rare, terminal neurodegenerative disease. “It turned my world upside down,” Bhaskaran said. He worked during the day, and spent his evenings Googling the illness and treatment options and in Facebook groups. But Bhaskaran discovered that finding clear,

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Cardless swipes up $30M to build a new generation of co-branded credit cards

More than a quarter of all U.S. residents use co-branded credit cards today to get discounts and other extras from brands they use regularly, but not all is rosy in the world of loyalty commerce. Major brands like Uber, Starbucks and Walmart have all pulled back from such projects over the years after failing to

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Latin America fintech will be a market to watch in 2025

Heading into 2024, Mike Packer, a partner at fintech-focused QED Investors, predicted we’d hit the bottom for funding to Latin American fintech startups during the year. While momentum wasn’t a straight shot up and to the right, Packer’s prediction may still have come true. The volume of venture capital dollars invested into fintech companies based

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Money for tech that matters

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. If you’d like to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Friday, sign up here! The week before Thanksgiving is typically busy with announcements of all sorts, but this week has been particularly interesting. Money was flowing to big problems, like defense, cybersecurity, and

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OneRail’s software helps solve the last-mile delivery problem

Last-mile delivery, the very last step of the delivery process, is a common pain point for companies. According to one survey, nearly 90% of retailers struggle with their last-mile delivery operations, either because of technical issues, costs, or a combination of both. Bill and Lisa Catania understand this well. The husband-and-wife team founded OneRail, a

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Lighthouse, an analytics provider for the hospitality sector, lights up with $370M at a $1B valuation

Here is yet one more sign of the travel industry’s noticeable boom: a major growth round for one of the B2B startups servicing it. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C of $370 million. The KKR-led round catapults Lighthouse to a valuation of over

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Fusion startup Tokamak Energy attracts $125M for its egg-like reactor design

As the world races to add more power plants to satiate AI’s thirst for electricity, investors have been plowing money into nuclear fusion, the pie-in-the-sky technology that appears to be inching its way toward commercial viability. The latest exhibit: Tokamak Energy, a UK-based startup that’s working to refine its squeezed-doughnut approach to fusion power. The

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