1.
Zume co-founder joins Cleo Capital while tackling climate change
Julia Collins, who co-founded and co-led Zume Pizza, has a new job: entrepreneur-in-residence at Cleo Capital, an early-stage VC scout fund that relies entirely on female entrepreneurs. Why it matters: Collins is one of the incredibly few black women to start a "unicorn" startup, but she stepped away from Zume a year ago to tackle climate change with a new company, Planet FWD (which Cleo is backing). The intrigue: "My ambition is to help reverse climate change by making it easier to bring carbon neutral products to market," Collins tells Axios of her new company. "And as a new mom, I became obsessed with being able to tell my kid 'I did everything I could to fix this.'” [ Axios ]
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2.
Getting Their Gobble On: Food Delivery Funding In 2019
Food delivery is an interesting category. It’s not a new concept, but tech has enabled it to be done more efficiently on the consumer end. Lots of startups have popped up in the space in recent years, they’ve become popular among consumers, and many companies have grown extremely fast. Crunchbase News has written plenty about food delivery companies before, including about how one even managed to make an adjusted profit. But as the year ends, we wanted to take a
look at how much venture capital love (i.e. funding) the space had received so far this year. [ Crunchbase ]
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3.
Latin America roundup: Neobanks raise $205M+; Softbank backs VTEX
Argentina’s Ualá became the most recent Latin American fintech to receive a growth-stage funding ($150 million) from Asian investors, Tencent and Softbank. This marks Tencent’s second round of investment in Ualá, the first coming in April 2019. Tencent also invested $180M in Brazil’s leading neobank, Nubank in 2018. With Ualá, Tencent and Softbank will join a team of investors including Soros,
Goldman Sachs, Endeavor, Monashees, Ribbit Capital, and Jefferies LLC, who have backed Ualá since it was founded in 2016. Ualá has provided over 1.3M accounts for unbanked and under-banked Argentine customers in the past two years and recently launched new products for lending and savings. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
4.
The CIA’s VC fund has backed Australian malicious bot blocker Kasada
Cybersecurity startup Kasada has closed its $7 million Series A raise with the CIA’s 20-year-old venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel (IQT) joining the round. The Sydney tech venture previously announced the first $6.5 million in the Series A from the CSIRO’s innovation fund, Main Sequence Ventures, and Westpac’s Reinventure Group, having first raised $2.5m in 2018. The IQT backing is a major coup for the four-year-old startup launched by CEO
Sam Crowther when he was a teenager. [ Startup Daily ]
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5.
3 Indian-origin former staff of health start-up charged in USD 1 billion fraud
Three Indian-origin ex-executives of a Chicago-based health tech start-up have been charged by the federal authorities for their alleged roles in a fraud scheme which involved falsifying the company's financial performance to raise nearly USD 1 billion in debt and private equity. The co-founders of Outcome Health Rishi Shah, 33, and Shradha Aggarwal, 34, and former executive Ashik Desai, 26, are among six people accused of fraud "that targeted the company's clients, lenders and
investors," the US Department of Justice said on Monday. [ Deccan Chronicle ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
6.
Cybersecurity Company Cymulate Raises $15 Million
Israeli cybersecurity startup Cymulate Ltd. raised a $15 million series B led by Vertex Growth Fund, with participation from Vertex Ventures Israel, Dell Technologies Capital, and Susquehanna Growth Equity. The round, announced Tuesday, brings the company’s equity raised to date to $26 million, after a $7.5 million series A round raised in March. [ calcalistech ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
7.
IPO vs. Direct Listing
The New York Stock Exchange filed paperwork on Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission to let companies going public through a direct listing to raise capital. Here at Crunchbase News, we cover a lot of tech and tech-adjacent startups as they go public. The process by which they’ve done so has been pretty much the same: through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). But lately there’s been more and more talk of going public through a direct listing, so we thought
we’d break down exactly what that means. [ Crunchbase ]
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8.
Instagram founders join $30M raise for Loom work video messenger
Why are we all trapped in enterprise chat apps if we talk 6X faster than we type, and our brain processes visual info 60,000X faster than text? Thanks to Instagram, we’re not as camera-shy anymore. And everyone’s trying to remain in flow instead of being distracted by multi-tasking. [ Tech Crunch ]
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9.
Female STEM Entrepreneurs In Latin America Are Gaining Momentum
Guest post by Susana García Robles, Chief Investment Officer and Gender Initiatives Coordinator at IDB Lab. Although female founders receive less than 2 percent of venture capital funding worldwide, Latin America is a growing hub for female STEM entrepreneurs who are building startups to solve pressing social issues. Using their background and studies in science, technology, engineering, and math, they’re creating ventures that provide access to finance, health and education, or improve traditional industries like transportation, agribusiness, food and mining. [ Crunchbase ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
10.
NYSE proposes allowing companies to raise fresh capital in direct listings
The biggest hurdle for companies aiming to follow Spotify and Slack into the public markets is that the direct listing process they pursued doesn’t currently allow businesses to raise new capital. The New York Stock Exchange is trying to fix that. [ CNBC ] Checkout 15K+
Venture Capital Data on our platform.
11.
Purple Carrot Enters Into Venture Capital With The Garden Incubator
Vegan meal kit provider Purple Carrot has announced the formation of a plantbased incubator in order to assist early-stage plant-based companies in scaling their operations. The Garden Incubator will serve as an investor, an incubator and a launch pad providing a range of services. [ Veg Conomist ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
12.
NYSE proposes allowing companies to raise fresh capital in direct listings
When former New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter launched The Players' Tribune five years ago, the website touted itself as a platform aimed at giving professional athletes the opportunity to bypass traditional media outlets and tell their stories directly to fans.
And the VC-backed site has indeed had its share of powerful essays and breaking news from athletes, including NBA star Kevin Durant announcing his decision to join the Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavaliers player Kevin Love's account of dealing with mental health struggles and WNBA champion Sue Bird writing a love letter to her girlfriend, women's soccer icon Megan Rapinoe. [ Pitchbook ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
13.
Detectify raises additional €21M for its ethical hacker network
Detectify, the Sweden-born cybersecurity startup that offers a website vulnerability scanner powered by the crowd, has raised €21 million in further funding. Leading the round is London-based VC firm Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors Paua Ventures, Inventure and Insight Partners. Detectify says the new funding will be used to continue to hire “world-class” talent to further accelerate the company’s growth and
deliver on its mission to reduce internet security vulnerabilities. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
14.
In Finland, a start-up wants to produce hydrocarbons using renewables
In towns and cities around the world, air pollution is a big problem. From low emission buses and green walls to canopies containing algae, a range of technologies and ideas are being developed and deployed to boost urban air quality. [ CNBC ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our
platform.
15.
This 20-Year-Old Article Explains So Much About the State of Silicon Valley Today
Profitability has lately been a hot topic in the tech world. But it's hardly a new headache. One Term Sheet reader unearthed a New York Times article from 20 years ago that rings eerily familiar: “So Lucrative That It’s Almost Profitable.” Michael Granoff, founder of Israel-based venture capital firm Maniv Mobility, wrote in and said he vividly remembered reading the satirical piece from 1999 by a writer who had a plan for a
“business:” selling $100 bills on the internet for $95. The following year, he planned to raise the price to $96 and tell investors that he cut losses by 20% in just one year and was clearly on a path to profitability. [ Fortune ]
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16.
Bungalow Raises $47 Million To Prove Co-Living Is Not The Next Co-Working
It should have been a hard sell. Public markets had received Uber and Lyft’s IPOs poorly in the spring given the services’ lack of profitability. By fall, WeWork’s IPO was collapsing as it continued to burn money on its business of leasing properties and turning them into co-working spaces. But Bungalow’s cofounder and CEO Andrew Collins believed his co-living business—which uses a similar model of subdividing homes and renting out the rooms—was different. Private market investors, at the very least, agreed. [ Forbes ]
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17.
Tracking Patreon’s March To 4M Patrons, $1B In Payouts
There’s no point in pretending that the idea of Patreon isn’t neat. By collecting supporters for an artist, or publication, or group in one place, Patreon is building a paid platform to support creativity. It’s a good idea, even if the company’s business choices have at times attracted user blowback. [ Crunchbase ]
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18.
Zurich’s Bankers Make Way for Techies and Bitcoin Startups
On Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich’s main street, a building that once housed a private bank has been turned into a hub for blockchain development. The forces reshaping the economy of Switzerland’s largest metropolis are also exerting a sartorial influence. Fifteen years ago, “I think 80 percent of the men would’ve been wearing a suit and tie. Now it looks different,” with more people dressed casually, says Thomas Meister, general manager of Trust Square, which has 40-odd companies working on crypto applications as tenants. [ Bloomberg ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
19.
What Serena Williams has learned from venture investing
Tennis star Serena Williams says her five years as a venture investor have helped inform her newest entrepreneurial foray—a fine jewelry line with pieces priced from $299 to $10,000. Williams, who revealed in April that she’d quietly been investing in early stage companies since 2014, tells Fast Company that the experience of investing has made her keenly aware of the importance of business structure and strong partnerships. Serena Ventures is an investor in more
than two dozen companies, including Tonal, Brandless, The Wing, MasterClass, and Andela. [ FastCompany ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
20.
A Singapore-Backed Startup Wants to Reinvent the Outdoor Fan
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