1.
How food media brand Chefclub reached 1 billion organic views per month
Chefclub hasn’t attracted a lot of headlines over the years as it has only raised $3.5 million. But it is slowly building a major media brand on social media platforms as it now competes directly with Tastemade and Tasty. Compared to more traditional recipe websites and brands, Chefclub focuses exclusively on the intersection of food and entertainment. If you’ve watched a few Chefclub videos, your reaction is probably something along the lines of “oh no they
didn’t.” You’ll see a lot of melted cheese, and somehow cooking often involves deep frying all the things. Some people around me are obsessed with those videos even though they’d never consider watching a cooking show on TV. [ Tech Crunch ]
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2.
Dutch online supermarket Picnic secures €250 million to finance its new, massive automated distribution centre
Picnic, the Dutch online supermarket that’s not to be confused with the American venture-backed automated pizza assembly startup with the same name, raised quite some eyebrows back in March 2017 when it closed a €100 million funding round. More eyebrows will be raised, and higher up, now that the company has secured a €250 million financing round to bankroll the building of a massive (42,000 square metre) automated distribution centre in
Utrecht. [ tech.eu ]
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3.
Tray.io brings in $50M more at a $600M+ valuation for its workflow automation tools
Organizations are always looking for new ways to work more efficiently, but too often the problem is that, in a digital-first environment, they have to get in line to ask their in-house IT experts (or even more expensively, external consultants) to build those solutions for them. To underscore the demand for a better approach, today a startup that has constructed a way around that, specifically in the world of app integrations, is announcing a sizeable round of funding. [ Tech Crunch] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
4.
From Helsinki: A Conversation On Investing In Deep Tech With Two Firms – Future Ventures and Future Positive Capital
I caught up with two co-founders at the Slush event in Helsinki this year — Maryanna Saenko of Silicon Valley-based Future Ventures and Sofia Hmich of Paris-based Future Positive Capital. Both are newly-founded firms focused on Deep Tech Investing and have raised inaugural funds earlier this year. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Gené: Maryanna, Future Ventures has raised a $200 million fund this year. How do you plan to invest this fund? Maryanna: Steve Jurvetson and I founded Future Ventures a year ago and started fundraising in November. We went to our LPs and said; if you are motivated to understand what are the fundamental technologies that will change our world for the better, if you understand that the horizon of these technologies is very long, if you’re willing to kind of come on this ride with us, we want to invest in the most fundamental changes in the world. We pitched a fund of $200 million, two partners. We really care about
each and every technology that we’re trying to bring into the fund. [ Crunchbase ]
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5.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is coming to Disrupt Berlin
Back in 2010, the web performance and security company Cloudflare launched in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield competition. The company came in second. Earlier this year, Cloudflare IPOed. To talk about this journey, Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince will join us on the main stage at Disrupt Berlin on December 12. He’ll also participate in a panel about building successful SaaS companies on the Extra Crunch stage, together with Red Point’s Laura Urquizo and Point Nine Capital’s Christoph Janz. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
6.
David, Michael, and John: The Ten Most Common First Names For VC Partners In The U.S.
Let’s say you wanted to raise your (current or future) kid to be a venture capitalist. To be sure, this is a very dubious goal on your part, but let’s roll with it, for the sake of this tongue-in-cheek introduction. So how would you set your sweet precious kid up for success? Research by Crunchbase News has some of the answers. Step one: go to college at Harvard or Stanford or UPenn — you know, somewhere fancy. [ Crunchbase ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
7.
Chewy Backer Invests in Arts-Supply Startup Arteza
Volition Capital, an early investor in pet supplies seller Chewy Inc., believes it has found another diamond-in-the-rough in South Florida. This time the Boston firm invested $24 million in a profitable art-supplies maker, Arteza Inc. The Series A deal is Arteza’s first institutional outside investment. [ WSJ ]
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8.
SoftBank's Vision Fund has already had another difficult week, and this time its got nothing to do with WeWork
Masayoshi Son, the CEO and founder of SoftBank, has became a household name in Silicon Valley for his company's Vision Fund — a venture firm with a strategy of pouring hundreds of millions (and sometimes billions) of dollars into startups, in an attempt to pick the next class of big winners.[ Business Insider ]
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9.
Why startup CEOs are turning to non-dilutive debt funding to fuel growth
Taking the entrepreneurial plunge takes grit, a growth mindset, and perseverance to succeed on this journey. One of the most important job requirements of startup CEOs is being diligent about financing growth while navigating the ebbs and flows of business. To fuel growth initiatives, entrepreneurs kicking off the fundraising process as an early stage startup find themselves navigating a complex number of options available to them. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
10.
TikTok is accused of censoring anti-Chinese government content, again
A US teenage TikTok user’s attempt to spread awareness about China’s oppression of its Uighur Muslim population has renewed questions about censorship on the China-based social media company’s platform. Earlier this week, 17-year-old Feroza Aziz, who lives in New Jersey, posted on TikTok what was presented as a three-part tutorial on how to get longer eyelashes but quickly switched to a call-out about China’s treatment of its Muslim
population. Several human rights groups have accused China of putting 1 million Muslims, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, into concentration camps and shutting down or destroying mosques. China’s government denies this and claims that the camps are merely vocational training centers. [ Vox ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
11.
Parcel delivery startup Sendle sets its sights on the US
Sydney-based courier disruptor Sendle is heading to the US just five years after its launch hoping to carve out a slice of the growth e-commerce deliver market. The venture raised $20 million in a Series B at the start of 2019, in part to explore international markets and with four billion parcels shipped around the US annually, sees opportunity in the $100 billion market targeting small business there with its flat rate carbon-neutral shipping service. [ Tech
Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
12.
Zebra Fuel, the startup that brought fuel directly to your vehicle, is ‘no longer’ delivering in London
Zebra Fuel, the London-based startup that delivered fuel directly to your vehicle — backed by Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, Brent Hoberman’s Firstminute Capital and Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman — has told customers it is “no longer” delivering fuel in London. However, it is unclear at this stage if the company has ceased operations entirely. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
13.
'Long game' starting to pay off for logistics startup ProServ
Brian Johnson was starting to hate his job. He loved the work he did. But the company was growing faster and that meant more meetings and planning sessions and less time on the work he enjoyed — building relationships between freight owners and carriers. [ Star Tribune ] Checkout 15K+ Venture
Capital Data on our platform.
14.
Foodvisor raises $4.5 million to track what you eat using AI
French startup Foodvisor has raised a $4.5 million funding round after generating 2 million app downloads. Agrinnovation is leading the round and various business angels are also participating. I covered Foodvisor last month, so I’m not going to describe the app once again. In a few words, the startup uses deep learning to enable image recognition to detect what you’re about to eat. It can detect the type of food and it also tries to estimate the
weight of each item. [ Tech Crunch ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
15.
Paris-based Forest Admin picks up $7 million Series A to expand its back office developer tool
Forest Admin, the French startup creating back-of-house developer tools, has raised a $7 million Series A led by Notion Capital and Runa Capital. Forest has built a universal admin interface to manage customer data and business operations. By plugging the Forest API into their application, the customer is delivered an off-the-shelf admin panel that requires no front-end development. There’s no need to develop in-house admin tools, which allows companies to focus on their
customer-facing product, even as they scale. [ Tech.eu]
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16.
Online Bra Retailer Brayola Files for Stay of Proceeding
New York-based online lingerie retailer Brayola Fitting Technologies Inc. has filed for a stay of proceeding with the Tel Aviv district court on Thursday over a debt of NIS 25.8 million ($7.43 million), according to court documents reviewed by Calcalist. [ calcalistech ]
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17.
UK’s Panintelligence pockets £4.5 million to grow business intelligence platform for complex sectors
Leeds-based Panintelligence has raised a £4.5 million Series A from YFM Equity Partners and Comhar Capital to further scale its data visualisation, reporting, and analytics software. The Panintelligence “Pi” suite of software enables businesses to use data in almost any format to trigger bespoke reports and visualise trends in real-time, helping inform strategic decisions and lower costs. Originally developed in the credit and banking sectors, the
software has moved into other highly-regulated areas, such as financial services, healthcare, and education. [ Tech.eu ]
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18.
Anti-money laundering software startup TookiTaki raises $11.7 million in additional Series A funding
TookiTaki, a startup that develops machine learning-based financial compliance software, announced today it has raised a $11.7 million in additional Series A funding, led by Viola Fintech and SIG Asia Investment, with participation from Normura Holdings. Existing investors Illuminate Financial, Jungle Ventures and SEEDs Capital also returned for the extension, which brings TookiTaki’s total Series A (first announced in March) to $19.2 million. [ Tech Crunch ]
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19.
Rossum raises $4.5 million to make manual data entry, across all sectors, a thing of the past
Rossum, a London-based deep learning startup, has raised $4.5 million to pursue its mission of making manual data entry completely obsolete, saving businesses time and money (and their employees, sanity). The round was led by LocalGlobe, with participation from Seedcamp, Miton, and StartupYard. [ Tech.eu ] Checkout 15K+ Venture Capital Data on our platform.
20.
Forest Admin raises $7 million to help you build admin panels
French startup Forest Admin has raised a $7 million Series A round from Notion Capital and Runa Capital. The company lets you build back end admin panel so that your team can track and manipulate data from a single interface. [ Venture Beat ]
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