Smart home startup Josh.ai raises $11 million to offer a home assistant alternative to Alexa

Directly taking on Google and Amazon generally seems to be an ill-advised strategy for a young startup. It’s even more complicated when you’re competing on the home assistants front, a technically-complex, capital-intensive future platform that both tech giants have dumped substantial sums into. Over the past few years, the small smart home startup Josh.ai has …

Plantible raises $4.6 million seed round for an egg white replacement that isn’t aquafaba

When California announced a statewide lockdown, Tony Martens and Maurits van de Ven decided to stay put instead of heading home to Amsterdam. So, the co-founders of Plantible bought two trailers and started living at their HQ: a two-acre duckweed farm in San Diego. Plantible uses duckweed, a tiny aquatic leaf, to extract a plant-based …

Wise locks down $5.7 million to scale its challenger bank designed for small businesses

Stripe and Shopify have transformed the face of commerce for small business users, yet when it comes to putting that cash somewhere, SMBs have found that the banking options aren’t quite as transformative. Wise is a new challenger bank built specifically for small businesses. The startup is aiming to insert itself as an essential service …

When regulation presents a (rare) opportunity

Bradley Tusk Contributor Bradley Tusk is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. More posts by this contributor In London, Uber has won the battle but risks losing the war Shockingly, Congress acted responsibly in regulating autonomous cars… So what’s next? Every time we realize something new about the coronavirus, it’s always worse than we …

Niche’s one-stop shop for college searchers raises a $35M Series C

Despite the implications of its name, edtech platform Niche took nearly a decade-and-a-half to find its place within the world of the college search process. The company started as College Prowler, selling informational books, which looked like a hybrid between CliffsNotes and a Zagat guide, about colleges. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and …

Investors, startup founders in India pool $13M to fund projects that fight coronavirus

More than 150 investors and entrepreneurs in India are funding dozens of projects in a bid to help millions better combat the COVID-19 epidemic and help the nation’s booming startup ecosystem withstand the economic devastation it has caused. The investors said they have contributed 1 billion Indian rupees — or $13 million — of their …

Spark fast follows with a $25M Series B round into customer success platform Catalyst

The world has been turned upside down the past few weeks, but one lesson of business remains as important as ever: treating your customers well is the best avenue to future business strength, particularly at a moment of extreme stress. As businesses come to terms with the economic crisis underway, executives are moving resources from …

Tecton.ai emerges from stealth with $20M Series A to build machine learning platform

Three former Uber engineers, who helped build the company’s Michelangelo machine learning platform, left the company last year to form Tecton.ai and build an operational machine learning platform for everyone else. Today the company announced a $20 million Series A from a couple of high-profile investors. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital co-led the round with …

Checkly raises $2.25M seed round for its monitoring and testing platform

Checkly, a Berlin-based startup that is developing a monitoring and testing platform for DevOps teams, today announced that it has raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Accel. A number of angel investors, including Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic, Zeit CEO Guillermo Rauch and former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, also participated in this round. The …

Shine adds invoice insurance to its freelancer bank account

French startup Shine is adding a new option today. If you think there’s a chance that a client is not going to pay your next invoice, you can insure that invoice to avoid any bad surprise. Shine is building a challenger bank for freelancers and small companies. It lets you send and receive money in …