TechCrunch Startup News

This morning Candu, a software startup that provides no-code web tools for SaaS apps, announced a $5 million funding round. TechCrunch caught up with founder Jonathan Anderson and lead investor Villi Iltchev, a partner at Two Sigma Ventures, to chat about the deal. First thing: This round, a bit like Scotch, has aged. It’s from […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lemonade is launching its renters insurance in France. This is the company’s third European launch after the Netherlands and Germany. Originally from the U.S., Lemonade is now a public company with a current market capitalization close to $4 billion. Lemonade will compete directly with a local competitor called Luko. Both companies share a lot of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce, who helped build the Einstein artificial intelligence platform, is taking on a new challenge — and it’s a doozy. Socher wants to fix consumer search and today he announced you.com, a new search engine to take on the mighty Google. “We are building you.com. You can already go […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pandemic has been terrible for many industries, but the book industry has gotten a rare reprieve in an otherwise dismal past decade. Locked in homes and forced to socially distance from others, us humans have more time on our hands and more need to connect to characters than ever before. That surge in interest […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Getsafe, the digital-first insurance startup that initially launched with an app for home contents insurance, has closed $30 million in Series B funding. Swiss Re, the reinsurer giant, led the round. Existing investors, including Earlybird and CommerzVentures, also participated. Getsafe has raised a total of $53 million to date since being founded in May 2015. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When one of AWS’s east coast data centers went down at the end of last month, it had an impact on countless companies relying on its services including Roku, Adobe and Shipt. When the incident was resolved, the company had to analyze what happened. For most companies, that involves manually pulling together information from various […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zephr has raised $8 million in a new funding round led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (owned by media giant Bertelsmann). The London-headquarted startup’s customers already include publishers like McClatchy, News Corp Australia, Dennis Publishing and PEI Media. CEO James Henderson told me via email that rather than creating “a monolithic product that tries to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Stripe has announced an ambitious new product today called Stripe Treasury. The company is partnering with banks to offer a banking-as-a-service API. In other words, Stripe clients will be able to provide bank accounts to their customers — the service is invite-only for now. This is part of a bigger trend called embedded […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Esports One, a startup bringing the fantasy approach to esports, is announcing that it has raised an additional $4 million in funding. When I first wrote about Esports One in April, co-founder and COO Sharon Winter described it as the first “all-in-one fantasy platform” in the esports world, allowing you to research players, create fantasy […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Given the attention that TechCrunch pays to Y Combinator’s Demo Days, we also try to keep tabs on the same startups as they scale and raise more capital. Yesterday we covered YC Winter 2020 participant BuildBuddy, for example. Today we’re taking a look at Heru, a startup based in Mexico City that is announcing a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices