Author: TechBrunch

Monzo Bank has raised another £150 million ($190 million) as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally, particularly in the US. The new round comes just two months after Monzo raised £340 million ($425 million). That means the London-based company will have more than $610 million in 2024 and has raised $1.5 billion since its founding nine years ago. The first tranche of the Series I round saw a rare co-investment by Alphabet's CapitalG and Google's GV, along with prominent backers such as HongShan Capital (formerly Sequoia Capital China), Passion Capital, and Tencent. The extension sees existing investors…

Reddit (now a publicly traded company and subject to greater scrutiny of its revenue growth) has placed a big emphasis on growing its audience around the world, especially in French-speaking countries. CEO Steve Huffman acknowledged during his first earnings call that the company is currently working on automatically translating site content into French in real time, thanks to advances in language models at scale. . He also mentioned expanding the ecosystem with some U-turns. The company hopes to woo developers with new tools, which is surprising given its history in this space. And the company plans to reintroduce Reddit Gold.…

Mushrooms continue to be a big field for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based proteins using biomass fermentation. There's also MyForest Foods and Fable Food. Then there's Meaty Foods, which claims to be different from other alternative proteins. The company makes cutlets and steaks from mycelium, or mushroom roots. “This is truly the next generation of innovative proteins,” CEO Phil Graves told TechCrunch. “It's a product that's rooted in nature. It's not genetically modified. We're just taking something from nature, guiding it, and giving it the nutrients and minerals…

High interest rates and financial pressures have made it more important than ever for finance teams to better manage cash flow, and several startups are looking to help. One such company is Panax, a two-year-old Israeli startup that just raised a $10 million Series A round led by Team8 with participation from TLV Partners. Startups have had the good fortune of following the CFO stack by streamlining processes and freeing up time to work on strategic tasks. SVB's collapse has provided a tailwind for the money management sector, which includes companies such as Embat, Kyriba, Statement and Vesto. Unlike some…

Cleaning the outside of a building is a dirty job and can also be dangerous. Lucid Bots debuted in 2018 with his Sherpa series of high-altitude window cleaning drones, but now they're back to take on more labor-intensive tasks. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based company is part of Y Combinator's 2019 companies of the year, with a theme of building intelligent robots to tackle the “dirty” jobs that humans don't do. It has taken on a new form. Ashur said he wanted to do it. “We started with a very simple problem, but after years of pursuing our desire to make…

High interest rates and financial pressures have made it more important than ever for finance teams to better manage cash flow, and several startups are looking to help. One such company is Panax, a two-year-old Israeli startup that just raised a $10 million Series A round led by Team8 with participation from TLV Partners. Startups have had the good fortune of following the CFO stack by streamlining processes and freeing up time to work on strategic tasks. SVB's collapse has provided a tailwind for the money management sector, which includes companies such as Embat, Kyriba, Statement and Vesto. Unlike some…

For the founders of data governance startup Atlan, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they started their company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka started building India's national data platform called SocialCops. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that we've developed tools to manage and collaborate data, bring together myriad data sources, and gain some control over data clutter within large organizations. The company was founded in 2020, and data issues have only grown in importance since then, and even more now as companies look to acquire data houses to leverage generative…

It is estimated that around 2 billion people, especially those in low- and middle-income countries, do not have access to high-quality, affordable essential medicines. The situation is made worse by low-quality or even deadly counterfeit drugs that fill the gap. This shortage means that treatable and preventable diseases end up causing suffering and even death. This is the problem B2B marketplace Axmed is trying to solve by addressing supply chain fragmentation, and the startup recently raised $2 million in seed funding from Founderful Ventures to further its plans. did. Focused on low- and middle-income countries, Axmed is building a marketplace…

Bankruptcy lawyers representing clients affected by the dramatic collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX 17 months ago say the majority of victims will get their money back, plus interest. The news comes as FTX co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman Fried (SBF) was found guilty on seven counts related to fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, and his client The announcement comes six months after nearly $8 billion in funds went missing. In March, SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeitures. The crypto mogul filed an appeal last month that could last for…

Google on Wednesday launched its digital wallet in India with local integration, nearly two years after the app was relaunched as a digital wallet platform in the US. As TechCrunch exclusively reported last month, Google Wallet will operate in India alongside the existing Google Pay app and will remain the company's payments app in India. Google replaced its Pay app with Wallet in the US in February. “Google Pay is not going anywhere. Google Pay is our primary payments use case,” Ram Papatla, Google's general manager and Android India engineering lead, said at a press conference in New Delhi. “The…