Author: TechBrunch

Embedded finance is something brands and non-financial companies often hear about when they want to offer financial products and services such as banking, insurance, lending, and payments to provide a better user experience for their customers. Layer focuses on a better user experience, but includes accounting functionality. Its customers are companies like Square and Toast that work with small and medium-sized businesses to provide accounting and bookkeeping functionality within their products. These large companies will embed Layer's tools into their platforms for use by small and medium-sized businesses. Small businesses now have access to the bookkeeping and accounting tools within…

While more companies are investing in AI, many are struggling to put AI-powered projects into production, let alone achieve meaningful ROI. There are many challenges. But one thing that often repeats is data management. The data that enterprises need to train, run, and fine-tune their AI models is unorganized, siled, and unoptimized. In a 2022 survey by Great Expectations, an open source data benchmarking platform, 77% of organizations said they were concerned about data quality. Startups promising to solve these data problems are raising money. On Wednesday, Weka, a platform for building data pipelines that handle a variety of data…

PayHOA is a Kentucky-based, self-founded startup that provides software for self-managed homeowners associations (HOAs) and is an example of how real-world problems can turn into opportunities. is. The company just raised a $27.5 million Series A round in an environment where Series A rounds of nearly $30 million are no longer common. PayHOA founder and CEO Mike Bollinger is putting his finance degree to good use. The entrepreneur has two other companies: LegFi.com, a startup focused on financial management for fraternities and sororities, and File990.org, which serves the tax compliance needs of nonprofits. He started his PayHOA in 2018 after…

The U.S. restaurant industry is expected to surpass $1 trillion in sales for the first time this year, despite further economic pressures on consumers. Now Restaurant365, a startup building technology to manage these businesses, has raised his hefty $175 million in funding to capitalize on that growth. The funding was led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from the company's existing backers KKR and L Catterton. Restaurant365 did not disclose the valuation it received for this round, but co-founder and CEO Tony Smith confirmed to TechCrunch that it was an uplifting round. “We're excited about it [the business] We continue to…

It seems like just yesterday (or 7 years ago!) that I was focusing on the rapidly developing Portugal's growing startup and investment scene. I updated the article in 2021 and noticed an explosion of new companies and investors. Today, further evidence has emerged that Portugal is spreading its wings as one of Europe's freshest and most voracious tech ecosystems. Venture firm Schilling has launched a €50 million fund to support growth-stage startups in its portfolio and, crucially, to invest in startups everywhere. other than that. Shilling, the VC arm of Portuguese private equity firm Draycott SCR, is best known as…

Chang She, previously VP of Engineering at Tubi, is a Cloudera veteran with years of experience building data tools and infrastructure. But when she started working in her AI field, he quickly ran into traditional data infrastructure issues that prevented her from putting her AI models into production. “Machine learning engineers and AI researchers are often locked into substandard development experience,” she told TechCrunch in an interview. “Data infrastructure companies don't understand the machine learning data problem at a fundamental level.” So Chang (one of the co-creators of the wildly popular Python data science library Pandas) co-founded LanceDB in collaboration…

Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 stunned companies that relied on oil and gas energy. Suddenly, renewable energy became essential to survival. But what's the best way to buy one? This was the germ of the idea behind trawa, a Berlin-based renewable energy supply company that recently raised €10 million in a seed round led by Balderton Capital. This funding round brings the startup's total raised to over €12 million. Trawa's pitch is to simplify energy purchasing and management for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by leveraging two things: An AI-powered platform that allows businesses to buy from…

If you live in the US, you may be using apps like Venmo or Cash App to pay back friends or split bills with your roommate. Lydia is a French startup that has turned payments into mobile apps and services for consumers. Now, with 8 million users, the company finds itself in an interesting position. Do you want to add more financial services to increase your average revenue per user? Or simplify your app so that as many people as possible can use Lydia to send and receive money from their mobile phones? Do you want to? The company essentially…

Cargo ships that enter a commercial port incur costs called “payments'' and “port call expenses.'' These may include port fees, towing fees, and pilotage fees. It's a complex patchwork, with every port performing its own steps, many of which are done on spreadsheets. The global cost of port calls exceeds $220 billion annually, including all ships. Now, Harbor Lab, the Greek maritime software startup we last covered when it raised a €6.1 million seed round, has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by European VC Atomico. According to Harbor Lab, the cost of ship calls is…

Indian insurance startup Go Digit has raised $141 million from dozens of investors as part of an initial public offering that begins Wednesday. Indian investment trusts managed by Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Bay Pound, Mirae Asset Management, Steadview Capital, HSBC, as well as SBI, ICICI, Axis, Tata, and Edelweiss. served as the anchor backer for the IPO. , Go Digit disclosed in a stock exchange filing. Founded by former KPMG executive and insurance industry veteran Kamesh Goyal, Go Digit sells auto, health, travel and accident insurance. The startup simplifies the insurance purchasing and reimbursement process,…