When Josh Silverman started shopping around the idea for his methane-eating microbe startup, Windfall Bio, eight years ago, the market just wasn’t ready.
Menlo Park–based Windfall Bio raised a $28 million Series A round to expand its commercialization efforts.
The round was led by Prelude Ventures with participation from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Incite Ventures and Positive Ventures, among others, as well as existing investors, including Mayfield.
Windfall works with industries that produce large levels of methane, such as agriculture, oil and gas, and landfills.
The startup supplies methane-eating microbes that absorb methane emissions, turning them into fertilizer.
Noname Security, a cybersecurity startup that protects APIs, is in advanced talks with Akamai Technologies to sell itself for $500 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.
Noname was co-founded in 2020 by Oz Galan and Shay Levi and is headquartered in Palo Alto but has Israeli roots.
The startup raised $220 million from venture investors and was last valued at $1 billion in December 2021 when it raised $135 million in a Series C led by Georgian and Lightspeed.
While the sale price is a significant discount from that valuation, the deal as it currently stands would be for cash, the person said.
In February, Israeli news outlet Calcalist reported that Noname was in negotiations with several potential buyers, including Akamai.
When it comes to news items that we love at TechCrunch, IPOs rank pretty darn high.
Another great newsy bit that comes along less frequently than we’d like is a startup buying another startup.
These deals are often very interesting as they either bring a gob of talent, or technology to an already growing company, potentially accelerating it.
So it was with joy that the Equity Podcast crew dug into Automattic buying Beeper for $125 million.
But certainly we are an ocean or two away from the heady days we saw back in 2021.
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Currently, Exponent Energy has 60 charging stations in six cities: Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Hyderabad.
Vinayak told TechCrunch that Exponent Energy’s charging stations offer 10x efficiency by charging 20 to 30 vehicles daily, whereas other EV charging stations typically charge two vehicles.
Similarly, setting up an Exponent charging station costs nearly $6,000 (500,000 Indian rupees), while a CNG station demands hundreds and thousands of dollars.
This has restricted the availability of CNG to around 60 stations in Bengaluru, while Exponent Energy already has 40 charging stations in the city, the executive said.
It is also looking to deploy its charging tech on electric buses in India later this year.
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Lyrak to take on X by combining the best of Twitter with fediverse integrationThreads.
Once live, Lyrak users will be able to see posts from Mastodon users and vice versa.
Founded by London-based web designer and marketer Rishi Siva, Lyrak is named form a lead character in the TV show “His Dark Materials,” Lyra.
Lyrak says it will focus initially on getting journalists to join the network, to help it with becoming a real-time social app.
“The advantage of being a startup building a social app is that we have a fresh perspective on things.
The lowly lamppost might be a better option: they’re everywhere, and they have all the wiring needed to make curbside charging seamless.
One startup from New York City, Voltpost, has been working on a product that retrofits existing street lampposts to enable EV charging.
On Thursday, it introduced its lamppost charger after a year of design and development.
Voltpost’s charger docks at hand-level on the lamppost shroud, and the retractable cable has an anchor eight-feet up to keep it off the ground.
As is the case with just about every EV charger network, there’s an app to oversee charging sessions, including payments.
Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was last valued at $5 billion in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees as companies are not significantly hiring talent.
TechCrunch exclusively learned that Checkr conducted the layoffs across all departments and different levels on Tuesday.
“In response to economic conditions that have impacted companies’ hiring, we made the difficult and painful decision to reduce the size of our team.
This will allow us to operate more efficiently and ensure the long-term health of our business,” a Checkr spokesperson said in the statement.
The job cuts — which affected 32% of the company’s workforce — came nearly two years after Checkr announced the acquisition of Inflection, the startup behind GoodHire, a background-checking platform for small- and mid-sized businesses.
It’s easy to assume the e-commerce ship has sailed when you consider we have giant platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, and Wix dominating the sector.
E-commerce platform, ikas, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round as it seeks to expand its operations into new markets in Europe.
The company currently operates in Turkey and Germany, and says its platform simplifies store management for companies that want to have a digital presence.
Also investing in ikas is Re-Pie Asset Management, which has grocery delivery startup Getir in its portfolio as well.
The round saw participation from ikas’ existing investor Revo Capital, best known as the first institutional investor in Getir, Param, Midas and Roamless.
