Fresh off the success of its first mission, satellite manufacturer Apex has closed $95 million in new capital to scale its operations.
The Los Angeles-based startup successfully launched and commissioned its first spacecraft, a model called Aries, in March.
The company is on track to manufacture five Aries this year alone, Apex CEO and co-founder Ian Cinnamon told TechCrunch.
Apex was founded on the thesis that the one of the main bottlenecks facing the growth of the space industry was satellite bus manufacturing.
The company is approaching fifty people and that number is likely to double by the end of this year.
TechTaka, a South Korean online shopping fulfillment startup that provides third-party logistics services for e-commerce sellers, has raised $9.5 million (12.6 billion KRW) in a Series B round of funding from a sole investor, Altos Ventures.
The outfit helps e-commerce sellers manage the supply chain, from warehousing, order packing and shipping, so that TechTaka users can focus on product and marketing.
His expertise and interests in logistics and optimization led him to start TechTaka to offer quick and reliable logistics services.
(Coupang has its own fulfillment centers, and Naver bolsters its fulfillment service in collaboration with logistics and fulfillment companies like TechTaka.)
“We tested our service in the U.S. by introducing Korean e-commerce sellers to Amazon, starting in May 2023,” Kim said.
A startup called Instagrid is using software to scale that mountain when it comes to enterprise-grade portable chargers.
But power conversion has not kept up,” said Andreas Sedlmayr, the co-founder and co-CEO, in an interview.
The funding is being led by Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) — the later-stage investing arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
(It also happens to suggest a different alternative to what Instagrid has built: solarized systems, which represents another alternative that exists today and Instagrid could also potentially adopt.)
Existing portable battery packs target consumer users and lack the peak power performance for professional application.
Employee performance reviews take time and effort — and aren’t always conducted very efficiently.
Seeking to make the performance review process easier — or at least less of a headache than it has been historically — Ben Hastings and Jon Malpass founded PerformYard, a platform that provides a collection of software-based retention, staff management and upskilling tools.
“PerformYard has been cash-flow positive with attractive unit economics for the majority of our existence as a business.”Prior to launching PerformYard, Hastings spent the majority of his career in tech as a go-to-market sales leader.
“In early 2013, I decided to go all-in on building a software-as-a-service platform for employee performance management and personally funded the initial team.
“Our mission is to simply enable and facilitate any performance process that our customers are looking to automate and improve,” Hastings said.
