Some call it the “commercial valley of death,” and it’s the point at which many climate tech startups struggle.
Climate nonprofit Prime Coalition is hoping to bridge the valley with a new program, Trellis Climate.
Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce.
“There are more and more philanthropists that are really interested in solving the climate problem,” Lara Pierpoint, director of Trellis Climate, told TechCrunch.
“It is the most flexible and potentially risk-forward set of dollars that are out there.”For founders in climate tech, that sort of funding is likely welcome news.
After considering a few ideas, they decided to go after what they saw as a largely unaddressed market: Tools to help small businesses secure U.S. government contracts.
“The federal contracting community has seen a shrinking of the small business industrial base for much of the past decade,” Doherty told TechCrunch.
It’s also expensive for them to bid on contracts — if they don’t win, they may run out of cash.”As a result of labyrinthine systems and mountains of paperwork, finding and bidding for U.S. federal contracts is a laborious process.
To attempt to give these small businesses a boost, Goltser, Mason and Doherty founded GovDash, a platform that provides workflows to support government contract capture, proposal, development and management processes.
New York-based, six-employee GovDash currently works with around 30 federal contractors across the U.S., Doherty said, and is “nearly” cash-flow positive.
AI agents are the new hot craze in generative AI.
On Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, the company introduced a new tool to help companies build AI agents.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
In this case, it’s relying on Google Search (which in reality could or could not be accurate).
“We’re now bringing you grounding in Google Search, bringing the power of the world’s knowledge that Google Search offers through our grounding service to models.
New U.S. ‘green bank’ aims to steer over $160B in capital into climate techFor years, banks have been financing large renewable power projects, from utility-scale solar farms to horizon-spanning wind farms.
But the demand is there, which is why advocates have been clamoring for the federal government to support a so-called green bank, which will underwrite these sorts of projects.
That green bank is now a reality.
Green bank loans have a pretty good track record, too.
The Connecticut Green Bank, for example, has a delinquency rate that’s on par with other commercial lenders across both residential and commercial portfolios.
VCs double down on fintech Coast, which aims to be the Brex for ‘real-world’ industriesThe expense management arena is a crowded one, with well-funded players such as Brex, Ramp and Navan all clamoring for market share.
While Coast declined to divulge hard revenue figures, CEO Simon told TechCrunch that it saw about 550% increase in annualized revenue and payment volume growth in 2023.
That growth prompted its existing investors to double down on the company, while attracting a new backer as well.
Today, Coast is announcing that it has raised an additional $25 million in venture capital and $67 million in debt financing.
Sign up for TechCrunch Fintech here.
PhonePe aims to be a top Google Play alternative in India — but it has a challenging road aheadWalmart-backed PhonePe is set to launch its Android app store this week with zero commission for in-app purchases for developers.
Later that month, a bunch of Indian startups banded together to form a coalition and explore an alternative app store.
Over the years, other startup executives have also complained about Play Store’s 30% fee and have pushed for a “Made in India” app store.
In 2021, Google dropped its commission from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million a developer earned from the Play Store each year.
If you are a developer publishing your app on alternative app stores, I’d love to hear from you on im@ivanmehta.com
But the two engineers, who met a few years ago during the pandemic, are nothing if not optimistic.
Hay and Ding are the co-founders of TextQL, a platform that connects a company’s existing data stack to large language models along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4.
In 2022, they launched their attempt in TextQL, which uses a data model to map a company’s database to the “nouns” representing a customer’s business in their language — e.g.
TextQL connects to business intelligence tools and points users to existing dashboards when a question has already been asked.
It’s able to reference documentation from enterprise data catalogs such as Alation, Hay says, as well as notes in platforms like Confluence or Google Drive.
Historically, vacation rental companies have managed homes for homeowners.
Overmoon is a three-year-old vacation rental startup with a different model that essentially cuts out the middle man.
But Fraiman doesn’t believe that so many proptech companies are failing because of high interest rates.
“I think the inability to raise capital is the real reason and interest rates are a contributing factor,” he said.
Plus, higher interest rates means fewer buyers out there, which means less competition.
Erick Coser and Otávio Costa Miranda moved back to Brazil in 2019 to solve a large, yet unsolved problem in Latin America.
Meanwhile in São Paulo, that is one camera per thousand people.
Coser and Costa Miranda drew on the experiences of Europe to create Gabriel in 2020.
The company integrates cameras and computer vision with routine police operations to address public safety challenges across Latin America.
That walks side-by-side with strong investments in the takeover of São Paulo in 2024 and preparations for launching new cities in 2025.”
TikTok is looking to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to as much as $17.5 billion this year, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
As Bloomberg previously reported, TikTok was on track to amass around $20 billion in global gross merchandise value last year.
In addition, the report says the company is planning to launch TikTok Shop in Latin America in the coming months.
The report indicates that during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season in November, more than 5 million new U.S. customers purchased something via TikTok Shop.
TikTok Shop has also started to reduce some subsidies for merchants.
