The economy remains on shaky ground in Europe, but there is some silver lining for enterprise startups: those building tools to help businesses run their finances in more steady and predictable ways are seeing a boost to their business.
“We are now poised to take the AccountsIQ product and service to the next level,” said Tony Connolly, founder and CEO of AccountsIQ, in a statement.
Thus, the prosaic accounting startup continues to get attention.
(AccountsIQ and its primary investor for this round, Axiom Equity, are not disclosing its valuation.)
In contrast, Cran says that AccountsIQ positions itself as the platform that businesses will move to as they scale up.
Meta on Thursday said it is rolling out its Meta Verified program for WhatsApp Business users in Brazil, India, Indonesia and Colombia, and eventually to more countries.
The plan also lets businesses use their WhatsApp Business account from multiple devices.
Until now, WhatsApp Business users had to use their personal phone numbers to service customer calls.
With more than 200 million monthly users on WhatsApp Business, Meta is trying to build a full suite of solutions that businesses can tap for communicating with their customers.
The company said existing commerce and payment services only cater to the top 200 million users.
It was while sourcing manufacturing equipment for Tesla factories that Will Drewery drew inspiration for Diagon, a startup that helps manufacturers procure equipment.
Companies in fields like automotive and aerospace can identify qualified suppliers from Diagon’s network of equipment suppliers, system integrators and service providers.
East Coast originsThe journey to Diagon for Drewery, who spent most of his career as an equipment buyer, started in Pittsburgh.
“This is why I felt the market needs a Diagon,” Drewery said.
“Now we are developing tools that help customers find suppliers better or help them interpret and summarize quotes better,” Drewery said.
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.
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.
Sprinto, a security compliance and risk platform, has raised a $20 million Series B round to build more automation into its compliance management platform and widen its customer base to include the wide gamut of companies that operate digitally but aren’t tech-first.
Sprinto is working to automate this aspect of security compliance management, which involves vendor risk management, vulnerability assessment, access control, evidence collection and other filing tasks.
Sprinto uses a mix of AI, GPTs and its own internal large language model to offer efficiencies in compliance management.
The market for automated compliance management solutions already has players such as Vanta and Drata, which Sprinto considers its key competitors.
However, Redekar said Sprinto primarily focuses on automating the entire compliance management process and helping businesses build trust.
Hoping to stall a ban, TikTok says it generated $14.7B for US small businesses last yearAs U.S. lawmakers weigh a possible TikTok ban, the ByteDance-owned short-form video app released an economic impact report on Thursday.
In it, the company touts the platform generated $14.7 billion for small- to mid-size businesses (SMBs) last year, and a further $24.2 billion in total economic activity, supported through small business’s use of TikTok.
In addition, it says that over 7 million U.S. businesses rely on TikTok and that 224,000 jobs were supported by small business activity on the platform in 2023.
In March, a bill that could ban TikTok passed in the House of Representatives.
The Trump administration had previously sought to ban TikTok, calling it a national security risk, but Trump now opposes a ban, saying that Meta would benefit.
Some may help businesses build a website, whereas others may just be useful for getting listed on search engines.
The startup also uses AI to ease businesses’ journey to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses grow their revenues by 15–20% using its products.
Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of consumer internet investor and venture-building firm Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015.
Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to grow its presence.
The round also includes existing investors, Notable Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and PLUS Capital.
“To have over 2 million workers on Homebase, which is over 2% of the workforce, is impressive for a private company,” Richards said.
In 2021, sources told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden that the company’s valuation was between $500 million and $600 million.
“We are using technology to give workers superpowers and in fact, make the work more human, not less,” Waldmann said.
Small businesses have always provided that, and this, to me, is why our mission is so important to make these jobs even better.”
Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code.
Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer “quick replies,” which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files.
Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf.
The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.
(They can be found under Settings > Telegram Business in the app.)
