Remofirst raises $25M to take on Deel and Rippling in the global HR tech spaceIn the world of HR tech startups, there are the Davids and the Goliaths.
Deel and Rippling are the Goliaths, both having raised millions of dollars in venture capital.
But Remofirst, which just secured $25 million in Series A funding, is proving to be a very worthy David.
Remofirst, an HR tech startup, touts that it hires its clients’ employees and contractors in more than 180 countries on their behalf without those companies having to set up local entities.
“We see SMBs as an underserved segment of the market,” Serik told TechCrunch.
Enter Underscore VC’s Lily Lyman, who is coming to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 in Boston to discuss how founders can build investor relationships with the right venture capitalists.
She will discuss how to build venture relationships ahead of time, and how founders can — and should!
In today’s more stringent venture environment, founders can’t run a 2021-era playbook (unless they are building an AI foundational model company, I suppose).
So, bring your notebooks and questions to Lyman’s Early Stage session coming up next month.
She’ll be joined by a bevy of other startup folks who will be on hand to share their hard-earned wisdom.
The Harness offering also has two other components, serving as a marketplace for discovery of advisors and services and consumer financial insight tools.
In order to fill that need, Harness partnered with experienced tax advisors who in most cases already had a significant roster of clients.
So when those advisors partnered with Harness, many of those clients became clients of Harness as well.
Put simply, the new platform “powers the collaboration between tax advisors and their clients,” the company said.
About 75% of Harness’ clients come through advisors that join the platform.
In an unexpected move, Miles Grimshaw announced today that he is rejoining Thrive Capital after working as a general partner at Benchmark for the past three years.
Grimshaw first joined Thrive, a New York-based venture firm that Joshua Kushner founded, in 2013.
He is returning as a general partner.
When joining storied venture firm Benchmark in December of 2020, then-29-year-old Miles Grimshaw became its fifth general partner.
He had similarly joined a team of four other partners at Thrive back in 2013.
London-based fintech company Monzo raised a late stage funding round of $430 million (£340 million), confirming a report from the Financial Times from a few weeks ago.
Founded in 2015, Monzo provides UK current accounts, debit cards and several financial products with a digital-first approach.
That’s why Monzo is sort of defying the odds with this new funding round, with Google playing a big part in this investment.
Monzo reached a post-money $4.5 billion valuation in 2022.
Now, Monzo has nine million retail customers in the U.K.
Berlin’s Razor Group has acquired U.S.-based Perch, and on top of this it has raised just over $100 million led by Presight Capital with other undisclosed investors participating.
The news is the latest development in a wider consolidation and reordering taking place in the world of e-commerce aggregation.
Perch, we have heard from multiple sources, had been looking for a buyer for the better part of a year.
Perch and Razor do happen to have some investors in common, such as Victory Park Capital, which may well have been central to the negotiations between the two.
He claims that this deal solidifies Razor as the “market leader”, and that it is on track for $1 billion in revenues in the next four to eight quarters.
TechCrunch has learned that the program, known as the “Startup Qatar Investment Program,” is backed by a Qatar Development Bank (QDB)-managed $100 million fund.
Like most venture ecosystems, several of these requirements are mandated by limited partners, primarily sovereign wealth funds, in the Gulf upon these venture capital firms.
Just last week, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund unveiled a $1 billion venture capital fund of funds dedicated to international and regional venture capital funds.
For Qatar, launching its fund of funds and startup program signifies a crucial step toward developing its tech ecosystem to rival its neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Last year, the MENA region experienced a 23% decline in venture capital activity compared to the global average of 42%.
Venture capital funding has never been robust for women or Black and brown founders.
Read about funding for Black foundersFunding to Black founders has been on a steady decline since 2021, implying that investors have either lost interest or focus on backing Black founders.
This is a big deal because after the murder of George Floyd, the venture and startup ecosystem made promises to better support Black founders.
Since 2022, TechCrunch has been speaking with experts to find out what is needed to help boost funding to Black founders.
To help gather data, last year, Crunchbase announced it would officially start tracking the amount of venture capital dollars allocated to LGBTQ+ founders.
The venture capital stars were shining in Los Angeles this week at the Upfront Summit, an invite-only VC conference founded by Mark Suster and known for going all-out.
AI was the talk of the town again and even some celebrities graced the stage, including Lady Gaga, Cameron Diaz, Katy Perry and Novak Djokovic.
What may have been a little different this year, though, is that it’s been a tough one for venture capital and startups seeking venture capital.
Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, briefly addressed rumors about what led him to leave Founders Fund earlier this year.
Rabois didn’t come out and call people there “lazy,” though he did note that he knows founders who look elsewhere for talent.
Inspired Capital is celebrating its fifth birthday with the closing of its Inspired Capital Fund III with $330M in capital commitments.
The New York-based early-stage venture firm was founded in 2019 by entrepreneurs Alexa von Tobel and Penny Pritzker.
They went on to raise $200 million for a debut fund and then $281 million for its second fund in 2021.
“Venture capital, when properly deployed is actually the most powerful economic engine that the world has ever seen.
As part of the new fund, Inspired Capital wrote a manifesto that highlights how the venture capital firm thinks, what it believes in and what it is looking for.
