India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group.
Pocket FM offers audio series with several short episodes and aim to become the “Netflix for audio” globally.
That means you can’t use the coins you bought on Pocket FM to unlock content Pocket Novel products and vice versa.
Pocket FM also has a limited audiobook vertical where it competes with the likes of Audible with a similar pay-to-unlock strategy.
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA has held talks with Pocket FM for a potential mega funding round, TechCrunch reported last week.
The Carevoice, an embedded insurance solution provider that started in Shanghai and now has a footprint across 15 countries, has apparently made that math look attractive to investors in the space.
The company just raised $10 million from a Series B financing led by U.K.-based Apis Insurtech Fund I, which contributed to most of the round.
In 2023, U.S.-based digital health startups raised a total of $10.7 billion across 492 deals, the lowest amount since 2019, according to Rock Health, a health tech-focused seed fund.
That funding slowdown also hit The Carevoice, though it weathered the storm by reaching healthy cash flow.
Embedded health solution providers like The Carevoice can find themselves competing with traditional IT and consulting service companies, such as Tata’s TCS.
Autonomous vehicle technology startup Motional has secured a bridge loan that provides a temporary financial reprieve as the company searches for a longer-term source of funding, TechCrunch has learned.
Motional CEO Karl Iagnemma told staff in a companywide email viewed by TechCrunch that the company’s board of directors approved the bridge financing.
After a wave of consolidation and shutdowns in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry, Motional is one of the few companies left that’s still pursuing a commercial robotaxi service.
The company operates an autonomous vehicle taxi service in Las Vegas (still with human safety operators behind the wheel) on Uber, Lyft and Via platforms.
The autonomous vehicle company last had layoffs in December 2022, when it cut about 10% of its workforce.
TechCrunch reported about Lightspeed Venture Partners engaging to invest in Pocket FM last year.
ADIA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, whereas Pocket FM said it refrains from commenting on market speculations.
Pocket FM operates on a freemium model, leveraging long-form episodic storytelling to give users the choice to pay only for content they prefer rather than the entire library.
The startup announced last month that it will invest $40 million to grow its online reading platform Pocket Novel.
More than 90,000 writers had signed up to the app in less than a month, Pocket FM co-founder Rohan Nayak wrote on LinkedIn this week.
Phantom Auto, a remote driving startup that launched seven years ago amid the buzz of autonomous vehicle technology, is shutting down after failing to secure new funding, TechCrunch has learned.
Phantom Auto, which had cut staff last year, employed a little more than 100 people as of this week.
Phantom Auto’s demise is the latest in a long line of startups that popped up as the autonomous vehicle technology industry gained attention and investment from investors.
Phantom Auto was founded in 2017 and initially focused on applying its teleops technology to autonomous vehicles on public roadways such as robotaxis and self-driving trucks.
Phantom Auto pivoted in 2019 and started shopping its remote driving system to logistics, specifically forklifts and yard trucks that have no autonomy as well as autonomous sidewalk delivery robots.
Nanonets, which primarily targets the financial services sector, says its AI platform aims to improve the efficiency of these processes and make them cost-effective.
The company’s AI platform uses machine learning architectures to analyze unstructured data from uploaded documents and extract useful information.
Nanonets is not alone in the global market for AI-based workflow automation.
Consistent revenue growth is one reason investors have been investing in AI startups despite the slowdown in global markets.
AI startups in the U.S. receive the most investments, followed by companies in China, U.K., Israel and India.
Autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition has raised $250 million in a round that values the startup at $6 billion, as it pushes to bring more artificial intelligence to the automotive, defense, construction and agriculture sectors.
The eye-popping funding round is the latest example of investor fervor for AI.
Lux Capital, Elad Gil, and Andreessen Horowitz all previously led funding rounds for Applied Intuition.
Founded in 2017, Applied Intuition creates software that automakers and others use to develop autonomous vehicle solutions.
“When they think like, ‘I have this software or AI problem,’ we generally want them to think about us,” Younis says.
Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth.
The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol.
Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage, and more.
The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol.
Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships.
Why does every startup want to help you get paid?
Then I wrote about Remofirst, a startup out to take on the likes of Deel and Rippling, too, securing $25 million in Series A funding.
Also, Tage wrote about how UAE-based RemotePass announced it had raised $5.5 million in Series A funding led by Istanbul-based 212 VC.
Paris-based business banking startup Qonto is using an undisclosed portion of its cash reserve to acquire Regate, an accounting and financial automation platform.
Argyle raises $30M to expand automated income, employment verificationSynctera raises $18.6M in Series A-1 funding (TC covered Synctera’s Series A here.)
The Artemis Fund, which invests in underrepresented founders, closed on its second fund with $36 million in capital commitments.
“We really wanted to make sure that our LPs aligned with our long-term goal of backing diverse founders,” Murakhovskaya told TechCrunch.
VC investment itself continues to be fairly stagnant in these areas, according to my colleague Dominic-Madori Davis, who crunched the numbers on venture capital funding to these demographics earlier this month.
Female founders and co-founders secured more capital overall in 2023 than they did in 2020, according to new Pitchbook research.
For Fund II, Artemis intends to continue leading and co-leading investments and will target around 20 new companies.
