And tech companies in the West have rallied around the sector, increasingly working with Ukrainian tech firms on a range of initiatives.
This week Google launched its second ‘Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund’ with a budget of $10M to support Ukrainian startups during 2024 and 2025.
Selected Ukrainian startups will receive up to $200,000 in equity-free funding, as well as Google mentorship, product support, and $300,000 in Google Cloud credits.
Meanwhile, Estonian accelerator Startup Wise Guys launched Growth Ukraine, a programme for startups in Ukraine.
And the EU-funded project ‘Seeds of Bravery’ programme has five programmes to support Ukrainian tech startups with grants ranging from €10,000 to €50,000.
After a few years of funding frenzy, autonomous driving companies in China are experiencing a slowdown in investment.
Haomo.ai, an autonomous driving startup backed by Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, has raised 100 million yuan, or $14 million, from a fresh round of funding, it said today.
Four-year-old Haomo has raised over $200 million worth of equity funding, according to startup database ITJuzi, and all of that money was denominated in Chinese yuan.
Chinese food delivery giant Meituan and Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Qualcomm, are among Haomo’s past investors.
Haomo is competing with a rank of Chinese AV upstarts that raised money from Western VCs and, such as Pony.ai, WeRide, Momenta, Deeproute.
India has updated official rules in the space sector to attract global investors and companies, after opening it up to private players four years ago.
The new foreign direct investment (FDI) policy raises limits on foreign investment, potentially spurring renewed interest in the South Asian space community.
Private and public actors in India have been taking measures to increase participation in the country’s space sector.
India has around 190 space tech startups, offering solutions including launch vehicles, space situational awareness and hyperspectral imagery.
Investments in Indian space startups reached over $124 million last year, per government data.
This YC alum just raised $31M to build the ‘TurboTax for construction permitting’ Kleiner Perkins led the Series A, which came just over a year after seed roundAnyone who has ever tried to build or renovate a house knows the pain of obtaining construction permits.
It’s no surprise then that the startup world has seen a flurry of startups focused on streamlining the permitting process.
Today the company is announcing it has raised $31 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
More affordable housingPermitFlow primarily works with general contractors to help make the permitting process less painful.
“A municipality today will have a digital permitting process.
Online interior design startup Havenly is acquiring artisan home decor startup The Citizenry, the company announced today.
Launched in 2014, The Citizenry works with artisans from around the world to produce limited-edition runs of handcrafted home goods.
By acquiring The Citizenry, Havenly is expanding its offerings in furniture, textiles and home decor.
“The Citizenry works with master artisans and heritage manufacturers to bring to market beautifully designed, globally-inspired products that are ethically crafted – from rugs and bedding, to decorative baskets and accents.
As for The Citizenry, the startup most recently raised $20 million in Series B funding in June 2021.
That’s the driving idea behind Nile, a startup that aims to create this data system with serverless Postgres at its core.
This could be authentication, billing, and so on.”Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly the problem Nile tries to solve.
The idea here is that every SaaS company has a data layer at its core and since we are talking about SaaS companies, they all have to solve for multi-tenancy in some form or another, no matter whether they are in the B2B or B2C space.
Traditionally, the team argued, solving problems around data and database management was always an application problem rather than a database problem.
Nile is turning this on its head by making multi-tenancy a core feature of its Postgres solution and by separating the data layer from the compute layer.
Flexport, a logistics company with $2.7 billion in venture and debt funding, is reportedly planning additional layoffs.
Flexport, which provides freight forwarding and brokerage services, announced similar cuts in October, when founder Ryan Petersen returned as CEO and slashed the company’s workforce by 20% — affecting about 600 workers.
An additional round of layoffs at Flexport would cap a brutal January for tech workers, as giants and startups alike have eliminated a combined tens of thousands of jobs across the industry.
While San Francisco-based Flexport wouldn’t be an outlier for making cuts, the timing would be peculiar.
Just last week, Flexport said it’d raised an additional $260 million in funding from Shopify.
Krutrim, an AI startup founded by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, said it has raised a funding round that values it at $1 billion.
It’s also the first Indian AI startup to become a unicorn, it said.
Matrix Partners India — which has also backed Aggarwal’s other two startups, ride-hailing firm Ola and EV startup Ola Electric — led the $50 million “first round” in Krutrim, it said Friday.
The startup plans to launch a conversational AI assistant that understands and speaks multiple Indian languages, the startup said.
The startup plans to make a beta version of its eponymous chatbot available to consumers next month and follow it with rolling out APIs to developers and enterprises.
Veho, a package delivery company, confirmed that it laid off 19% of its employee headcount, or about 65 jobs.
As first reported by The Information, these layoffs came after Veho grew revenue nearly 90% in 2023.
That was after announcing $125 million in Series A funding two months prior, the round that pushed Veho into unicorn territory.
At that time, Veho said it had 910 employees across corporate and warehouse teams and was looking to fill additional positions.
Veho remains optimistic, telling TechCrunch that its capital position “is very strong and we are building on our strong momentum and record peak season in 2023.”
Agriculture has a long heritage of being constantly disrupted by technology, an evolution that has continued to play out until today.
Bluewhite will also be using the funding to continue expanding in its current markets, and to break ground in new ones.
“Labor, labor, labor: it is the biggest need,” he said in an interview.
Tractors fitted with Bluewhite’s robots can still be operated by humans in situations where they might still need to be.
Bluewhite cites forecasts from researchers that project a market worth $11.5 billion for autonomous tractors by 2030.
