Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal.
Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator that helped the company launch in the summer of 2022, also participated in the Series A financing.
The company has built an LLM-powered co-pilot that helps nurses and doctors save hours on gathering medical documentation required by insurance.
While Anterior’s initial offering is in prior authorization automation, the company eventually plans to expand into other medical administrative functions.
Makhzoimi also backed Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup that launched this year with $1 billion in funding.
Powerhouse venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is promoting Jennifer Li to general partner after six years at the firm.
She’s being tapped to help invest the new $1.25 billion Infrastructure fund managed by longtime a16z general partner Martin Casado.
The Infrastructure fund is part of the fresh $7.2 billion that the Silicon Valley VC giant just raised.
Li has been an investing partner on the Infrastructure team for a while, which means she was already writing checks and taking board seats.
Plus she’s one of only four GPs on the Infrastructure team.
The tech world is incredibly focused on AI and its applications today, but artificial intelligence is hardly the only place where progress is being made.
If you want to get really into the weeds, pay attention to the progress that quantum computing is making, as made evident recently by an announcement from Microsoft and Quantinuum.
The pair of companies made what TechCrunch described as a “major breakthrough in quantum error correction,” which could make quantum computing systems far more usable than before.
The gist is that they encoded several physical qubits into a single logical qubit, which made it easier to detect and correct errors.
The error rate in quantum computing is a material issue to the technology’s performance, making the news that the two companies managed “run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error” pretty big news.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)!
TC reporter Tage Kene-Okafor reported on how Uber led a $100 million investment into African mobility fintech Moove as the startup’s valuation hit $750 million.
He also wrote about how Zone raised $8.5 million to scale its decentralized payment infrastructure.
Dollars and centsNon-sexy industries can appeal to investors too.
The YC-backed startup raised $4.1 million last year with the goal of serving high-earning millennials and Gen Zers.
Italy’s competition and consumer authority, the AGCM, has fined TikTok €10 million (almost $11M) following a probe into algorithmic safety concerns.
Moreover, this content is systematically re-proposed to users as a result of their algorithmic profiling, stimulating an ever-increasing use of the social network,” the AGCM wrote.
The authority said its investigation confirmed TikTok’s responsibility in disseminating content “likely to threaten the psycho-physical safety of users, especially if minor and vulnerable”, such as videos related to the “French scar” challenge.
One notable change as a result of the DSA is TikTok offering users non-profiling based feeds.
TikTok also faces the possibility of increasing regulation by Member State level agencies applying the bloc’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive.
Kurs Orbital, a startup founded by Ukrainian space industry veterans, has closed a new tranche of funding to accelerate the commercialization of its satellite servicing technology.
The two-year-old company aims to unlock a new era for human activities in space by enabling capabilities like satellite relocation and inspection, de-orbiting and space debris removal.
Unlike other firms developing in-space servicing tech, Kurs Orbital’s module will be able to attach to “non-cooperative” targets, or target spacecraft that aren’t fitted with any hardware in advance.
On-orbit servicing has gained attention in recent months after the failure of a handful of high-cost, high-profile satellite missions.
We believe that one of the next big steps in space will be multimodality, as we know it on Earth.
The startup’s eponymous app lets people self-publish stories, and then, using AI and data science, it selects what it believes are the most compelling of these to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell on a second app, Galatea.
The $37 million, a Series C, is being led by Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.
The investment brings the total raised by Inkitt to date to $117 million (other rounds included a $3.9 million seed; a $16 million Series A and a $59 million Series B).
The average number of books read (and completed) has also dropped to around 5.
“Inkitt is doing just that with stories, creating content that is hyper-personalized and meaningful to every person.”
Now, Plural itself is scaling up, with a fresh €400 million fund to back what Hogarth refers to as “transformational” startups in the region, bringing more operational know-how to get them running as businesses.
Just six months before, Atomico reported, in its annual survey, that startups in Europe had raised a record $100 billion 2021.
Plural’s €250 million debut fund itself was arguably a product of that: it was actually intended to be €150 million.
Even Plural has sat on some of its money: Hinrikus said in an interview that it’s still making investments out of its first fund.
“[With] AI right now, there’s a huge number of people building businesses that look identical to 500 other startups.
Farm work is tough on the body and requires long hours in sometimes extreme environments.
It can also be difficult to hire and retain staff in a category that frequently relies on migrant workers.
We’ve seen a number of startups attempt to automate field work over the past decade.
The company’s first system, Amiga, is modular, allowing it to be deployed for a broad range of tasks.
In this study we saw the number of weekly labor hours reduced by 50% – 80%.
Exponent Founders Capital, an early-stage venture firm founded by alumni of startups such as Plaid, Robinhood and Ramp, has closed on $75 million in capital commitments, TechCrunch is the first to report.
The firm, which is emerging from stealth today, raised $50 million for its first fund in November of 2021.
Managing Partners Charley Ma and Mahdi Raza co-founded Exponent after meeting while Ma was leading fintech growth at Plaid, and Raza was leading growth and payments at Robinhood.
Exponent, which focuses on enterprise SaaS, fintech, infrastructure and GTM (go to market) software companies, invested in about 40 startups out of its first fund.
He worked in growth and payments at Robinhood before joining Stytch to lead early growth there.
