HR startup Rippling is in discussions to raise at a $13.4B valuation, up from $11.25B The round could total $870M, including $670M worth of secondaryLate stage HRtech startup Rippling is raising new capital.
This will be Rippling’s Series F, and could raise its valuation to as high as $13.4 billion on a post-money basis, up from the $11.25 billion valuation it reached when it last raised capital in a $500 million Series E just a year ago.
Rippling had raised $1.2 billion total previous to this round.
Rippling competitor Gusto told TechCrunch that it reached $500 million in trailing revenue last year, along with cash flow positivity.
Earlier this year Deel, which focuses on payroll for teams that cross borders, said that it had reached $500 million worth of annual recurring revenue.
A crypto wallet maker claimed this week that hackers may be targeting people with an iMessage “zero-day” exploit — but all signs point to an exaggerated threat, if not a downright scam.
Trust Wallet’s official X (previously Twitter) account wrote that “we have credible intel regarding a high-risk zero-day exploit targeting iMessage on the Dark Web.
According to Apple, there is no evidence anyone has successfully hacked someone’s Apple device while using Lockdown Mode.
For its part, CodeBreach Lab appears to be a new website with no track record.
TechCrunch could not reach CodeBreach Lab for comment because there is no way to contact the alleged company.
Climate investor Bay Bridge Ventures is raising a new $200 million fund, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Bay Bridge filed paperwork Monday for the new climate fund with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
And Congruent Ventures raised a $275 million fund in 2023, turning down $325 million in additional LP interest.
Bay Bridge Ventures is new, having been founded in 2022 with a focus on ESG more broadly and sustainability in particular.
Still, that doesn’t mean Bay Bridge lacks experience.
When prolific venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Hippeau announced in early 2024 they were pivoting away from consumer tech, it sparked a social media debate about whether there are still opportunities.
Jumping in, Maven will be there helping to build the next game-changing health AI company or robotics AI consumer business, he said.
Scheinman started the firm in 2013 and brought in Deshpande soon after to focus on consumer AI and personalized medicine.
They brought in investment partner Robert Ravanshenas in 2015, and again in 2020 after a stint in a startup operating role, to focus on fintech, longevity and consumer AI.
Together the trio remains committed to seeding similar consumer tech trends, including applications of AI, personalized healthcare, climate and sustainability, family technology and fintech.
It may seem like a paradox to have virtualized Kubernetes clusters.
Loft Labs saw a similar problem with resource utilization in Kubernetes clusters that VMware saw with server utilization, and has built a virtualization tool to make them more efficient by sharing common underlying applications.
Loft Labs lets users share these common applications with multiple virtual clusters in the same way that VMs share server resources.
“We’re essentially turning many clusters into one cluster, and then have virtual clusters on top of the common applications,” CEO Lukas Gentele told TechCrunch.
And the thing that we learned was the problem of sharing Kubernetes clusters, isolating tenants in the cluster and how hard it is.
When Alex Katz founded Two Chairs in 2017, he firmly believed that in-person therapy is the most effective for behavioral health.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $72 million Series C equity and debt financing led by Amplo and Fifth Down Capital, bringing Two Chairs total funding to $103 million.
Amplo also led the company’s $22.5 million Series B in August 2019.
Two Chairs is one of the latest therapy startups to raise substantial funding rounds.
Last week, Grow Therapy, a three-sided mental health platform for therapists, payers and patients, raised an $88 million Series C round led by Sequoia.
The round values the company at €100 million ($107 million), post money.
But finmid believes it has the potential to lock in more business specifically in its home region.
Unlike a bank, Wolt has access to the restaurants’ sales history, and finmid helps it leverage that data to decide who will see a pre-approved financing offer.
The working capital doesn’t come from Wolt, but from finmid’s financing partners.
For a platform like Wolt, embedding finmid is a way to make life easier for restaurants while generating additional revenue without much additional effort.
According to a post from Ghost founder John O’Nolan, the company — which is structured as a nonprofit — is considering federating Ghost over ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers the fediverse.
It also asks how federation would personally benefit Ghost users.
With Ghost, however, the idea could be to federate the accounts of the writers who use Ghost to publish their content.
After seeing O’Nolan’s post, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput reached out to help with the ActivityPub integration, which O’Nolan accepted.
In addition to Newton, other notable Ghost users include 404Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.
And more AI companies are receiving investments than ever before, with 1,812 AI startups announcing funding in 2023, up 40.6% versus 2022, according to the Stanford HAI report.
“There’s been a more deliberate approach by investors in evaluating AI investments compared to a year ago.
According to a PitchBook report compiled for TechCrunch, VCs invested $25.87 billion globally in AI startups in Q1 2024, up from $21.69 billion in Q1 2023.
Despite the general malaise within AI investor circles, generative AI — AI that creates new content, such as text, images, music and videos — remains a bright spot.
“We’ll soon be evaluating whether generative AI delivers the promised efficiency gains at scale and drives top-line growth through AI-integrated products and services,” Kumar said.
Meta said on Monday that it plans to “temporarily” shutter Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction imposed by the Turkish competition authority last month over the way Meta shares data between Threads and Instagram.
In 2022, Turkey imposed a $18.6 million fine on Meta for combining user data across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Initially, the only way Meta allowed users to delete a Threads profile was by deleting their whole Instagram account, though it later introduced a separate mechanism for those wishing to ditch their Threads profile only.
Turkish regulators had announced the investigation on the way Meta linked Threads with Instagram in December, concluding last month that there was a strong case to answer for.
The latter of these options means a user’s profile can be resurrected when and if Threads is available in the country again.
