Gorilla, a Belgian company that serves the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised €23 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led by U.S. venture capital firm Headline.
Founded in 2018, Antwerp-based Gorilla works with energy providers across Europe, the U.S. and Australia, including British Gas’ parent Centrica, Shell Energy, and Atlanta, Georgia-based Gas South.
Throw into the mix geopolitical factors such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, ever-evolving regulations, increasingly distributed energy sources across fossil and renewables, and the increasing use of connected technology, and we now have fertile ground for data-focused energy startups to flourish.
“No one knows what the energy sector will look like 10 years from now,” Gorilla’s co-founder and CEO, Ruben Van den Bossche, said in a statement.
Other participants in the round include the startup’s existing investors Beringea and Belgian private equity firm, PMV.
The early-stage venture capital firm took a unique take on the industry by spearheading public relations for its portfolio companies.
Through Fund I ($20 million) and Fund II ($50 million), the Silicon Valley firm’s portfolio has had 22 exits, including an IPO with Terran Orbital.
It also has backed eight unicorns, including Superhuman, Remote, Worldcoin, Truebill (which exited to Rocket Companies in 2021) and DuckDuckGo.
“When we connected, he was already the founder of three unicorns, which was quite surprising,” Bucher told TechCrunch.
A year later, Bucher exited M&A PR Studio and started Day One Ventures.
The folks at Collaborative Fund certainly like a challenge.
Oh, and they decided to raise their sixth flagship fund at a time when limited partners have grown more miserly.
Collaborative recently raised $125 million for its sixth flagship fund, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch, completing the process in just over 90 days.
“This fundraising environment is tougher than any I’ve seen since starting the firm well over a decade ago,” founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro told TechCrunch.
Part of that could be the fact that Collaborative has recently returned capital to its LPs, Shapiro said.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Image Credits: OdaHardware is hard, episode 234: We already knew that Humane’s Ai Pin launch was going anything but smoothly.
Image Credits: Sword Health / CompanyLive by the sword : Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, raised a $30 million primary funding round and a $130 million secondary funding round that brought its valuation to $3 billion.
: Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, raised a $30 million primary funding round and a $130 million secondary funding round that brought its valuation to $3 billion.
Where’s your head at: Austrian startup Storyblok raised $80 million to add more AI to its “headless” content management system (CMS) for non-technical people.
Your usual host Kirsten Korosec is taking a much deserved vacation, so I’ll be walking you through this week’s transportation news.
A little birdImage Credits: Bryce DurbinA lot of little birds have been talking to senior reporter Sean O’Kane about what is going on behind EV startup Fisker.
Other deals that got my attention …Euler Motors, an Indian manufacturer of commercial EVs, raised $24 million in a Series C extension.
Gireve, a French B2B platform for EV charging, raised €20 million to expand further in Europe and internationally and develop new services.
Zoox plans to test its robotaxis in Austin and Miami this summer, making them the Amazon-backed company’s fourth and fifth test cities.
That means that they first need an eye exam from an optometrist to receive that prescription.
But, due to a nationwide shortage of eye care practitioners, it may take weeks, especially in rural areas, to get an appointment.
Eyebot, a new startup coming out of stealth on Thursday, wants to reduce the time it takes to receive an eye exam to about 90 seconds without the direct involvement of an optometrist.
But if they purchase glasses from one of Eyebot’s partner brands, the eye exam is free.
The company hopes that major eyeglass brands will rent Eyebot terminals and put them in the retail locations of their choice.
Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year.
Online grocery is hard — complex orders with perishable items and a multi-temperature supply chain in a highly price sensitive category,” Oda’s CEO, Chris Poad, wrote on LinkedIn last week (before the layoffs were announced).
Prior to the pandemic, Oda – founded in 2013 – carved out a place for itself as one of the strong regional players in online grocery delivery in Europe.
But by late 2022 Oda was raising $151 million at a valuation of $353 million.
Local publication e24 says Kinnevik and other existing backers Summa Equity and Verdane are expected to provide the bulk of the NOK600 million ($57 million) Oda is reportedly raising.
If you want to get your product in a grocery store in Mexico City, Dataplor has global location intelligence to help you do that.
The company raised $2 million in 2019 to bring Latin American food delivery vendors online.
Dataplor uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language models and a purpose-built technology platform to take in public domain data.
While that is not totally unique — there are companies like ThoughSpot, Esri and Near doing something similar around business and location intelligence — Dataplor’s “secret sauce” is combining all of that technology and public domain data with a human factor.
The round also includes participation from Quest Venture Partners, Acronym Venture Capital, Circadian Ventures, Two Lanterns Venture Partners and APA Venture Partners.
UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms.
To date, most legaltech startups that are deploying AI have concentrated on the big, juicy market of ‘Big Law’ — meaning large, either country-wide or global, law firms that are keenly pushing AI into their workflows.
These include Harvey (US-based; raised $106M); Robin AI (UK-based; raised $43.4M); Spellbook (Canada-based; raised $32.4M).
Lawhive targets its platform at small law firms or solo lawyers running their own shop.
That’s a very small number of big law firms in the US in the UK.
Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the nine-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market.
It did not disclose the valuation at which the funds were raised but strongly denied that its new valuation was below $2 billion, asserting there was “no valuation” attached to the round.
Existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest have invested in the new round, the startup said.
Their debt will convert to equity at a valuation below $2 billion in the next round, according to a source with direct knowledge of the terms.
ShareChat was valued at $4.9 billion in a funding round it raised in mid-2022.
