Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has since 2015 been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets, shielding them against losses from pests, diseases and/or extreme weather events like floods and droughts.
“Partnering with this group of like-minded investors to boost the growth of Pula globally is a very exciting milestone in driving our triple 100 vision, through which we intend to bring insurance to 100 million smallholder farmers.
Pula embeds insurance in partners’ productsInstead of selling insurance directly to farmers, Pula has built a distribution channel of over 100 partners, including charitable organizations, banks, governments and agricultural input companies, to serve even the hard-to-reach farmers, by embedding insurance, for instance, in farm input costs or credit.
Each product Pula offers is customized to suit the demands of its clients, and the needs of the beneficiary farmers.
Pula, through insurance partners, has been offering rural families in Nigeria comprehensive coverage against banditry, disease and death of animals.
Venture capitalists’ appetite for fusion startups has been up and down in the last few years.
The road to true fusion power remains long, but the kicker is that it’s no longer theoretical.
He added the timeline was to be able to get to fusion energy by the mid-2030s.
If we manage to get to that then the middle of the 2030s is possible.”The startup’s investors are equally convinced.
And there are at least 43 other companies developing nuclear fusion technologies.
Kiki World, a beauty startup launched last year, wants consumers to co-create products and co-own the company with the help of web3 technology.
Kiki co-founder Jana Bobosikova said she believes that being a loyal user of a brand in the Web 2.0 world could be a net negative experience.
Kiki is flipping that model by allowing its community members to vote on the features they want before the beauty products are made.
Although members’ product votes are recorded on Ethereum, Bobosikova said some participants don’t need to know they are taking action on blockchain.
But, as Simpson pointed out, Kiki has plans to eventually expand beyond the world of beauty.
It last raised a $50M Series C funding round in 2021.
TransferGo claims the new investment doubles its valuation to around $600M, from the $200M-$300M Dealroom valued it at back in September 2021.
We achieved sustainability of the business and became profitable and we still have proceeds from the last funding round.
We don’t need external capital to grow.”However, he saw the opportunity to raise funding from Asia to expand there.
“We are still taking customers from incumbents: 75% come from cash, banks, and Western Union — that’s still the gorilla in the room.”He puts TransferGo’s growth down to focusing on the consumer experience.
Sprinto, a security compliance and risk platform, has raised a $20 million Series B round to build more automation into its compliance management platform and widen its customer base to include the wide gamut of companies that operate digitally but aren’t tech-first.
Sprinto is working to automate this aspect of security compliance management, which involves vendor risk management, vulnerability assessment, access control, evidence collection and other filing tasks.
Sprinto uses a mix of AI, GPTs and its own internal large language model to offer efficiencies in compliance management.
The market for automated compliance management solutions already has players such as Vanta and Drata, which Sprinto considers its key competitors.
However, Redekar said Sprinto primarily focuses on automating the entire compliance management process and helping businesses build trust.
EarliTec Diagnostics just raised fresh capital to expand its system that helps clinicians diagnose children as young as 16 months old.
According to EarliTec, children with autism won’t focus on the video the same way that kids without autism will.
The Autism Impact Fund closed a $60 million fund, 20% higher than its $50 million target, this week.
Divergent Ventures raised a $10 million fund in 2021 that focuses on early-stage companies across the neurodiversity space.
Opya, a digital therapy platform for autism, has raised more than $19 million from backers including SoftBank’s Open Opportunity Fund.
Bitkraft Ventures — a games investor based out of Denver, Colorado, but with European founders — has raised its third fund, coming in at $275 million.
The fund will make seed and Series A investments in gaming studios, and platforms to support game production.
The moves comes at a time when games investments have actually declined 72 per cent year on year, according to a recent Pitchbook report.
Founded by games industry veteran Jens Hilgers, Bitkraft has over 130 companies in its portfolio, and more than $1 billion in assets under management.
Perhaps the best way of positioning Bitkraft is to compare it to Play Ventures in Singapore which has raised $222.9M across 4 funds, but also invests across several types games platforms.
Data transformation and optimization — tasks that many, if not most, large enterprises deal with — aren’t easy.
The result was Coalesce, a San Francisco-based company building a suite of data transformation services, apps and tools.
“The data transformation layer has long been the largest bottleneck in analytics,” Petrossian, Coalesce’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
Coalesce’s response is a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes.
That sort of vendor lock-in could be an anathema to expansion, especially given that Coalesce isn’t the only data transformation tool vendor in town.
Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception.
This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few and far between in France.
Before Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google.
We’ve developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,” Crespo said.
Like many software companies, Pigment has also added AI features.
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners.
In 2022, Aerospike added document support and then followed that up with graph and vector capabilities — two database features that are crucial for building real-time AI and ML applications.
“We were founded primarily as a real-time data platform that can work with data at really high scale, or, as we call it, unlimited scale,” Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer said.
So our premise has held good that real-time data and real-time access to data is going to be important pretty much across every industry.
“Aerospike, with its impressive customer base and performance advantage at scale, is uniquely positioned to become a foundational element for the next generation of real-time AI applications.”
