Some may help businesses build a website, whereas others may just be useful for getting listed on search engines.
The startup also uses AI to ease businesses’ journey to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses grow their revenues by 15–20% using its products.
Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of consumer internet investor and venture-building firm Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015.
Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to grow its presence.
Full Glass Wine, a brand acquisition management startup that specializes in acquiring wine marketplaces, has raised $14 million in a Series A round to continue acquiring DTC (direct-to-consumer) wine marketplaces, aiming to lead the DTC wine market.
The deal is Full Glass Wine’s third acquisition in a year and will enable the startup to expand its subscription-based model.
DTC wine brands sell wine directly to wine lovers, bypassing traditional distribution channels“By uniting Winc, Wine Insiders, and Bright Cellars, we offer a one-stop shop for all things wine, catering to a wider range of wine drinkers than most traditional retailers, grocers, or single-brand DTC companies,” Neha Kumar, co-founder and COO of Full Glass Wine, told TechCrunch.
“However, there are also some misconceptions consumers might have about DTC wine.
“We’re looking at a total of at least a few dozen employees now at Full Glass Wine,” Kumar said.
Thailand’s HD is building chatbots aimed at one such industry: healthcare.
The company started as a marketplace for third-party healthcare and surgery services, and sees a strong case for developing conversational AI for the healthcare customer journey.
Even though each product has a description on HD’s marketplace HD Mall, Ho says people still prefer to ask first.
M Venture Partners, FEBE Ventures, Partech Partners, Ratio Ventures, Orvel Ventures, and TA Ventures also participated in the round.
AI for Southeast AsiaHo says HD is working on building the “Sierra AI of the Southeast Asian healthcare industry.”Over five years, Ho and his team saw that the faster HD’s representatives responded to inquiries, the higher the conversion rate.
A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building.
Modal provides personalized technical skills training for a company’s staff, offering on-demand coaching and a pedagogical approach that groups users into semi-structured online learning communities.
First, Shimkus says, by honing in on hot trends: data and AI.
“The rise of AI is bringing more visibility to data teams than ever before,” Shimkus said.
“It’s hard in today’s ever-changing workplace landscape to predict what your teams need, meaning most leaders don’t have a reliable way to plan for and improve their team’s skills.
The deal is interesting on a number of fronts including the round’s structure and how Skyflow has been impacted by growth of AI.
The new capital comes after Skyflow expanded its data privacy business to support new AI technologies last year.
(In its latest news dump, Skyflow said that it expanded its support of China and that market’s particular data rules.)
This Skyflow round slots neatly into several trends we’ve observed recently.
The explosive growth in AI is creating healthy businesses for LLM infrastructure and support companies.
Wen Hsieh and Haomiao Huang, both Kleiner Perkins investors, left the firm in 2023 to start their own venture capital fund called Matter Venture Partners.
The median venture fund raised that year was around $37 million, according to a PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report.
Matter Venture Partners invests at the large seed rounds, Series A and Series B.
He believes that Matter Venture Partner’s focus on hard tech was the reason for the oversubscription.
We like to fund them and entrepreneurs that contribute to these new innovations.”So far, Matter Venture Partners invested in six companies not made public yet.
Most recently, the company expanded its offer its virtual therapy sessions to services for adolescents across its footprint.
The virtual clinic’s medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorders is available across 50 states for adults and teens.
Since its Series B, Pelago has experienced an impressive 11x revenue surge and claims to have 100% client retention.
Pelago members have regular sessions with virtual care teams in the app, consisting of health coaches or licensed drug and alcohol counselors.
In addition to its virtual therapy interface, the company is investing in bringing more tech to bear on its business.
StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding round.
The startup serves over 50 clients across 17 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
One differentiator from its competitors in the cybersecurity industry is its unique expertise in Asia-related threats, Kevin Yoo, chief operating officer (COO) at StealthMole, told TechCrunch.
“The high demand for Asia-oriented threat information underscores the uniqueness and value of our dataset for customers worldwide, within and beyond Asia,” Yoo said.
Korea Investment Partners led the Series A round with participation from Hibiscus Fund (a joint venture between RHL Ventures, Penjana Kapital and KB Investment) and Smilegate Investment.
Observe — not to be confused with Observe.AI — builds observability tools for machine-generated data that aims to break down data silos, useful for developers to understand how apps are working, being used, and potentially failing.
The main use case for Observe today is to analyze data to troubleshoot when an application is not working as it should be.
It’s very permissive.” The company today works with third-parties to enhance that work but he doesn’t rule out native applications in these and other areas down the line.
“We see it as a lever to unlock new customers,” he said of the investment thesis of Snowflake Ventures.
[In data,] there is nothing that competes with Observe right now,” Williams added.
Not many startups can claim Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as paying customers, but Confetti can.
How it worksCompanies use Confetti to bring team-building experiences to their remote teams, with support for hybrid too.
ComplexitiesIn a prior job, Rubin says she was tasked with organizing a team-building event, an endeavor that proved more difficult than she initially envisaged.
“When we started, we were solely focused on in-person events, helping companies organize events in the office,” Rubin said.
“We’re already providing companies with options to purchase Confetti Credits, which can be used to buy experiences on our platform,” Rubin said.
