Draijer said the company started off as an installer of solar panels in Spain, but after the pandemic, it decided it should offer a solar energy management system.
“Solar is not a product,” Draijer said, explaining why most Spaniards can’t or just don’t want to pay upfront for solar panels.
That’s why SolarMente offers subscription-based energy management services, which include installing solar panels without upfront costs.
“We’re using this round to really power our super app for home energy,” Gardrinier said.
But first, SolarMente wants to further expand across Spain, where its subscription solar offer just became available nationwide, Draijer told TechCrunch.
Cultivated Biosciences, a Swiss biotechnology food startup says it has solved this with the development of its yeast cream, derived from a specific type of oleaginous yeast, that mimics the texture and mouthfeel of traditional cream.
This method is also non-GMO and is easier to scale, said Lucie Rein, chief commercial officer at Cultivated Biosciences.
Cultivated Biosciences is designing its end product to go into consumer products, for example, like coffee creamers, milk and ice cream.
We also replaced the whitening agents, so we actually replace everything, and we stay stable.”Over the past year, Cultivated Biosciences has worked on scaling.
Cultivated Biosciences is joining them, having raised another $5 million recently.
London-based fintech company Monzo raised a late stage funding round of $430 million (£340 million), confirming a report from the Financial Times from a few weeks ago.
Founded in 2015, Monzo provides UK current accounts, debit cards and several financial products with a digital-first approach.
That’s why Monzo is sort of defying the odds with this new funding round, with Google playing a big part in this investment.
Monzo reached a post-money $4.5 billion valuation in 2022.
Now, Monzo has nine million retail customers in the U.K.
As an extension round, the valuation is also remaining flat, at $2.6 billion.
(Prior to that, the company raised a $100 million round in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation.)
“I didn’t feel the need to increase the valuation from the last round,” CEO and founder Dean Sysman, answered when asked about the decision.
Axonius is one of a group of specialist firms building platforms to help manage this.
“We’ve been a longstanding partner of Axonius, and we like to double down into our best performing companies.
Apple’s €1.84B fine, new AI rules in India, and the latest pre-IPO roundListen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, in which we take a look back at the weekend and what’s ahead in the week.
Over the weekend we had a great chat with Nubank’s CEO, which you can find here.
We are back Wednesday, see you then!
Bitcoin jumped and Coinbase’s app crashed, while Aptos eyes Hong Kong and Telegram rolls out rewards with TONWelcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
This week in web3Crunching numbersThis week the crypto market was very hyped up as the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, bitcoin and ether, both jumped about 23.6% and 18%, respectively, on the week, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The total crypto market cap increased 19.4% over a seven-day period to $2.34 trillion.
Our favorite ‘Crypto Twitter’ postICYMI, last week a lot of crypto people were tweeting about emails from Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
In June 2022, Magic Eden raised $130 million in a Series B round that granted it unicorn status.
At the time, it looked like it would be more than $50 million; in the end it ended up a little lower.
This latest round brings the total raised by the company, which was founded about four years ago, to $64 million.
Photoroom plans to use the funding to hire more people and to continue investing in its R&D and infrastructure.
Other features it offers includes AI-generated backgrounds, scene expansions, AI-generated images, and a plethora of image editing tools.
“Photoroom’s generative AI capabilities are unparalleled, and we have no doubt that they will continue to lead the way in this rapidly evolving landscape.”
It’s hard to keep track of crypto’s technical development, but one thing hasn’t changed much: blockchain applications are notoriously hard to build.
This stems in part from their decentralized nature, resulting in a lack of uniform standards across different infrastructure pieces.
Initia, founded by a group of developers in their late 20s, is trying to bring more interoperability to multi-chain networks and simplify the process of creating app-specific blockchains, or app chains.
In layman’s speak, Initia is abstracting away app chains’ technical complexity, aiming to make them more friendly to both end users and app developers.
They paused the project after the FTX implosion and eventually changed tack to work on blockchain infrastructure.
But Microsoft and Mistral AI buried the news — or at least an important part.
At the time, the company raised €385 million (around $415 million) with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading the investment round.
Unlike previous Mistral AI releases, Mistral Large isn’t open source.
With this investment, Microsoft is now an investor in OpenAI’s capped profit subsidiary and Mistral AI.
As for Mistral AI, the so-called European AI champion looks more and more like its American competitors with a closed-source approach and a long list of American backers.
Hot on the heels of the successful completion of its grid-connected geothermal power plant in Nevada, Fervo Energy is raising $221 million per SEC documents, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Previous geothermal plants have only scratched the surface by accessing hot springs or shallower rock formations.
Fervo uses directional drilling techniques pioneered by the oil and gas industry to extend its wells far beyond their surface footprints.
Once those wells are drilled, Fervo then strings them with fiber optic cables connected to a range of sensors.
Previous investors include BHP Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Congruent Ventures, DCVC, and Prelude Ventures.
