In the latest development, three-year-old Hohm Energy, which connects homeowners and businesses with accredited solar installers, product suppliers, and embedded solar finance in South Africa, has raised $8 million in seed investment.
The funding, whose first tranche of $4.25 million came in Q4 2022, is the largest seed round for a tech startup in South Africa, according to Hohm Energy.
Hohm Energy says its solution was built as an alternative and sustainable energy source for over 7 million addressable households connected to South Africa’s national grid.
Hohm Energy would then generate a final engineering proposal and present it to its banking partners for financing approval.
“We are thrilled to announce our inaugural investment in Hohm Energy.
After laying off over 1,000 workers across divisions last week and cutting 100 jobs at YouTube, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a memo to its staff warning more layoffs are expected this year.
Pichai’s memo said the company will have to make “tough choices” to meet its ambitious goals, as reported by The Verge.
But I know it’s very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted,” he said in an email to staffers.
At the time, the company also confirmed to TechCrunch that Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman were leaving the organisation.
On Wednesday, Google laid off 100 YouTube staffers as part of reorganisation.
Deal Dive: Tier and Dott’s merger is not a sign of what’s to come in M&A this year Consolidation can be complicatedEarlier this week, European micromobility companies Tier and Dott said they had agreed to merge.
The companies hope they can become profitable if they work together, my colleague Romain reported.
This seems like a solid outcome for the two startups, since they likely weren’t going to reach IPO scale on their own.
After all, if the companies weren’t going to survive as solo entities, it makes sense to at least try another direction.
Last year I came up with a hypothesis about M&A in 2024; I was inspired by Getir acquiring FreshDirect to fill a gap it needed to potentially reach profitability.
Investors bring expertise from their prior careers as COOs, CFOs, or other operational roles.
However, navigating conversations with investors in their areas of operational expertise isn’t always straightforward.
I keep the following principles in mind to avoid these pitfalls and get the most out of investors’ operational knowledge and experience.
What would happen if we broke down the percentage of our sales reps hitting 50%, 80%, or even 100% of their quota?
Our numbers looked good on paper, but unless we could democratize sales success, our efforts wouldn’t scale.
Satellite imagery and machine learning offer a new, far more detailed look at the maritime industry, specifically the number and activities of fishing and transport ships at sea.
Satellite imagery offers a new perspective on this conundrum: you can’t hide from an eye in the sky.
The dark fishing industry is huge — perhaps as big again as the publicly documented one.
“Fish are an important dynamic resource that move around, so openly tracking fishing vessels is fundamental for monitoring fish stocks.
The global community only hears second-hand, and one of the study’s findings was that the Asian fishing industry is systematically under-represented.
The global re-commerce market is poised for growth as consumers increasingly settle for pre-owned goods to save on cost, and as some observe conscious consumption.
With the global re-commerce market expected to continue its growth spurt, C2C marketplaces like Saudi Arabia’s Soum are looking to capture users in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
Soum was founded in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2021, and is now eyeing growth expansion to other MENA countries, beginning with the United Arabs Emirates.
Beyond expansion, the startup, whose top listings are electronics, is also increasing the categories it covers by including products like automobiles and collectibles.
This is the preposition that Soum brings to the table.”Soum manages the entire process from listing to delivery.
There are some minor redactions, but the bulk of this slide deck is intact.
In 2022, around 300 million liters of sustainable aviation fuel was produced, and that doubled this year to more than 600 million liters, per the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
Let yourself nerd out about the techWhen you’re building a deep tech company, the tallest pole in the tent is always going to be the tech itself.
Make it work, then make it work at small scale, then scale to production scale.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Metafuels could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
True Anomaly has closed $100 million in new funding, a strong signal that the appetite for startups operating at the intersection of space and defense is far from abating.
The new round was led by Riot Ventures, with participation from Eclipse, ACME Capital, Menlo Ventures, Narya, 645 Ventures, Rocketship.vc, Champion Hill Ventures and FiveNine Ventures.
True Anomaly is looking to fill a critical gap in space situational awareness and defensive operations through software and hardware, including the line of autonomous spacecraft capable of rendezvous and proximity operations.
In previous interviews with TechCrunch, True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers called out what he sees as a critical “information asymmetry” between the U.S. and its adversaries in space.
Jackal, Mosaic and the company’s other work in space domain awareness are meant to close that gap.
The Body Smart scale is a $100 gadget that Withings debuted fourteen years after its first smart scale, the Body Comp. The scale is the baby brother in the company’s…
The widely-adopted strategy of content management nowadays is largely a centralized affair, where one party or institution manages the entirety of a digital asset. But this isn’t always ideal, and…
