“The predominant traveler today was born in an age where they are very comfortable with technology,” Harman Singh Narula, Canary Technologies co-founder and CEO, said.
Narula started Canary Technologies with longtime friend SJ Sawhney to provide that technology so hotels can offer better guest experiences, augmented by technology.
Today, the hotel guest management technology company’s platform digitizes the hotel guest journey from post-booking through checkout with tools that manage mobile check-in/checkout, registrations, upsells, guest messaging and digital tipping.
Canary now works with over 20,000 hoteliers globally at brands like Marriott International, Four Seasons, Choice Hotels, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Rosewood and Intercontinental Hotel Group.
Though he didn’t give a specific valuation, Narula did say the valuation has now more than doubled since the company’s $30 million Series B round in 2022.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
This week, we’re looking at Rippling’s controversial decision to ban some former employees from selling their stock, Carta’s massive valuation drop, a GenZ-focused fintech raise, and more!
But there is one big exception: It has banned former employees who work for a handful of competitors from selling their stock.
What else we’re writingIn early 2022, the fintech startup Bloom was accepted into Y Combinator as the first-ever startup from Sudan to participate in the famed accelerator.
In an unusual move, Capital One is teaming up with payment giants (and rivals) Stripe and Amsterdam-based Adyen to offer a free product aimed at fraud reduction, the financial services giant told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal.
Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator that helped the company launch in the summer of 2022, also participated in the Series A financing.
The company has built an LLM-powered co-pilot that helps nurses and doctors save hours on gathering medical documentation required by insurance.
While Anterior’s initial offering is in prior authorization automation, the company eventually plans to expand into other medical administrative functions.
Makhzoimi also backed Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup that launched this year with $1 billion in funding.
BlackRock, an investor in Byju’s, estimates that its stake of Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing.
So it doesn’t come as a surprise that BlackRock has implied a zero valuation to Byju’s.
At the end of October last year, BlackRock had cut the valuation of Byju’s to about $1 billion.
However, the research’s note chart (embedded below) did use zero in the column for estimated value.
The story has also been updated to emphasize BlackRock’s valuation adjustment in its Byju’s stake.
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.
The big idea was to become the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions in the world.
Roughly 15 months later, in late 2022, the company’s CEO, Henry Ward, told Axios that Carta was worth even more – $8.5 billion – following a separate secondary sale.
(He did not disclose how many shares were sold at this valuation or who bought them.)
Now, Carta is seemingly returning to its roots – and an earlier valuation that’s probably better suited to the business.
Over the years, Carta has raised roughly $1.2 billion from investors, according to the startups tracker Tracxn.
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.
It’s been more than a minute since Tesla went public, but the EV company was inescapable on TechCrunch this week.
From layoffs to pricing changes and more, it was a week dyed deeply in Tesla colors so we had to chat through the latest.
But that was just one element of what we got into on Equity this week.
We also dug into Mary Ann’s reporting about Ramp’s latest round — and up valuation — that fit neatly next to Rippling’s own impending fundraise.
Equity is back tomorrow with a special interview between Mary Ann and Notable Capital’s Hans Tung, so stay tuned!
Spend management startup Ramp has raised another $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today.
New investor Khosla Ventures and existing backer Founders Fund co-led the raise, which also included participation from new backers Sequoia Capital, Greylock and 8VC.
Other existing investors Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Sands Capital, D1 Capital, Lux Capital, Iconiq Capital, Definition Capital, Contrary Capital also put money into the latest round.
Apparently, there were no hard feelings on the part of Founders Fund, which still participated in the financing, even without Rabois.
(It’s worth noting that Rabois originally represented Founders Fund and has sat on Ramp’s board since 2019.)
HR startup Rippling is in discussions to raise at a $13.4B valuation, up from $11.25B The round could total $870M, including $670M worth of secondaryLate stage HRtech startup Rippling is raising new capital.
This will be Rippling’s Series F, and could raise its valuation to as high as $13.4 billion on a post-money basis, up from the $11.25 billion valuation it reached when it last raised capital in a $500 million Series E just a year ago.
Rippling had raised $1.2 billion total previous to this round.
Rippling competitor Gusto told TechCrunch that it reached $500 million in trailing revenue last year, along with cash flow positivity.
Earlier this year Deel, which focuses on payroll for teams that cross borders, said that it had reached $500 million worth of annual recurring revenue.
