Teachers’ Venture Growth, the late-stage venture and growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, is investing $80 million in Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit underwriting solutions to banks and other financial institutions. The new investment values Perfios at a valuation of over $1 billion. 15-year-old Perfios, which raised a $229 million … Read more
TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility – your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. This week, read about autonomous vehicle company … Read more
There’s a lot of money in voice cloning. Case in point: ElevenLabs, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, today announced that it closed an $80 million Series B round co-led by prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and entrepreneur Daniel Gross. The round, which also had … Read more
Xpressbees, an Indian logistics firm that works with several e-commerce firms in the country, has raised $80 million in a new funding round led by Ontario Teachers’ late-stage venture growth fund amid a surge in the country’s online shopping activity. The Canadian pension fund has acquired a stake in the Pune-headquartered startup at about $1.4 … Read more
Welcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Take predictions and urban legends with skepticism: Luko is not France’s next unicorn, and Paul McCartney is not dead. Now rumor has it that … Read more
Ten years ago today, Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee penned a column for TechCrunch that brought the term “unicorn” into the world. Defined at the time as “U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors,” the term has since expanded to encompass all private startups valued … Read more
Supply chain logistics platform Flexport is acquiring the assets of shuttered digital freight network Convoy, according to a memo Flexport CEO Ryan Peterson sent to staff Wednesday. Flexport will restore Convoy’s trucking logistics services for customers in the coming weeks, reads the memo, shared by Freight Waves. Peterson said Flexport won’t acquire the business or … Read more
Prove Identity, the smartphone-based identity verification startup that originally made its name years ago as Payfone before rebranding in 2020, has raised $40 million. According to the company, the funding is coming in at a “unicorn status” valuation which would pip it past the $1 billion mark. The company, which has around 1,000 business customers, … Read more
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. … Read more
Slice, which counts Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Blume Ventures and EMVC among its backers, was valued at about $1.5 billion in its previous funding round last year. Indian unicorn fintech Slice is merging with North East Small Finance Bank, they said Wednesday after receiving the approval from the central bank, in an extremely rare feat … Read more