wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Doug Schuessler has always been a founder. This passion, which has been with him since childhood, saw him launch two startups, move to San Francisco, and take a job at Square to see what a “real rocket shop looked like.” He later became chief revenue officer at restaurant booking platform Resy, before becoming a founder once again.
After Resy sold to AMEX, Schuessler said he started studying the hospitality technology industry more and found himself hooked on hotels.
“Independent hotels really need the help,” he told TechCrunch.
He said decades ago most of the hotels in the country were independently owned, but hotel chains have started to buy up these smaller properties, leaving the remaining independent hotels with more competition.
Schuessler and his co-founder, Cody Rose, who also worked at Resy, decided to create Safara, a business that lets customers book nearly every hotel in the world — whether it’s a chain or independent.
The list is curated from a mix of consumer data and community-sourced recommendations. There is also a rewards program, that provides cash back to those who book through the platform which can be applied to the next trip. Independent hotels using Safara can access it commission-free, though technically any hotel can plug into the platform.
“Think of it as another direct challenge alongside their website,” Schuessler continued. “We then connect these two products to elevate the guest experience by enabling direct web guests who book directly on the hotel’s site to manage that reservation in the Safara app.”
Today, Safara announces an undisclosed led by Sequoia and Defy.vc, as well as the acquisition of the company Skipper, an online booking engine used by independent hotels. With the additional funding, Safara has raised $14 million in funding to date.
The Safara and Skipper team came together after being introduced by a mutual investor who felt the companies had a similar outlook on the hospitality space. The Skipper co-founders will join Safara in some capacity.
“We actually made a pass at the deal earlier in the year,” Schuessler said. But the stars eventually aligned. “Both companies have a much better chance at achieving the shared vision together than they do apart.”
Safara aims to be different from others on the market by offering software solutions to hotels and products that serve the consumer on their side, too.
“The magic is going to come in 2025 when we connect these two products more deeply to create new experiences for both hotels and guests,” Schuessler, who is the company’s CEO, said.
Schuessler met his investors through warm introductions, he said. Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia, was the company’s first major believer but passed the first time around.
“I remember him saying, ‘Maybe we can become partners in the future,’ and at the time I thought that was BS, but it turned out to be the truth,” Schuessler said. He met Brian Rothenberg, a partner at Defy.vc, through the AngelTrack network, and said the two immediately hit it off.
“He is extremely supportive through good and bad and we tend to see the world through a very similar lens,” he continued.
Safara will use the fresh capital to scale product development and the number of hotels using its product.
“Our focus of 2025 and beyond is really to empower independent hotels with the same technology and network advances as chain hotels,” Schuessler said. “If we get this right, not only do we help these hotels succeed, but the types of experiences that will unlock for guests are things that frankly don’t exist right now. And if we accomplish both of those things, the sky is the limit for Safara as a company.”
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As a dietitian, Vanessa Rissetto’s main goal is to help people stay healthy.
She also knew that there were some roadblocks to achieving that. For example, the Black community deals with pressing health concerns, in addition to a disproportionate lack of access to care. More than 80% of registered dietitians in the U.S. are white, she said.
“As a Black woman, I wanted to bring more diversity to the industry to expand access to more Americans in need of nutrition care,” she told TechCrunch.
The result was her company Culina Health, which she co-founded with fellow dietitian Tamar Samuels in 2020. Today, the company announces a $7.9 million Series A, led by Healthworx, the CVC of the insurance company CareFirst.
Culina Health connects patients and healthcare providers to a network of registered dietitians who can provide virtual care in areas such as chronic disease prevention, wellness, and weight loss.
“Nutrition is vital to longevity and overall health, and it can be very sensitive for many individuals,” Rissetto said. “We come to every patient with personalized solutions rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.”
Culina Health, which already works with insurance companies and Medicare, says at least 70% of the U.S. can currently access its platform. It also says it has served more than 10,000 patients with its Culina Health Method, a methodology used to provide personalized care to patients.
Others in the space include Nourish, Foodsmart, and Berry Street.
“We are attacking the issue as a brand-new challenge, requiring a comprehensive and clinically rigorous approach,” Rissetto said, adding she doesn’t feel many others are doing the same. “We also stand out through our non-judgemental and culturally-affirming care. Individuals seeking nutrition care should be met where they are—not expected to fit a mold.”
Rissetto called the fundraising journey exhilarating, exhausting, and validating. Culina Health met its lead investors through word of mouth and eventually inbound requests.
“Culina’s mission was clear and stood out to investors as something unique in the industry and worth the investment,” she said.
Other investors in the company include Collab Capital, Cake Ventures, and GW Ventures.
The fresh capital will be used to expand and enhance Culina Health’s nutrition counseling. “We will implement new AI platforms to improve care efficiency, lighten our physicians’ burden, and strengthen our leadership team with new key hires,” Rissetto continued.
“With this new funding, the sky is the limit in providing the best possible care for our patients.”
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A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions to make a splash in the world of AI is returning to the spotlight.
Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer products based on the lab’s work. Its first enterprise product, optimising GPU use, is already bringing in millions of dollars in revenue. And its first consumer product, a playable “open world” AI model called Oasis, was released when Decart came out of stealth and already claims “millions” of players.
Now, on the back of that strong exit out of the gates, Decart has raised another $32 million led by Benchmark.
The funding, a Series A, is coming less than two months after the company — which is headquartered in San Francisco but with substantial operations in Israel — had raised a seed round of $21 million from Sequoia and Zeev Ventures, with the two firms also participating in this latest Series A.
And TechCrunch understands from sources that Decart’s new post-money valuation is now over $500 million. (For a point of comparison, the seed valued it at just over $100 million.)
Leitersdorf is a youthful 26, full of energy and coming in fast. He says the aim is not just to take on companies we already know of as big players in the AI field like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and the rest. He said he wants to build “a kilocorn” — that is, a trillion-dollar company.
“We have a long way to go, and we have great stuff to build,” he added. That being said, he noted that yes, the company has already been approached as an acquisition target multiple times. And there are some interesting (if slightly more modest) comparables if you just look at the optimization piece that Decart has built, such as Run:ai getting acquired by Nvidia for $700 million.
Leitersdorf’s exuberance nevertheless comes after a decade of impressive momentum that got him to where he is now.
Born in Israel, Leitersdorf spent his early years there before moving with his family to Switzerland and then Palo Alto, following his parents’ work (they are doctors and researchers).
As a teen at Palo Alto High School, he pushed himself to get his diploma in just two years, only to then jump into university, back in Israel at the Technion, where he finished his undergraduate, masters and PhD work in computer science in just five years, including time that overlapped with his military service.
His co-founder Moshe Shalev (pictured above, left) is impressive in a different way: he came to computer science while doing his own time in the IDF having been raised in a strict Orthodox household. He turned out to have a knack for it and helped establish, build and run AI operations for the IDF’s 8200 intelligence unit, where he remained for nearly 14 years.
There is a third co-founder with an equally impressive background although his name is not yet being disclosed due to existing commitments.
Decart, as it exists today, is focusing on three primary areas, as Leitersdorf describes them: systems (currently: infrastructure optimization), models (AI algorithms) and data (which you can read as: applications that ingest and return data).
Decart’s first product, which it actually launched while still in stealth earlier this year, is in the systems camp: software to help optimize how GPU processes work when training and running inference workloads on AI models.
That software has turned out to work very well: it is being used by a number of companies building and running models, to bring down some of the extreme operational costs the come with building or using artificial intelligence. Leitersdorf said that using its software, workloads that might typically cost $100/hour to run can be brought down to a mere 25 cents/hour.
“That definitely got people’s attention,” he joked. Indeed, AI is very hot right now, but it seems that companies building tech to improve how well AI works… are even hotter.
The company is not disclosing the names of any of its customers, but it claims to be generating millions of dollars already in revenue and there are enough customers using it that Decart was profitable when it launched at the start of November. It’s on track right now to remain profitable through the end of the year, Leitersdorf added, and that interest from the market is another likely reason why VCs are interested.
“Decart’s innovation makes AI generation not only more efficient but also more accessible for any type of user,” said Victor Lazarte, a general partner at Benchmark that led the deal, in a statement. “By removing barriers to entry and significantly reducing costs, they are empowering a new wave of creativity and practical applications. We’re proud to join them on this journey as they redefine the possibilities of AI and its role in our everyday lives.”
It may so far be the engine driving the startup’s bottom line, but that optimization product is not Decart’s primary focus. Leitersdorf said that Decart built it to help finance the business when still in stealth mode, based in part on research he had done when still a student.
Leitersdorf said that Decart’s second product is in tune with what it hopes to do more of in the future.
The Minecraft-like Oasis, which it launched to coincide with emerging from stealth two months ago, is a “playable” AI that generates real-time, responsive AI-based audio and visual interactions.
The plan is to launch more experiences along these lines, Leitersdorf. These will include an upgraded Oasis game, along with others powered by generative AI and interactivity. These could include AR or VR experiences that would not need specific hardware to run.
“The problem [with VR and AR previously] was that we started with the hardware rails,” he said. “But building hardware is hard, getting people to adopt new hardware is hard. The nice thing about Gen AI is that we can actually [build AR] in the software part. We can actually bring value before the hardware is even ready.”
You could argue that Decart has, ironically, possibly put the cart before the horse when it comes to some of its ambitions. Leitersdorf didn’t have much of an answer to give me on what the company’s position would be on customers that wanted to use its optimization software to build or run nefarious models.
Nor does the company currently have a plan in place for how to make sure that the applications it developed did not get misused or abused. Right now, he said, those are not scenarios that have presented themselves.
More to the point is getting more people interested in its work across the platform, and turning that activity into revenue.
“The real king makers are the users,” Leitersdorf said. “They are the only ones that matter.”
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Integrating quantum computing into real-world computer applications is an ongoing problem, as the platforms are architected fundamentally differently. BlueQubit, a San Francisco-based quantum software startup founded by Stanford alumni, thinks it might have the answer.
Its Quantum Software as a Service (QSaaS) platform attempts to tackle the above problem by providing end-users with access to what’s known as ‘Quantum Processing Units’ (QPUs) and quantum computing emulators.
To further its mission, it’s now raised $10 million in a Seed funding round led by Nyca Partners. The idea is to marry enterprise applications, and advanced quantum hardware.
Sectors like finance, pharmaceuticals, and material science are starting to feel the boundaries of what’s possible with classical computing, which is why Quantum computing is receiving so much attention lately.
Quantum holds the promise of unlocking new solutions to many intractable problems. Google’s recent announcement of Willow, its latest, quantum computing chip, showed a glimpse of a world where computers could perform a computation, in under five minutes, that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years (that’s the number one followed by lots of zeros).
BlueQubit’s QSaaS framework supports use cases such as financial modeling, pharmaceutical development and visualization.
Hrant Ghairbyan, CEO and Co-Founder of BlueQubit, told TechCrunch the company leverages large-scale classical computing resources—specifically, a fleet of GPUs—to develop and test quantum algorithms before deploying them on real quantum processors.
“This approach enables us to scale effectively and pioneer novel algorithms for quantum machine learning and quantum optimization,” he said.
Its software stack runs quantum emulators “up to 100 times faster than commonly available alternatives, combined with a set of algorithms developed by our team,” he added.
MIT graduate Gharibyan co-authored a groundbreaking ‘wormhole teleportation’ algorithm, which the Google Quantum AI team later implemented on their superconducting processor.
BlueQubit’s CTO, Hayk Tepanyan, went to Stanford University, and later worked on Google’s infrastructure team. Gharibyan and Tepanyan met at Stanford.
“We decided to start the company while sitting on surfboards in Santa Monica, CA, in the spring of 2022,” said Gharibyan. “We had just heard a new announcement from the IBM Quantum team about progress on superconducting qubits, and it was clear that the quantum landscape was advancing at an incredible pace.”
“We have been looking for a team to invest in who are looking to enable financial services firms to hit the ground running once quantum is here,” said Tom Brown, Partner at Nyca, said in a statement. “Hrant and Hayk have the background, skills, and drive to operationalize something that until recently has mostly been theory.”
Also participating in this round was Restive, Chaac Ventures, NKM Capital, Presto Tech Horizons, BigStory, Untapped Ventures, Formula VC and Granatus.
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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for nearly 50% of Southeast Asia’s GDP, contributing to job creation, innovation, and overall economic expansion. Nevertheless, as in other parts of the world, SMEs in Southeast Asia face challenges when it comes to sufficient working capital. In a nutshell, SMEs are typically deemed too risky for traditional banks to lend to them, so those banks charge high rates, if they approve them at all.
Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya, two entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia who met while both were getting graduate degrees at Harvard Business School (HBS), were acutely aware of that gap back home. Inspired by HBS’ stated mission to “make a difference in the world,” they set out to address it.
“We had grown up as underdogs, felt privileged to be at HBS and wanted to pay it forward to Southeast Asia,” Teo said in an interview with TechCrunch. “SMEs resonate with us and financing is their biggest pain point.”
Their startup, Funding Societies, is a Singapore-based SME lending platform with licensed and registered offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. On the back of strong growth across the region — to date it’s loaned more than $4 billion to over 100,000 businesses — the fintech startup has been on a funding tear, too, most recently raising $25 million in equity.
The investment comes from a single investor: Cool Japan Fund (CJF), Japan’s sovereign wealth fund. Notably, this marks the fund’s first investment in a fintech company in Southeast Asia.
The recent funding brings the total raised by Funding Societies to approximately $250 million in equity. Investors have included strategic backers such as Khazanah Nasional Berhad and Maybank, which put in $40 million less than a year ago, as well as SoftBank Vision Fund 2, CGC Digital, SBVA (previously SoftBank Ventures Asia), Peak XV Partners (formerly known Sequoia Capital India), and Alpha JWC Ventures, among others.
Funding Societies was founded in Singapore in 2015 on the back of the two founders’ collective backgrounds. Teo previously worked at Accenture, McKinsey, and KKR Capstone, while Wijaya had experience in a family business in Indonesia. After deciding to build a business to work with SMEs, the duo spent around three years researching the most groundbreaking companies in the U.S., analyzing their journey to the top.
The company says that it has loaned more than $4 billion in business financing to date to around 100,000 SMEs across its five Southeast Asian countries. This is up from $3 billion in April 2023. Additionally, it has generated an annualized payment gross transaction value (GTV) of more than $1.4 billion since expanding into its payments business in 2022.
The startup plans to use the money to expand its primary focus, providing financing services faster to SMEs in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. It is also investing in AI to digitize and automate the lending application process and grow its payments business, which was launched in 2022.
On top of that, through a partnership with CJF, it will offer financial services to back Japanese companies that are already operating businesses, or looking to expand their presence in Southeast Asia, or entering new markets in Southeast Asia, Teo told TechCrunch.
The startup provides a wide range of financing options, including term loans, micro-loans, receivable/payable financing, revolver loans, and asset-backed business loans, ranging from $500 to $2 million, to meet the diverse needs of businesses at different stages. Many companies use the funds for working capital or as bridge loans to scale up.
One of the things that sets the startup apart from competitors like Validus and Bluecell Intelligence is that it offers a one-stop shop service, from short-term financing to supply chain financing, via online and offline channels and partnerships, and payment offerings, according to the company CEO.
Revenue from digital financial services in Southeast Asia is expected to rise, with digital lending leading the way and making up about 65% of the total revenue, according to an e-Conomy SEA Report 2024.
Since a mammoth $144 million Series C+ funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in February 2022, the Southeast Asia SME lending market has significantly consolidated, making the startup even stronger as a market leader, claimed Teo.
Ironically, one company’s crisis could become Funding Societies’ gain. Teo said the company expects more consolidation among fintechs focusing on credit in Southeast Asia. That is because many companies are getting to the end of their runways and unable to raise more money in the still-slugging SEA funding climate. Those that have focused on single countries are especially vulnerable, he added.
“Since SoftBank Vision Fund’s investment in February 2022, the macro market has changed considerably, with U.S. banks collapsing, impacting credit supply to non-bank lenders,” Teo told TechCrunch. “U.S. rate hikes have also raised the cost of funds.” Up until September, the macro market faced a 23-year period of rate hikes, and geopolitics have hurt SMEs and raised non-performing loans, he added.
In this challenging period, in December 2022, the company made its first acquisition: Sequoia-backed payments fintech CardUp. This almost tripled its revenue while maintaining its headcount almost flat. Teo noted also that the startup made investments in three companies in the period, including a fintech company and a startup specializing in POS software.
A social and economic impact report that the startup collaborated on with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 2020 found that Funding Societies-backed MSMEs contributed $3.6 billion to GDP and created approximately 350,000 new jobs. In addition, it helped SMEs boost their revenue by 13% through quick disbursement and a simple application process, according to the company.
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After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry.
Hoadley’s brother-in-law, and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&A in the waste management space at the time. Sikma discovered how outdated many of the companies changing hands were. When he and Hoadley started looking deeper, they realized waste management might be exactly what Hoadley was looking for.
“All of the existing software in the space, they were clunky, old,” Hoadley told TechCrunch. “Sometimes we’d talk about how this one reminds us of the Oregon Trail, this reminds us of the cell phone Michael Douglas used in ‘Wall Street.’ They’re very clunky and antiquated.”
Hoadley, now CEO, and Sikma, now president, launched Hauler Hero in 2020. The cloud-based software platform works with waste management companies on everything from route planning and management to billing to a customer portal where companies’ underlying customers can request pickups. Hauler Hero’s software also taps AI to help automate some of these tasks like invoicing and route management to find inefficiencies and help companies save money.
Hoadley said the company specifically decided to build multiple product lines right out of the gate as opposed to just building route management or billing software with plans to expand later. He said that he watched ServiceTitan struggle to expand into recurring services (pest control) while he was there. The company ended up having to buy an existing player to get it to work. He didn’t want his company to face the same fate.
“We wanted to make sure that we built this the right way from the beginning,” Hoadley said. “Many people will advise you to build an MVP, which is just a wedge into the market, and on balance, that didn’t seem like the right way to do this. It’s more difficult to raise all the capital and start that way, but now we’ve got a really efficient machine that our customers love.”
The company launched its platform in beta in 2022 and rolled out publicly in Q1 2024. Since then it has amassed more than 120 residential and commercial waste management customers across 40 states. It’s grown its revenue 200% in the past year.
Hauler Hero is announcing that it raised $10 million in seed funding led by I2BF Ventures with participation from K5 Global and Somersault Ventures in addition to executives from companies like Gusto and ServiceTitan and some of Hauler Hero’s customers.
Hoadley said the company plans to use the funds to hire more engineers and sales folks and to continue working on product development.
One area the company is working on, Hoadley said, is building up their products for larger enterprise customers that want better integrations with their other related businesses like transfer stations, or places to sort and store waste. He added that they are also looking to build up its integrated communications offerings like two-way text messaging, which would allow the company to get enough data to eventually build a customer service agent.
Hauler Hero’s tech operates in a relatively crowded industry filled with legacy software companies including Capterra, WasteWorks, and cieTrade, among others.
There are also other startups looking to solve these problems. Copenhagen-based WasteHero is one early-stage startup looking to build software for this industry that’s raised $6.7 million in venture funding. New York-based CurbWaste is another that raised $21.2 million in funding.
The waste management market is massive, though: It generated more than $140 billion in revenue in the U.S. alone in 2023. While the industry does include huge enterprises like Waste Management and G Mello, it also includes thousands of smaller privately run waste collection companies. Hauler Hero wants to grab a meaningful market share.
“It’s extremely rewarding. These are people who really are doing backbreaking work and God’s work,” Hoadley said. “It’s really rewarding to give them an opportunity to get their workflows done more quickly, to be able to generate reports more easily, and ultimately to grow faster and have more cash in their pockets to do the things that matter to them.”
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