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 6114As predicted, ServiceTitan’s wildly successful IPO is beckoning other fintechs to move forward on their own public debuts. Digital bank Chime has filed its confidential paperwork with the SEC, Bloomberg reports. It’s been prepping for this moment since it hired banker Morgan Stanley in September, with an eye to IPO in 2025.
The IPO won’t really be headed for reality until that paperwork becomes public and institutional investors agree to buy in at a price that Chime wants. That could be a tall order. Chime was last valued at $25 billion when it raised $1 billion in the height of the valuation frenzy of 2021, and has raised $2.65 billion total, Pitchbook estimates. Its investors include Forerunner Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Sequoia, Softbank, Tiger, many others.
Chime declined to comment.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
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.”
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
There’s an ocean of meme coins beyond Dogecoin, and a new startup called Neverless wants to make it easier to get started with trading crypto, with a particular focus on providing access to small-cap tokens. This is an interesting new crypto startup, founded by three former executives at Revolut, the London-based fintech juggernaut.
Phuc To was the global head of product for Revolut, and was in charge of the company’s crypto project back in 2021. Mikael Peydayesh was the head of core payments at Revolut, and later became the head of premium plans, and Arthur Johanet was the head of card payments for a while before he went on to lead Revolut’s cryptocurrency department.
While crypto exchanges have greatly simplified the onboarding experience for new users over the years, the three believed it could still be improved, and so they teamed up to create a new app that makes cryptocurrencies more accessible.
Neverless lets you buy over 400 crypto tokens from the app using Apple Pay or Google Pay. In addition to the most common cryptocurrencies, the startup has chosen to offer access to meme coins and relatively rare coins with low trading volumes.
Buying these small-cap tokens can be challenging, as you usually need to find a crypto exchange that lists them. Alternatively, you can swap tokens on a decentralized exchange, which can be complicated if you don’t understand how decentralized applications (dApps) work.
Moreover, there are some caveats when you’re trying to buy tokens with low trading volumes. Pricing can vary from one trading venue to another, and there can be a large spread between the buying and selling prices. Neverless says it can seamlessly route trades to the right trading platform to get its users the best prices.
Another issue regular people have with crypto trading products are the fees involved. While tech-savvy people often look at the fineprint before buying crypto, and are willing to create yet another account, big exchanges often take advantage of their clout to charge higher fees if you just want to instantly buy and sell crypto, without creating a market order.
Neverless doesn’t charge fees to buy and sell cryptos using bank transfers, blockchain transfers, Apple Pay and Google Pay. For transactions above $1,000 with Apple Pay or Google Pay, the startup charges a 1% fee. Of course, things could change in the future as Neverless becomes more popular.
So how does the startup make money right now? On some cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, DOGE, SOL, XRP and AVAX), Neverless generates interest that is passed on to the users. The company also offers automated trading strategies that revolve around high-frequency arbitrage and market-making. Neverless can take a share of the returns generated from these yield-generating products.
The company has secured a MiFID license, which means that it is a regulated financial firm in Europe. It will have to comply with the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation when it comes into force in the coming weeks.
Earlier this year, the startup raised $6.7 million in a seed round led by Lakestar and Connect Ventures. Nordstar, Chad West, Dan Westgarth, Eamon Jubbawy, Xiao-Xiao and David Chreng also invested in the round.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
Indian startups raised 32% fewer funding rounds in 2024 compared to last year, per new numbers from data intelligence platform Tracxn, signaling that investors are being more selective when striking deals.
The number of startup funding rounds fell to 1,448 compared to 2,114 last year, but overall funding rose 6% to $11.3 billion — the disparity here indicates that investors aren’t shy of whipping out their checkbooks when they want to.
Early-stage investment activity reflected the broader trend, with the number of Series A and Series B deals declining to 387 from 420 a year earlier, though the total capital invested remained steady at $3.16 billion. Fewer startups managed to raise seed funding this year, though, with transactions falling to 925 from 1,545, while funding contracted 22% to $970 million.
Late-stage funding underscored the market’s favor of larger deals, with startups raising 136 Series C and later rounds for a total of $7.13 billion this year — a 12% increase in capital despite lower volume. Startups raised 20 rounds worth more than $100 million in 2024, compared with 18 such rounds in 2023.
The public markets emerged as a bright spot, with over 40 startups completing IPOs — an 80% increase from 2023. Swiggy’s $1.35 billion listing last month was this year’s largest tech IPO globally.
A pipeline of more than 20 startups, including quick-commerce group Zepto, and business-to-business marketplace Infra.Market, are preparing to go public in 2025.
A number of early-stage startup deals are also in the works, sources tell me: Quick-commerce startup Swish is in talks to raise about $15 million; Premji Invest in talks to back Digitap; Spotdraft is seeking to raise a debt round; WhistleDrive is in talks to secure about $11 million; Vodex.ai is in advanced stages of discussions to secure about $10 million to $15 million; and 91squarefeet, Galaxeye.space, R for Rabbit, and Biryani by Kilo are in advanced stages of deliberations to close new rounds.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
Over the last decade, the Sustainable Ocean Alliance has graduated from dorm room activism to a thousands-strong global network of experts, investors, and “ecopreneurs” — all of whom believe the best way to save the ailing oceans is to embrace innovation. Founder Daniela Fernandez has steered the ship the whole time, and the SOA is ready to make another splash.
Since Fernandez started it in 2014, SOA’s approach to addressing the climate crisis embraced the emerging startup economy. “Before us, no one in this space was even counting entrepreneurship or innovation as part of the solution,” she told TechCrunch in an interview. “This is an investable industry! And we are so proud to have led the way. I mean, l collectively we’ve deployed almost half a billion into this space.”
It took time for the idea to gain traction, but Fernandez’s invincible optimism and enthusiasm have snared powerful investors (the Benioffs are backers) and countless young folks who want to take action.
“My perspective has always been: Look at the economy of it,” she explained. “If there is an alternative to a company or sector, that’s sustainable while also making money, that is how society is going to shift. And these alternatives are already in the market; the question is how quickly can we scale them — how can we make them the norm? And how quickly can we bring in the capital we need to support this market?”
The organization moved from advocacy to active participation in that market with its accelerator program, which has helped dozens of companies grow from pre-seed to commercialization.
That approach has had to change as SOA identified categories that represent the best chance at breaking through to the mainstream. As it puts them: Greenhouse Gas Reduction, Pollution Reduction, Ecosystems and Species, Blue Foods, and Ocean Data, Literacy, & Research.
The program itself has changed, too, from Startup 101 with a conservation twist to one more focused on making the connections that matter and presenting data that convinces.
“Early on, a lot of these companies were just interested in understanding what the ocean ecosystem needed from them,” Fernandez said. “Like, what’s the product market fit, who are the experts that they can benefit from speaking to? Now that we’ve in essence institutionalized the SOA as a leading organization in this space, it’s more about lifetime support for these companies. This is an association that is beneficial to these founders, that opens a lot of doors. And there is capital that is actively seeking these investments that [other incubators and industry groups] might not be aware of.”
(That includes, perhaps, SOA’s own venture arm, Seabird Ventures.)
“We were also able to collect a lot of impact data from our companies,” she continued. “One of our competitive advantages is we created the industry’s first ocean impact assessment, a framework to assess the effect these startups were having in the world.”
That informed the creation of this new Ocean Solution Label, not just a rubber stamp but involving a close assessment of a company’s methods and impact. The idea is that companies and products bearing the label aren’t just meeting some low bar of “less terrible than most” but actually have a measurable and significant positive impact on the ecosystem. (It’s a tie-up with the Solar Impulse Foundation, which has been doing something similar for a while.)
“The primary target is investors,” she said. “We need to start signaling and moving more capital into this space. Investors are looking at ocean-related deals coming across their table, and their LPs are asking for them to be more deliberate about impact … but there are many companies out there that might be blue washing and trying to raise money against this growing trend. We’re trying to get into the weeds on measurements of the impact, and the benchmark has to be outsize impact on the planet for them to receive the label.”
In the meantime, a new batch of startups is coming through the Ecopreneur system:
Fernandez teased that another big structure-level change for SOA is coming soon. But what impresses her the most is quite simply the scale of an operation that was once literally just her.
“We’re in 186 countries! Versus where we started from, in my dorm room in Washington, D.C.? And we actually have like … projects, founders, youth hubs on the ground in all those locations. These are people actively thinking about solutions, not just on climate anxiety,” she said. “Applications for our programs are increasing, the amount of young people trying to become an ocean leader or delegate to our events is increasing, the variety of companies we’re seeing is increasing.”
“It’s almost as if being an ocean entrepreneur is so complex, because it’s such a multi-dynamic industry, that the only way to do it is with a systematic, macro-level approach … which we have taken.”
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
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.”
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch