17 October, 2024
Series A to B startups scale up at Disrupt 2024
Series A to B startups — check out the ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024!
Why Join the ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program?
Amplify Your Reach
Showcase your groundbreaking innovation on the Disrupt Expo Floor, where you’ll catch the eye of 10,000 tech leaders and investors. This is your moment to shine and forge connections that could elevate your startup to new heights.
Maximize Your Impact
Benefit from four conference passes that allow your team to fully engage with the Disrupt experience. Attend insightful sessions, network with industry insiders, and present your startup to a wide-ranging audience, all while building invaluable relationships.
Boost Your Visibility
Gain prominent exposure on the Disrupt website, exhibitor lists, and event app. With access to the press list and comprehensive marketing support, your startup will stand out and attract interest from investors and partners.
Affordable and Valuable
For just $3,500, the ScaleUp Exhibitor Package offers an exceptional value for startups aiming to scale their presence at Disrupt. This package provides unmatched visibility, networking opportunities, and marketing support. Plus, if your application is not accepted, you’ll receive a full refund.
What’s included in the ScaleUp Startup Package?
Exhibition Space: One 6’ x 30” table with table linen and chairs.Exhibition Day: One full day to exhibit, chosen by TechCrunch for maximum exposure.Team Passes: Four startup exhibit team-member passes.Branding: An 11” x 14” tabletop sign with your startup’s logo.Lead Generation: Access to lead-generation services.Connectivity: Complimentary partner Wi-Fi network access.Visibility: Your logo and company profile featured in the TechCrunch Disrupt mobile app.Press Access: Access to the exclusive TechCrunch Disrupt press list.Guest Passes: Ten Expo+ passes for your network and supporters.
Is this the same as Startup Battlefield?
No, the ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program is distinct from Startup Battlefield. The latter is a competition for pre-Series A companies, offering a chance to win a $100,000 equity-free prize and other benefits.
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Sensi.AI grabs $31M Series B from Insight, Zeev to monitor seniors 24/7
Older adults increasingly want to age in their homes rather than nursing facilities.
A study by the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) found that nearly 90% of people over 65 want to stay in their homes as they grow older. That means there is plenty of work for home care agencies whose staff assist the elderly primarily only during the day and possibly only for a few hours a day or week.
Technology built by Sensi.AI claims to help home care agencies virtually monitor the well-being of the elderly around the clock.
Sensi was founded by Romi Gubes in 2019 after she discovered that there was abuse happening in her five-year-old daughter’s childcare facility. She immediately removed her daughter but started thinking about how to prevent similar situations from happening to kids and other vulnerable populations. Gubes, an engineer who always dreamed of starting her own company, had the idea of using audio AI to analyze what may be happening with people who can’t advocate for themselves. She chose to work with audio because placing cameras in the home may feel intrusive to many people.
She decided to apply this technology to home care agencies, a fast-growing area amid the large desire for aging in place.
While various solutions help with emergencies, such as fall detection monitoring offered by OlaCare and SafelyYou, Gubes told TechCrunch that Sensi provides a more comprehensive overview of what’s going on. Not only can it help alert that the home care client has had an emergency like a fall, but it can also indicate less urgent health problems like urinary tract infections, pneumonia and “good-to-know” issues, including change in activity levels, sentiment and lack of companionship, Gubes said.
Sensi works by placing simple audio pods similar to Amazon’s Alexa throughout the person’s home, but generally in the bedroom, the bathroom and the living/kitchen area. The company’s AI then continuously collects the audio and analyzes it for any variations from the baseline.
The company claims to identify over 100 insights about the well-being of seniors. Its clinical care team, which includes a social worker, an occupational therapist, nurses, and geriatrics clinicians, continuously develops new data points to track.
According to Gubes, Sensi AI’s technology is in high demand. Over 80% of the largest home care networks in the United States are using Sensi to help monitor their clients’ physical, emotional, and cognitive needs.
The company’s revenue grew threefold year over year for the last three years, though Gubes wouldn’t share what the baseline was. She expects revenue to expand at the same pace over the next two years.
This fast growth has investors excited, too. On Wednesday, Sensi announced a $31 million Series B led by Insight Partners and Zeev Ventures, with participation from existing investors Entrée Capital, Flint Capital, Jibe Ventures, and Secret Chord Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to $53 million.
As for how innovations in generative AI are helping Sensi, Gubes said that launching new languages is a breeze with LLMs. The company is currently serving home care facilities based in the U.S. and Israel, where Gubes is from. But it plans to expand to other countries with the help of new funding and GenAI capabilities.
“Now that there are no issues with coming up with new language models, the sky’s the limit for us,” she said.
Hebbia raises nearly $100M Series B for AI-powered document search led by Andreessen Horowitz
Hebbia, a startup using generative AI to search large documents and return answers, has raised a nearly $100 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The round valued the company between $700 million and $800 million, although TechCrunch couldn’t verify whether that valuation is pre- or post-money. (One possible scenario is $700 million pre/$800 million post.) Hebbia disclosed in an SEC filing in May that it had by then raised $93 million out of a hoped-for $100 million, but we understand from two of the people that the round hit a near $100 million mark and has closed.
Hebbia and Andreessen Horowitz didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Hebbia was founded in 2020 by George Sivulka, who launched the company while working on his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford. Sivulka was inspired by his friends working in the financial industry who told him that part of their long work weeks was spent searching for information in SEC filings and other dense documents. Sivulka thought that AI could help them save hours at the office and give them more time for rest and sleep.
Hebbia’s AI can look over billions of documents at once, including PDFs, PowerPoints, spreadsheets and transcripts and return specific answers, the company says.
The startup sells primarily to financial service firms, including hedge funds and investment banks. But its product could also be used by law firms and other professional domains.
The latest funding brings Hebbia’s total capital to over $120 million. The company raised its $30 million Series A in September 2022 led by Index Ventures with participation from Radical Ventures.
The company’s product is similar to Glean, whose software can fetch information in plain English from various business applications. In February, Glean raised a $200 million Series D at a valuation of $2.2 billion, led by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed.
Japan's SmartHR raises $140M Series E as strong demand for HR tech boosts its ARR to $100M
SmartHR, a cloud-based human resources and labor management software startup, said on Monday that it has raised $140 million in a funding round led by KKR and Teachers’ Ventures Growth, an investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, with participation from existing investors.
The Series E round, which comes three years after the company raised a $142.5 million (15.6 billion JPY) Series D at a valuation of $1.6 billion, is the latest indicator that investors are still keen to back tech that helps companies more efficiently manage their biggest cost base: staff.
The company declined to comment on its current valuation.
Co-founded in 2015 by Kensuke Naito and Shoji Miyata, SmartHR has been seeing strong demand for its SaaS platform, which helps enterprises manage and streamline human resources and operations, in the past couple of years. Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached $100 million as of February 2024, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch, which signifies a decent uptick from the $80 million in total revenue it reported in FY 2023.
That growth is in line with the robust demand for HR tech that we’ve been seeing in other parts of the world. U.S.-based Rippling, which SmartHR says is its closest comparable company in terms of products and strategy, saw its ARR double to $350 million in 2023, per The Information. Gusto, which offers payroll management software and services, told TechCrunch its revenue had crossed $500 million by April 2023; and Deel, which manages payroll for companies across international lines, this March said that it had clocked ARR of more than $500 million.
There’s also a mountain of venture capital in this market, estimated to be worth a whopping $81.84 billion by 2032, per Fortune Business Insights. Rippling, one of the biggest startups in the space, has raised about $1.4 billion, per a spokesperson at Rippling, and said it was valued at $13.5 billion following a $200 million funding round in April. Gusto has raised nearly $750 million, Crunchbase data says, and it is worth around $9.6 billion, per PitchBook. And Deel, worth $12 billion, has raised a total of $679 million, according to Crunchbase.
And you have investors throwing cash at smaller startups attacking nearly every facet of traditional HR: Remofirst, which helps its customers hire globally without setting up local offices, recently raised $25 million; Palm takes a mobile-first approach to improving the HR tech experience in MENA, and last year got $5 million; Compa in January landed $10 million to build its platform that provides recruiters aggregated compensation data so they can be more competitive when hiring; and Legion last month raised $50 million to automate hourly staff management for companies.
SmartHR’s peers in Japan include back-office software players such as Works Human Intelligence, freee and Moneyforward. The company sets itself apart by “obtaining the latest and most accurate employee data through labor management, which positions it as a system of record in HR,” its spokesperson said, adding that leveraging this employee data allows it to deploy new products rapidly.
The startup said the new capital will go toward developing new solutions and hiring, as well as organic and inorganic (read: M&A) growth strategies. It currently has about 1,000 employees.
Its previous backers include Light Street Capital, Sequoia Capital Global Equities and Whale Rock.
Updates with Rippling’s total amount of funding
Nala to use $40M Series A to build B2B payments platform, scale remittance services
Nala, a remittance startup that is now widening its portfolio through a new B2B payments platform, has raised $40 million equity in a rare deal that becomes one of the largest Series A transactions in Africa.
The oversubscribed round was led by San Francisco-based VC firm Acrew Capital, with participation from DST Global Partners, Norrsken22, HOF Capital, and existing investors including Amplo and NYCA Partners. A number of angel investors, including fintech founders Ryan King of Chime and Vlad Tenev of Robinhood made investments too.
Nala founder and CEO Benjamin Fernandes told TechCrunch the new capital injection, which follows a $10 million seed in 2022, will fuel the company’s global growth plans that involve scaling its remittance business to serve the Asian and Latin America markets.
Currently, Nala, through its consumer app, enables people domiciled in the E.U., U.K. and U.S. to send money across 249 banks and 26 mobile money services in 11 markets across Africa. Where Nala has integrated with mobile money services like Kenya’s M-Pesa, remitters can pay bills directly into local mobile wallets.
Fernandes says the decision to add payment capabilities was informed by user requests of a 360-degree control of their money. The fintech plans to scale these offerings to the planned new markets, starting with Asia.
Nala is also doubling down on its B2B payments platform launched in March to serve global businesses making payments into and out of Africa.
“This $40 million funding round marks a pivotal moment for Nala. It will enable us to go beyond remittances and extend our reach beyond Africa, building a robust payments ecosystem. We’re reinvesting this money to enhance our infrastructure, ensuring reliable, low-cost payments for all. With the launch of our own payment rails and the expansion of our B2B platform Rafiki, we’re not just talking about change, we’re building it. We’ve got some bold, ambitious plans, give us a couple of years,” said Fernandes.
Fernandes launched Nala in 2017 initially to offer local money transfers in Tanzania but pivoted to enable foreign remittances in 2021.
Nala set out to offer remittance services, it’s building a B2B payment platform too
The startup’s new B2B platform, Rafiki, also powers Nala’s consumer app. Fernandes told TechCrunch in a past interview that they decided to build the payments platform to guarantee the reliability of its remittance services and to serve global businesses looking for dependable services.
Through Rafiki, which directly integrates with banks and mobile money providers, Nala says it is able to guarantee service availability for its consumer service. Besides, its own payment infrastructure implies lesser charges for the users of its consumer app, making it more competitive.
Guaranteeing service delivery, Fernandes said, has been the fuel behind the growth of the startup’s consumer business, which accounts for over 90% of its revenues currently. He said Nala is on the path to cross 500,000 customers and has already attained profitability.
The payments platform is also gaining clientele with early ones including U.K.-based fintech TransferGo which uses Rafiki for Africa payouts.
“For Rafiki, live customers on Nala range from global payroll providers such as Cadana to global remittance companies such as TransferGo and global banks doing cross border payments. The focus is enabling financial institutions and services to make cross border payments,” said Fernandes.
Opportunities in the remittance space
Nala’s plans for remittance services to other emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America comes after the World Bank predicted strong growth for the sector this year.
According to the World Bank’s Migration and Development Brief, remittance flows to sub-Saharan Africa are expected to grow by 1.5% after a slight drop in 2023 when they settled at $54 billion. Growth is also expected in regions like East Asia and the Pacific (excluding China), South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. This growth means demand for remittance services will persist.
“In India, migrants send over $125 billion a year and the market is growing with more people leaving. This creates opportunities for those customers to be served but also global trade between regions that will only increase. The Asian and African regions have been trading more and money needs to move reliably to make this happen,” said Fernandes.
As demand for remittance support grows, the World Bank notes that sending money across borders remains costly. The global average cost of sending $200, for instance, was 6.4% of the amount sent. However, digital remittances cost was lower, at 5%, compared to non-digital at 7%, making a case for services provided by Nala and its peers, which include Flutterwave. Nala says bringing down the cost of sending money is at the heart of their offering.
Acrew founding partner Lauren Kolodny said, “We believe Nala will be the leader in remittances for the next generation of Africans who are expected to account for 35% of all the world’s youth by 2050,” adding that the team “has deep local knowledge, fintech expertise, and unique community building know-how to build the cross-border payment rails for the next billion.”
Defense AI startup Helsing raises $487M Series C, plans Baltic expansion to combat Russian threat
Defense AI startup Helsing has raised €450 million ($487 million) in a Series C financing round led by General Catalyst. It now plans to expand its presence in European nations bordering Russia. The announcement came as NATO held its annual summit in Washington, D.C., where the Russian invasion of Ukraine is high on the agenda.
As per the above plan, Helsing has created a new entity in Estonia and plans to spend €70 million on Baltic defense projects over the next three years. The Germany-HQ company also has offices in Munich, London and Paris, and said the new cash injection would be spent developing its AI capability and expanding from its 300-employee base.
Helsing creates AI software to process information from defense systems, boost weapons capabilities in drones and jet fighters, and improve battlefield decisions.
Gundbert Scherf, Helsing’s co-chief executive officer, said in an interview with TechCrunch that “Ukraine has used technology for its defense against the full-scale Russian invasion, and I think us being able to help there and deploy our technology and execute the mission we had set out three and a half years ago, to use AI to protect our democracies, has been a big driver for us.”
“We’re a company founded on European values and defending European interests and democracies, and right that now is happening in Ukraine,” he said, speaking about the move into Estonia. “But of course, it’s also happening on our eastern flank, all the way from Finland, through the Baltics, down to Poland … Estonia is a country that’s obviously also a leader in technology and the prime minister there has a high conviction in protecting European democracies. So it was a natural starting point.”
In a statement, Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, said that Helsing’s entrance was “very welcome” in her country and that “we need actions, not just words.”
“Russia has increased its defense budget to 7% of GDP, to a level where it’s pretty clear that the goal is probably not just Ukraine, but wider,” co-CEO Torsten Reil added. “We feel a sense of urgency and responsibility to create a capability gap in order to be able to deter and, if necessary, defend Europe and the NATO eastern flank.”
Asked where Helsing gets the bulk of its AI compute from, the company co-CEOs demurred on the details. Reil said: “We use our own compute obviously. We’re on ‘Edge’ devices, and there’s always local compute required as well. We also announced a few weeks ago Project Centaur, which is based on reinforcement learning to create an AI for air combat. That requires a lot of compute. So we spend a lot of money right now on training and training agents. Eventually, we’ll have extremely high capabilities in air combat. And there we use scaled-up compute.”
However, Reil said that while they have some compute capability, the company also uses third parties, but he said these cannot be named for “security reasons.”
To date, Helsing has won deals with Airbus SE and defense ministries in Germany and Ukraine, including the German Eurofighter Electronic Warfare upgrade (with strategic investor and committed partner Saab AB), the AI infrastructure for the Future Combat Air System (FCAS, with consortium HIS) and a number of classified contracts in the maritime and land domains, the company said in a statement.
The latest funding round would theoretically value the company in the region of €4.95 billion ($5.4 billion) according to a source who spoke to Bloomberg, but the company has declined to comment on matters of valuation.
The startup is plowing an increasingly popular furrow for startups as defense tech rockets up the agenda of Western investors both concerned at the war footing of Russia and the possible threat from China. Silicon Valley put almost $35 billion into defense tech startups in 2023, and over $9 billion so far this year, according to a report released last week by PitchBook.
At the same time, Western defense budgets are going up, creating an opportunity for founders and investors in the space.
However, while a U.S. equivalent to Helsing might be Anduril Industries Inc., few other European defense startups have managed to get to Helsing’s scale, in part because European government defense spending still lags behind that of the U.S.
The new funding means that to date Helsing has raised €769 million in total from investors including from Prima Materia (the fund set up by Spotify founder Daniel Ek) and Swedish defense supplier Saab AB. Joining the latest round were Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Plural, Greenoaks Capital Management and Elad Gil, a Silicon Valley investor.
In a statement, Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, managing director and head of Europe for General Catalyst, said: “I have deep conviction that Helsing is on the path to becoming a global category leader. As we witness battlefronts on European soil for the first time in decades, we believe the role of companies like Helsing has never been more critical.”
Exein raised $15M Series B to stop robotic arms going haywire
By now, we’re all pretty familiar with cybersecurity for computers. But what would happen if a robotic arm on a production line was hacked and instructed to kill its human co-worker? That “device security” is the kind of thorny problem that Rome-based startup Exein is tackling.
The IoT cybersecurity company has now raised €15 million in a Series B round led by 33N, a VC that specializes in cybersecurity and infrastructure software. The capital will be used to expand in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.
Exein’s IoT security solution embeds security measures directly into device software, effectively trying to “immunize” the device from attacks. It also uses AI at the edge to enhance protection, the company said in a statement.
The company is also involved in the Yocto Project initiatives, part of the embedded Linux sector, which operates on 6 billion devices annually.
“For instance, we secure machinery systems, CNC systems, so things that actually have a real impact in the lives of people,” said Exein CEO Gianni Cuozzo. “If you are an employee working with a robotic arm and something happens, you can get hurt or a production line can be stopped.”
“There was no software standardization before us. Everybody was doing their own framework and security approach. We are the first standardization in security sanitation layer in this market,” he added.
The funding round was also joined by Partech, as well as existing investors United Ventures, eCAPITAL and Future Industry Ventures (a Redstone/SBI fund).
Spanish startup Exoticca raises a €60M Series D for its tour packages platform
The type of overseas trip where you need multiple hotels, flights, activities, transfers, transport methods, and guides has traditionally been undertaken by travel agents. Since there’s no real-time pricing for such complex offerings, travelers have few other options. Spanish startup Exoticca set out to crack that nut and has now raised a €60 million Series D round led by Quadrille Capital.
The market for multiday tour packages is very large, but it’s one of the last areas of the travel industry to be digitized. Exoticca’s platform connects flights, hotels, meals, transfers, transportation and local companies. This makes it simpler to book these more complex packages and reduces costs by as much as 30%, the company claims.
Exoticca also claims to have more than doubled its sales year-over-year since 2015 and now operates in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Colombia through a network of travel and non-travel online and offline partners.
“The package tour was invented by Thomas Cook two centuries ago and has really not evolved in that time,” said Exoticca CEO Pere Vallès. “We’re bringing a model that is more digital, that allows us to sell these types of products online, that is more flexible, but has also some big advantages when it comes to cost and price.”
Exoticca competes to some extent with Tourlane, a planning and booking platform that helps travelers research and buy multiday tours online. Tourlane has raised $101 million to date.
However, Vallès said that Exoticca doesn’t “see them as competitors. They have a different model, which is more based on a marketplace. They don’t offer real-time pricing.”
His company is focused on “value for money,” Vallès said. “And this leads us to a customer that is middle class and upper middle class.” He added that 75% of Exoticca’s business is in the U.S. and Canada, “so it’s Americans and Canadians traveling to the 70 destinations that we offer,” from the company’s headquarters in Barcelona.
He said the objective is to expand into Latin America, the Middle East, India and China.
In a statement, Alejandra Duran Gil, partner at Quadrille Capital, said: “Exoticca’s strong financial foundation and the team’s exceptional execution are at the heart of our investment thesis.”
Also participating in this round were new investors, including All Iron and ICF and existing investors 14W, Mangrove, Bonsai, Sabadell and Aldea.
Vanta raises $150M Series C, now valued at $2.45B
Vanta, a trust management platform that helps businesses automate much of their security and compliance processes, today announced that it has raised a $150 million Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital.
The company is now valued at $2.45 billion, up from $1.6 billion in 2022 when it raised its $40 million Series B round. Earlier this year, Vanta announced that it had surpassed $100 million in ARR in its financial year ending in January.
Initially, Vanta focused on helping businesses obtain ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 2, and similar certifications. Now the company is aiming to go beyond that. Vanta co-founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo told me that while Vanta obviously started with a focus on automated compliance, especially for startups, it is now moving to become part of a larger and more holistic discussion about trust.
“Vanta today, we still do a lot of SOC 2, but a lot of what we’re building is around how do you help companies build out their security programs?” Cacioppo told me. “And then how do they go get credit? There’s a compliance piece, there’s the trust centers, there’s real-time security status pages and questionnaire automation, but the thesis behind a lot of that is: if you can give people credit — which really means revenue — for showing off all the good security work they’ve done, they will do more good security work. … When we talk about trust, a lot of trust in software, especially B2B software, it’s around: Can I trust you with my customers’ data?”
She noted that a customer like Omni Hotels, for example, doesn’t necessarily come to Vanta because they need help with compliance, as they don’t actually build their own software. But they do hold a lot of customer data in third-party tools and they need help in making sure that those tools are secure and trustworthy.
As a part of this focus on trust, Vanta is also building some of its own security tools. It’s doing this not to compete with the likes of CrowdStrike, Cacioppo said (and this was before last week’s CrowdStrike disaster), but to help companies ensure that when they make a claim about, say, which employees have access to a given dataset, they can demonstrate that this is indeed the case on a deeply technical level.
Often this also means building integrations into existing security tools. So far, Cacioppo said, Vanta has built roughly 200 of these in-house and another 100 companies or so have also built their own.
Naturally, the company also has an AI play. Vanta launched its first AI products last year and it now expects to increase its use of large language models.
For example, the company recently launched its questionnaire automation service. Many companies use security review questionnaires when they bring new vendors on board, for example. These take forever to fill out, in part because the information lives in so many different systems. The idea here then is to automate all of this — with humans in the loop — and so far, Vanta’s quality metrics show that about 80% of the answers the tool provides are immediately accepted by the human reviewers. A large number of the missing 20% requires only minor wording changes.
“It is an application of LLMs that is actually useful, actually saving people time, [doing work] that, in fact, no one wanted to do, at least from a blank page,” Cacioppo said.
With this new funding, Vanta plans to continue to go upmarket as it branches out from its startup roots (and even today, three-quarters of the current YC cohort uses Vanta). In total, the company now has over 8,000 customers. But the company also plans to use the new funding to build out its AI products (a common tenor among startups these days) and to increase its global presence. Vanta currently has 500 employees with a regional focus on North America, the U.K., Germany and Australia, and about a quarter of Vanta’s customers are now outside of the U.S.
New investors in the round include Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and J.P. Morgan. Existing investors Atlassian Ventures, Craft Ventures, CrowdStrike Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures and Y Combinator also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $354 million since its launch in 2018.