Salesforce backs Indian payments startup Razorpay

by Manish Singh - September 20, 20210

Six-year-old Bangalore-based fintech Razorpay, which was valued at $3 billion in a financing round in April this year, has courted one more high-profile investor: Salesforce Ventures. Razorpay said on Monday it has received a “strategic investment” from the venture arm of the American enterprise giant. The investment will help the startup

F5 acquires cloud security startup Threat Stack for $68 million

by Carly Page - September 20, 20210

Applications networking company F5 has announced it’s acquiring Threat Stack, a Boston-based cloud security and compliance startup, for $68 million. The deal, which comes months after F5 bought multi-cloud management startup Volterra for $500 million, sees the 25-year-old company looking to bolster its cloud security portfolio as applications become a growing

Pakistan edtech startup Maqsad gets $2.1M pre-seed to make education more accessible

by Kate Park - September 20, 20210

Taha Ahmed and Rooshan Aziz left their jobs in strategy consulting and investment banking in London earlier this year in order to found a mobile-only education platform startup, Maqsad, in Pakistan, with a goal “to make education more accessible to 100 million Pakistani students.” Having grown up in Karachi, childhood friends

Demand Curve: How to get social proof that grows your startup

by Ram Iyer - September 18, 20210

Nick Costelloe Contributor Share on Twitter Nick writes actionable growth marketing insights as head of content at Demand Curve. More posts by this contributor Demand Curve: How to double conversions on your startup’s homepage Demand Curve: 10 lies you’ve been told about marketing When people are uncertain, they look to others for behavioral guidance. This is

Patient monitoring startup Doccla secures $3.3M Seed funding for ‘virtual wards’ platform

by Mike Butcher - September 15, 20210

Doccla, a healthtech startup with a platform that can monitor patients on hospital wards and in the home, has secured a $3.3 million Seed funding round, led by Giant Ventures and Speedinvest. The company allows hospitals to predict when beds will be freed up by monitoring patients remotely via wearable

Nigerian agritech startup Releaf secures $4.2M to scale its food processing technology

by Tage Kene-Okafor - September 15, 20210

The distance between their farms and the nearest processor is key for smallholder farmers who need to process their crops. And though Nigeria’s food processing systems have a keen resemblance to the West with respect to big factories and huge economies of scale in high-demand cities, farmers still suffer from

Logistics startup Stord raises $90M in Kleiner Perkins-led round, becomes a unicorn and acquires a company

by Mary Ann Azevedo - September 15, 20210

When Kleiner Perkins led Stord’s $12.4 million Series A in 2019, its founders were in their early 20s and so passionate about their startup that they each dropped out of their respective schools to focus on growing the business. Fast-forward two years and Stord — an Atlanta-based company that has developed a

GM invests in radar software startup Oculii as demand for automated driving features rise

by Aria Alamalhodaei - September 13, 20210

Oculii looks to supercharge radar for autonomy with $55M round B

Oculii, a software startup that aims to improve the spatial resolution of radar sensors by up to 100-fold, has scored a new investment from General Motors. The new funding, which the two companies say is in the millions, comes just months after Oculii closed a $55 million Series B. Oculii and

The next big startup may just help venture back more startups

by Natasha Mascarenhas - September 12, 20210

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Oper8r, built by Winter Mead and Welly Sculley, wants to help new entrants in the VC world scale. The accelerator launched last year as a “Y Combinator for

What minority founders must consider before entering the venture-backed startup ecosystem

by Annie Saunders - September 12, 20210

Sesie Bonsi Contributor Share on Twitter Sesie Bonsi is the founder and CEO of Bleu, a financial technology platform focused on enabling touchless payment experiences. Funding for Black entrepreneurs in the U.S. hit nearly $1.8 billion in the first half of 2021 — a fourfold increase from the previous year. But most venture-backed startups