Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
This week we are looking at acquisitions of small startups, two new unicorns, wearable AI devices, and VCs who are supporting Kamala Harris. Let’s get into it.
Most interesting startup stories from the week
With the IPO market pretty much dead, we can’t help but track what’s going on with the other kind of exit: mergers and acquisitions. Even though they are not always the outcomes founders or investors were hoping for, we surely are hearing of more startups selling themselves.
Canva’s draws on Leonardo: Graphic design platform Canva has picked up generative AI-powered image creation startup Leonardo.ai, which raised nearly $39 million in venture capital since its founding two years ago. While we don’t know how much Canva paid for Leonardo, we do know that the design giant is busy building out its AI stack, and Leonardo is another piece of that puzzle. Read more
Airtable acquihires Dopt: There is a war for AI talent these days. That’s why collaboration company Airtable decided to buy such talent wholesale. This week, it acquired Dopt, a startup specializing in AI-powered onboarding. At its new home, the Dopt team will be tasked with developing various AI capabilities and will perhaps work on Airtable’s recently launched Airtable Cobuilder, an AI-driven app creation tool. Read more
Clutch grabs on to Plaiced: Four-year-old Clutch, a marketplace connecting creators with businesses, has raised $2 million from investors, including Precursor Ventures, and at one point had more than 200 creators on the platform and a 3,000-person waitlist. But the road eventually got tough. The startup restructured itself and laid off staff to reach profitability. Still, the startup’s co-founder decided that Clutch’s best path forward is to sell itself to online social network Plaiced. Read more
Bending Spoons scoops up WeTransfer: Bending Spoons, an Italy-based tech company known for acquiring well-known but struggling startups like Evernote and Meetup, has made another purchase — file transfer service WeTransfer. The 15-year-old WeTransfer was considering a public debut in 2021 but withdrew its plans when the IPO window closed in early 2022. Read more
Most interesting fundraises this week
It’s a bike, it’s a taxi, it’s a unicorn: Rapido, an Indian bike-taxi startup, has achieved unicorn status with a $120 million led by WestBridge Capital. The funding shows that Rapido is encroaching on India’s long-standing mobility Uber and Ola duopoly. Read more
Flo Health raises $200 million: The fertility-focused period tracking app has raised a Series C led by General Atlantic at a $1 billion valuation. TechCrunch chatted with Flo’s co-founder and CEO Dmitry Gurski about the latest funding, women’s health and things in between. Read more
Combating loneliness with AI: It may feel like something out of a science-fiction book or a “Black Mirror” episode, but Harvard dropout Avi Schiffmann is convinced that constant companionship is one of AI’s killer use cases. He built a device called Friend, which is a necklace that always listens to a person and responds via SMS. Friend, which is priced at $99 and expected to be available in January 2025, has raised $2.5 million in VC funding at a $50 million valuation from investors, including Caffeinated Capital’s Raymond Tonsing, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, and Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko. Read more
Bee too: Wearable AI hardware that listens and interacts with its owner has yet another entrant, Bee. Founded by former Twitter employees, the company has raised $7 million to develop an AI assistant that can take notes, surface contextual reminders and build lists. Read more
Knowde takes a cut: Sequoia-backed Knowde raised $60 million in a round that values it lower than the $500 million valuation it garnered in 2021. The company, a marketplace to buy chemicals and raw ingredients, founded by a former DuPont chemist, has now raised more than $150 million in total venture funding. Read more
Most interesting VC and fund news this week
VCs for Kamala: With the 2024 presidential election just months aways, many VCs are picking sides — publicly. This week, Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban have pledged to vote for Kamala Harris. They created a group called VCsForKamala and are using the website to solicit donations for the current vice president. As of this writing, 645 venture capitalists have pledged their support for Harris. Read more
Cook leaves Tiger: Over the last couple years, Tiger Global has had several high-profile departures, such as software investment lead John Curtius and Scott Shleifer, who moved on to the role of an adviser. The latest exodus comes from partner Alex Cook, who focused on many of Tiger’s India investments. Read more
Moxxie raises third fund: Fundraising is tough for emerging VC firms, but Moxxie Ventures defied the odds by easily surpassing its fundraising target for its third fund. The underrepresented founder-focused firm, which is led by Katie Jacobs Stanton, a seasoned investor with a strong network, has secured $95 million in fresh capital. Read more
Last but not least
Applied Intuition, an autonomous vehicle software startup, raised a $250 million Series E a few months ago. Now the company has sold $300 million in a secondary sale, adding Fidelity Management & Research Company to its long list of existing investors, which include Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Mary Meeker’s growth fund Bond. Read more