Anna Heim, Author at TechCrunch

In Mexico’s tense job market, Minu’s take on employee benefits includes financial wellness

Anna Heim — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0000

In a tight labor market, the best way to attract and retain talent is to look after employee well-being. As Mexico is nearing full employment, this creates tailwinds for these endeavors, but with particular awareness that financial, physical, and mental health are interconnected. “The main problem to solve in Mexico is around financial matters,” said […]

The US IPO window hasn’t reopened yet, but startups take what they can

Anna Heim — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 20:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here! Despite the short workweek in many locations, the last few days have been crammed with deal announcements and funding news, although it is too early to tell how much was just on hold before […]

Startup land wasn’t as quiet this week as you might’ve expected

Anna Heim — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 20:08:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here! This week probably wasn’t the best one to make any type of big announcement. But when it comes to startups, there are quite a few contrarians, leaving us […]

Datadog challenger Dash0 aims to dash observability bill shock

Anna Heim — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:46 +0000

The end of zero-interest rates has driven companies to look for savings wherever they can, but one area continues to be a major budget drain. Observability — collecting and understanding data and systems — typically remains an organization’s second-highest cloud expenditure, right after cloud provisioning itself. People have even gone so far as to talk […]

New funding rounds confirm that money attracts money

Anna Heim — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Money attracts money, as the saying goes. This week seemed to confirm it, with a couple startups announcing new rounds of funding only months after their previous […]

Modash is flipping the influencer marketing script by connecting brands with the long tail of creators

Anna Heim — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 17:58:29 +0000

Estonia-based startup Modash has raised a $12 million Series A led by henQ, a Dutch VC firm that prides itself in “funding the odd ones.” And what’s odd about Modash, according to CEO Avery Schrader, is that its team “has a really strong opinion in a space that nobody really has much faith in anymore.” […]

Founders and VCs back a Pan-European C corp, but an ‘EU Inc’ has a rocky road ahead

Mike Butcher, Anna Heim — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:13:24 +0000

It’s become a common refrain in political discourse: Europe needs to take radical action to remain competitive. On the long list of potential reforms, one that’s gaining particular traction is a new, EU-wide corporate status for innovative companies. Known (somewhat obscurely) as the “28th regime,” the innovation is being billed as Europe’s answer to a […]

Not all startups mourn IPOs, but liquidity still must flow

Anna Heim — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Several startups announced new rounds this week without disclosing their valuation. This doesn’t mean that these were down rounds, but rather it confirms that our collective focus […]

Investors bet on the power of light, diamonds in the trash, and more

Anna Heim — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week brought us some exciting fundraising news from around the world, and even some exits. But if you are looking for tech IPOs, you will have […]

With $11.9 million in funding, Dottxt tells AI models how to answer

Anna Heim — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:59:00 +0000

As we’ve reported before, enterprise CIOs are taking generative AI slow. One reason for that is AI doesn’t fit into existing software engineering workflows, because it literally doesn’t speak the same language. For instance, LLMs (aka large language models) require a lot of cajoling to deliver valid JSON. That’s where a U.S.-based startup called Dottxt […]

Nordic entrepreneur-led VC firm Node.vc closes €71M first fund

Anna Heim — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 06:30:00 +0000

From Switzerland’s Founderful to Italian Founders Fund and the Dutch Operator Fund, a new crop of European VC firms claim to operate as “entrepreneurs backing entrepreneurs.” Although it might still be early to call it a trend, Swedish fund Node.vc has now joined this group, with €71 million in funding to deploy into startups across […]

New rounds will help startups challenge well-funded rivals

Anna Heim — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. It was once again the private market that generated the most funding-related news in the startup world this week, both for companies and for funds. But it […]

Health insurtech startup Qantev raises €30 million to outperform LLMs with small AI models

Anna Heim — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 04:00:00 +0000

Health and life insurance providers face a rising volume of claims due to chronic disease and aging populations, but their processes lack scalability. AI automation can help, but it takes more tailoring than for other insurance types. Automating property and casualty insurance, for instance, gave rise to public company Guidewire decades ago, but health insurance […]

OpenAI secured more billions, but there’s still capital left for other startups

Anna Heim — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week once again brought us AI funding news, as well as some warnings: Some categories and stages are showing signs of overheating. Luckily, we also spotted […]

ETH Zurich spinoff Voliro’s flying robots save lives, but don’t tell its CEO

Anna Heim — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 12:00:00 +0000

We have only touched the surface of what drones can do and how ubiquitous they will become. This is also true in industry, where they have the potential to replace human labor in risky activities such as inspection at height. Swiss startup Voliro operates in this space, with flying robots that can inspect wind turbines, […]

AI dominated both YC Demo Day and startup news

Anna Heim — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week was a busy one for the startup and VC world, with its fair share of funding news and, of course, the latest edition of YC’s […]

M&As and AI are in the spotlight, but there’s still capital left for quick commerce and more

Anna Heim — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:05:00 +0000

This week brought reassuring signs that dealmaking is still happening on both sides of the table. New unicorns are being minted, and more capital is flowing into AI.

Shrinking teams, warped views, and risk aversion in this week’s startup news

Anna Heim — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:05:00 +0000

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week once again proved that the startup world isn’t homogeneous when it comes to risk-taking. Let’s have a look. Most interesting startup stories from the week […]

YC alum Odigos aims to help enterprises find errors and stamp out latency in their systems

Anna Heim — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Companies’ data architecture today looks nothing like it did 20 years ago, but monitoring and tracing tools haven’t followed suit, making it difficult for engineering teams to identify the root cause of errors and latency issues. Israeli developer Eden Federman (pictured above, right) thinks the solution is distributed tracing, a more advanced observability method, but […]

La French Tech gears up to go in a new direction

Anna Heim — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 16:43:53 +0000

After weeks in political limbo, France now has a new prime minister, former EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. But parliament remains bitterly divided, generating uncertainty for many economic sectors — including the country’s dynamic startup ecosystem, which has so far benefited from public support. La French Tech isn’t just a term referring to France’s 25,000 […]