#gradient ventures

Google’s venture capital arm Gradient Ventures has made another foray into Europe, investing as part of a $3.2 million seed round in two-year-old German startup Weflow. Weflow is the latest in a line of ecosystem startups to emerge from frustrations with using the omnipresent CRM (customer relationship management) software that is Salesforce. These venture-backed upstarts focus on things like…

Generative AI has undoubtedly been the big buzzword of the past year, driven in large part by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and ChatGPT. But while the ability to create all manner of fresh content from a simple prompt raises various societal and ethical questions, it also opens the door to myriad businesses that simply would not have been possible just 12 months ago. Venture Capitalists (VCs) have been…

Vault, an online banking platform serving small-to-medium sized business (SMBs) in Canada, is launching to the public today after raising $3.7 million in seed funding. Founded in late 2021 by Saud Aziz and Ahmed Shafik (who previously worked at sunday, Revolut and Koho), Toronto, Ontario-based Vault says its mission is to “revolutionize” the banking experience for Canadian entrepreneurs and SMBs…

The inability to accurately assess risk for insurance purposes is costing the industry a lot of money. Earlier this year, State Farm reported that its property and casualty underwriting business took a $13 billion hit in 2022 due to “rapidly increasing claims severity and significant additions to prior accident year incurred claims.” Axle is trying to change that. The two-year-old company…

Data has emerged as one of the world’s greatest resources, underpinning everything from video-recommendation engines and digital banking, to the burgeoning AI revolution. But in a world where data has become increasingly distributed across locations, from databases to data warehouses to data lakes and beyond, combining it all into a compatible format for use in real-time scenarios can be a…

BlockJoy, a startup providing white label blockchain nodes as a service, raised a total of $12 million from its seed and Series A rounds, the company exclusi1vely shared with TechCrunch. The Boston-based startup aims to reduce operating costs by up to 80% for enterprises running staking nodes and APIs as a service, the two co-founders, Sean Carey and Chris Bruce, said to TechCrunch. “On AWS, it…

Meet the startups competing at TC Sessions: Crypto

We’re thrilled to announce the three early-stage startups that will take the stage and go head-to-head in the pitch competition at TC Sessions: Crypto — this Thursday, November 17, in Miami. There’s still time to be in the room. Buy your pass right now to watch these founders square off in front of a live audience. They’ll have to work hard to impress our expert VC judges — Wen-Wen Lam, partner,…

Gradient backs Butter’s operating system for food distribution businesses

Many small to mid-sized food distributors still run on pen and paper. This makes it difficult to pinpoint things like how certain products are performing and customer churn. It also makes it hard for businesses to comply with the FDA’s new food traceability regulations. Butter’s solution is an all-in-one management system that helps distributors run their businesses while serving as a system of…