TechCrunch Startup News

Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse company, doesn’t tend to do small rounds. On Friday night word leaked out about its latest mega round. This one was for $479 million on a $12.4 billion valuation. That’s triple the company’s previous $3.9 billion valuation from October 2018, and CEO Frank Slootman suggested that the company’s next finance event is likely an IPO. Dragoneer Investment led the round along with new investor Salesforce Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A startup called Our.News is working to make its users smarter consumers of the news. In other words, it’s confronting some big, seemingly intractable problems. For one thing, there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation online — as Our.News founder and CEO Richard Zack put it, “Unfortunately, you have thousands of people all over the world who intentionally make it hard for people to know what’s true. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Datree, the early stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort. Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million seed round announced in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Deliverr doesn’t own a warehouse or a delivery truck, but the startup is helping e-commerce companies not named Amazon achieve Amazon-like two-day shipping. The startup does it with intelligent algorithms, and today it announced a $40 million Series C investment. Activant Capital led the round. Other investors in the company include 8VC, GLP and Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Peterson. The company reports it has raised a total of $70 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snapchat’s developer platform is blowing up as a gateway to teen social app users. Hoop is the latest Snap Kit blockbuster, rocketing to #2 on the overall App Store charts this month with its Tinder -esque swiping interface for discovering people and asking to message with them over Snapchat. Within a week of going viral, unfunded French startup Dazz saw Hoop score 2.5 million downloads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Industrial robots are expensive. But, then, so are construction mistakes. Being off by an inch here or there adds up quickly, and too often crews need to correctly costly errors. There’s a reason construction has become the next great target of the robotics and automation industries, with a number of startups vying to create solutions that can constantly monitor sites to detect mistakes before it’s too late. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As esports grows and creates opportunities for gamers to level up to the pro or streamer level, there is still a huge barrier in the way. There is not a wealth of training options for gamers. If you can’t get better within the environment of the game itself, then you’ve peaked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning Finix, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup selling payments tech to other businesses, announced that it has raised a $35 million Series B. Sequoia led the round, which also saw participation from new investors Activant Capital and Inspired Capital. Finix did not disclose a new valuation as part of its round, and declined to share any growth metrics regarding its business. Instead, it offered a TAM figure and noted the number of countries in which it currently operates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Those looking outside of Silicon Valley as a potential hub for their startup might want to take a gander at Utah — at least that’s the kind of trend the new Silicon Slopes Venture Fund hopes to create. The newly formed fund, put together by Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, Omniture and Domo founder Josh James and Stance co-founder turned Pelion Venture Partners’ Jeff Kearl, pledges to invest solely in Utah-based startups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpsRamp, a service that helps IT teams discover, monitor, manage and — maybe most importantly — automate their hybrid environments, today announced that it has closed a $37.5 million funding round led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, with participation from existing investor Sapphire Ventures and new investor Hewlett Packard Enterprise. OpsRamp last raised funding in 2017, when Sapphire led its $20 million Series A round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices