What happened in the startup ecosystem this week? 11

Startups, unlike traditional businesses, are established with the goal of rapid growth and often take risks and receive a large amount of investment. These investments are used to accelerate the growth of the business and they often develop projects that focus on technological innovation. However, the survival and growth of startups is often a challenging process.

Entrepreneurs have to constantly improve their product and business model, impress their customers and satisfy investors in order for their business to succeed. A successful startup is achieved with a team that believes in and is excited about its product, a business model that meets the needs of customers, and proper management of its financial resources. Building a startup therefore requires a great deal of risk and dedication, but can offer significant rewards when it succeeds. Let’s see what happened in the startup ecosystem this week.

Also See: Manta Network Receives $25 Million Investment

Startups that received investment

Spline, a codeless design tool for creating 3D assets, has received investment. First Round Capital announced that it raised $15 million in a seed round. Click for more information.

Embrace, a solution that helps engineers build better mobile experiences, has announced a $20 million increase in growth funding. Click for more information.

Simbe Robotics announced new funding this week. The $28 million Series B led by Eclipse follows a $26 million Series A in late 2019. Click for more information.

Fortune Mine Games is a mobile game startup based in Istanbul. It received $2 million in seed investment. Click for more information.

OrganOx is a medical device company based in Oxford. The company raised 25 million pounds in a growth financing round led by Lauxera Capital Partners. Click for more information.

PVcase, which designs software technologies related to solar energy, announced that it has received an investment of 100 million dollars.  Click for more information.

Identity verification platform Bureau has secured an additional $4.5 million in Series A funding round, in addition to $12 million.  Click for more information.

Musinsa, an online fashion platform in South Korea, has received $190 million in investment.  Click for more information.

London-based AI startup Tractable has raised $65 million in a Series E investment round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Click for more information.

Preply, a language learning platform that connects people with teachers, said it has raised $70 million in new capital to increase its use of artificial intelligence. Click for more information.

Kuasar, which offers video analysis service with the help of artificial intelligence, received a pre-seed investment at a valuation of 19.6 million TL. Click for more information.

P0x Labs, the team behind the Manta Network, a privacy-preserving protocol that runs on the Polkadot network, successfully completed a $25 million Series A funding round today. Click for more information.

What’s new this week

The Biden administration announced that it will invest $20 billion from the federal “green bank” for clean energy projects in the region. It will also provide competitive grants to nonprofits, community development banks and other groups to invest in clean energy projects. Both funds will focus on disadvantaged communities. The $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund provides grants to three national clean financing organizations. The $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator will work with other groups to provide access to the investments needed to bring clean technology projects to fruition. Click for more information.

Norway-based online education platform Kahoot was acquired by General Atlantic, Lego Group and Goldman Sachs for $1.7 billion. General Atlantic, Lego Group and Goldman Sachs acquired Kahoot in exchange for a cash payment. In the agreement regarding the acquisition, it was stated that the online education platform was valued at 3.47 dollars per share. Click for more information.

Qualtrics, a cloud-based platform for managing online customer experiences, plans to spend $500 million on AI over the next four years. The company made the announcement this morning in conjunction with the launch of its new AI integrated platform, XM/os2 (a decidedly unwieldy name), which delivers productive AI solutions tailored to enterprise experience management use cases. “For the first time, we are bringing the power of generative AI to every part of our platform,” Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin said in a statement. Click for more information.