World Of News

“Instant” grocery delivery has been a big theme among food startups in Europe, where customers can order from a limited assortment of items and get their purchases packed from “dark stores” and delivered in sometimes as little as 10 or 15 minutes. But today a startup that’s built a much bigger proposition — a virtual supermarket of 17,000+ items that it delivers in as little as two hours — is announcing some funding as it expands in Europe. Rohlik , a Czech startup that has built an online grocery ordering and delivery business selling grocery fare — which it procures itself wholesale, or in partnership with established businesses, combining that with items sourced from local small businesses — has picked up €100 million ($119 million at today’s rates). This Series C investment values Rohlik at €1 billion ($1.2 billion). The round is being led by Index Ventures, which was also part of Rohlik’s $230 million Series B that it raised only three months ago . Previous backers including Par...

Kevin Novak joined Uber as its 21st employee its seventh engineer in 2011, and by 2014, he was the company’s head of data science. He talks proudly of that time, but like all good things, by the end of 2017, he’d done what he wanted to do at Uber and left. At first, he picked up the pace of his angel investing, work he’d already begun focusing on during weekends and evenings, ultimately building a portfolio of more than 50 startups (including the fintech Pipe and the autonomous checkout company Standard Cognition ). He also began advising both startups and venture firms — including Playground Global, Costanoa Ventures, Renegade Partners and Data Collective — and, eventually realizing he wants to spend the rest of his career as a startup investor,  Novak this year decided to launch his own venture outfit in Menlo Park, Calif.: Rackhouse Venture Capital . Indeed, Rackhouse just closed its debut fund with $15 million, anchored by Uber’s first head of engineering, Curtis Chambers; S...

Nodes & Links is a scheduling platform for large-scale infrastructure projects which works out when the nuts and bolts for the bridge (for example) should be delivered, and in what order. Unsurprisingly, complex infrastructure projects often get this wrong. The company has now raised an $11 million Series A funding round led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150 , alongside Zigg Capital and Westerly Winds, with participation from existing investors Entrepreneur First, ADV and Seedcamp. Launched in 2018, the company’s Aegis platform is used by Balfour Beatty, Costain and BAM Nuttal, and claims to have delivered millions in cost savings on infrastructure projects, because the building materials and assembly ends up being organized in the right order. Given that most major projects run significantly over time and over budget, scheduling correctly can make a huge difference to costs, as well as the impact on the environment. The company quotes a survey by Oxford University that ...

VividQ , a UK-based deeptech startup with technology for rendering holograms on legacy screens, has raised $15 million to develop its technology for next-generation digital displays and devices. And it’s already lining up manufacturing partners in the US, China and Japan to do it. The funding round, a Seed extension round, was led by UTokyo IPC, the venture investment arm for the University of Tokyo. It was joined by Foresight Williams Technology (a joint collaboration between Foresight Group and Williams Advanced Engineering), Japanese Miyako Capital, APEX Ventures in Austria, and the R42 Group VC out of Stanford. Previous investors University of Tokyo Edge Capital, Sure Valley Ventures, and Essex Innovation also participated. The funding will be used to scale VividQ’s HoloLCD technology, which, claims the company, turns consumer-grade screens into holographic displays. Founded in 2017, VividQ has already worked with ARM, and other partners, including Compound Photonics, Himax Tec...

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 30, 2021. It’s the last day of the quarter. It’s the last day of the first half of the year. It’s the halfway mark for your New Year’s resolutions. The kickoff of Q3 means that we are heading into yet another earnings season. To close the second quarter, a number of companies went public including Didi and SentinelOne. The TechCrunch take is that we’re seeing some interesting pricing differentials between companies from the United States compared to China. — Alex The TechCrunch Top 3 Robinhood fined ahead of IPO: While we count down to Robinhood’s IPO filing, long expected after a strong first quarter , the company was hit with $70 million in fines and penalties today for what the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) described as “widespread and significant harm suffered by customers.” Venture...

Lego has worked extremely closely with Apple over the years, experimenting with unreleased iOS tech and demoing it onstage at launch events like WWDC; this has included some pretty heavy tinkering on the augmented reality ARKit platform that they’ve integrated several of their play sets with, adding digital experiences to the physical toys. But one of the most impressive integrations between iOS tech and physical Lego bricks just popped up on the App Store, and it’s built by a team of fans. The new app Brickit is aiming to one-up what even the Lego Group has created with an app that uses computer-vision tech to quickly make sense of a mountain of bricks. All users need to do is haphazardly dump Legos into a single layer on the floor. From there the app is able to quickly analyze and identify bricks in the collection and serve up some fun little projects that users have all or most of the bricks they need to build. The most impressive element of the app is its speed — the app is able...

Geoffrey Moore Contributor Share on Twitter Known for his seminal book "Crossing the Chasm," Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker and adviser who splits his consulting time between startup companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolio and established high-tech enterprises — including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5Networks, Gainsight, Google and Splunk. Jeff Bussgang, a co-founder and general partner at Flybridge Capital, recently wrote an Extra Crunch guest post that argued it is time for a refresh when it comes to the technology adoption life cycle and the chasm . His argument went as follows: VCs in recent years have drastically underestimated the size of SAMs (serviceable addressable markets) for their startup investments because they were “trained to think only a portion of the SAM is obtainable within any reasonable window of time because of the chasm.” The chasm is no longer the barrier it once was because businesses have finally understood ...