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DeHaat, a startup that offers a wide-range of agricultural services to farmers in India , has raised $60 million in a new funding round as it looks to deepen its penetration in the country and reach break-even profitability within two years. Sofina Ventures and Temasek co-led the Patna and Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s Series E funding, it said, at a valuation between $700 million and $800 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. Existing backers RTP Global Partners, Prosus Ventures and Lightrock India also participated in the new round. Farming is a $350 billion industry in India, but farmers face a myriad of challenges in the country that were largely unaddressed until upstarts such as DeHaat arrived on the scene. Farmers struggle with securing agri-inputs, finding buyers for their produce and in maintaining enough runway. Giants such as Reliance and Adani Group offer some services to farmers, but their involvement in the agriculture sector remains largely limite...

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 . Heeeeeey! Couple of fun things we have in the pipeline at the moment… Did you know we’re looking for you and your expertise for our TechCrunch founder summit ? Join us for a free, one-hour webinar on Thursday, December 8 and learn about “Building a Compensation Plan for Better Retention,” where we’re talking with two of the top folks at BambooHR, who’ll be offering their expert guidance. If you’re wondering what our Spotify Wrapped listening personalities are, you are in luck. See below. Happy end of November — onward to the last month of the year! — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 #SpotifyWrapped : If you were like most of us TechCrunchers today, you were finding out what Spotify had to say about your year-long listening trends. Sarah writes that in addition to the list of your most listened-to songs, Spotify Wrapped 2022 attempted ...

Microsoft may have long had OpenAI as its trusty partner (after its sizable investment ), but AWS today announced that Stability AI , one of the hottest new upstarts in the generative AI space and the company behind Stable Diffusion , is doubling down on its cloud, making it its “preferred cloud provider to build and scale its AI models for image, language, audio, video, and 3D content generation.” In addition, Stability AI will also work with AWS to make its open-source tools and model available to more students, researchers, startups and enterprises (which sounds quite a bit like what Microsoft and OpenAI said when they announced their partnership). Stability AI, which recently announced a $101 million funding round at a valuation of over $1 billion, was already using thousands of Nvidia GPUs in the AWS cloud to train its models. Now, the two companies are formalizing this relationship, with Stability AI planning to use AWS’ SageMaker ML platform, on top of its lower-level infras...

Over the past 11 years, eFounders has refined the startup studio model in Europe. The company has contributed to the launch of more than 30 different startups, including three unicorns —  Spendesk , Aircall and Front . While things seem to be doing well for the startup studio, eFounders is pivoting — sort of. As of today, eFounders is becoming Hexa , a holding company for different startup studios. You could have seen this change coming as eFounders hasn’t been just eFounders for a while. In addition to its initial studio focused on the future of work, eFounders has already launched two new studios — Logic Founders for fintech startups and 3founders for web3 startups. Hexa is going to run three different studios — Logic Founders, 3founders and, yes, eFounders. So what is happening with eFounders then? “I started writing a LinkedIn article saying that it is the last time I’m writing as the founder of eFounders,” eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elzière told me. But he is n...

Prismforce, an India-U.S. startup that provides IT and tech services companies with tools to build better talent supply chain, has raised $13.6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India. IT providers spend a large part of their variable costs on hiring skilled employees. But finding those employees from the ever-growing talent market and deploying them effectively to get adequate results is one of the most significant pain points for the industry worldwide. Prismforce is taking Amazon’s approach to matching the demand for talent with the supply for companies offering IT and tech services, said co-founder and CEO Somnath Chatterjee. “We are treating this as a supply chain problem, where you have to standardize demand, standardize supply, make the match happen, almost as if you are an e-commerce engine and e-commerce marketplace trying to make a talent marketplace,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. After spending 14 years as a partner at McKinsey, Chatterjee f...

Gogoro, the Taiwanese company that’s commercializing battery swapping ecosystems for electric scooters, is targeting the Philippines as its next market. The startup said Tuesday it has partnered with Filipino conglomerate Ayala Corporation, telecomms provider Globe and corporate venture builder 917Ventures to launch a B2B battery swapping pilot in Manila in the first quarter of 2023. 917Ventures is a subsidiary of Globe, which is part of Ayala Corporation’s umbrella. The partnership with heavy hitters in the Filipino ecosystem comes a few days after the Philippines approved the removal of import duties on electric vehicles and their parts for the next five years. The move is part of the Philippines’ Electric Vehicle Industry Development Act , signed into law this year, to promote clean energy innovation. Horace Luke, founder and CEO of Gogoro, told TechCrunch the tariff removal applies to battery charging and swapping equipment, as well, making it the perfect time for Gogoro to intr...

Prismforce, an India-U.S. startup that provides IT and tech services companies with tools to build better talent supply chain, has raised $13.6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India. IT providers spend a large part of their variable costs on hiring skilled employees. But finding those employees from the ever-growing talent market and deploying them effectively to get adequate results is one of the most significant pain points for the industry worldwide. Prismforce is taking Amazon’s approach to matching the demand for talent with the supply for companies offering IT and tech services, said co-founder and CEO Somnath Chatterjee. “We are treating this as a supply chain problem, where you have to standardize demand, standardize supply, make the match happen, almost as if you are an e-commerce engine and e-commerce marketplace trying to make a talent marketplace,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. After spending 14 years as a partner at McKinsey, Chatterjee f...

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 . Oh hey! While we have you here, grab your calendar — we’ve got some things for you to add. For the stargazers among us, we’ll be in Los Angeles doing TC Sessions: Space on December 6. And on April 20, 2023, we’re heading to Boston for our TC Early Stage festival . Come to either. Come to both. Come to neither. We love you all just the same. But we’d prefer to see your faces in person if we can! Oh, and did you know it’s “Giving Tuesday”? That means it’s time to think about which of your favorite causes deserve some of your time or dollars, if you have some of either to spare. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 And the winner is… : Okay, all you fans of taking photos of yourself “in the now,” no matter where you are. Ivan writes that BeReal won “app of the year” for 2022 in Apple’s annual App Store Awards. Order up! : Nigerian restaurant ...

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 . Oh hey! While we have you here, grab your calendar — we’ve got some things for you to add. For the stargazers among us, we’ll be in Los Angeles doing TC Sessions: Space on December 6. And on April 20, 2023, we’re heading to Boston for our TC Early Stage festival . Come to either. Come to both. Come to neither. We love you all just the same. But we’d prefer to see your faces in person if we can! Oh, and did you know it’s “Giving Tuesday”? That means it’s time to think about which of your favorite causes deserve some of your time or dollars, if you have some of either to spare. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 And the winner is… : Okay, all you fans of taking photos of yourself “in the now,” no matter where you are. Ivan writes that BeReal won “app of the year” for 2022 in Apple’s annual App Store Awards. Order up! : Nigerian restaurant ...

At its traditional evening keynote at re:Invent, AWS tonight announced quite a bit of new hardware in its cloud, starting with a new version of its Nitro hypervisor, new instance types, and a new version of its custom Arm-based Graviton chips which was specifically designed for powering high-performance computing workloads. This new Graviton3E chip — a variant of the existing Graviton line — promises significant performance improvements, including 35% better performance for workloads that heavily depend on vector instructions. These new chips will obviously power new AWS EC2 instance types, starting with the logically dubbed Hpc7G. This new instance type will come in a variety of sizes, with up to 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory. It’ll take until early 2023 before these instances become available, though. For more network-intensive workloads, AWS is also launching a new Graviton 3E instance type (c7gn). For Intel fans, there are also new Ice Lake-based Xeon-based machines , too. Ima...

On November 22, alternative financing startup Pipe announced that its three co-founders were stepping down from their executive roles and that a search for a new, “veteran” CEO had commenced. In an exclusive interview, co-founder and former co-CEO Harry Hurst told TechCrunch that the trio were “0-1 builders, not at-scale operators.” He said the company’s revenue was growing year-over-year and that the company had five years of runway. Finding the right successor could take a while, however. For starters, Pipe — which has raised more than $300 million from investors since it was founded in 2019 — has just one outside board member in Peter Ackerson, a general partner at Fin Capital who himself became a VC just three years ago. Hurst and fellow founders Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia are the only other directors on the board. More, detractors seem bent on raising questions about the way the business has been run. Since that article was published, several sources who wished to remai...

On November 22, alternative financing startup Pipe announced that its three co-founders were stepping down from their executive roles and that a search for a new, “veteran” CEO had commenced. In an exclusive interview, co-founder and former co-CEO Harry Hurst told TechCrunch that the trio were “0-1 builders, not at-scale operators.” He said the company’s revenue was growing year-over-year and that the company had five years of runway. Finding the right successor could take a while, however. For starters, Pipe — which has raised more than $300 million from investors since it was founded in 2019 — has just one outside board member in Peter Ackerson, a general partner at Fin Capital who himself became a VC just three years ago. Hurst and fellow founders Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia are the only other directors on the board. More, detractors seem bent on raising questions about the way the business has been run. Since that article was published, several sources who wished to remai...