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Shipfix , a relatively new startup aiming to drag the dry cargo shipping industry into the digital age, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Idinvest Partners, with participation from Kima Ventures, The Family, Bpifrance and strategic business angels. The company was founded in December 2018 by Serge Alleyne (CEO) and Antoine Grisay (COO), and launched just two months ago. “We’re trying to fix the email overload for everybody involved in the process of fixing a dry cargo ship by providing a comprehensive market monitor,” Alleyne tells TechCrunch. “We’re also producing data-driven insights that are profoundly missing in the bulk/break-bulk space. Actually the last revolution of the dry cargo industry was email, and so far people still rely on indices based on a panel of brokers while all the data is available in emails”. To solve this, Alleyne says that Shipfix connects to its clients’ email to extract and anonymously aggregate “billions of data points using...

As Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart spend billions to make a dent in India’s retail market and reel from recent regulatory hurdles , the two companies have stumbled upon a new challenge: Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man. Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio, two subsidiaries of Ambani’s Reliance Industries, said they have soft launched JioMart , their e-commerce venture, in parts of the state of Maharashtra — Mumbai, Kalyan and Thane. The e-commerce venture, which is being marketed as “Desh Ki Nayi Dukaan” (Hindi for new store for the country), currently offers a catalog of 50,000 grocery items and promises “free and express delivery.” In an email to employees, accessed by TechCrunch, the two aforementioned subsidiaries that are working together on the e-commerce venture, said they plan to expand the service to many parts of India in coming months. A Reliance spokesperson declined to share more. The soft launch this week comes months after Ambani, who runs Reliance Industries — Indi...

Postmates and Uber have filed a complaint in California federal district court, alleging that a bill limiting how companies can label workers as independent contractors is unconstitutional. The complaint, which includes two gig workers as co-plaintiffs, was filed in U.S. District Court on Monday, days before Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5) is due to go into effect on Jan. 1. It asks for a preliminary injunction against AB-5 while the lawsuit is under consideration. The complaint argues that AB-5 violates several clauses in the U.S. and California constitutions, including equal protection because of how it classifies gig workers for ride-sharing and on-demand delivery companies compared to the exemptions it grants to workers who do “substantively identical work” in more than twenty other industries. AB-5 was authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Democrat representing the 80th Assembly District in southern California and signed into law in September by Governor Gavin Newsom. It is int...

Huawei reported resilient revenue for 2019 on Tuesday as the embattled Chinese technology group continues to grow despite prolonged American campaign against its business, but cautioned that growth next year could prove more challenging. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, wrote in a New Year’s message to employees that the company’s revenue has topped 850 billion Chinese yuan ($122 billion) this year, a new record high for the Chinese group and an 18% increase over the previous year. Xu said Huawei, the second largest smartphone maker globally, sold 240 million handsets this year, up from 206 million last year. “These figures are lower than our initial projections, yet business remains solid and we stand strong in the face of adversity,” he wrote. He acknowledged that Huawei is confronting a “strategic and long-term” campaign against its business by the U.S. government . If the campaign persists for long, it would create even more “difficult” environment for the 32-year-old firm...

Funding for tech startups has been on an inevitable upswing for years, a result of a virtuous circle where wildly successful tech companies on the public markets whet the appetites of investors and investors’ backers to find more diamonds, a push met by a pull from the rush of talent with entrepreneurial aspirations out to put that money to work. 2019 has felt a bumper year in that longer trend, with 9-figure rounds ($100 million or more) and “unicorn” statuses so prevalent that the numbers have started to cease to be news items in themselves. With 2020 now just days away, a look at the 50 biggest funding rounds for start-ups in the past year draw out some trends. We’re pulling out the top five below for a closer look, but it’s interesting too to see some of the other trends emerging across the rest of the pack. Automotive remains a huge pull when it comes to raising big bucks: part of the reason is because the space is capital intensive, as it straddles both software and hardware (t...

Venture capital investment exploded across a number of geographies in 2019 despite the constant threat of an economic downturn. San Francisco, of course, remains the startup epicenter of the world, shutting out all other geographies when it comes to capital invested. Still, other regions continue to grow, raking in more capital this year than ever. In Utah, a new hotbed for startups , companies like Weave, Divvy and MX Technology raised a collective $370 million from private market investors. In the Northeast , New York City experienced record-breaking deal volume with median deal sizes climbing steadily. Boston is closing out the decade with at least 10 deals larger than $100 million announced this year alone. And in the lovely Pacific Northwest, home to tech heavyweights Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is experiencing an uptick in VC interest in what could be a sign the town is finally reaching its full potential. Seattle startups raised a total of $3.5 billion in VC funding across...

2019 was a packed year for commercial space and space startups, but 2020 isn’t likely to see any kind of slowdown. In fact, it’s going to get a lot busier in a few key ways that could have the effect of driving even more enthusiasm, energy and funding into the emerging space tech industry. The biggest thing happening in space next year is easy to pick out already: NASA’s Commercial Crew program. Both of the partners the agency selected to work with it on returning human launch capabilities to American soil, Boeing and SpaceX, are in the process of accomplishing the last key things they need to get done before actually putting astronauts on board their spacecraft, and it seems very likely that 2020 is when we’ll finally see those missions fly. Here’s a breakdown of that and other things to watch for 2020 in space tech that will define the industry, and determine whether it continues to be a hotbed of investment and activity, or whether it slows in terms of VC and startup interest. Cr...