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Z?m wins $150M from San Francisco schools to modernize and electrify student transport

TechCrunch

The startup’s fleet of 206 buses, vans and cars is distributed based on specific use cases, placing students who live on busier routes on school buses and sending out cars and vans for others to increase efficiency. The buses previously used were old and owned by the incumbent and have been moved out of the city.

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Tile secures $40 million to take on Apple AirTag with new products

TechCrunch

The company has been a longtime leader in the lost item finder space, offering consumers small devices they can attach to items — like handbags, luggage, bikes, wallets, keys, and more — which can then be tracked using the Tile smartphone app for iOS or Android. “We felt this was the right mix of capital choice for us.”

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6 VCs explain why embedded insurance isn’t the only hot opportunity in insurtech

TechCrunch

He thinks that early use cases may center on customer service, but is certain that more will follow. Every time a big name enters insurance, there is always a mix of skepticism from incumbents and a reminder that change is needed. And their huge customer base could be a competitive edge. That’s a very good question.

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Spryker raises $130M at a $500M+ valuation to provide B2Bs with agile e-commerce tools

TechCrunch

It plans to use the funding to expand its own technology tools, as well as grow internationally. Spryker’s argument is that by being a newer company (founded in 2018) it has a more up-to-date stack that puts it ahead of older startups and more incumbent players like SAP and Oracle.

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Daily Crunch: Months after rejecting a $17B bid, Zendesk sells to private equity group for $10.2B

TechCrunch

As Frederic writes, Amazon trained the system — which currently supports Java, JavaScript and Python — on billions of lines of publicly available open source code and its own codebase, as well as publicly available documentation and code on public forums. .” Reactions have been mixed, Jacquelyn reports.

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Convoy: The Future of Truck Freight

Y Combinator

In the last few years, incumbents have started to adopt technology to fix inefficiencies, but they’ve focused on tools to streamline individual tasks (e.g., Fragmented supply and demand is a problem for incumbents, but a great opportunity for a digital marketplace. On the supply side of the US freight market, there are 1.6

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What goes up must come down

TechCrunch

Banking-as-a-service startup Synctera is partnering with Solvent , a fintech company that is building “affordable financial services” to support those who were previously incarcerated. BNPL player Affirm last week reported mixed financial results. Another example of fintech for good. While its fiscal first quarter revenue of $361.62