Top startup news for today, Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Good morning! Here are some of the top technology startup news stories for today, Wednesday, March 13.

Fintech startup Stash lands $65 million in funding. Stash, a New York City-based micro  digital investment platform startup has raised $65 million in funding to continue to expand its operations. The round was led by an unnamed institutional investor, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Breyer Capital. Founded in 2015 by Brandon Krieg, David Ronick, and Edward Robinson, Stash’s mission is to empower a new generation of investors, giving everyone access to financial opportunity. Stash allows over two million consumers to save money and make micro-investments (as little as $5 at a time) through a mobile app also offering a debit account linked to a card. The company has also launched a rewards program for people to receive fractional shares of stock of publicly traded companies when they make certain purchases on Amazon.com, Chipotle, and other stores.

Precision farming startup Taranis unveils enhanced platform for aerial imagery insights into farming. Taranis has unveiled its enhanced insights-centered platform for aerial imagery for farming to provide advanced actionable insights for its customers. The company has also announce the expansion of its fleet to over one hundred manned aircrafts and autonomous drones increasing reach for global customers worldwide. Founded in 2015 by CEO Ofir Schlam, Asaf Horvitz, Eli Bukchin, and Ayal Karmi, Taranis is a leading precision agriculture intelligence platform that uses sophisticated computer vision, data science and deep learning algorithms to effectively monitor fields, predict and prevent threats to over 20 million acres of crops on a granular level.

Tetrate lands $12.5 million in funding to build its enterprise-grade service mesh platform. Tetrate, a San Francisco, CA-based enterprise service mesh company, raised $12.5M in funding to build an enterprise-grade service mesh platform, to expand its open source leadership and deepen its contributions to the open source community. The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from 8VC, Intel Capital, Rain Capital, Samsung NEXT, Pankaj Patel, Guido Appenzeller, BV Jagadeesh, and Shiva Rajaraman, and others. Founded by key creators and maintainers of the Istio and Envoy open-source projects and led by Varun Talwar, CEO, Tetrate provides an enterprise-grade service mesh platform for DevOps, security, and network administrators to manage the hybrid cloud application infrastructure.

Automation Hero secures $14.5 million funding to help businesses automate repetitive processes with intelligent process automation. Automation Hero announced it has raised $14.5 million investment led by Atomico and supported by Baidu Ventures (BV) and Cherry Ventures to lead the new generation of AI and data-centric Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). In conjunction with the funding, Automation Hero also announced that Ben Blume, principal at Atomico, will join its board. This round of funding was raised within just 12 months and brings the total investment to $19M. It will be used to accelerate Automation Hero’s growth, including the expansion of its international team.

Dept acquires Rocket Insights to further fuel its expansion into the U.S. market. Dept, the leading digital agency in Europe has acquired the U.S.-based Rocket Insights to further fuel its expansion into the U.S. market. The acquisition will further fuel Dept’s global expansion with new offices in Boston and Brooklyn, led by the Rocket Insights team. Additionally, the acquisition signals a powerful merger of Dept’s digital transformation services with Rocket’s product development expertise. With over 1000 experienced team members, the Amsterdam, Holland-based agency combines creativity, technology, and data to help reinvent and accelerate digital reality by creating experiences for customers around the world.