Good morning! Below are some of the top tech startup news stories for Thursday, May 2.
Food startup Beyond Meat IPO raises $241 million as demand and appetite for veggie grows. Beyond Meat, a food startup backed by business and Hollywood celebrities including Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, has raised $241 million in its initial public offering after pricing its shares at the top end of an elevated price range. Beyond Meat, which makes vegan chicken and beef substitutes, was founded in 2009 by Ethan brown. It has raised a total of $122 million in funding over 7 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Oct 5, 2018 from a Series H round.
FreightHub secures $30 million in Series B financing to expand footprint in Asian markets. FreightHub, a Berlin, Germany-based digital freight forwarder, raised $30m in Series B funding to continue to develop its digital service offering and to expand its footprint in the Asian markets. The round was led by Rider Global, with participation from Maersk Growth, Northzone, Unbound, Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital (GFC), and Cherry Ventures. Founded in 2016 by CEO Ferry Heilemann, Erik Muttersbach, Michael Wax, and Fabian Heilemann, FreightHub is a digital asset-free freight freight-forwarding service for sea, air and rail freight, covering the entire process chain from quotation, booking, document management, handling and supply chain data analytics.
Google launches CallJoy, a virtual cloud-based customer service phone agent for small businesses. Google has launched a new cloud-based phone agent called CallJoy that enables small business owners to measure, improve and automate customer service, the tech giant announced in a blog post Wednesday. The U.S.’s 30.2 million small businesses receive about 400 million incoming daily calls from consumers placing a to-go order, booking an appointment, inquiring about inventory and more.
Elevate Security acquires Phish5 to broaden its services. Elevate Security, an integrated Security Behavior Training and Analytics platform, acquired Phish5, a phishing simulation suite startup for an undisclosed amount. The Phish5 product has been integrated into the Elevate Platform, and is renamed as Elevate Phishing. Co-founded CEO by Robert Fly, Elevate Security provides an integrated security behavior training and analytics platform which enables CISOs and security awareness practitioners to get holistic visibility into employees’ security behaviors, along with security behavior change tools, all in a single system.
InCountry launches with $7 million to help multinational companies store customer data locally. InCountry, a San Francisco-based founded by Peter Yared, has raised $7 million to help multinational companies with global data compliance and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that came into effect last year. InCountry.com comprises of team with extensive experience in enterprise infrastructure software, cyber security architecture, cryptography, and developer tools. The company offers an API that funnels a company’s data to and from InCountry’s local “top tier” data centers, which include a combination from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud.
