Top tech startup news for today, Wednesday, January 22, 2020: Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Jumia, Sysdig, Promethium

Good morning! Below are the top tech startups news for today, Wednesday, January 22, 2020.

African unicorn Jumia looks to services, platforms to halt slide. African e-commerce unicorn Jumia Technologies, which last year became Africa’s first tech startup to list in New York, is shifting its focus on proving it can turn a profit after a bad 2019, according to a report from Reuters, citing one of its co-founders. “We’re going to be extremely disciplined and very focused on our path to profitability,” Hodara told Reuters on Tuesday at the company’s office in Lagos. Jumia, which hit a peak value of close to $4 billion, has seen its shares fall by nearly 70% since its IPO last April.

SoftBank, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, others invest $161 million in cell-based meat startup Memphis Meats. Memphis Meats, a food tech startup and leading cell-based meat, poultry and seafood company, announced today it has closed $161 million Series funding round. The round was led by tech heavyweights including SoftBank Group, Norwest and Temasek. Also joining the round are new and existing investors including Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Threshold Ventures, Cargill, Tyson Foods, Finistere, Future Ventures, Kimbal Musk, Fifty Years and CPT Capital. Based in Berkeley, CA, Memphis Meats is developing methods to produce meat directly from animal cells, without the need to breed or slaughter animals. The company released the world’s first cell-based meatball in February 2016 and the world’s first cell-based poultry in March 2017.

LumApps Raises $70M in Series C Funding. LumApps, a New York City-based SaaS provider of cloud-based enterprise communication solutions, raised $70m in Series C funding to accelerate its investment in R&D with a particular focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Product development, and  Sales and Marketing. The round, which brought total funding raised to date to $100 million, was led by new investor Goldman Sachs Growth with participation from Bpifrance, through its Growth Fund Large Venture, alongside Idinvest Partners, Iris Capital, and Famille C (Courtin-Clarins’ family office). Led by Sébastien Ricard, CEO, LumApps is a social and collaborative intranet platform designed to connect, inform, and engage employees.

Container security startup Sysdig scores $70M in late-stage funding round. Sysdig, a container security startup that enables companies to securely run cloud-native workloads in production, said today it has secured a massive $70 million in Series E round of funding that brings its total capital raised to $206 million. The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with a participation from previous investors Bain Capital Ventures and Accel and new investors Glynn Capital and Goldman Sachs. Sysdig will use the funds to extend market presence and leadership in enabling enterprises to confidently run cloud-native workloads in production. Founded in 2013 by Loris Degioanni, the San Francisco, California-based Sysdig offers two main products designed to secure container environments, which are used to host modern software applications that can run on any platform.

Promethium raises $6M to let businesses use natural language processing to get answers to complex questions. Promethium, an augmented data management provider and the first company, has raised $6M in funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategies and continued innovation of its Data Navigation System™ (DNS), which the company officially announced last October. The round was led by .406 Ventures with participation from existing investor Zetta Venture Partners. In conjunction with the funding, Promethium also announced that Graham Brooks, Partner at .406 Ventures, has joined its Board of Directors. Founded in 2018 by Kaycee Lai, Promethium is the first augmented data management provider to allow users to tap their organization’s entire data estate for answers to questions asked in plainspoken language, eliminating the dependence on manual SQL scripting and increasing innovation cycle time by 100x.

Israeli IoT startup Veego AI drives auto-support into connected homes. Veego Software, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup that is putting an end to malfunctions in the connected homes, today announced the Veego Self-Care solution based on artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies, enabling real-time self-support in the connected home. The solution shifts costly and cumbersome subscriber-support actions from traditional customer care to the vigilant Veego AI, saving service providers vast technical support resources and expenses. Founded just about two years ago by Amir Kotler, Denis Sirov, and Reffael Caspi, Veego software resolves malfunctions in the connected home, autonomously discovering devices and services, and resolving problems before subscribers even experience them.