Latest news with #Crunchbase
African Manager
22-05-2025
- Business
- African Manager
Tunisia 82nd in Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2025
The global organization StartupBlink has released its updated 2025 Global Startup Ecosystem Index, providing an in-depth analysis of startup ecosystems worldwide. The report evaluates over 1,400 cities and 100 countries, offering detailed national and city rankings alongside regional and sector-specific insights. Leveraging data from partners like Crunchbase, SEMRush, and BrightData, it serves as a critical resource for startups, policymakers, and investors making location-based decisions. The Tunisian ecosystem is ranked 82nd. With a score of 0.787, Tunisia is in the top 10 in Africa (7th), having gained eight places compared with the previous edition and representing annual growth of 15.3%. Within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Tunisia is ranked 14th; however, the report emphasizes that this progress is insufficient given the growing competition from other North African countries. In fact, Tunisia's growth remains the lowest in the region at under 15%, which restricts its ambitions in such a competitive regional context. Tunis, the capital, moved up 18 places to 327th in the world. This brings it closer to the top 300, with a local ecosystem growing steadily at over 22% per year. Sousse is ranked 1,233rd in the world. Overall, Tunisian startups raised around $15.2 million in 2024. Meanwhile, Egypt has confirmed its dominance in North Africa, with an ecosystem almost three times as powerful as Tunisia's. It ranks 65th worldwide and 7th in the MENA region, with Cairo leading the way and achieving a score far higher than Alexandria's. In 2024, Egypt is set to achieve its best regional ranking since 2021, with its start-ups having raised 281.6 million dollars. Second in North Africa behind Tunisia, Morocco ranked 88th in the world with a score of 0.687. In 2024, it attracted $176.9 million in funding. It should be noted that none of the other countries in the North African region feature in the ranking. North Africa recorded the lowest annual growth rate of the continent's major regions, at 15.7%. South Africa retains its leading position on the continent (52nd in the world), ahead of Kenya (58th), Egypt and Nigeria (65th), with Cape Verde (75th) closing the top five. The most powerful start-up ecosystems worldwide are found in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada and Sweden. In terms of cities, San Francisco remains the world leader, closely followed by New York, London, Los Angeles and Beijing. These cities stand out for their entrepreneurial dynamism and appropriate infrastructure. In the Arab world, the United Arab Emirates dominates the rankings, occupying 21st place worldwide thanks to its favorable environment for startups, economic openness, and incentive policies.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Databricks to buy open-source database startup Neon for $1B
Data analytics platform Databricks said on Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, for about $1 billion. Databricks said acquiring Neon's tech would let it combine the startup's serverless relational database management system with its own data intelligence services to let its customers deploy AI agents more efficiently. Founded in 2021 by CEO Nikita Shamgunov and software engineers Heikki Linnakangas and Stas Kelvich, Neon offers a managed cloud-based database platform (with free and usage-based paid plans) that lets developers clone databases and preview changes before they go to production. The platform automatically scales processor, memory and storage according to usage, and supports branching — isolated database instances for testing and development — as well as point-in-time recovery. Those capabilities, Databricks says, are ideally suited to workloads run by AI agents, which operate faster than human developers but often require supervision to control for errors. Citing recent telemetry, the company said 80% of the databases "provisioned on Neon were created automatically by AI agents rather than by humans." 'The era of AI-native, agent-driven applications is reshaping what a database must do,' said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, in a statement. 'Neon proves it: four out of every five databases on their platform are spun up by code, not humans. By bringing Neon into Databricks, we're giving developers a serverless Postgres that can keep up with agentic speed, pay-as-you-go economics and the openness of the Postgres community.' Neon has so far raised $129.5 million, according to Crunchbase, and its investors include Microsoft's venture arm M12, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, and Notable Capital. Databricks, for its part, has so far accumulated more than $19 billion in financing, and in January closed a $15.3 billion financing at a $62 billion valuation. Databricks hasn't held back from dipping into its warchest as it seeks to capitalize on the AI boom and position itself as a top service to build, test and deploy AI models and agents. The company last June acquired data management company Tabular, reportedly for nearly $2 billion, and in 2023 bought MosaicML, an open-source platform for training large language models and deploying AI tools, for $1.3 billion. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at
TechCrunch
14-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Databricks to buy open-source database startup Neon for $1B
Data analytics platform Databricks said on Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, for about $1 billion. Databricks said acquiring Neon's tech would let it combine the startup's serverless relational database management system with its own data intelligence services to let its customers deploy AI agents more efficiently. Founded in 2021 by industry veteran CEO Nikita Shamgunov, software engineers Heikki Linnakangas and Stas Kelvich, Neon offers a managed cloud-based database platform (with free and usage-based paid plans) that lets developers clone databases and preview changes before they go to production. The platform automatically scales processor, memory and storage according to usage, and supports branching — isolated database instances for testing and development — as well as point-in-time recovery. Those capabilities, Databricks says, are ideally suited to workloads run by AI agents, which operate faster than human developers but often require supervision to control for errors. Citing recent telemetry, the company said 80% of the databases 'provisioned on Neon were created automatically by AI agents rather than by humans.' 'The era of AI-native, agent-driven applications is reshaping what a database must do,' said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, in a statement. 'Neon proves it: four out of every five databases on their platform are spun up by code, not humans. By bringing Neon into Databricks, we're giving developers a serverless Postgres that can keep up with agentic speed, pay-as-you-go economics and the openness of the Postgres community.' Neon has so far raised $129.5 million, according to Crunchbase, and its investors include Microsoft's venture arm M12, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, and Notable Capital. Databricks, for its part, has so far accumulated more than $19 billion in financing, and in January closed a $15.3 billion financing at a $62 billion valuation. Databricks hasn't held back from dipping into its warchest as it seeks to capitalize on the AI boom and position itself as a top service to build, test and deploy AI models and agents. The company last June acquired data management company Tabular, reportedly for nearly $2 billion, and in 2023 bought MosaicML, an open-source platform for training large language models and deploying AI tools, for $1.3 billion.
Business Journals
13-05-2025
- Business
- Business Journals
Richmond telehealth company AnswersNow wins big industry award
Richmond virtual behavioral therapy company AnswersNow Inc. was recently named the world's best telehealth platform at the MedTech Breakthrough Awards. The Los Angeles group annually hands out awards to companies, products and people in the medical tech, digital health and fitness spaces, including those working in medical devices, internet of things, electronic health records and more. The group of 141 winners for 2025 was judged from a pool of more than 4,500 nominations. AnswersNow pairs families with behavioral health clinicians specializing in autism on its proprietary platform. The clinicians provide applied behavior analysis, which is often used to teach new behaviors or diminish behaviors associated with autism. It is also used in the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other developmental disabilities. The company utilizes telehealth technology to meet patients where they are and at more convenient times. That, it says, makes care more accessible and affordable. 'Traditional autism care in America is past its breaking point and families deserve better,' AnswersNow CEO Jeff Beck said in a statement. 'This recognition is an important validation of our team's collective effort and the undeniable evidence that virtual ABA therapy helps learners everywhere lead more fulfilling lives.' AnswersNow recently made a series of executive hires with an eye on expansion in 2025. Beck told me March the company would likely go to market in the third or fourth quarter to raise more money. AnswersNow has raised roughly $12.5 million to since its founding in 2017, according to Crunchbase, including an $11 million Series A round in 2023 led by New York's Left Lane Capital. Beck told me the company, which employs a total of 154, has tripled revenue each year since 2022. He declined to give exact figures. Today, AnswersNow is serving Medicaid and commercial clients in Virginia, Texas and Georgia.
Business Insider
12-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
How Termina selected and ranked the 2025 Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists
The Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists are now in their fifth year in our partnership with Business Insider to objectively identify and celebrate the success of some of the world's greatest seed investors. In the run of these releases, AI has emerged as a defining characteristic of seed-stage startups today, the results of which will likely drive the lists to come. To produce the 2025 rankings, we statistically analyzed seed investor performance in 25 areas using Crunchbase and PitchBook data. Since one of our goals is to analyze the prospective success of investors, rather than focus solely on past achievements, we consider only active investors with a minimum of five investments between 2010 and 2025. Our lists include solo venture capitalists and angel investors worldwide, assessed based on their investments in US companies. The investors that made the cut for the 2025 lists were those with the strongest long-term indicators: exits (initial public offerings or acquisitions). For this year's ranking, investors whose stronger indicators were follow-on fundraising activity have had their positions affected by the recent pullback in venture capital fundraising. To be named to the list, seed investors must have: Investments that led to successful exits, including IPOs or acquisitions (exits that were meaningfully above "liquidation preference" or demonstrated increased company value rather than simply raising capital). Investments that display intermediate signs of future success, with seed investments consistently receiving material sums of follow-on investment. Active moderate-to-high seed investing over the previous two years. Exits statistically have the most influence on differentiating investors. We also updated our methodology this year to weight more recent investments for the intermediate milestones, such as follow-on fundraising. This year, the candidate pool that met the above criteria was 1,974 investors, a 5% increase from last year's. Women accounted for 11% of all seed investors in this year's pool — up from 8% of the first Seed 100's pool in 2021. This final list included 26 investors that increased their rank, 27 with the same or lower rank, and 47 new investors. Twenty-seven investors in this year's ranking were also featured in the original 2021 list. The generative AI wave of seed investing It's been two years since OpenAI released its revolutionary large language model GPT-4, which ignited the world's imagination about the future of artificial intelligence. Having AI at the center of large outcomes is not new; many companies, including Alphabet and Meta, have predicated their business models on it and were successful long before ChatGPT. You can segment AI into discriminative and generative models. The key difference lies in their objectives. Discriminative models focus on predicting labels and values, or making decisions based on input data, while generative models aim to capture the underlying data distribution and generate samples from that distribution. The first wave of seed investing in AI was from 2010 to 2018, during which companies included discriminative machine learning in their general business models. For example, companies like Uber, Instacart, Airbnb, and DoorDash were built on discriminative matching and recommendation algorithms. The new wave of AI was kicked off by generative models, which include large language models like those that power OpenAI's ChatGPT, Alphabet's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude. In a mere two years, the share of companies where AI materially matters to their products has nearly doubled from 13% to 24%. How this evolves will likely greatly influence how the Seed 100 rankings look over the coming years. Since seed investments usually take years to mature, we're still a few years away from understanding how the new wave of AI investments will perform. In the chart below, we show five seed investment categories to contextualize the growth of AI investment. Note that this is not an exhaustive view of seed investment sectors. In this view, while there has been steady expansion of AI investing at the seed stage, the jump last year stands out. Termina Jake Ellowitz is the chief technology officer and cofounder of Termina, which works with venture capital and private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, and executives to assess investment opportunities.
