News

Fertility services aren’t just good for employees, there’s a business case for them, too, according to Carrot Fertility co-founder and CEO Tammy Sun. Carrot provides fertility benefits to employers, and in August closed on a $75 million Series C funding round. Crunchbase News

Mmhmm and Carrot Fertility were featured on Otta’s 2021 US Rocket List! Otta

Instacart made its name by providing a way for consumers to bypass shopping in stores in person, by ordering items online and getting them delivered to their homes — a business that positively boomed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But with physical stores still looming large in the world of groceries, Instacart also wants to play a role there, too. Today, the company announced that it is acquiring Caper AI, a startup that builds smart cart and cashier-less checkout technology that uses computer vision and other techniques to detect items and ring them up for shoppers. TechCrunch

Audioshake has announced the completion of a $2 million seed funding round. Audioshake’s on-demand A.I.-driven platform deconstructs songs into their parts (“stems”) so that they can be monetized for new uses in re-mixes, samples, sync licensing, and more. Hypebot

You can learn a lot by interviewing over 150 chief diversity officers. Elise Smith and Heather Shen certainly did when they conducted research for the startup they co-founded, Praxis Labs, which creates virtual reality-powered diversity training sessions for organizations. Praxis Labs, where Smith is CEO and Shen is chief product officer, said Friday that it raised $15.5 million in funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Penny Jar Capital, the early-stage investment firm of NBA superstar Stephen Curry. Fortune

Steven Wolfe Pereira is disrupting one-size-fits-all learning and helping today’s children thrive through a new “storyteaching” platform called Encantos. Hispanic Executive

By helping hundreds of hospitals like HCA Healthcare hire nurses faster and with less aggravation, Iman Abuzeid has built the rare VC-backed startup that’s already profitable. It likely won’t be long before it becomes a unicorn. Forbes

Incredible Health was featured as one of Forbes’ list of 25 startups most likely to become unicorns! Forbes

When working toward tackling a national epidemic, the status quo has to be turned upside down and Goodr — an Atlanta-based food waste startup — thrives on creating tech innovations that disrupts the traditional way of solving hunger. AfroTech

Constellation, a distributed infrastructure that connects big data and the blockchain, today announced it has acquired Dor, a startup that helps retail brands grow their business by empowering them to improve customer outcomes through its data analytics solution that enables them to better understand store foot traffic. ACCESSWIRE

Finix, Juniper Square, and Clearco were featured on CB Insight’s Fintech 250 list! CB Insights

Most people probably don’t think of school teachers as creators. But the edtech startup Encantos does and is rolling out a new product that lets them and other subject matter experts teach kids about topics such as Black history or life skills such as problem solving, CEO Steven Wolfe Pereira tells The Information. The Information

Clearco has officially expanded to Australia, its fourth international market to date, as the Toronto-based startup sets its sights on the Asia-Pacific region. As part of its expansion, the FinTech firm has promised to invest up to $100 million AUD ($92 million CAD) in e-commerce, mobile app, and SaaS businesses in Australia. To lead these efforts, Clearco has hired former Google director and Limepay co-founder Dan Peters as managing director of its Australian operations. BetaKit

A North Texas couple saw a need and filled it, making the story of ShearShare something good for more than one million licensed professionals. Tye and Courtney Caldwell created the app ShearShare in 2017 and have watched it grow since. NBCDFW

Carrot Fertility makes this month’s list of movers and shakers in SF tech.
Built In SF

The larger a coding project gets, and the more people become involved, the harder it becomes to get a big picture view of how the entire project fits together, and this is especially true for distributed teams. Today, CodeSee, an early stage startup that wants to help development teams understand the entire code base, released OSS Port, an open source project designed to help disparate open source teams do just that. TechCrunch

In an effort to empower people to work out of the office (OOO), which is a way cooler term compared to using “distributed workforce,” mmhmm CEO Phil Libin and his brilliant team have created video platforms that make the experience of interacting with co-workers in a distributed setting fun and entertaining. Rather than a dull video call, it’s lighthearted and makes you feel comfortable, and actually want to see and interact with your colleagues. Forbes

“It’s an incredible honor to be chosen for Venture Atlanta, a conference that has a proven track record of finding and supporting the best in tech,” said Sonja Ebron, co-founder of Courtroom5, a Durham-based startup company that will showcase at the event. “We’re proud of what we’ve created at Courtroom5 and the number of people we’ve been able to assist in what can often be a very confusing and expensive civil court process.” WRAL TechWire