News

Fortune is the first to report, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm Seven Seven Six is leading the Grand’s $4.7 million seed funding round, returning after a $2.4 million pre-seed in May 2021. Ohanian views coaching that addresses the whole person—rather than solely professional goals—as an increasingly important component of business. “Emotional intelligence and genuine human connection are critical as complementary skills in the age of AI,” he said in a statement. Fortune

Insurance is one of those things that always seems unnecessarily complicated. But Marshall Darr wants to make it easier for small businesses to provide insurance for their employees. Enter StretchDollar, which launched this week in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Colorado. Technical.ly

Wicked Saints is the first company to emerge from Niantic’s Black Developers Initiative, an incubator for Black game creators. They’ve just raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Riot Games and Oregon Venture Fund, bringing the company to a total $4.6 million in funding, inclusive of a pre-seed round. TechCrunch

Through his startup Meter Feeder, New York native Jim Gibbs is on a mission to help cities “future proof” their parking revenue. Pittsburgh Inno

Sperry has tapped Chris Echevarria, founder and creative director of the Brooklyn-based brand Blackstock and Weber, to reinvent some of its signature styles. WWD

When Elise Smith co-founded DEI learning platform Praxis Labs in 2019, she wasn’t trying to gain fame. She was trying to level the corporate ecosystem. Inc.

Eight years ago, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy founded theBoardlist. The board candidate discovery platform helps board-ready executives find their first seats and helps companies find diverse board talent. Fortune

The mass merchant will carry several of the DTC brand’s products in stores nationwide as well as on its website. Retail Dive

A business-minded mom makes sweet treats safe for everyone. Denise Woodard’s Partake Foods takes spot 151 on Inc’s 5000 List of 2023, making the list for a second year in a row! Inc.

AI music startup AudioShake is disrupting the music industry with its on-demand platform and API that makes quality dubbing and content localization viable for content creators at all levels. The company’s AI music-separation technology allows musicians, audio engineers, producers, publishers, labels and other content creators to apply their audio content to new uses in karaoke, sync licensing, re-mixes, spatial audio, VR/AR, gaming, dubbing and social apps. Forbes

Catalog owners and estate administrators are turning to AI-driven tech, such as Audioshake, to make music freshly available for remixes, samples or synch placements. Billboard

CodeSee was founded in 2019 with the goal of helping programmers understand the entire code base inside a company. The idea was to provide visual maps, so you could see the connections between services and systems and how changes might affect the different links. Today, the company announced it was adding a generative AI capability to the platform, making it easy to ask questions about the code base in natural language. TechCrunch

Husband and wife duo Tye and Courtney Caldwell run their own hair care business but noticed a problem: empty chairs. So using some creativity, they came up with an app that’s been a game changer in the industry. TODAY Show

Bobbie, an organic infant formula company, has acquired Nature’s One, a 26-year-old pediatric nutrition company, in a move that gives Bobbie end-to-end control over formula manufacturing through a new facility and triples the size of Bobbie’s operations. TechCrunch

A machine developed by Co-Star, a technology company with a buzzy astrology app, answers specific questions like “Should I start a cult?” using A.I. technology and a person’s birth date, time and place. New York Times

No garment, no matter how durable, how locally sourced, how biodegradable, how many times it can be recycled, can ever be as sustainable as the garment that was never made. With that eye toward sustainability, as well as cutting waste from the expense line, Rachel Liaw launched Fuse Inventory in 2016, a hyper-advanced version of the Excel spreadsheet still being used by many companies. WWD

In a press release published earlier this week, stock photography company Getty Images announced the introduction of the #AutisticOutLoud campaign in partnership with Hiki, a neurodiversity-centric friendship and dating app targeted towards members of the autistic community. The campaign’s goal is to “increase authentic representation of autistic people through the lens of the community.” Forbes

Praxis Labs, a San Francisco, CA-based software-as-a-service virtual reality (VR) company with an end-to-end immersive learning platform, received an investment from Accenture Ventures. FinSMEs

Tracy Chou launched the Twitter app Block Party in 2021 to help users escape targeted harassment campaigns that she—as an Asian American woman—knew from personal experience could ostracize vulnerable voices from the public conversation. But on Wednesday Block Party closed its doors, becoming the latest victim of soaring new bills imposed by a struggling Twitter under new owner Elon Musk. TIME

Brightflow AI has acquired CircleUp to bolster its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered financial insights tool. PYMNTS