Weekly Startup Roundup – 1, June 2018

Here are a few developments from the startup world from the last week of May.

• Online lending startup Cointribe raised $10M in a Series B round of funding. The funding round for the Gurugram-based startup was led by Sabre Partners
• AI startup SenseTime raised $620M in its newest round of funding. This brings the Chinese company’s valuation at more than $4.5 Billion. This also brings the total amount raised by SenseTime in the past six months to over $1.2B. The previous round of funding was from a group of investors led by Alibaba Group Holding.
• The Chairman of Wipro Azim Premji led a $100M funding round for US e-commerce fraud prevention startup Signifyd. This round of funding now puts the company’s valuation at over $400M.
• German automaker Daimler led a funding round to raise $175M for Estonia’s online taxi services startup Taxify. Taxify is uber’s rival in Europe and Middle East market and ferries over 10 million people with over 500,000 companies across the 25 countries where it operates.
• Chennai-based processed foods startup, YCook, raised $5M in a series B round of funding led by 021Capital. The round also involved funds from Netherland-based impact fund OikoCredit and its current backer Omnivore.
• Amazon made its first investment in the Indian insurance services sector as it led a $12M funding round in Acko General Insurance.
• Higher education programmes iNurture acquired student engagement and employability platform Krackin. With this acquisition, iNurture will be able to provide a multi-channel platform for students, academia, and various industry establishments to communicate and coordinate with each other.
• Digital Insurance platform Toffee raised $1.5M in a seed round led by Kalaari Capital, Omidyar Network, and Accion Venture Lab. Toffee intends to use the funds for product development and team expansion.