Startups Weekly: A much-needed unicorn IPO update

In this week’s newsletter: Details on Pinterest, Lyft, Uber and Zoom’s upcoming IPOs, plus Glossier and Rent The Runway’s big rounds.

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Zeus raises $24M to make you a living-as-a-service landlord

Cookie-cutter corporate housing turns people into worker drones. When an employee needs to move to a new city for a few months, they’re either stuck in bland, giant apartment complexes or Airbnbs meant for shorter stays. But Zeus lets any homeowner get paid to host white-collar transient labor. Through its managed ownership model, Zeus takes […]

View More Zeus raises $24M to make you a living-as-a-service landlord

Polis, the door-to-door marketer, raises another $2.5 million

Polis founder Kendall Tucker began her professional life as a campaign organizer in local Democratic politics, but — seeing an opportunity in her one-on-one conversations with everyday folks — has built a business taking that shoe leather approach to political campaigns to the business world. Now the company she founded to test her thesis that […]

View More Polis, the door-to-door marketer, raises another $2.5 million

Robotics, AR and VR are poised to reshape healthcare, starting in the operating room

About 20 years ago, a medical device startup called Intuitive Surgical debuted the da Vinci robot and changed surgical practices in operating rooms across the United States. The da Vinci ushered in the first age of robotic-assisted surgical procedures with a promise of greater accuracy and quicker recovery times for patients undergoing certain laparoscopic surgeries.  For […]

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Medivis has launched its augmented reality platform for surgical planning

After two years of development, Medivis, a New York-based company developing augmented reality data integration and visualization tools for surgeons, is bringing its first product to market. The company was founded by Osamah Choudhry and Christopher Morley who met as senior residents at NYU Medical Center. Initially a side-project, the two residents roped in some […]

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GBatteries let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

A YC startup called GBatteries has come out of stealth with a bold claim: they can recharge an electric car as quickly as it takes to full up a tank of gas. Created by aerospace engineer Kostya Khomutov, electrical engineers Alex Tkachenko and Nick Sherstyuk, and CCO Tim Sherstyuk, the company is funded by the […]

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Standard Cognition raises $40M to replace retailers’ cashiers with cameras

The Amazon Go store requires hundreds of cameras to detect who’s picking up what items. Standard Cognition needs just 27 to go after the $27 trillion market of equipping regular shops with autonomous retail technology. Walk into one of its partners’ stores and overhead cameras identify you by shape and movement, not facial recognition. Open […]

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Envoy raises $43 million to digitize your office

The office might not seem like an area in desperate need of disruption, but Envoy — a Silicon Valley company used to sign in over 100,000 visitors at offices across the world each day; and a TechCrunch SF office neighbor! — has raised $43 million to do just that. The company started life five years […]

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RankScience closes $1.8M seed — and now only wants to replace human SEO staff if you don’t have any

A couple of years ago YC-backed RankScience, which offers AI-enhanced SEO split-testing, put a few SEO experts’ noses out of joint when the fledgling startup brashly talked about replacing human expertise with automation. Two years on its pitch has mellowed, with the team saying their self-service platform is “augmenting human SEO ability rather than replacing […]

View More RankScience closes $1.8M seed — and now only wants to replace human SEO staff if you don’t have any