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Investors who know her think seem to think she has what it takes. Brian Rothenberg, a partner at Defy Partners who helped scale Eventbrite across six years before he joined the world of venture capital, just led a $1.5 million seed round for Novi. (“We see a groundswell of consumer consciousness in this area,” Rothenberg…

The cost of owning a car is a big part of many family budgets. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average household spent $8,864 on owning and operating vehicles in 2017, up 5% from the year before, with car insurance accounting for about $1,000 of total costs.

These four fintech companies are offering new ways to shop for and pay for insurance. Depending on your circumstances, they may help you save.

Empower (empower.me), a high-growth mobile banking app in the US challenger bank category, announced $20 million in Series A funding. The financing included participation from new investors Icon Ventures, Defy Ventures, and David Velez, Founder and CEO of Nubank, one of the most valuable financial technology startups in the world. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Initialized Capital also joined this round. Empower has created a distinctive consumer banking experience that combines AI and human coaching to power an innovative suite of personal finance solutions, including: high-yield deposit products, easy budgeting and spend tracking, bill negotiation and subscription management, and personalized recommendations to empower Millennials to make better financial decisions. Empower is the first to bring all of these features into one seamles

PullRequest, a startup that provides code review as a service, announced today that it was buying Moonlight, an early-stage startup that has built an online platform for hiring remote developers. The companies did not share the terms.

Lyal Avery, founder and CEO at PullRequest, says he bought this company to expand his range of services. “Our platform is at a place where we’re very confident about our ability to identify issues. We’re moving to the next phase of fixing issues automatically. In order to do that, we have to have access to people producing code. So with the developers on our platform that are currently reviewers, as well as the Moonlight folks, we can start to fix the issues we identify, and also attach that to our learning processes,” Avery explained.

The company announced Tuesday it raised $1 million in a seed round led by Defy Partners. “We see ourselves as a trusted advisor for pet health and happiness,” Mawhinney told Built In. “Our mission is for pets to be treated, loved and cared for as equals.”

Apploi, a platform that simplifies the hiring process for service-oriented businesses, announced Thursday they raised $5.2 million in funding led by Silicon Valley-based Defy Partners.

Agentology, a conversation enablement platform that revolutionized lead engagement for real estate, today announced the business’ rebrand to Verse.io.

Founded by veteran entrepreneur, startup investor, and expert in information retrieval and automated decision systems Brian Shin, Searchable.ai is a rather stealthy San Francisco-based startup. According to a press release announcing $2 million in seed funding, the company is developing “a new personalized semantic search engine for your work.”

Founders, employees, and investors ultimately want to know that the startup they are committing time and/or capital to has a reasonable probability of growing very quickly over a very long period of time. Whether a startup can achieve sustained growth (how fast, for how long, and how profitably) is really the difference between a startup…

Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise. The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round.