Tech
Hauler Hero collects $16M for its AI waste management software
Hauler Hero has picked up fresh funds as demand for its AI-powered waste management software continues to pile up.
The New York-based startup raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Frontier Growth with participation from K5 Global and Somersault Ventures, among others, TechCrunch has learned. Hauler Hero has raised more than $27 million in venture capital, to date.
Hauler Hero has developed an all-in-one software platform for waste management companies that covers a variety of functions, including customer relationship management, billing, and routing. And now, like so many other software companies, Hauler Hero plans to offer AI agents to its customers as well.
Hauler Hero was co-founded in 2020 by CEO Mark Hoadley and brother-in-law Ben Sikma, who encountered outdated software while working on mergers and acquisitions in the sector. Their aim was to bring waste management into the modern era.
“All of the existing software in the space, they were clunky, old,” Hoadley told TechCrunch in 2024. “Sometimes we’d talk about how this one reminds us of the Oregon Trail, this reminds us of the cell phone Michael Douglas used in ‘Wall Street.’ They’re very clunky and antiquated.”
The numbers suggest the company has had some success; Hauler Hero said it has helped facilitate 35 million trash pickups since inception in 2020. And it continues to grow, according to Hoadley, who told TechCrunch the company has doubled its head count, revenue, and customer base since announcing its seed round in late 2024.
Hauler Hero has added new features to its platform since its seed round, Hoadley said. The most notable is a product that captures images from third-party cameras on garbage trucks and sends them directly to a software command center. This information helps waste management companies confirm pickups, verify billing, and keep a better eye on their distributed fleet, according to the company.
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Hoadley said some sanitation workers, and their respective unions, don’t love this tech upgrade. But he added that most unions prevent the footage from being used against the drivers for disciplinary measures, for example, and that the images can actually help reduce liability for drivers in accidents or if they are accused of missing a pickup.
“Think of it as like running a factory with no roof and no visibility into what’s happening in that factory,” Hoadley said. “If you don’t have visibility into what’s happening out there, it’s very hard to have quality control. And the quality control in this case is what was out there, was it picked up?”
A trio of AI agents
Hauler Hero is now working to develop and deploy a set of three AI agents. One, Hero Vision, is focused on automatically identifying service issues and revenue opportunities. Hero Chat is a chatbot for customer inquiries. Hero Route will use route data to automatically adjust routes to make them more efficient.
“There’s an enormous amount of data in our system about pickups, work orders, billing information, and if you give these agents an understanding of your data model, you can just go tell them, hey, go build me a chart,” Hoadley said.
Hauler Hero plans to use some of its recent funding to commercialize these agents in addition to bulking up its offerings for municipal entities, a growing group of the company’s customers.
“It wasn’t something that I necessarily thought was going to be part of this journey,” Hoadley said about working with these public entities. “It kind of came organically as many things do. We just had inbound from some municipalities and eventually we sold one of them and then we sold another.”
Hoadley said that he thinks some of that demand is driven by the fact that its two main competitors, Routeware and Wastech, merged in 2024, leaving government entities with little choice of providers to work with.
Hoadley said the company is now focused on fine-tuning and scaling its product — and maybe some new additions as well.
“We’re going to continue to chart the course for the next decade of being at the cutting edge of delivering value for customers, leveraging all the latest tools,” Hoadley said. “There’s a lot more fun things and valuable things that we can do for our customers, and we’re really excited about it.”
This piece has been updated to better reflect which investors participated in the Series A.
Tech
Primary Ventures raises healthy $625M Fund V to focus on seed investing
Primary Ventures has closed a $625 million Fund V focused on seed investing nationwide, which is a sizable fund for a firm that focuses solely on early-stage investing. It perhaps showcases how the size of early-stage rounds has dramatically increased in the age of AI.
Ben Sun, a co-founder and general partner at Primary Ventures, told TechCrunch the average check size for this fund will range from $5 million to $10 million, and he hopes the firm will invest in 40 to 50 companies over the course of three years. He said the fund will also go as early as pre-seed.
The fund will also continue to spread its investments nationwide. Primary is one of New York’s most well-known venture firms, and at one point, most of its investments were focused in the Big Apple. Sun said the location thesis has changed.
The firm, which overall focuses on early-stage investing, has now done deals in Chicago, Seattle, Virginia, and D.C. “The talent, the founder, and the startups are happening everywhere,” he said. “The potential outcomes are so much bigger than they’ve ever been.”
He sees seed investing as headed toward its own asset class, especially as the quality of talent and their startups continue to rise, paired with tech’s current transformation. Firms are competing, after all, to find the hottest deals. “I think [a fund of this size] allows you to go in and compete and bring more resources to the table to work with the best founders and opportunities.”
Sequoia also recently raised a $200 million seed fund, as did Uncork Capital, which announced a $225 million seed fund earlier last year.
Though Primary calls itself a generalist, Sun said the firm has sector specialists, each with their own focus. He likes consumer, but also has investors focused on vertical AI, fintech, healthcare, enterprise, cybersecurity, and infrastructure. “We pretty much cover probably 80% or 90% of the seed sector activities out there.”
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Fund V has already invested in three companies. Primary previously raised $60 million in Fund I when it launched in 2015, followed by $100 million in Fund II and $150 million in Fund III.
It raised a $275 million fund and an additional $163 million for an opportunity fund. Some of its investments include the AI chip company Etched, the risk management platform Alloy, the women’s networking hub Chief, and the AI marketplace Dandelion Health. It has $1.65 billion in assets under management.
Tech
Spotify hits a record 751M monthly users thanks to Wrapped, new free features
Swedish music streaming giant Spotify saw its user numbers peak last quarter, driven by its year-end “Wrapped” campaign, which rounds up stats and listening highlights for users and new features on its free tier.
The company said it saw a record 38 million new users in the fourth quarter, taking its total to 751 million monthly active users, up 11% from a year earlier. Paying subscribers increased by 10% to 290 million in the quarter.
Spotify said the “Wrapped” campaign resulted in more than 300 million engaged users and 630 million shares on social media in 56 languages.
Revenue came in at €4.53 billion ($5.39 billion), about 7% more than a year earlier, thanks to an 8% increase in subscription revenue. However, the company’s ad-supported business saw revenue dip by 4% to €518 million ($616.6 million). Gross margin, an important metric investors watch for indications of improvements to Spotify’s profitability, improved by 83 basis points to a record high of 33.1% as the company sold more ads for podcasts and music.
The solid performance comes as Spotify’s new co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström take the reins from co-founder Daniel Ek, and they will now oversee a business that has far outgrown what it initially set out to do.
After launching as a music-streaming pure-play, Spotify has expanded its remit to include podcasts, audiobooks, and even physical bookstores. It’s launched music videos within the app as well as video podcasts and has doubled down on its retention strategy by adding social features like group chats and letting users share what they’re listening to. You can even use Spotify to book tickets to concerts, or explore the story behind songs.
The company has also added AI features like an AI DJ and AI-generated playlists, and now lets users exclude tracks from being recommended to help them better tailor what they listen to.
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Profitability has been a big focus for Spotify in recent years, and the company has tried to achieve that by increasing subscription prices in the U.S. and Europe. It’s also added new features to its free, ad-supported tier to attract more people away from rivals like YouTube Music and Amazon Music, letting users search for and choose songs they want to listen to.
The company expects to reach 759 million users and 293 million paying subscribers in the current quarter.
Tech
Former GitHub CEO raises record $60M dev tool seed round at $300M valuation
Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has raised the largest-ever seed round for a dev tool startup, according to its lead backer, Felicis. The startup, Entire, has raised $60 million at a $300 million valuation.
Entire offers an open source tool to help developers better manage code written by AI agents.
Entire’s tech has three components. One is a Git-compatible database to unify the AI-produced code. Git is a distributed version control system popular with enterprises and used by open source sites like GitHub and GitLab.
Another component is what it calls “a universal semantic reasoning layer” intended to allow multiple AI agents to work together. The final piece is an AI-native user interface designed with agent-to-human collaboration in mind.
The first product Entire is releasing is an open source tool it calls Checkpoints that automatically pairs every bit of software the agent submits for use in a software project with the context that created it, including prompts and transcripts. The idea is to allow the human developer to review, search, and perhaps even learn from why the AI did what it did.
Entire hopes to help developers better deal with the large volumes of software created by AI coding agents. Popular open source projects are particularly overwhelmed these days with suggested code contributions that may or may not be AI slop — meaning poorly designed and possibly unusable code.
Dohmke explains in the press release: “We are living through an agent boom, and now massive volumes of code are being generated faster than any human could reasonably understand. The truth is, our manual system of software production — from issues, to git repositories, to pull requests, to deployment — was never designed for the era of AI in the first place.”
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Dohmke was CEO of Microsoft’s GitHub for four years, leaving in August 2025 to found a startup, he said in a post on X at the time. During his time there, he oversaw the rise of the popular coding agent GitHub Copilot.
Other investors in the seed round include Madrona, M12, Basis Set, Harry Stebbings, Jerry Yang, and Datadog founder and CEO Olivier Pomel.
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