Month: November 2019

MMC Ventures, the London-based VC that typically invested at Seed and Series A via the various funds it manages, has launched a new £100 million “Scale Up” fund to provide expansion capital to its later-stage portfolio companies. This is a move we are seeing a number of early-stage European VCs make, such as LocalGlobe with
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Ride-hailing service Heetch has added a new investor to its $38 million Series B round. AfricInvest is investing another $4 million in the startup — in total, Heetch has raised a $42 million Series B round. Previous investors in the Series B round include Cathay Innovation, Idinvest and Total Ventures. Heetch first started as a
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Stephen Eaves, the chief executive of a new startup that promises to overlay data on electricity distribution, has spent years developing data management technologies. Eaves’ first company, the eponymous Eaves Devices, focused on energy systems in aerospace and defense — they converted the military’s fleet of B2 bombers to use lithium ion batteries. The second
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The ban on political ads announced by Twitter two weeks ago has come into effect, and the rules are surprisingly simple — perhaps too simple. No political content as they define it may be promoted; Candidates, parties, governments or officials, PACs, and certain political nonprofit groups are banned from promoting content altogether. The idea intended
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Earlier this year, GetYourGuide raised a gigantic $484 million funding round with SoftBank’s Vision Fund leading the round. Now that the German startup has reached a valuation well over the $1 billion mark, it’s time to look back at the company’s impressive trajectory. That’s why I’m excited to announce that GetYourGuide co-founder and CEO Johannes
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London edtech startup pi-top has gone through another round of layoffs, TechCrunch has learned. pi-top confirmed that eight jobs have been cut in the London office, saying the job losses resulted from a “restructuring our business to focus on the U.S. education market”. In August we broke the news that the STEM hardware focused company
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Lazard, the global investment bank, has been quietly recruiting a ten-person team in London to head up its newly created “Venture and Growth Banking” division to match investors with European scale-ups. Unlike some investment banks, the focus of Lazard Venture and Growth Banking will include Series B and C. That’s earlier than many startups typically
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TikTok is beginning to dabble in social commerce. The short-form video app said it has started to allow some users to add links to e-commerce sites (or any other destination) to their profile biography as well as offer creators the ability to easily send their viewers to shopping websites. The company said the roll-out of
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In the world of enterprise software, there are often strange bedfellows. Just yesterday, Salesforce announced a significant partnership with AWS around the Cloud Information Model. This morning, it announced it was moving its Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure. That’s the way that enterprise partnerships shimmy and shake sometimes. The companies also announced they were partnering
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Instagram is making Like counts private for some users everywhere. Instagram tells TechCrunch the hidden Likes test is expanding to a subset of users globally. Users will have to decide for themselves if something is worth Liking rather than judging by the herd. The change could make users more comfortable sharing what’s important to them
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Homeis, a startup building networking tools for immigrant communities, officially launched its community for Mexican immigrants this week. Co-founder and CEO Ran Harnevo (pictured above) previously founded video syndication company 5min, which was acquired by AOL, where he served as the global president of the company’s video division. (AOL also bought TechCrunch and then was
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The multi-trillion dollar global real estate market is getting flipped on its head. Business model innovation, data accessibility and the proliferation of mobile, SaaS and other cloud-native software have already given rise to a cohort of tech unicorns that sit amongst the world’s most influential real estate companies. Emerging technologies and growing capabilities across machine
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The problem of how to find the potential treasure trove hidden in millions of pounds of trash is getting a high-tech answer as investors funnel $16 million into the recycling robots built by Denver-based AMP Robotics. For recyclers, the commercialization of robots tackling industry problems couldn’t come at a better time. Their once-stable business has
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A UK PR firm pitching to run an account for Ola has proposed running a campaign to politicize ride-hailing as a tactic to shift regulations in its favor. The approach suggests that, despite the appearance of ride-hailing platforms taking a more conciliatory position with regulators that are now wise to earlier startup tactics in this
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