Fintech startup N26 recently reached a new milestone as it now has five million customers. The company launched onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt five years ago. The premise was simple. A young startup wanted to build a bank that didn’t suck. Given the company’s impressive growth rate and its 4.8-star rating in the App Store, it’s
Month: February 2020
Facebook’s messaging app for families with children, Messenger Kids, is being updated today with new tools and features to give parents more oversight and control over their kids’ chats. Now, parents will be able to see who a child is chatting with and how often, view recent photos and videos sent through chat, access the
Small business lending is a huge market that has attracted massive attention from VC investors in recent years. Startups like Kabbage have raised more than a billion dollars in venture capital and debt to create lending platforms for businesses, and others in the space like Fundbox for lending and BlueVine for banking are trying to
Dixa, the customer engagement platform, has closed $36 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Notion Capital, with participation from existing investors Project A Ventures and SEED Capital. The Copenhagen and now London-based startup says it will use the new capital to accelerate its product development. This will including innovating with regards to
Microsoft Teams, the collaboration platform that competes with Slack, has been down since about 8:30 am ET. Microsoft reports the outage was due to an expired certificate. Microsoft first posted that an outage was in progress on its Office 365 Status Twitter feed about 9:00 am ET, stating the company was looking into the problem.
Azimo, the money transfer service that is HQ’d in London but has the majority of its staff based in based in Poland, has secured €20 million in debt from the European Investment Bank (EIB), the lending arm of the European Union. The financing is supported by the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the financial
As Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs cluster around the worldview that artificial intelligence is poised to change how we work, investors are deciding which use cases make the most sense to pump money into right now. One focus has been the relentless communication between companies and customer that takes place at call centers. Call center tech has spawned
Japan’s tourism industry is booming, but it faces a hotel room shortage, especially in Tokyo as it prepares for the Summer Olympics. H2O addresses the market opportunity with a platform that helps vacation rental owners manage their properties. The startup announced today it has raised $7 million in Series B funding from Samsung Ventures, Stonebridge
Twitter announced today that over the holidays it identified and shut down “a large network of fake accounts,” as well as many others “located in a wide range of countries,” collectively abusing a feature that let them match phone numbers to user accounts. TechCrunch previously reported this same issue on December 24, which is also
HPE announced today that it has acquired Scytale, a cloud native security startup that is built on the open-source Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) protocol. The companies did not share the acquisition price. Specifically, Scytale looks at application-to-application identity and access management, something that is increasingly important as more transactions take place between
Miles Kirby Contributor Miles is the managing director of AV8 Ventures and is based in London. He is focused on investments at Seed and Series A. It’s a somewhat crude yardstick by which to measure innovation in deep tech, and the result perhaps reflects historic bias as much as it does actual leadership in innovation
RFocus asks a simple question: What if instead of just antennas and transmitters on access points and mobile devices, we put the things just about everywhere? You know, just totally slather the walls with the stuff? The new “smart surface” from MIT’s CSAIL uses in excess of 3,000 antennas to boost signal strength by nearly
This is it, startup fans. It’s your very last chance to scoop up the few remaining tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize — the best Silicon Valley startup soiree bar none. If you want to join this fun gathering of 1,000+ likeminded startuppers on February 7, you’d best act quickly. Exhibitor tables have
Those looking outside of Silicon Valley as a potential hub for their startup might want to take a gander at Utah — at least that’s the kind of trend the new Silicon Slopes Venture Fund hopes to create. The newly formed fund, put together by Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, Omniture and Domo founder Josh James
When siblings Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi fled the war in Kosovo in 1999, arriving as refugees on the West Coast of the US, they would have had no idea they’d go on to launch a technology company together. But as adults, the pair set up attacking the $6.7 billion telepresence and video communication category which
Big changes ahead for BlackBerry and TCL at a time when the smartphone market continues to see slowing growth. The two announced today that they would end their four-year brand licensing and tech support partnership in August 2020, with TCL ceasing to make new models of BlackBerry handsets after then, but continuing to support models that
As it has done in previous election years, Apple today has added special coverage of the 2020 US presidential election to its Apple News app. The coverage includes curated news, information, and data related to the election from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FiveThirtyEight, Fox News, NBC News, ProPublica, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times, The
‘I like to talk about things that I’m learning that I think are applicable to other people’ Greg Epstein 9 hours Greg Epstein Contributor Greg M. Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and the author of The New York Times bestselling book “Good Without God.” Described as a “godfather to the [humanist]
When Uber and Lyft went public, it wasn’t the drivers who got rich — it was the executives, investors and some early employees. In an era when it has become clear that tech executives and investors are frequently the only ones who’ll reap rewards for a company’s success, cooperative startups are getting more attention. Depending
Ann Miura-Ko Contributor Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, she earned a PhD in math modeling of cybersecurity at Stanford University. More posts by this contributor You need a minimum viable
Greg Epstein Contributor Greg M. Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and the author of The New York Times bestselling book “Good Without God.” Described as a “godfather to the [humanist] movement” by The New York Times Magazine in recognition of his efforts to build inclusive, inspiring and ethical communities for the
Everybody’s talking about revenues after WeWork, but maybe you still don’t need to have all the right numbers in place to achieve a strong IPO? That’s the initial takeaway Alex Wilhelm has after One Medical’s successful debut this week. One might think it looks like a tech-enabled unicorn, that doesn’t generate the recurring revenue and
When Ginni Rometty steps down as CEO at IBM in April and her replacement Arvind Krishna takes the helm, more than eight years will have passed since she took the reins at Big Blue. The executive helped lead a massive transformation, but IBM has had a bumpy financial ride throughout her tenure — at one
Ann Miura-Ko Contributor Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, she earned a PhD in math modeling of cybersecurity at Stanford University. More posts by this contributor You need a minimum viable
SoftBank wants its competing portfolio companies to stop losing so much money and, in some cases, to merge. That’s the news out from the Financial Times today, which reported that Uber and DoorDash discussed merging last year. The talks didn’t wind up in a deal. The two companies, each heavily backed by SoftBank and its
Back in 2016, Nutanix decided to take the big step of going public. Part of that process was creating a pitch deck and presenting it during its roadshow, a coming-out party when a company goes on tour prior to its IPO and pitches itself to investors of all stripes. It’s a huge moment in the
Legacy, a male fertility startup, has just raised a fresh, $3.5 million in funding from Bill Maris’s San Diego-based venture firm, Section 32, along with Y Combinator and Bain Capital Ventures, which led a $1.5 million seed round for the Boston startup last year. We talked earlier today with Legacy’s founder and CEO Khaled Kteily
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. It was yet another jam-packed week full of big news, IPO happenings, and venture activity. As always we’ve done our best to deliver the gist on what’s been going on. We had Alex Wilhelm and Danny Crichton
When analyzing the cloud market, there are many ways to look at the numbers; revenue, year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter growth — or lack of it — or market share. Each of these numbers tells a story, but in the cloud market, where aggregate growth remains high and Azure’s healthy expansions continues, it’s still struggling to gain