Sonos has a new speaker that starts shipping later this month, and it’s a significant departure from the company’s usual offerings in a number of ways. The all-new Sonos Roam is a compact, portable speaker with a built-in battery and Bluetooth connectivity — but still very much a Sonos system team player, with wifi streaming,
Month: April 2021
Bob W, the self-described “tech-driven” hospitality provider that offers an alternative to traditional hotels and short-stay rentals, is disclosing €10 million in seed funding. Leading the round, which included a first tranche of €4 million last year, is byFounders VC and private equity firm Finnish Industry Investment (Tesi). Other European real estate and venture capitalist
Historically, podcasts have been aimed at consumers. The value to be gained in the B2B world is something that has been largely untapped. For Lindsay Tjepkema — who has been entrenched in the world of B2B marketing for more than 15 years — the opportunity was massive. So in 2019, she founded Casted, an audio
Messaging is the medium these days, and today a startup that has built an API to help others build text and video interactivity into their services is announcing a big round to continue scaling its business. Sendbird, a popular provider of chat, video and other interactive services to the likes of Reddit, Hinge, Paytm, Delivery
Google Cloud today announced that it is joining the FinOps Foundation as a Premier Member. The FinOps Foundation is a relatively new open-source foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation, that launched last year. It aims to bring together companies in the ‘cloud financial management’ space to establish best practices and standards. As the term implies,
The European Union may investigate Facebook’s $1BN acquisition of customer service platform Kustomer after concerns were referred to it under EU merger rules. A spokeswoman for the Commission confirmed it received a request to refer the proposed acquisition from Austria under Article 22 of the EU’s Merger Regulation — a mechanism which allows Member States
Hipmunk’s founders are building a successor to their now-defunct flight search service. The startup was acquired by SAP-owned travel and expense platform Concur in 2016, and its CEO Adam Goldstein departed in 2018. But Goldstein told me he and his co-founder Steve Huffman (also co-founder and CEO of Reddit) were still disappointed when Concur shut
Glints, the Singapore-based career platform, announced today it has raised $22.5 million in Series C funding led by Japanese human resources management firm PERSOL Holdings. The new capital will be used on Glints’ expansion in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan and hiring for its product and engineering teams. Glints co-founder and chief executive officer Oswald
Clubhouse, a one-year-old social audio app reportedly valued at $1 billion, will now allow users to send money to their favorite creators — or speakers — on the platform. In a blog post, the startup announced the new monetization feature, Clubhouse Payments, as the “the first of many features that allow creators to get paid
For those who follow the space, LG will be remembered fondly as a smartphone trailblazer. For a decade-and-a-half, the company was a major player in the Android category and a driving force behind a number of innovations that have since become standard. Perhaps the most notable story is that of the LG Prada. Announced a
Thanks to a warm welcome from Miami, our first City Spotlight was a big success. We met investors and entrepreneurs who are working on amazing things, and we were proud to share their personal stories on why Miami is the right city for them to live in and do business. Join us on our next
It appears that the slowdown in tech debuts is not a complete freeze; despite concerning news regarding the IPO pipeline, some deals are chugging ahead. This morning, we’re adding Alkami Technology to a list that includes Coinbase’s impending direct listing and Robinhood’s expected IPO. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning
The Supreme Court has vacated a previous ruling that found former President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his Twitter foes. The ruling was upheld by a Manhattan federal appeals court in 2019, which deemed Trump’s actions unconstitutional. The court found that because Trump used Twitter to “conduct official business” and interact with the
FinanZero, a Brazilian online credit marketplace, announced today that it has closed a $7 million round of funding – its fourth since it launched in 2016 was founded in 2016. It has raised a total of $22.85 million to date. The real-time online loan broker allows people to apply for a personal loan, a car
Why did Byju’s raise over $1 billion last year and is already inching closer to securing another half a billion dollars? We are getting some answers today. Byju’s said on Monday it has acquired Aakash Educational, a 33-year-old chain of physical coaching centres, as the Indian online learning giant looks to further consolidate its leadership
On a recent morning in downtown Shenzhen, Lingyu queued up to order her go-to McMuffin. As she waited in line with other commuters, the 50-year-old accountant noticed the new vegetarian options on the menu and decided to try the imitation spam and scrambled egg burger. “I’ve never had fake meat,” she said of the burger
Mar.31 — Paysafe Chairman Bill Foley and CEO Phil McHugh discuss Paysafe going public via SPAC. They speak with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Ten global startups, three rounds of pitching, nine expert judges. It’s not the 12 Days of Startups (no robotic partridge in a pear tree here), it’s the TC Early Stage Pitch Off — otherwise known as day two of TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising. Yesterday on day one, TC Early Stage was all
Mike Barile spent two years and racked up nearly $20,000 in credit card debt to bring his first startup, Backflip, to life. The former management consultant had spent years toiling in the startup grind, first at Uber, then, after taking a coding academy bootcamp through AppAcademy (where Barile met his co-founder, Adam Foosaner), at Google
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Happy Saturday, everyone. I do hope that you are in good spirits and in good
Apr.01 — Peter Chapman, chief executive officer and president at IonQ Inc, discusses his company going public via a special purpose acquisition company deal with dMY Technology Group Inc. that gives the combined entity a pro-forma implied market capitalization of about $2 billion. He also shares how soon quantum computing will become mainstream and what
At the end of 2020, I argued that edtech needs to think bigger in order to stay relevant after the pandemic. I urged founders to think less about how to bundle and unbundle lecture experience, and more about how to replace outdated systems and methods with new, tech-powered solutions. In other words, don’t simply put
Woody Sears has long been interested in storytelling. After spending several years in sales after nabbing an MBA from Pepperdine — and following the debut in 2007 of the first iPhone — he founded a storytelling app called Zuuka that built up a library of narrated and illustrated kids’ books for the iPhone and iPad.
For this morning’s column, Alex Wilhelm looked back on the last few months, “a busy season for technology exits” that followed a hot Q4 2020. We’re seeing signs of an IPO market that may be cooling, but even so, “there are sufficient SPACs to take the entire recent Y Combinator class public,” he notes. Once
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. It was a busy week on the IPO front, Danny was buried in getting the Tonal EC-1 out, and Natasha took some time off. But the
Clubhouse’s list of competitors is growing. LinkedIn has now confirmed it’s also testing a social audio experience in its app which would allow creators on its network to connect with their community. Unlike the Clubhouse rivals being built by Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn believes its audio networking feature will be differentiated because it will be
Apple adds classic titles to Apple Arcade, Microsoft experiences an outage and Coinbase is going public. This is your Daily Crunch for April 2, 2021. The big story: Apple Arcade expands with classic games Until now, Apple’s game subscription service was limited to exclusive new titles, but today it’s introducing two new categories: App Store
Mar.30 — Jesse Powell, CEO and founder of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, discusses Coinbase Inc’s plan to make its trading debut in April, as well as his own timeline to take Kraken public in the second half of 2022. He also talks about measuring Bitcoin in prices of luxury cars. Powell speaks to Emily Chang and
The first quarter of 2021 was a busy season for technology exits. Coming off a hot period in the final quarter of 2020, it was no surprise that tech upstarts pursued liquidity through a variety of mechanisms as the new year began. There were IPOs, there were direct listings, there were PE deals. Hell, we
Cross-border payments startup dLocal has raised $150 million at a $5 billion valuation, less than seven months after securing $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. This means that the five-year-old Uruguayan company has effectively quadrupled its valuation in a matter of months. Alkeon Capital led the latest round, which also included participation from BOND,