I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an “internet identity” for $425,000. “I hate the universe,” she texted. Sure, the universe would be better if people with a spare $425,000 spent it on mutual aid or something,
Month: July 2021
Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business’ stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range, and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.
This year, livestream viewers in China are projected to spend more than $60 billion on digital shopping experiences that let them interact with influencers in real time. Promoting everything from cosmetics to food, social media stars use Taobao, TikTok and other platforms to livestream products and take questions from the audience. On Taobao’s Singles Day
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We were a smaller team this week, with Natasha and Alex joined by Grace and Chris to sort through a week that brought together both this quarter’s earnings cycle and the Q3 IPO rush. So, it was just a little busy!
Mar.03 — Emily Chang highlights Astra, the latest startup company trying to take part in the modern-day space race. Astra CEO Chris Kemp has decided to take the company public through SPAC to raise enough money to help the company get to space.
Jason Dressel Contributor Jason Dressel is president of History Factory, which helps companies use their history and heritage to enhance and transform strategy, positioning, marketing and communication. Every week over the past three and a half years, an average of three CEOs have exited tech companies in the U.S. That tally is higher — in
Chilean startup Xepelin, which has created a financial services platform for SMEs in Latin America, has secured $30 million in equity and $200 million in credit facilities. LatAm venture fund Kaszek Ventures led the equity portion of the financing, which also included participation from partners of DST Global and a slew of other firms and
Since U.K. spying headquarters GCHQ was established in Cheltenham in the 1950s, the city has attracted large firms like IBM, Raytheon, Microsoft and BAE Systems to the region, and startups like Truststamp, Bamboo Technologies, Ripjar, Hub8 and CYNAM have emerged from the city. All of these firms draw on the talent that naturally gravitates to
In the last decade, high-quality design has become a necessity in the software space. Great design is a commodity, not a luxury, and yet, designing beautiful products and finding great designers continues to be a struggle for many entrepreneurs. At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong walked us through some of the ways founders
Robinhood priced at $38 per share this week, opened flat and closed its first day’s trading yesterday worth $34.82 per share, or a bit more than 8% underwater. The company posted a mixed picture today, falling early before recovering to breakeven in late-morning trading. It wasn’t the debut that some expected Robinhood to have. The
Outvio, an Estonian startup that provides a white-label SaaS fulfillment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers in Spain and Estonia, has closed a $3 million early-stage financing round led by Change Ventures. Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco), and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn). Several angels also joined the round including James
The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) has awarded Zūm, a startup that wants to upgrade student transportation, a five-year $150 million contract to modernize its transport service throughout the district. Zūm, which already operates its rideshare-meets-bus service in Oakland, much of Southern California, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas, will be responsible for handling day-to-day operations,
Today we’re wrapping our multi-week exploration of the global venture capital market’s second-quarter performance. We’ve gone around the world, working to better understand the geyser of cash flowing into today’s startups. But we’ve saved the best for last: Latin America. At a glance, the Latin American venture capital and startup market appears similar to what
Epic Games is teasing the biggest in-game event since Travis Scott psychedelically stomped through Fortnite’s virtual meadows. The mysterious new event, which Fortnite-maker Epic is calling the “Rift Tour,” will kick off on Friday, August 6 and run through Sunday, August 8. In the teaser announcement, Epic invites players to “take a musical journey into
Small and medium enterprises have become a big opportunity in the world of B2B technology in the last several years, and today a startup that’s building tools aimed at helping them manage their teams of workers is announcing some funding that underscores the state of that market. Homebase, which provides a platform that helps SMBs
Something very interesting is going on with supply chains, and has been for a while. But it’s clear the pandemic has accelerated the trend. Tech startups are once again cutting out the middle man, but this time at the supply chain level. The opportunity is to replace supply chains with platforms – it’s the ‘platformization
Aron Solomon Contributor Aron Solomon, J.D., is the head of Strategy for Esquire Digital and the editor of Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was the founder of LegalX, a legal technology accelerator. More posts by this contributor If you don’t want robotic dogs patrolling the
Robinhood priced its public offering at $38 per share last night, the low end of its IPO range. The company was worth around $32 billion at that price. But once the U.S. consumer investing and trading app began to allow investors to trade its shares, they went down sharply, off more than 10% in the
Alanna Gregory Contributor Alanna Gregory is a marketing executive and is currently senior global director at Afterpay. Previously, she was VP at Hairstory, the founder and CEO of VIVE Lifestyle, and was an AVP at Barclays. More posts by this contributor E-commerce roll-ups are the next wave of disruption in consumer packaged goods What comes
Prashant Pandey Contributor Prashant Pandey is the head of engineering at Asana, a leading work management platform for teams. Prior to Asana, Prashant started and led the Bay Area team building Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service. Startups and SMBs are usually the first to adopt many SaaS products. But as these customers
Algolia has raised a $150 million Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of $2.25 billion. Compared to the Series C round from October 2019, the company’s valuation has more than quadrupled. It means that Algolia is now a unicorn with a valuation above $1 billion. The company is best known for its search-as-a-service
Idan Plotnik Contributor Idan Plotnik is the CEO and founder of Apiiro, a code risk platform. DevOps is fundamentally about collaboration and agility. Unfortunately, when we add security and compliance to the picture, the message gets distorted. The term “DevSecOps” has come into fashion the past few years with the intention of seamlessly integrating security
Merqueo, which operates a full-stack, on-demand delivery service in Latin America, has landed $50 million in a Series C round of funding. IDC Ventures, Digital Bridge and IDB Invest co-led the round, which also included participation from MGM Innova Group, Celtic House Venture Partners, Palm Drive Capital and previous shareholders. The financing brings the Bogota,
As more people are venturing out into the world this summer (safely, we hope!), Snapchat wants to make it easier for people to find restaurants, stores, parks and other interesting spots in their neighborhood. Today, Snapchat is starting to roll out the My Places feature on its Snap Map, which connects users with over 30
One year after voice-based AI technology company ConverseNow raised a $3.3 million seed round, the company is back with a cash infusion of $15 million in Series A funding in a round led by Craft Ventures. The Austin-based company’s AI voice ordering assistants George and Becky work inside quick-serve restaurants to take orders via phone,
Cast your mind back to that scene in Minority Report where all those autonomous cars are whizzing through the city. The more practically-minded of you may well have gone: “Yeah, but what about the insurance…?”. Among the startups building the on-demand, connected insurance world for the vehicles of tomorrow right now are UK-based Zego which
Satellite connectivity company Swarm has come out with a new product that will give anyone the ability to create a messaging or Internet of Things (IoT) device, whether that be a hiker looking to stay connected off-the-grid or a hobbyist wanting to track the weather. The Swarm Evaluation Kit is an all-in-one product that includes
PayPal’s plan to morph itself into a “super app” have been given a go for launch. According to PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, speaking to investors during this week’s second-quarter earnings, the initial version of PayPal’s new consumer digital wallet app is now “code complete” and the company is preparing to slowly ramp up. Over the
There is no authoritative playbook for marketing these days. Every company must find its own voice, and as it grows and evolves, its marketing needs to evolve as well. Relying on proven tactics and measurable metrics isn’t enough — today, the most effective marketers constantly study and learn from innovative approaches while exploring new avenues.
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