The upside of the Open Banking regulations which have swept jurisdictions like the UK and the EU is that many more challenger banks have appeared. The headache for either incumbent banks or for upstart startups is the very proliferation of these new banks and financial tech products. But as we know, in gold rushes, the
Month: July 2021
On July 27, hardware maker Nothing will debut its first product, wireless earbuds dubbed Ear 1. Despite releasing almost no tangible information about the product, the company has managed to generate substantial buzz around the launch — especially for an entry into the already-crowded wireless earbud market. The hype, however, is real — and somewhat
French startup ManoMano has raised a Series F funding round of $355 million led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The company operates an e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and gardening products. It is currently available in six European countries. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of $2.6 billion. In addition
Following on from mid-June when first-time buyer mortgage lending startup Generation Home raised a $30.4m Series A round and a £300m loan facility from NatWest, it’s now adding to its board. Although known for becoming an Angel investor since leaving Monzo, the challenger bank startup he co-founded, Tom Blomfield hasn’t joined any startup boards. That
E-commerce is booming in Southeast Asia, but in many markets, the fragmented logistics industry is struggling to catch up. This means sellers run into roadblocks when shipping to buyers, especially outside of major metropolitan areas, and managing their supply chains. Locad, a startup that wants to help with what it describes as an “end-to-end solution”
Meet Tinybird, a new startup that helps developers build data products at scale without having to worry about infrastructure, query time and all those annoying issues that come up once you deal with huge data sets. The company ingests data at scale, lets you transform it using SQL and then exposes that data through API
Evan Fisher Contributor Founder of Unicorn Capital and Minimal Capital, Evan Fisher‘s pitching and investor strategy has helped startups raise more than $2.5 billion. Let’s play out this scenario. Your deck is ready and you’re just about to start reaching out. What does conventional wisdom say that you should send? A three-paragraph overview, four bullet
Icon group is a new $30M VC fund being launched out of Germany’s iconmobile group, a WPP network agency. This means a reorganization of the company from a full-service innovation agency into also offering VC backing. iconmobile has garnered a reputation as an innovative technology, design, and sustainability agency, but the turnaround means it will
Lordstown Motors continues to stumble. The beleaguered electric vehicle startup is now being investigated by the Department of Justice, in addition to an ongoing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigation, first broke by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, is still in its early stages, according to unnamed sources. It is being
As companies scrambled to re-orient themselves last year during the pandemic, one thing was clear: the shift to remote working had come sooner than anyone expected. With this came a fundamental shift in how businesses would have to hire new talent. And the question was, were managers going to laboriously sift through CVs in a
In this case study, we’ll show how we used research-driven CRO (conversion rate optimization) techniques to increase lead conversion rate by 79% for China Expat Health, a lead generation company. Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups. Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody. Image Credits:
This morning Codat, a startup that provides APIs to link small-business fintech data to external services, announced that it has closed a $40 million round led by Tiger Global. The company raised $10 million in a Series A around a year ago that Index led; Codat also raised some strategic capital in the interim, but
In 2020 lots of workloads shifted to the cloud due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that figuring out how to migrate those workloads got any easier. Device42, a startup that helps companies understand their infrastructure, has a new product that is designed to analyze your infrastructure and make recommendations about the most cost-effective
Germany’s federal information commissioner has run out of patience with Facebook. Last month, Ulrich Kelber wrote to government agencies “strongly recommend[ing]” they to close down their official Facebook Pages because of ongoing data protection compliance problems and the tech giant’s failure to fix the issue. In the letter, Kelber warns the government bodies that he
Lisa W. Liu Contributor Lisa W. Liu is a senior partner at The Mitzel Group, where her practice focuses on business and immigration issues. A CEO’s fiduciary duties to their company and its shareholders do not end when they are off the clock — they must always act in good faith. However, navigating the boundaries
Swedish gaming giant Modern Times Group (MTG) has acquired Indian startup PlaySimple for at least $360 million, the two firms said Friday. MTG said it will pay 77% of the acquisition sum to Indian game developer and publisher in cash and the rest in company shares. There’s also another $150 million reward put aside if
Yesterday, China ordered ride-hailing company Didi to stop signing up new customers after regulators announced a cybersecurity review of the company’s operations. As of this writing, Didi’s stock price is down 5.3%. In today’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm suggested that the move wasn’t a complete surprise, but it still “puts a bad taste
As enterprises and carriers gear up for operating and scaling IoT services and monitoring the activity of their devices, machines and more globally, a startup that is building technology to make this easier and cheaper to implement is announcing some funding. FloLive, which has built a cloud-based solution to stitch together private, local cellular networks
Hepsiburada — Turkey’s giant online shopping platform considered the Amazon of its country — floats on the Nasdaq today, for a valuation likely to exceed $3.9 billion on current projections, especially with shares being marked up to $14 apiece (up from the previously predicted $12 pricing). Bu this isn’t the end of the journey for this break-out Turkish tech and e-commerce
For kids of a certain age — think 9 to 15 — options for enrichment are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while the ability to make money is largely non-existent. A new startup called Mighty wants to provide them with a new alternative through a platform it’s building that, like a kind of
Therapy is rapidly becoming a standard part of many people’s lives, but 2020 interrupted that trend by nixing in-person sessions and forcing therapists to migrate their entire practice online — and it turns out that’s not so easy. Frame simplifies it with an all-in-one portal for clients and therapists, unifying the listings, tools, and management
TechCrunch is trying to help you find the best growth marketer to work with through founder recommendations that we get in this survey. We’re sharing a few of our favorites so far, below. We’re using your recommendations to find top experts to interview and have them write their own columns here. This week we talked
With a lot of us spending more time at home these days, home improvement has continued to be a booming market. Now, one of the big players in that space — ServiceTitan, which builds software that today is used by over 100,000 contractors to manage their work — is getting a little bigger. The company
Privacy litigation that’s being brought against Facebook by two not-for-profits in the Netherlands can go ahead, an Amsterdam court has ruled. The case will be heard in October. Since 2019, the Amsterdam-based Data Privacy Foundation (DPS) has been seeking to bring a case against Facebook over its rampant collection of Internet users’ data — arguing
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny, Natasha, and Alex were on-deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. But, if you want to hear more about Robinhood, this is not the episode for you. If you want to learn more about the consumer fintech company’s
Shares of Chinese ride-hailing provider Didi are sharply lower this morning after news broke that its domestic regulators are investigating the newly public company. A loose translation of the probe’s official notice indicates that the cybersecurity review is “in order to prevent national data security risks, maintain national security, and protect the public interest.” Yesterday,
In a surprise announcement today, IBM announced that Jim Whitehurst, who came over in the Red deal, would be stepping down as company president just 14 months after taking over in that role. IBM didn’t give a lot of details as to why he was stepping away, but acknowledged his key role in helping bring
A court in Paris has fined Airbnb, the popular marketplace for vacation rentals. According to the court, the tech company has failed to comply with local regulation when it comes to listing your apartment on the platform. Airbnb should pay $9.6 million (€8.08 million) to the city of Paris. This decision has been years in
This afternoon Robinhood, the popular investing app for consumers filed to go public. The company intends to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol “HOOD.” That Robinhood released an S-1 filing today is not a surprise. The company privately filed to go public back in March, leaving the startup-watching world waiting for the eventual filing
It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few hours ago to go public, where it will trade under the ticker “HOOD.” The Equity crew has been