Ariana Grande strutted and soared around a candy-colored series of Fortnite sets in Epic’s latest major in-game live music event. The multi-day “tour” offered gamers and Grande fans alike plenty to enjoy while showcasing Epic’s impressively smooth and visually inventive vision for live events that millions of people can enjoy simultaneously. Fortnite players have known
Month: August 2021
A major UN scientific report has concluded that human activity is changing the climate at an unprecedented rate. The report has been describe as a “code red for humanity” by its authors. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is stern and blunt in its conclusions: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed
Launched in February 2019, Kroo, the London-based consumer-facing fintech raised some seed funding last year for its prepaid card service which claims to offer more ‘social features’ in its drive towards offering full-blown banking services. Kroo’s pitch is that it removes friction from financial interactions with friends and family, and throws in some environmental initiatives
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You
The Chinese government’s crackdown on its domestic technology industry continues, with Tencent under fresh pressure despite the company’s efforts to follow changing regulatory expectations. News broke over the weekend that Beijing filed a civil suit against Tencent “over claims its messaging-app WeChat’s Youth Mode does not comply with laws protecting minors,” per the BBC. And
James Evans and his co-founders at CommandBar were working on a software product when they hit a wall while trying to access certain functionalities within the software. That’s when the lightbulb moment happened and, in 2020, the team shifted to building a product search engine add-on to make software easier to use. “We thought this
Back in December 2020 we covered the launch of a new kind of smartphone app-based search engine, Xayn. “A search engine?!” I hear you say? Well, yes, because despite the convenience of modern search engines’ ability to tailor their search results to the individual, this user-tracking comes at the expense of privacy. This mass surveillance
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Less than a year after its $3 million seed round, Verifiable snapped up another $17 million for its healthcare provider credentialing API toolkit. The Austin-based company’s technology creates an infrastructure for healthcare provider data management that puts providers at the center. Verifiable founder Nick Macario told TechCrunch that data fuels critical operations across health systems
As startups in Africa continue to grow and raise money at a ridiculous pace, so too will their cap tables expand. Most African startups’ bulk of VC money is from foreign investors, making it imperative for African startups to incorporate abroad, especially in the U.S. The processes for incorporation are quite complicated, and even though
Michelle Davey’s pitch to Jordan Nof of Tusk Ventures about Wheel, a startup focused on providing a full suite of virtual care solutions to clinicians, was front-loaded with early metrics. It may not be standard practice to start with the numbers, especially early on, but she explained to us why she chose that strategy —
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.
Sam Richard Contributor Sam Richard is senior director of growth at OpenView. More posts by this contributor SaaS companies can grow to $20M+ ARR by selling exclusively to developers Everyone at an organization should own growth, right? Turns out when everyone owns something, no one does. As a result, growth teams can cause an enormous
Data science platform Dataiku announced today it has raised a $400 million Series E, bringing its valuation to $4.6 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from returning investors like ICONIQ Growth, CapitalG, FirstMark Capital, Battery Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Dawn Capital. New investors included Insight Partners, Eurazeo, Lightrock and Olivier Pomel,
Aug.04 — Joe Lubin, CEO of Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum, discusses upgrades rolling out on the platform he says will transform transaction fees, mining costs, and improve overall security and sustainability. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
With most popular online video games, there’s a huge gap between being a good player and a great one. A casual player might be able to hold their own against other casual players, only for a random pro to wander by and chew through everyone like they’re somehow playing with a different set of rules.
Hippo began to trade earlier this week after completing its SPAC combination. The home-focused U.S. neoinsurance provider initially stuck close to its $10 per-share pre-combination price before plummeting yesterday during regular trading. But Hippo’s declines don’t appear to be of its own doing. Lemonade, another U.S. neoinsurance player — albeit one more focused on rental
While Amsterdam garners the lion’s share of attention in the Netherlands tech ecosystem, the not-so-far-away region around Utrecht has its fair share of tech startups and investors, as is evidenced by our latest survey of locals, below. Area ecosystem wranglers such as StartupUtrecht, UtrechtInc, Holland Startup, Utrecht Community and others bring startups, scaleups, corporates, angels,
Assembling a startup team is harder than assembling 10 IKEA dressers, and the stakes are much, much higher. Starting with the assumption that 90% of startups will fail and the most successful ones take an average of six years to IPO, founders must make careful decisions about whom they invite to join the core team.
Venture capitalists are chatting this week about a recent piece from The Information titled “The End of Venture Capital as We Know It.” As with nearly everything you read, the article in question is a bit more nuanced than its headline. Its author, Sam Lessin, makes some pretty good points. But I don’t fully agree
YouTube earlier this year announced its plans to significantly invest in original creator content for its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, with the introduction of a $100 million YouTube Shorts Fund. The fund will reward creators for their most engaging and most viewed short-form videos over the course of 2021 to 2022, with the goal of quickly
V2Food is one of many new contenders in the alternative protein space, founded in Australia but now setting its sights on Europe, Asia and beyond. It has a few key advantages over the competition, and with €45 million in new funding it may be finding its way to plates in the Eurozone soon. The company
High-quality UX for websites and apps is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have if a company is to succeed. But scaling the impact of UX teams is not simple, and in recent years teams have turned to what’s know as DesignOps platforms to help them. Now, a new startup hopes to become a key
It sounds like a plan concocted by a supervillain, if that villain’s dastardly end was to provide cheap, clean power all over the world: launch a set of three-kilometer-wide solar arrays that beam the sun’s energy to the surface. Even the price tag seems gleaned from pop fiction: one hundred million dollars. But this is
Foldables! Two, probably! Those are your headliners. Samsung tipped its hand with the event invite, which features a pair of geometrical objects that pretty clearly represent the new Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip. The other headliner is what we won’t be seeing at the event (Deadliner? Endliner?). The company already confirmed via corporate
This past decade, Nigeria has seen several companies cater to the development and growth of software engineers and tech talent in general. It’s a space many in the Nigerian ecosystem like to think is budding yet overcrowded. So when Chika Nwobi started Decagon in 2018, the perception was generally “here comes another tech talent accelerator.”
SentiLink, an identity verification technology startup, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round led by Craft Ventures. Felicis Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and NYCA also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total raised to $85 million since its 2017 inception. The company declined to reveal at what valuation the money
For mobile users, Discord is adding one new feature that you’d find on a more traditional social app. The company rolled out an option for users to customize their profiles across its iOS and Android apps Tuesday, following the feature’s release on the desktop version of Discord in late June. The new option lives in
UK-based open banking bulk payment startup Comma has raised £4.34 million ($6m) in a Seed round of funding led by Octopus Ventures and Connect Ventures. They were joined by investors Village Global, and the founders of Wagestream, Peter Briffet and Portman Wills. The company says it enables small and micro businesses to bulk pay bills,
Matt Cohen Contributor Founder and managing partner at Ripple Ventures, Matt Cohen is a business operator turned early-stage investor. Tony Conrad Contributor Having founded about.me and Sphere (both acquired by AOL), Tony brings founder and startup leadership expertise to his partner role at True. Many VCs tout their mentorship and hands-on approach to founders, especially