African e-commerce fulfilment startups backed by Y Combinator seem to be piquing investors’ interest this year for their niche e-commerce play. Summer batch graduate ShipBlu is the latest on that list and confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised $2.4 million in seed funding. The company, founded by Ali Nasser, Ahmed ElKawass, Abdelrahman Hosny in
Month: October 2021
Kathryn Kosmides Contributor Kathryn Kosmides is a survivor of gender-based violence and the founder of nonprofit background check Garbo. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s message about Instagram’s impact on teenage girls was unequivocal: Facebook’s studies found that 13% of British teens said Instagram prompted thoughts of suicide, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating
Jim Mann Contributor Jim Mann is director of acquisitions at Thrasio, a consumer goods company reimagining omnichannel commerce and consumer products. The toughest questions most entrepreneurs face will involve international expansion. Whether to, when to, where to and how to expand all involve a wealth of complex considerations. The stakes are high: Success could mean
During its big VR and AR-focused event Thursday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major new title headed to its VR platform that should turn a few heads. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is on the way to the Oculus Quest 2. San Andreas is Rockstar’s well-loved 2004 entry into the hit GTA
David Karandish Contributor David Karandish is founder and CEO of Capacity, an enterprise artificial intelligence SaaS company headquartered in St. Louis, MO. The global help desk automation industry is expected to grow to $11 billion by 2023 as support automation empowers companies to serve their customers more effectively. By automating repetitive tasks and FAQs, companies
Salted, a Los Angeles-based startup creating digitally native quick-service restaurant brands, brought in a new round of $16 million in Series A funding to continue its nationwide expansion. The company was founded seven years ago by CEO Jeff Applebaum, but a focus on providing healthy QSR brands and going after the $325 billion food delivery
Twitter announced last month it would soon introduce an option that allows hosts to record their live audio sessions in Twitter Spaces to make them available for replay. While the company at the time said the feature would launch in a “few months,” it’s not surprising that, given Twitter’s accelerated pace of development, the company
Grant Lee has been living in slide decks for most of his career, but it wasn’t until he was doing some advisory work last year that relied heavily on slides that he aimed to reimagine the format. “Slides were built for a different era of work,” he told TechCrunch. “They were more of a visual
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.
There’s a new venture studio in the world that looks rather different from earlier venture studios from a structural standpoint. Unlike renowned outfits like Atomic or Science or Expa that create companies that then sell equity to VCs who expect that equity to rise in value, this new studio, SuperLayer, plans to spin up consumer
Hello, and welcome to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. And have a good time. This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a host of topics from the public and private markets alike. In our
Twitter is rolling out the ability for all iOS users globally to Super Follow select creators. The option was previously only available to users in the U.S. and Canada. Super Follows allow users to subscribe to accounts they like for a monthly subscription fee in exchange for exclusive content. It’s Super Following time –– everyone
Protein biochemist Dr. Jasmin Hume was working in the alternative food space when she saw an opportunity to evolve technology so that our global food industry can reduce its reliance on animals. She started Shiru in 2019, and the company uses a “precision fermentation” process to create plant-based ingredients for food companies. The result has
Today’s world is run on data, and the amount of it that is being produced, managed and used to power services is growing by the minute — to the tune of some 79 zettabytes this year, according to one estimate. Today, a company called Yugabyte, which has built an open-source distributed SQL database model to
Is Southeast Asia about to hit an inflection point for tech startups? Four hundred million people in the region already use the internet, but by year’s end, one estimate suggests that 80% of the population over the age of 15 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam will be digital consumers. “As per
As startup funding increases around the world, The Exchange has poked its head into markets as far-flung as Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Wherever we looked, we’ve found venture capital flowing in record quantities. The story has been largely the same inside the United States, with Boston having a solid year, along with
Lisa Gilbert Contributor Facebook may have a new name, but a rebrand won’t erase the multiple recent disclosures illustrating how destructive the company is for society — and how harmful it is for its own investors. The revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen were shocking but not surprising. According to Haugen, who worked for the
Jonathan Greechan Contributor Jonathan Greechan is CEO and co-founder of the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator, Founder Institute. More posts by this contributor Do you fit the mold for the next generation of values-driven VCs? These best practices maximize the value of your online events Earlier this year, a report from the EU showed that 42%
Brazilian grain trading marketplace Tarken secured $3.5 million in a seed round, co-led by Monashees and Maya, to continue developing its technology that connects grain buyers and sellers and operates an artificial intelligence tool for commodity pricing. Joining them was Gilgamesh Ventures and individual investors, including Kavak founder Carlos Garcia, Ualá founder Pierpaolo Barbieri, Zap
Matt Bivons Contributor Matt Bivons is CEO and co-founder of Canopy Servicing, an API-first platform for personalized and transparent lending. He previously served as VP and GM at GreenSky, and head of growth at Earnest and VaycayHero. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is an old form of payment that is new again in a big
Edtech unicorn Udemy priced its IPO at $29 per share, the upper end of its IPO range. Using a simple share count, the company was worth around $4 billion at its IPO price and a few hundred million more if a full -diluted share count is employed in our valuation calculations. For edtech, the Udemy
Former President Trump’s new social network might be in hot water before it even launches. Mastodon, a free social media framework, alleges that Truth Social is passing open source software off as its own and has given them 30 days to fix this. If it doesn’t fix things by the end of next month, things
There are several plastic clamshells sitting in front of me on a conference room table — around 20 or so boxes, labels facing forward, with a plate of turnips and a tub of those R&D strawberries we saw back in part two. It’s a nice photo opportunity, backdropped by Bowery Farming’s impressive grow system and
The Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported earnings this week. As you might expect, they did just fine with a growing market that passed $45 billion worldwide, good for a mind-boggling $180 billion run rate and trailing 12 month revenue of $164 billion. Revenue grew 37% overall in
Zeit Medical, which makes an early warning system for strokes during sleep, has raised $2 million in a seed round just after leaving Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort. The company’s work suggests the brain-monitoring headband could save lives by alerting people to possible strokes hours before they might otherwise be noticed, and the new funding
Amit Anand Contributor Amit Anand is a founding partner of Jungle Ventures and an early pioneer and leader in the development of Southeast Asia’s venture capital industry. More posts by this contributor Investors are doubling down on Southeast Asia’s digital economy With Grab’s announcement of its imminent Nasdaq listing and GoJek merging with Tokopedia to
Allbirds is a tech-enabled shoe company that raised a series of venture capital rounds since mid-2015, per Crunchbase data. And it’s going public. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. The company’s IPO would be something we’d cover regardless of how it
Well, it’s official. After 17 years of being called Facebook, the social networking parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus has a new name. Facebook’s corporate entity is now Meta. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg announced the change at the company’s AR/VR-focused Connect event, sharing that the new title captured more of the company’s core
Agriculture has a 10,000-year history, and it’s predominantly a history of technology. Developments from the plow and wheel to enclosures and the modern mechanical miracles of gas-powered tractors and sorters have consistently improved crop yields, allowing humanity to expand from tens of millions of people to a global population projected to top 10 billion this
When brands sell through social media and other third-parties, they often spend millions of dollars to advertise on those platforms, yet have little or no knowledge of who their customers actually are. Social commerce startup Social Chat is out to change that. Frost Li, the former head of growth at Wish, founded the company in
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