People come together around the dinner table and the food they love, but for Umamicart founder and CEO Andrea Xu, it wasn’t always easy to find the ingredients to make the foods she grew up eating with her family. Xu’s parents are Chinese, but moved to Spain, opening up their own Chinese restaurant. She recalls
Month: December 2021
AWS held its annual customer conference, re:Invent, this week in Las Vegas. It’s typically been a high-energy customer extravaganza, a circus for tech people, but there were a few unusual things about this year’s model that made the event feel a bit more subdued than in the past. For starters, it was the first time
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Looking for our other guides? Find them here! As we wade into the second pandemic-era holiday season, there’s no better time to throw yourself headlong into a new hobby. Or that’s what you should tell your loved ones
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s Friday, which means the whole crew was aboard for this particular episode. We had Grace and Chris behind the scenes, and Mary Ann, Natasha, and Alex on the mics. And, frankly, we
The plan is simple: First, we create a knockoff of a popular digital service. Second, we cry political persecution. Third, we raise a bunch of money with a SPAC. And then, to cap it off, we take on AWS. Got it? What’s actually funny is that I am not kidding. That is not only a
Facebook Messenger announced today that it’s starting to test out a new “Split Payments” feature that introduces a way for users to share the cost of bills and expenses through the app. The company says the new feature is a “free and fast” way to handle finances through Messenger. The new feature is rolling out
Bret Taylor is on a roll: On Monday, he became the chair of Twitter’s board, and a day later, Salesforce made him its co-CEO and co-chair. Enterprise reporter Ron Miller looked back at Taylor’s career to better understand how a one-time Google product manager ended up co-leading one of the world’s most valuable companies. To
Vinehealth, a 2018-founded, London-based digital health startup that’s built an app which offers personalized support for cancer patients while also making it easier to gather patient-reported outcome (PRO) data, including for drug development and clinical trials, has closed a $5.5 million seed round as it prepares to expand into the U.S. The round, which co-founder
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Zindi is all about using AI to solve real world problems for companies and individuals. And the South Africa-based crowd-solving startup has done that over the last three years they have been in existence. Just last year a team of data scientists under Zindi used machine learning to improve air quality monitoring in Kampala as
Grab, the Southeast Asian super app, announced last night that it completed its business combination with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Altimeter Growth. The result? Grab will begin trading today on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “GRAB.” And it raised a pile of money in the process. Billions, in fact. The Exchange explores startups,
TikTok is today introducing new ways for its creators to make money from their content. While already, the short-form video platform allowed creators to accept virtual gifts from fans during TikTok LIVE videos, a set of new features will allow creators to accept payments and gifts when they’re not livestreaming through the addition of Tips
Companies face all kinds of challenges moving to the cloud. The more complex and spread out you are geographically, the more difficult it becomes to manage your network. In an effort to solve this issue, Amazon announced AWS Cloud WAN today to bring software-defined wide area networking to AWS. Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels
If you’re trying to get a mortgage or an auto loan, banks will put on their judging glasses and look into your past. Makes sense; it’s a reasonably reliable indicator as to whether you’ll be able to repay your loans or not. Student financing is a little different. Sure, your past plays a role, but
What goes up must come down. And what goes SPAC must go splat? We’ll keep workshopping that. Regardless, shares of super app Grab took a pounding today after its SPAC combination was approved last night and began to trade this morning. Grab’s stock initially rose, before falling sharply as the day went on. By the
Religion-based apps, tools, and communities aren’t brand new, including to investors. Pray.com, for example, an L.A.-based app for daily prayer and bedtime bible stories that was founded in 2016, has raised at least $34 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins. Ministry Brands, a nine-year-old, Knoxville, Tenn.-based outfit that now includes dozens of software and payments
Rachel Delacour Contributor Rachel is the CEO and co-founder of Sweep. Previously, she co-founded BIME Analytics, which was acquired by Zendesk. She invests in mainly women-founded businesses, and her achievements have been recognized by La Tribune Women’s award, the French State’s Young Innovative Enterprise Award, and she was named as one of France’s Inspiring 50.
At its annual re:Invent conference, AWS announced re:Post, a new community-driven question and answer service designed to help AWS customers remove technical roadblocks. The new service is part of the AWS Free Tier. AWS says re:Post is driven by the community of AWS customers, partners, and employees. “AWS re:Post is an AWS-managed Q&A service offering crowd-sourced,
The European Commission has given its clearest signal yet that it’s prepared to intervene over weak enforcement of the EU’s data protection rules against big tech. Today the bloc’s executive also had a warning for adtech giants Google and Facebook — accusing them of choosing “legal tricks” over true compliance with the EU’s standard of
Francois Nguyen Contributor Francois Nguyen, executive design director of product design at frog, is responsible for ensuring high standards of design excellence. With hybrid models taking off across many aspects of society, it’s clear that though they offer incredible flexibility, the boundary lines between work and personal life are becoming increasingly blurred and emotionally draining. Ritual has always been
If you bring up bad news about the price of technology stocks on Twitter, very helpful people will send you multi-year charts that put recent declines into historical context. Yes, thank you; I was not aware you could zoom out. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get
Mendel, a corporate spend management solution for enterprises in Latin America, announced today that it has secured $35 million in debt and equity. The Mexico-based startup closed the $15 million Series A round and $20 million debt financing after participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. ALLVP and Infinity Ventures, a firm founded by a
IRL, the SoftBank-backed social app and recent unicorn, is today announcing its first acquisition. The company is purchasing, for an undisclosed sum, the “digital nutrition” company AaBeZe Labs and its portfolio of IP with the goal of making IRL a healthier and more ethically designed social networking app. AaBeZe’s founders Michael Phillips Moskowitz, the former
The holiday shopping season kicked off last week with some lackluster results, but employers are still in dire need of workers. The tight labor market, driven in part by “The Great Resignation,” is highlighting the need for more tech-enabled tools for connecting employers with available workers. Shiftsmart, a New York-based labor management resource, is the
Paris-based VC firm Partech has announced the closing of the fundraising of its new growth fund. Partech Growth II is the firm’s second growth fund. And the team managed to raise $750 million. As a reminder, Partech Growth I was a smaller fund with €400 million under management, which represents $460 million at today’s exchange
SoftBank-based digital creation platform Picsart, which recently hit uniciorn status, announced today it’s acquiring the research and development company DeepCraft. The deal is a combination of both cash and stock and is in the seven-figure range, but the exact terms aren’t being disclosed. Picsart today offers a range of digital creation and editing tools aimed
Gozem, a super app that provides a host of services — including transport, e-commerce and financial services in Francophone Africa — has raised $5 million in Series A financing, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The Togo- and Singapore-based company received investment from AAIC, Thunes (TransferTo), Momentum Ventures (SMRT), Innoport Ventures (Schulte Group), CMC Ventures (National
1inch, a popular aggregator of decentralized protocols, has raised $175 million in what it calls a Series B funding round. It isn’t a traditional venture round as the company isn’t selling a stake in exchange for money. Instead, 1inch has sold $175 million worth of 1INCH tokens in a private token sales with institutional investors.
Less than 20% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. But LinkedIn, the largest professional social network globally, has so far catered only to this sliver of the population in the world’s second largest internet market. On Thursday, the Microsoft-owned service said it’s beginning to change that. LinkedIn has started to roll out support for Hindi
For even a casual observer of the tech industry, it’s been a good week for Bret Taylor: He was named board chair at Twitter on Monday, and yesterday, he became the co-CEO and co-chair at a SaaS company called Salesforce. From outward appearances, Taylor seemed extraordinarily well positioned to influence what goes on at Twitter