Affirm Holdings founder and CEO Max Levchin discusses the buy-now, pay-later firm’s second-quarter performance and growth strategy on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Month: February 2022
Going viral is the dream, but most projects need a little push. Mariusz Gąsiewski, Google’s CEE Mobile Gaming Lead, compares going viral to sightings of the mythical Yeti, the legendary snow creature that allegedly roams the Himalayas. “Many more people are talking about it than really saw it,” he told TechCrunch, noting that viral growth
Vendr, a startup that aims to help its customers buy software products faster and at a lower cost, announced this morning it has acquired Blissfully, a startup that builds SaaS management tooling. Vendr raised a $60 million round led by Tiger last year, making it one of the high-growth software companies that the crossover investor
When Redpanda launched in 2019, company founder and CEO Alexander Gallego thought a startup devoted to modernizing streaming data should have an appropriately nerdy name. He called it Vectorized, while the product he created was known as Redpanda. He soon learned, however, that people loved the name of the product, so he decided the company
The European Union has proposed an interesting addition to its fast updating digital rulebook today: The Data Act slots into an already ambitious digital policy framework with the goal of bringing clarity and fairness around the sharing of (mostly industrial) data generated by connected devices. It won’t be the last word on this either, as
Mark Cuban’s interactive platform Fireside, which helps creators reach audiences through live and virtual shows, is in talks to raise its Series A financing round and plans to make a push into web3 and metaverse in within months, two sources familiar with the matter said. Fireside is engaging with investors to raise about $25 million
Listen in to the first-ever episode of Found Live. We were joined by the mother-daughter duo Jordan Taylor and Edith Cooper who co-founded Medley — a group coaching platform focusing on personal and professional growth. They talked with the Found hosts about navigating a co-founder relationship with your mother or daughter. They discuss how important
Christian Ebersol was working for a health insurance company when he became interested in carbon capture storage and plant-based food. After joining the entrepreneur-in-residence program at OMERS Ventures to figure out where his next move might be in those spaces, he started reading Marl Bittman’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable
Enticing people to change their eating habits, especially to try alternative meat products, is a challenge for food tech companies because people want that product to taste, smell and feel like actual meat. Yali Bio is one company that thinks it has cracked that code by focusing on designer fats for plant-based meat and dairy
Last year I covered the launch of Berlin-HQ’d Revent — a new European early-stage with an “impact” focus — it was aimed to launch a €50 million ($60 million) fund to focus on climate tech, health, and well-being, and economic empowerment, backing startups with both “purpose and profit”. It’s now announcing the final close of
Ten game development studios in Africa have come together under one umbrella, the Pan Africa Gaming Group (PAGG), in an effort to unify the continent’s gaming sector, which is currently fragmented. The association is further envisioned to drive the uptake of gaming in the continent, and grow developer talent. The announcement was made today against
Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, February 22, 2022! We are back! Yes, after a lovely long weekend, your entire TechCrunch team is back in the saddle. Which is good because everything appears to be going on at once. So it was perfect that Slack decided that it actually wanted a four-day weekend
Alloy Automation, a Y Combinator graduate focused on connecting different e-commerce tools, announced this morning that it has closed a $20 million Series A led by a16z. The startup characterized the funding event as brisk, a contrast to its 2021 capital event when it was harder for the company to secure funding. TechCrunch covered Alloy’s
After publicly launching in the U.S. this past September, Facebook Reels today is becoming globally available in over 150 countries. The feature, which is a key part of Meta’s response to the TikTok threat, allows creators to share short-form video content on Facebook or cross-post Reels from Instagram in order to reach a broader audience.
The global chat commerce’s total addressable market is worth an estimated $80 billion and is seen as the third big wave of digital commerce after e-commerce and app commerce markets. As the largest digital platform in the world with more users than the internet’s 4.7 billion users, it only makes sense for businesses to communicate
More money for casual job-matching in Europe: Zenjob, a marketplace platform that targets students looking for side jobs in sectors like retail, logistics and hospitality and promises to connect them with employers in need of temporary labor, has closed a $50 million Series D round of funding. It’s just under two years since the Berlin-based
A team at Google is today launching a new product for mobile app developers called Checks which leverages A.I. technology to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, amid a rapidly changing regulatory and policy landscape. The freemium solution will be offered to both Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, who will
Jun.02 — Electronics Art Inc. CEO Andrew Wilson discusses the company’s banner year of 2020 and how the gaming industry has exploded throughout the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. The video game maker is set to debut the latest release of their popular title “Battlefield” and reveal the new cover of “Madden NFL 22” this
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, or Tuesday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week. We are a day late here thanks to the American holiday, which means
New data collected by Crunchbase News indicates that the value of global unicorns has crested the $4 trillion mark. The valuation milestone is notable not merely for its scale, but its relative size. Compared to what? The value of the major tech companies of the West, namely the U.S. Big Five. Once they were known
Luxembourg-based Leko Labs, a construction startup that’s developing sustainable wood-based building materials as an alternative to steel and concrete and applying automation to construction methods, has closed a $21 million Series A round of funding. The raise is led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150 with participation from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Tencent, AMAVI, Rise PropTech
Companies sit on a lot of unstructured data and often don’t have the capabilities to get much out of it. Now imagine having a way to store data and actually be able to ask it questions, for example, “When did ABC Company sign its first contract with us?” or “Show me videos that contain blue
Online language learning continues to be a huge opportunity for startups, with the most engaging experiences meeting a surge of interest from consumers looking for more productivity out of the hours that they spend on their smartphones. In one of the more recent developments, a language learning app called EWA — which has built a
The world’s labs are under pressure to do more tests and process more materials, not just due to COVID but from the growing biotech and drug development sectors — and automation is the sure path forwards. Automata, which got its start making a robotic arm for handling individual tasks, has now raised $50M to automate
Spotify’s oddly-named in-car entertainment system, “Car Thing,” is now available to the general public after initial tests that began in 2019. The now $89.99 device — a $10 increase from its limited public release in October — is largely targeted towards vehicle owners who don’t have a built-in infotainment system offering easy access to Spotify,
MarketForce, the retail B2B and end-to-end distribution platform founded in Kenya, has raised $40 million in Series A funding for its merchant inventory financing and expansion across Africa. MarketForce, which was launched in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda last year after growing beyond Kenya and Nigeria, plans to introduce buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options to help merchants access
Donald Trump’s media group released its TRUTH Social iOS app today in the U.S., but a scan of the app’s API using publicly available tools revealed that it already closed itself to registrations (also, the scan showed that its “proprietary account registration microservice” is named “Pepe,” which is also the name of a meme with
Relocating employees can involve up to 20-30 different complex processes, while many of the support packages on the market can be inflexible and expensive. Plus, relocating services are usually only available to company leaders, not staff. But an even bigger issue looms over companies today: the ‘great resignation’ brought on by the pandemic, as employees
RIP Mark Zuckerberg’s “time well spent“? In a move that appears to coincide with Facebook/Meta reporting slowing growth, photo-sharing app Instagram appears to have quietly removed the ability for mobile users to set a lower daily time limit reminder than 30 minutes. Indeed, the app’s UX design nudges people to choose a three hour ‘limit’
The Netherlands’ competition authority has once again increased a fine levied against Apple for failing to comply with an antitrust order related to payment tech and dating apps. The fifth penalty payment of €5 million issued today means the tech giant is now on the hook for €25M (out of a possible total of €50M)
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