Google’s public cloud has been chasing competing services from Amazon and Microsoft for so long, you might think it would be getting winded. But the critical Alphabet division keeps on keeping on, yesterday reporting revenues of more than $5.5 billion for the fourth quarter. That was the good news. The bad news was that Google
Month: February 2022
E-commerce has continued to boom in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but running an e-commerce business has also become significantly more chaotic, with unpredictable supply chains, logistics hiccups, and overall higher costs upending even the best-laid plans. To underscore the demand for solutions to address this, today a startup called Wayflyer — which has
Though the Covid-19 pandemic almost immediately devasted the business of travel booking startup Headout, the company has been able to return to growth as domestic travel rebounded in recent months. The service, which helps consumers book tours, events, and other experiences and activities in cities around the world, delivered 800% growth since January 2021 by
Sergiu Matei Contributor Sergiu Matei is the founder of Index, a platform that helps teams find and hire world-class remote software developers and be globally compliant from the get-go. More posts by this contributor 3 ways to recruit engineers who fly under LinkedIn’s radar The internet is undergoing a drastic facelift thanks to surging interest
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex brought on the Most Online™ reporter at TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling
Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has come a long from being run out of a garage in Phoenix to now a 120-person company, valued at $1.5 billion, that’s expected to grow to over 300 people by year-end as its business explodes. To aid on that front, Whatnot is making two key hires, one of which involves
Vegetable oils like canola and palm oil have become a major part of our diet, whether we like it or not, and while they’re useful substances, they’re not exactly good for you and are a major cause of deforestation. Zero Acre Farms is a new company aiming to provide a improved alternative, produced by microorganisms
Traditionally, a data lake was a place to store amorphous unstructured data, while a data warehouse was where you put very structured data like credit card information. That began changing in recent years as companies saw a need to merge the two concepts and the lakehouse idea — combining the power of the data lake
A piece of compliance theatre that the behavioral ad industry has for years passed off as “a cross-industry best practice standard” — claiming the consent management platform allowed advertisers to keep tracking and surveilling European Internet users without having to worry about pesky EU privacy laws — has today been confirmed to breach the bloc’s
The Joe Rogan controversy has been a PR headache for Spotify in recent days, but it doesn’t seem to have yet prompted a sizable exit to rival streaming apps, according to new app store data. Over the past several days, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other musicians have pulled their music from Spotify to protest
Whose Your Landlord,1 or WYL, announced a $2.1 million seed round today led by Black Operator Ventures, better known as BlackOps Ventures. TechCrunch readers will already be aware of BlackOps’ fund, which we covered at launch last December. The goal behind the $13 million capital pool was to invest in Black founders. The WYL round
Dana Stalder Contributor Dana Stalder is a partner at Matrix Partners. The former commercial chief (Product, Sales and Marketing) at PayPal, he now leads fintech investing at Matrix Partners, where he also invests in consumer marketplaces and enterprise software. More posts by this contributor Fintechs could see $100 billion of liquidity in 2021 2019 saw
As more companies become software companies, what is being created still needs to align with business objectives. Jellyfish believes this can be done by giving software engineering leaders the data and insights they need to do that. “The way that engineering teams are led, managed and tied to the business is still the same as
Last year product analytics and digital adoption platform Pendo pulled in $110 million investment from private equity firm Thoma Bravo, and that was not long after a $150 million tranche of funding. So the company — which allows companies like Okta, Salesforce, and Zendesk to onboard new customers or get employees to adopt new software as well as
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, February 1, 2022! I celebrated the first day of the month by having my internet cut out right as I started to prepare this
Another vertical farming operation revealed its plans to hit Nasdaq by way of SPAC. This week, Florida-based Kalera announced plans to merge with Agrico Acquisition Corp. in a deal that values the agtech firm at $375 million. The move comes as plenty of excitement swirls around the category, though Kalera, which currently lists on the
Rising pressure on big business to address the threat of climate change by decarbonizing their ops has, in recent years, led to huge demand for carbon offset schemes — enabling companies to buy carbon credits to ‘offset’ emissions so they can claim to be ‘greening’ their activities, without having to make more substantial changes (like,
It’s not a secret that the restaurant industry was a late adopter of technology, a move that unfortunately left many restaurants unprepared when online ordering and delivery became the norm during the global pandemic. Those that did embrace delivery found out quickly that the fees tacked on by food delivery companies were difficult to maintain
Stating the obvious: customer discovery is essential for startups that hope to achieve product-market fit. Unfortunately, most of us are not skilled when it comes to talking to strangers. Each member of a startup’s founding team was hired for a specific reason, but customer outreach rarely leads the list. Early-stage startups that hope to refine
Over the course of the last few years, Firewalla‘s combined firewall and router devices have made a name for themselves as the go-to hardware security tools for many enthusiasts and small businesses. Today, the company started shipping its newest device, the Firewalla Purple, a diminutive gigabit firewall and router that is currently retailing for $319.
Last November, Apple announced the launch of Self Service Repair — a surprising addition for a company that has notoriously lacked such capabilities. Those changes didn’t happen in a vacuum, of course. The president and Congress have both been pushing to open the so-called right to repair. There are plenty of reasons for this, from
Regardless of your perspective on blockchain-centered projects, venture capitalists appear to have made up their minds about the sector: Investments into crypto-themed companies — the web3 space, as its supporters call it — set records in 2021, records that could be beaten in 2022 if early data indicates where capital will flow this year. The
The shipping business in Africa has for years been inefficient and costly due to the traditional ways of managing operations – traditional in the sense that a shipper has to physically look for a transporter, sometimes through a middle-man, and often, once goods are delivered, the trucks almost always make the return trip empty. For
Netlify, the well-funded company that, in many ways, started the Jamstack movement, today announced that it has acquired Quirrel, an open-source service for managing and executing serverless functions. Founded by Simon Knott, who is also the maintainer of the popular Blitz.js React framework, Quirrel never raised any outside funding before the acquisition, which quietly happened
Earlybird, best known as the Berlin-based VC which has backed a myriad of German and European startups such as Soundcloud and N26, is today expanding its reach in Europe with the creation of a team and adjunct fund based out of Paris, France. The timing is decent. According to most annual European surveys, France regularly
The use of tracking cookies is winding down, and Apple’s anti-tracking privacy update has impacted mobile apps’ advertising revenues. But these changes have only prompted the adtech industry to get more creative with its solutions. The latest example comes from Pandora parent company, SiriusXM, which this week rolled out a new way to identify and
The demand for software engineers is expected to grow by 22% between 2020 and 2030, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This figure is larger than the 4% average for other careers. One would be out of touch with reality to say they haven’t noticed this phenomenon in Lagos, Africa’s startup
AirTree partners (from l to r): From left to right: James Cameron, John Henderson, Elicia McDonald, Jackie Vullinghs, Craig Blair and Helen Norton More money is flowing into Australia and New Zealand’s startup ecosystems. Sydney-based AirTree Ventures, one of the region’s most prolific VC firms, announced it has raised $700 million AUD (about $493 million
Private equity firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital have finally found a suitable match for Tibco: the firms will buy Citrix for $16.5 billion. The deal, which represents a roughly 30% premium on Citrix’s value, aims to combine the two companies to create a legacy enterprise tech powerhouse. But will the combination produce
GWI, a UK-based tech company — formerly GlobalWebIndex — that’s built up a SaaS business which disrupts traditional offline market research methods with a global network of data contributors, mobile surveys and a self-serve platform for surfacing rich consumer insights to customers that include tech giants like Google, has closed a $180 million Series B