BNPL is not a new concept; it’s just taken off in recent years and become far more mainstream. Buy now, pay later lets people do exactly what its name suggests — buy something and pay for it later. The difference between BNPL and credit cards is that rather than charge the full amount of a
Month: April 2022
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This was a live week! Which meant that Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic with Alex Wilhelm, and Grace Mendenhall, our ever-trusty producer, helped us power through. A big shoutout to Dennis,
Thanks to the explosion of low- and no-code development tools, building web apps from scratch has become easier — and cheaper — than it once was. But sophisticated search and navigation functions can complicate the process. A recent survey from IT research firm GoodFirms estimates the cost of a complex app to be between $91,550
One thing I love about fintech is the promise of unlocking more tools for more people. In a broad sense, the current era of fintech has done just that — people around the world now have access to financial services that were earlier either completely out of reach before, or, at a minimum, prohibitively expensive.
Less than a year ago, Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, intending to perform research in the public interest on making AI more reliable and explainable. Its $124 million in funding was surprising then, but nothing could have prepared us for the company raising $580 million less than a year
Snapchat is adding new assistive devices for Bitmoji avatars to expand its representation options for users. Now, users can add a hearing aid in a variety of colors and choose to have them in one ear or both. Snapchat has also added a selection of its most popular Bitmoji stickers featuring the avatar with a
AI systems that understand and generate text, known as language models, are the hot new thing in the enterprise. A recent survey found that 60% of tech leaders said that their budgets for AI language technologies increased by at least 10% in 2020 while 33% reported a 30% increase. But not all language models are
Used-car digital platforms have been proliferating across the world for a handful of significant reasons, but most of those are related to our recent pandemic. Among those reasons is the rapid digitization of the used car industry, as startups have flooded the market with easier-to-use platforms that the older e-commerce-style ones lacked. The other is
Twitter didn’t have as many users as it thought — a predicament that may have encouraged the company to more seriously consider its acceptance of Elon Musk’s proposal to take the company private in a $44 billion deal. According to Twitter’s Q1 2022 earnings out this morning, the company admits it had been overcounting the
Earlier this month at TechCrunch Early Stage, I talked to Frederique Dame, an investing partner at GV, about product-market fit. A standing-room-only crowd packed the venue as Dame spoke about her experience leading product and engineering efforts at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, sharing some of what she learned about gathering customer data, iterating quickly to
Lotti Siniscalco is a partner at Emergence Capital, where she invests in early-stage enterprise software companies. During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, she headlined a session dedicated to giving feedback on pitch decks. What follows is a small slice of Lotti’s input from the session. Constructing pitch decks is part art and part science. And they’re
On Friday afternoon, former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey turned to the platform that he co-created to speak about its future, days after the company was bought for $44 billion by Elon Musk. In the vague thread, Dorsey said he doesn’t believe in permanent bans, with the exception of illegal activity. “As I’ve said before,
Movable Ink today announced that it secured $55 million in a Series D funding round led by Silver Lake with participation from Contour Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and others, bringing the marketing software startup’s total raised to $97 million. The investment comes as Movable Ink — which was valued at $1.3 billion prior to the
In further fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Yandex, the company that’s sometimes referred to as the ‘Google of Russia’, has signed a term sheet to sell its media division to VKontakte (VK), aka the local Facebook equivalent. Yandex confirmed it has signed a term sheet to divest its news aggregator (News) and blogging/infotainment platform
Airbnb today announced that it will soon no longer offer refunds for COVID-19-related circumstances, including cases where a guest or host becomes sick with COVID-19 — reflecting an update to the company’s extenuating circumstances policy. Beginning May 31, Airbnb hosts’ cancellation terms will apply “as usual,” Airbnb said, although certain reservations made before May 31
As you might’ve heard, it’s getting a little crowded in space, between thousand-satellite constellations à la SpaceX’s Starlink and the millions of pieces of space junk accumulated from decades of launches. But it’s also getting a little crowded in the space-monitoring space, with a number of companies competing to create observation systems to help satellite
Ford started production yesterday on its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, a do-or-die vehicle that takes the automaker’s — and the United States’ — best-selling vehicle and swaps its gas-guzzling engines for powerful electric motors juiced by more than 1,800 pounds of batteries. The mattress-sized pack can deliver over 300 miles of range, but if Ford
Elon Musk has lined up a new CEO for Twitter and told banks that agreed to help fund his $44 billion acquisition offer about his plans to monetize tweets, according to a new report from Reuters. A source told Reuters that Musk has decided on who he plans to appoint as the new chief executive
Much of the grocery focus over the past three years has been around online adoption, but as long as 90% of U.S. grocery sales still happen in stores, companies like Clerk want to bring some digitization to the brick-and-mortar grocery experience. CEO Marlow Nickell founded Austin-based Clerk in 2016, and while he saw Amazon and
Mass transit group Swvl has confirmed to TechCrunch its deal to buy UK start-up Zeelo, estimated to be a $100 million acquisition, according to sources. The Egyptian-born startup that provides shared transportation services for intercity and intracity trips, recently expanded into Turkey with its acquisition of Volt Lines. Earlier this year it went public (NASDAQ:
Yesterday, fintech startup Lydia unveiled a brand new design for its financial super app. And it’s an opinionated take on mobile payments — not just a fresh coat of paint. I sat down with the company’s founders to discuss the thinking and vision for the future of Lydia. In many ways, Lydia isn’t standing still
Airbnb is going all in on the “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy that much of the business world has been forced to adopt, committing to full-time remote work for most employees and a handful of perks like 90 days of international work/travel. It’s a strong, simple policy that so few large companies have had the
“Investors are pouring money into Latin America’s logistics and shipping businesses,” our former colleague Jon Shieber wrote in 2019. But a pandemic later, amid unrest over gasoline prices across the globe, it’s time for a revisit. Nowports (YC W19) is a good starting point for comparison. In February 2019, the Mexican startup was just graduating
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold around 4.4 million shares of the company on Tuesday, according to regulatory filings published on Thursday. Musk, via Aaron Beckman, his power of attorney, filed a total of five Form 4s with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to cover all 138 individual transactions. The value of the sales in
Natural language processing (NLP), the field of AI that involves parsing text for tasks including summarization and generation, is a fast-growing technology. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said
It was last year that we covered the $11.2M fundraise for Sienna Network, the ‘privacy decentralized’ startup. The network is built on the Secret Network, which allows asset holders to switch to privacy-oriented tokens. Privacy-based financial blockchain projects are crucial if “DeFi” is to work properly, otherwise normal financial transactions – which are normally private
Boston- and San Francisco-based Mode Designs may not be a mainstream brand, but the company has made quite a name for itself in the mechanical keyboard world in recent years. The company’s previous releases, the high-end custom Mode Eighty tenkeyless (TKL), which you can easily configure to cost over $600 — without keycaps and switches
Snap isn’t just the company behind popular social app Snapchat. It has also built a powerful augmented reality developer platform called Snap AR — it spreads beyond Snapchat thanks to Camera Kit, an SDK solution that lets you integrate Snap’s camera capabilities in other apps. In Snap jargon, Lenses are essentially augmented reality apps that
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It’s Thursday, April 28, 2022, and Haje’s blood pressure is slowly returning to what passes for normal after raging about Social Security numbers for a few minutes. Look, it’s hard to get
Glorang, a Seoul-based edtech startup that offers after-school classes and extracurricular activities via online for students between the ages of 3 and 18, said Friday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding co-led by Korea Investment Partners and Murex Partners, along with Japan’s Pksha Capital. The new funding, which brings its total raised
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