Just over a year after launching a dedicated unit focused on digital markets inside the national competition watchdog, the UK government has put some meat on the bones of what this new Big Tech regulator will focus on — including confirming it will have the ability to levy fines of up to 10% of global
Month: May 2022
The NFT ecosystem continues to chug along, but the vast majority of volume is still moving through the centralized halls of NFT marketplace OpenSea, leaving crypto VCs eager to find new channels. Katie Haun’s new firm, Haun Ventures, has led its first deal in NFT startup Zora Labs. The $50 million funding round values the
Former investment banker Khaled Jalanbo was working with emerging artists when he encountered an entrepreneur who pointed out the similarities between working with artists and startup founders. “When you get picked up by a good institution or a good leader, or represented by a good gallery, all of a sudden there’s more demand for people
Twitter is rolling out a number of new features for its live audio Spaces product this week. The social media giant is giving hosts and co-hosts on iOS and Android access to analytics about their Spaces. For example, hosts and co-hosts can now get information about how many total live listeners tuned in to the
Google and SAP have partnered around a number of different projects over the years and Google Cloud, just like its competitors, is a strategic cloud partner for RISE with SAP, the German enterprise software company’s program to help its customers move to the cloud. Today, the two companies announced a rather substantial expansion of their
Digital therapeutics plus pills? Iceland’s Sidekick Health has developed a gamified digital care platform that’s designed to support healthcare outcomes by applying personalized behavioral lifestyle nudges, including alongside clinical treatments like drugs, to augment, extend and support patient care for a range of chronic diseases and conditions from cancer to cardiovascular health, diabetes and arthritis
Before you open the doors for due diligence: Is your financial house in order? Bill Petty 8 hours Bill Petty Contributor Bill Petty is a partner at Tercera. He is responsible for sourcing, executing and monitoring investments in third-wave services businesses. Are you a founder looking to raise capital? If so, before you open the
As startups look for corporate suitors, we predict a record 3,000 M&As in Q2 Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 11 hours The startup exit market has seen better days. Heck, the startup market has seen better days. After a turbulent and ultimately aggressive 2020 in venture capital terms, startups rolled into 2021 more than hot. Last
Microsoft is throwing its weight behind Epic Games in the fight against Apple — and bringing Fortnite back to iOS in the process. The company announced Thursday that it had partnered with Epic to make Fortnite available on Apple devices through its game streaming service, Xbox Cloud Gaming. Fortnite is back, but you still won’t
For the better part of a decade, VC firms and growth equity funds have plowed nearly $42 billion into battery technology startups across almost 1,700 deals, according to an analysis by PitchBook and TechCrunch. What’s more, about 75% of the investments in that period happened in the last two years alone. Venture capital firms aren’t
Logseq founder Tienson Qin takes a lot of notes about his work. He also likes to draw together with his six-year-old daughter on an iPad, and he found that the notes tool he had been using for years doesn’t run on the tablet. So like all enterprising engineers, he decided to build a new tool
French startup Alan has raised a new €183 million funding round ($193 million at today’s exchange rate). The company sells its own health insurance products and has expanded to other medical products and services. In other words, Alan wants to build a healthcare super app and a one-stop shop for all your questions and needs
It used to be getting from prototyping to manufacturing meant long, expensive trips to places like Shenzhen and a whole lot of trial and error. Fictiv was founded back in 2013 to address some of the biggest pain points of bringing products to market. The San Francisco startup runs what it calls a Digital Manufacturing
The medical world has come a long way from the traditional, centralized way of conducting clinical trials, but there’s still a lot of modernization left to do. Curebase provides the infrastructure — physical and digital — for distributed clinical trials, and will be doubling down on its success with a new $40 million funding round.
A group of nearly two dozen investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, crypto exchange Binance and asset management firm Fidelity has invested over $7.1 billion to back the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is also an investor in Tesla, delivered the largest
Shopify today announced that it will acquire Deliverr, a San Francisco, California-based ecommerce fulfillment startup, for $2.1 billion in cash and stock. The deal, rumors of which were reported in April by Bloomberg, is the largest acquisition in Shopify’s history, and Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke says that it will enable the company to
The European Union’s flagship reform for tackling Big Tech platform power, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), will come into force in early 2023, Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager has said — rowing back from an earlier suggested timeframe of this fall. But she also implied that enforcements against unruly Internet “gatekeepers” could flow soon after the
Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation has unveiled a fleet management system that can be used to help optimize operations for the startup’s trucking and ride-hailing products. Aurora announced the platform, named Aurora Beacon, alongside its first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, during which the company presented investors with a series of milestones on its path
Tactic, a startup that helps businesses manage — and simplify — cryptocurrency finances, is emerging from stealth today with $2.6 million in seed funding. Founders Fund and finance automation startup Ramp co-led the raise for Tactic, an eight-person outfit based in New York City. Elad Gil and Figma co-founder Dylan Field also participated in the
Twitter returned to the Digital Content NewFronts this evening to pitch its upcoming premium video content slate to advertisers, as it had in previous years. But this time around, the company is faced with a group of media buyers who are worried about the future of the social network as a “brand-safe” platform for their
AutoRabit, which provides CI/CD tools for Salesforce customer dev teams, today announced that it raised $26 million in a Series B funding round led by Full In Partners, bringing the startup’s total raised to $52.5 million. CEO Meredith Bell says that the new cash will be put toward product development and expanding the size of
Germany-based rental car giant Sixt has confirmed it’s been hit by a cyberattack that has caused widespread disruption to its global operations. According to a statement from Sixt, which has more than 2,000 locations across more than 110 countries, the company first detected “IT irregularities” on April 29, before subsequently confirming the cyberattack and containing
Moysle, a mobile device management platform for Apple devices, today announced that it raised $196 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from StepStone Group and previous investors including Elephant and Album VC. CEO Alcyr Araujo says that the round, which comes as Moysle introduces a new product, Apple
Alon Laniado Contributor Alon Laniado founded tech-enabled human services startups Fitmate Coach and PathMotion. Previously, he was a Bain & Co. strategy consultant and a U.K. Treasury policy adviser designing employment schemes. Utilizing AI and other automation tools to enhance the delivery of human services can make exclusive services like career coaching available to more
Average startup valuations are in decline, new data indicates. In March, The Exchange parsed a dataset from Carta, a unicorn whose software helps companies manage their cap table, which showed early indications that the startup valuation market was changing. A look at Carta’s full Q1 data collated by its head of insights, Peter Walker, clarifies
Consumer and business file storage and sharing service Dropbox will report its first-quarter earnings tomorrow, and for the former unicorn and present-day public company, the stakes appear quite high. Dropbox is coming off a year of growth stuck in the low teens, with growth forecasted to prove even slower growth in 2022. The performance Dropbox
Keyboard startup Fleksy has launched a new self-serve SDK to expand its reach for indie developers wanting to add custom keyboard software to their apps. The Barcelona-based mobile keyboard software maker has been pursuing a white label licensing approach to selling its customizable keyboard tech for several years but it’s now looking to expand its
If drones are to take over any of the numerous tasks they are supposed to, they’re going to have to get a lot smarter — and learn to work together. In a demonstration of both of these things, Chinese researchers show off a swarm of drones collectively navigating a dense forest they’ve never encountered. We’ve
TikTok is introducing a new way to lure advertisers to its platform by giving them the ability to showcase their brands’ content next to the best videos on TikTok. Ahead of its NewFronts presentation to advertisers scheduled for this afternoon, TikTok announced the launch of TikTok Pulse, a new contextual advertising solution that ensures brands’
Folk, the next-generation CRM started by European startup studio eFounders, is going live today. If you’ve paid attention to TechCrunch, I’ve already covered Folk in the past. Since then, the product has evolved a bit and is now ready for prime time. “The biggest SaaS [software-as-a-service] category is CRM. The highest valuation in the SaaS