Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Happily we were once again at full strength this week, with Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and Mary Ann Azevedo chatting, and Grace handling production. You can tell from the topic list today that we are in
Month: May 2022
In an effort to make its notoriously dense user agreements less labyrinthine, Meta has rewritten and redesigned how that information is presented. The company insists that the changes are in form, not function, bolding some lines, adding subheaders and illustrations instead of presenting that information as a giant wall of text. The result is still
Want to bring inflation to heel? There’s no single, simple fix, of course, or we would have done it already. But a good place to start would be weaning the economy off gasoline and diesel. Prices for fossil fuels are through the roof. Gas prices are up over 75% since last year, and diesel is
In sales, a win/loss analysis is the process of determining why deals are ultimately won or lost. That’s relatively self-explanatory, but more specifically, a win/loss review aims to contrast a sales organization’s performance with an industry or competitors and figure out why an outcome occurred. This involves gathering data, including sales notes and customer feedback,
Eric Landau Contributor Before Eric Landau co-founded Encord, he spent nearly a decade at DRW, where he was lead quantitative researcher on a global equity delta one desk and put thousands of models into production. He holds an S.M. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Physics
News broke yesterday that Substack, the popular newsletter publishing tool, called off fundraising plans for a Series C after a raise at its price target failed to materialize. The company’s revenue base, when compared with its hoped-for valuation, was too small to support the numbers that the startup had in mind. This is not a
OnlyFans founder Tim Stokley is getting into the web3 game with a new NFT startup, Zoop, launching this summer. On Zoop, people can buy, sell, and trade 3D NFT “playing cards” of their favorite influencers and celebrities. The limited-edition digital cards on Zoop will be officially licensed, according to the company, though it wasn’t clear
Bacterial secretions might dye your future wardrobe, and that’d be an improvement. That’s because textiles usually get their hues from toxic chemicals, and the resulting wastewater—laden with dyes, acids and formaldehyde—destroys rivers, such as those surrounding Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Wastewater treatment, when it happens, is just one of the energy-intensive (read: carbon-spewing)
The cannabis industry is doing very well in the United States: more than 75% of the population lives in a state where access is permitted, and the legal market is expected to generate $33 billion this year. A black market still eats into the industry’s bottom line, however, and a patchwork of state regulations artificially
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. It’s Thursday, May 26, 2022, and we have a busy day of news on the site today. Here are the gems sparkling in the spotlight of our journalistic gaze. For later in
Early-stage proptech startups have a potential new source of capital in 1Sharpe Ventures, which recently closed its $90 million inaugural fund. Roofstock co-founder and chairman Gregor Watson and real estate investor Rob Bloemker started the venture firm in 2021, and had their first close last year. The pair say the fund was “oversubscribed.” For the
The world’s richest man isn’t above trying to get a discount, apparently. In a new lawsuit, Twitter shareholders are suing Elon Musk, alleging that he manipulated the price of the company’s stock for his own benefit in the course of agreeing to buy the company. The lawsuit represents a group of Twitter investors but would
Sometimes when there is smoke, there is actually fire. Such was the case with the rumors of Broadcom’s interest in VMware this past weekend. It turns out that fire was burning hot, and today, Broadcom announced it is acquiring VMware in a massive $61 billion deal. The deal is a combination of cash and stock,
While the likes of Pipe are reaching multi-billion valuations, European revenue-based financing is experiencing as much of a boom as it is in the US. UK-based startup platform Bloom has now secured a £300m / $377m financing round led by Credo Capital and Fortress Investment Group LLC (NYSE:FIG), making it one of the better-funded revenue-based
Substack, the five-year-old newsletter platform that has aggressively positioned itself as a disruptive force in media, has abandoned efforts to raise a Series C round, the New York Times is reporting today. According to its sources, Substack held discussions with potential investors in recent months about raising $75 million to $100 million at a valuation
In every startup cycle, there are attempts to get consumers goods faster than ever before, the hope being that technology has improved to the point that such deliveries are financially possible. Infamous dot-com-era flameouts are now ancient history, but they do indicate just how long founders and their backing investors have been working on the
After buying Bungie earlier this year, Sony is moving fast to integrate the company’s expertise into its broader vision. In an investor presentation Thursday, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan outlined a near future for the company that focuses heavily on continually updated online games inspired by Destiny, Bungie’s long-running hit. Sony expects to spend
Humble Bee Bio is on a mission to create a biodegradable alternative to plastics by synthesizing the biology of bees. While the New Zealand-based company is still at an early stage — it’s about halfway through its proof of concept — if Humble Bee is successful, its bioplastics are likely to make it into the
Over the last decade, the rate at which organizations create data has accelerated as it becomes cheaper to store, access and process data. But as data continues to grow in scale and complexity, it’s becoming scattered across apps and platforms — often leading to problems where it concerns data quality. According to a 2020 O’Reilly
Fintech startup and alternative credit asset manager Viola Credit has closed its latest $700 million fund, which provides asset-based lending capital to fintech, proptech and insurtech startups. If this fintech play reminds you of Silicon Valley Bank, think again. The latter provides corporate lending, also known as venture lending. Instead, Viola provides lending capital to fintech
Longtime engineer and product designer Michael Sayman has been building apps since he was a kid, landing him roles at Facebook, Google, Roblox, and most recently Twitter, where he’s often been tasked with developing products aimed at a teenage audience. Sayman was only 17 when he joined Facebook, but had already built several apps —
Todd Olson Contributor Todd Olson is the co-founder and CEO of Pendo, a software platform that helps product teams and application owners improve their users’ experience. More posts by this contributor How startups outside the Bay Area can fundraise in a big way In today’s digital economy, you can tell a lot about a company
In Novembar last year, Frederic wrote about Lumigo‘s $29 million Series A round led by Redline Capital. The company makes a cloud-native application monitoring and debugging platform and has raised a total of $38 million since its launch in 2019. In the most recent installment of my Pitch Deck Teardown series, I am beyond excited
If you’re having problems accessing Instagram today, you’re not alone. The social media giant is currently experiencing some problems, according to reports on third-party web monitoring service Downdetector. The website indicates that issues began at around 12:30 PM ET. NetBlocks, which tracks global internet usage and disruptions, has also noted that Instagram is facing intermittent
Planet FWD, a carbon-assessment startup founded by Zume Pizza co-founder Julia Collins, grabbed another cash infusion in the way of 10 million Series A dollars to continue developing technology so that the $1.5 trillion consumer products industry can more accurately measure and reduce their carbon footprint. We profiled Collins’ journey from pizza to climate-friendly food
Assembled, which bills itself as a workforce management platform for customer support teams, today announced that it raised $51 million in a Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Emergence Capital and Basis Set Ventures. CEO Ryan Wang says the new capital will be put toward product development, including schedule
The U.K.’s competition watchdog has just announced another investigation into Google over potential antitrust abuses around adtech. This is the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) second probe of Google’s adtech practices — after it said it would investigate an ad deal between Google and Facebook referred to internally as ‘Jedi Blue’, back in March. (That
Joby Aviation — the publicly-traded electric air vehicle company with a current market cap of $3.1 billion — has received the necessary certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin on-demand commercial air taxi operations, the company said on Thursday. While it’s a significant milestone that puts Joby closer to its stated goal of launching
As members of the Terra community try to pick up the pieces from its currently defunct economy, Polygon is beckoning to the dozens of developers who had projects built on the inoperative blockchain. Polygon, a layer-2 blockchain built on Ethereum, has launched a “relatively uncapped multimillion dollar fund” so Terra-built projects can move to its
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s time at the company has come to an end. Dorsey stepped down from Twitter’s board of directors Wednesday, a change that’s effective as of the company’s shareholders meeting. Dorsey had already begun to distance himself from the social media platform he co-founded, leaving Twitter’s chief executive role late last year
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