E-commerce marketplaces are big businesses. It was estimated that some $3.2 trillion was spent globally on the top marketplaces in 2021, with those like Taobao, Tmall and Amazon accounting for over 60% of the activity, according to research firm Digital Commerce 360. With that number expected to grow 14% per year, Nautical Commerce wants to
Month: June 2022
Entrepreneur First made a name for itself a decade ago in its home base of London, and then further afield, for the novel approach it takes to tech investing: rather than seek out interesting, scaling startups like typical VCs, it backs founders and their very, very early stage startup ideas — so nascent in fact
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. Greetings, there is a lot of news to get into today, and my head is reeling a bit from some of that January 6 testimony today, so let’s get right into it.
Birdie, a UK-based caretech software-as-a-service maker, has closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by investment firm Sofina, with Omers Ventures and Index Ventures also participating — the latter reupping its backing after leading Birdie’s Series A last year. Max Parmentier, co-founder and CEO of Birdie, said the latest tranche of funding will
The Federal Trade Commission is suing Walmart for sitting by while scammers bilked customers out of more than $197 million, the agency alleged in a statement on Tuesday. It’s seeking a court order that would force Walmart to give money back to customers, on top of civil fines. In a brief response, Walmart described the
The auto industry is banking on electric vehicles to slash planet-cooking emissions, but EVs are still too expensive to knock gas-guzzlers out of the game. For now, at least. Sure, EV sales are up, maintenance costs are low, and gas prices are high, making combustion engines look all the worse. But on the flip side,
Mapan’s team, with CEO Ardelia Apti in the front In Indonesia, arisans are traditionally rotating savings and credit associations (RSCA) that let groups of people, primarily women, save and borrow money together. Mapan digitized that concept, and turned it into a service where users, also mostly women, can use it to pay for goods and
An independent review of UK legislation has concluded the country urgently needs new laws to govern the use of biometric technologies and called for the government to come forward with primary legislation. Among the legal review’s ten recommendations are that public use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology be suspended pending the creation of a
Ever spend much too long trying — and failing — to rediscover articles you’ve partially read? This reporter’s been there, and it seems I’m not the only one. According to 2021 Carnegie Mellon study on browser tab usage, many participants admitted to feeling overwhelmed by the amount of tabs they kept open but were compelled
Gaetano Crupi Contributor Gaetano Crupi is a partner at venture capital firm Prime Movers Lab. He serves on the boards of OCEANIX, Atom Computing, Conscious Cultures and MycoWorks. Over the past few months, investors from Sequoia to YC have sounded the clarion call to get their portfolio companies preparing for winter. At this stage, it
Data centers with servers attached to solid-state drives (SSDs) can suffer from an imbalance of storage and compute. Either there’s not enough processing power to go around, or physical storage limits get in the way of data transfers, Lightbits Labs CEO Eran Kirzner explains to TechCrunch. “Since its inception, NVMe has been revolutionizing the data
Facebook announced today that it’s introducing new features for Facebook Groups, including “Channels” that will let users connect with each other in smaller settings. Admins can create channels to connect with their groups in more casual settings within their communities to have more focused discussions. There are three types of channels that admins can create:
For a few years now the Sustainable Ocean Alliance has been a stalwart advocate for the “blue economy,” and an incubator for ocean-focused early stage startups. Now empowered by $15 million in new funding, the nonprofit hopes to expand its scope and more tangibly support the class of climate-motivated founders they call “ecopreneurs.” The funding
Amazon is reportedly planning to hold two Prime shopping events this year, according to a report from Business Insider. The online retailer already revealed the July dates for its Prime Day shopping event, and is said to be planning to hold a second shopping event for Prime members in the fall. The second event would mark
When users on websites and apps find they have problems, developers have various tools to record what they are doing in order to find out what went wrong. But these can involve cumbersome methods like screenshots, and back-and-forth emails with customers. ContentSquare and Medallia are products that primarily target marketers and product managers rather than developers, who
Few consumer electronics categories matured as quickly as wireless earbuds. We went from the first good implementation of the technology to near ubiquity, seemingly overnight. Suddenly a good pair is cheap and they seem to be everywhere. It’s precisely for this reason that it’s become nearly impossible to distinguish yourself from the masses of companies
LG officially pulled the plug on its smartphone division in April of last year. It was another signpost in a dramatically changing mobile market that had left the electronics giant behind. HTC tends to be lumped into that conversation, though the Taiwanese manufacture has – in spite of everything – continued to press on, even
Summer is whipping right along with Memorial Day and the Summer Solstice already in the rear-view mirror. We’re rounding the corner into the next long holiday weekend here in the U.S., and here at TechCrunch, that can mean just one thing. It’s time for our July 4th, two-for-one flash sale! Starting today you can buy
Vezeeta, a healthtech startup operating in the Middle East and Africa, reportedly laid off about 10% of its staff last week. The number of affected employees isn’t known; however, multiple sources who posted the news on LinkedIn, including affected employees, revealed that up to 50 people were let go. Vezeeta has almost 500 employees, according to
NASA’s CAPSTONE mission, which will chart a new orbit around the Moon which will hopefully be used for a future crewed lunar space station, is underway after a successful launch on Tuesday morning. Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle delivered the CAPSTONE satellite, which is roughly the size of a large microwave oven, to Earth orbit
Last week I wrote about an AI startup that’s building technology that can alter, in real time, the accent of someone’s speech. But what if the AI goal instead is to make it possible for people speaking in whatever way they do, to be understood just as they are, and to remove some of the
Google has invested in Progcap, an Indian startup that provides working capital to small and medium-sized businesses, the firms said Tuesday, making a new push into a category that has attracted the attention of Facebook and Amazon in recent years. The investment is part of a $40 million fresh funding Progcap has raised, it said.
Edtech up-skilling platform Degreed has acquired Learn In, which creates talent resource hubs for employers to better spin up education services for their teams. While we’d nearly always cover a notable acquisition in a relevant tech sector, the extra interesting bit here is a personnel one: both companies were co-founded by the same entrepreneur, David
Waymo, Aurora, UPS and Luminar are among a group of 34 autonomous vehicle developers, California business organizations, and automotive and logistics companies that have signed an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom asking him to revisit the California Department of Motor Vehicles’s 2015 prohibition on the operation of autonomous trucks in the state. California began
Until recently, Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, and Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of Teleport, had banded together as a sort of “mini Angel brand” known as “Taavet+Sten.” Tamkivi has done around 50 angel deals, Hinrikus has, reportedly, done as many as 150. But they were effectively pooling their personal capital as angel investors. However, evidently this
Consumers are ditching their current period tracking apps in favor of what they perceive to be safer options in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that allows individual U.S. states to criminalize abortion. The app switching trend is impacting all manner of period tracking apps, including leading app Flo, which owns
David Campbell Contributor David Campbell is the CEO and co-founder of Tropic, an infrastructure platform that helps companies better optimize SaaS purchasing. With a recession looming and economic headwinds showing no sign of abating, many companies are scrambling to cut costs. Software is a prime category for optimization, and many organizations are paying 50% more
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest, boldest and baddest technology news. This week we are not recording on a Tuesday as it’s a regular week. Though we would add that Equity will
The Cadillac Celestiq, the brand’s halo EV set to debut during Monterey Car Week in August, will reportedly start around $300,000, pushing it well above the top variants from other luxury EVs, including the Lucid Air Dream Edition, Porsche Taycan Turbo S and Tesla Model X Plaid. While Cadillac would not confirm the eye-popping price
It’s not news that times have changed in the world of fintech. After financial technology startups saw their fortunes rise during the venture capital boom that loosely wrapped as 2021 came to a close, they’re now suffering from a slump of a similar scale. The damage is not unidimensional. Instead, pain around the fintech sphere
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