Perhaps sitting perched somewhere in sunny Miami, Florida, is a founder wondering the best ways to fundraise for a company when situated outside a traditional tech hub like the Bay Area. They need not worry. Last week, Mike Asem from M25, Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund and Accel’s Rich Wong answered that question at TechCrunch
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While Meta tries to convince users to attend virtual work meetings in its metaverse, ForeVR Games, a VR gaming startup with casual games like bowling, darts and cornhole, is a reminder that virtual reality is supposed to be fun. ForeVR announced today a $10 million Series A funding round, which is being put toward building
Meet Neoplants, a French startup that is designing genetically modified houseplants so that they can absorb air pollutants. The startup’s first plant, the Neo P1, works hand in hand with the company’s own microbiome located in the soil near the plant roots. Neoplants targets specifically a group of indoor air pollutants that can’t be efficiently
A Google regulatory filing appears to have confirmed rumors in recent months that the European Union’s competition division is looking into how it operates its smartphone app store, the Play Store. However TechCrunch understands that no formal EU investigation into the Play Store has been opened at this stage. The SEC Form 10-Q, filed by
Healthcare benefits are great, but navigating them often isn’t. HealthJoy wants to make the experience more seamless for employees, while helping HR departments reduce the number of underutilized benefits. The Chicago-based company announced today it has raised $60 million in Series D funding, led by Valspring Capital with participation from Endeavor Vision and CIBC Innovation
The issue of women startup founders not receiving equitable venture funding is a shortfall of the West: It’s here, everywhere in the U.S., and over there, all throughout Europe. It’s hard to say that some of these metrics represent investors simply pulling back when data shows the bias has historical precedence. Even in 2008, all-women
Cutting your own carbon footprint isn’t easy, even for the most motivated person. Tracking, tallying, investigating, researching. For Sanchali Pal, though, that was part of the fun. Pal, who had been working in international development, wanted to start trimming her footprint. “I started building an Excel spreadsheet of the carbon emissions in my life, starting
The UK government has denied a fresh parliamentary delay to the Online Safety Bill will delay the legislation’s passage. The legislation is a core plank of the government’s 2019 manifesto promise to make the UK the safest place in the world to go online, introducing a regime ministers want to will drive a new era
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. Wednesday, and we’re excited to bring you another round of our esteemed Daily Crunch newsletter. There’s a wide variety of morsels, nuggets, and other bite-sized delights, so let’s go! — Christine and
India’s Money View is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a unicorn valuation, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, in a boost to the local fintech community that has been rattled by the central bank’s stringent guidelines and funding crunch in recent months. Apis Partners is deliberating leading a
2050 is an important year for climate tech, with the Paris Agreement calling for emissions to reach net zero by then. In a conversation with GenZero’s Frederick Teo for SOSV’s Climate Tech Summit, we talked about realistic paths to hitting that goal and how startups can tackle what Teo called one of the most existentialist
Redstone and EnjoyVenture have combined forces to create Human Impact Capital (HIC), Germany’s first dedicated scial impact VC fund. The fund will deploy cash into digital business models focusing on health, education and “living,” and explicitly invests to have an impact along sustainable development goals. To HIC, this means “No Poverty, Good Health and Wellbeing,
Smartphone shipment is often seen as the bellwether of China’s consumer spending, and right now, the picture isn’t very rosy. The world’s largest market for smartphones shipped 175.1 million handsets between January and August, marking a sharp 22.9% decline year-over-year, according to research from a state-backed institution. In August alone, shipments dropped 21.9% year-over-year. The
Elon Musk told Twitter employees Wednesday that he’s not planning on laying off 75% of staff when he takes over the company, Bloomberg reports, citing “people familiar with the matter.” This is a walk back from what Musk reportedly said last week. The celebrity executive denied the previously reported number when he addressed employees at
“There’s a big wave of innovation in managing cloud costs,” Team8 co-founder and managing partner Liran Grinberg told TechCrunch as part of our latest cloud investor survey. Having noticed tailwinds for the wave of B2B startups that offer cloud cost-optimization solutions, and cloud management more broadly, we were curious to know where VCs thought the
In tech, emerging trends usually elicit excitement and surprise, whether it’s the hot new sector that every venture capitalist is clamoring for a stake in, or the rise of a new technology you haven’t heard of. Until you only hear of it. This year, however, one of the biggest trends to form inside tech was
Many consumers and companies want to reduce their impact on the environment but may not know where to start or how to sustain the necessary changes. Tom Ferrier, the founder of Greener, an Australian cleantech startup, wants to help. He argues that sustainability and climate action doesn’t need to be complicated. His startup is geared
While climate tech may be all the rage right now — and for good reasons — new Paris-based VC firm Satgana (which means “a good company” in Sanskrit) is hoping its take on the subject will gain traction. It’s now completed the first closing of a target €30 million fund to back startups in areas
The widespread adoption of flexible work has increased the challenge of managing access to physical, commercial buildings, given the dynamic nature of hybrid workspaces. With today’s staffers coming and going to the office on unpredictable timetables, it can be tough to keep track of which have access to rooms and office resources. In a recent
Google, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines help you find information from the web. But it’s hard to find documents, messages, meetings, and emails from your own accounts. You need to go to different applications to find things that might be related to one project. A Y-Combinator-backed app called Needl is helping users with that. Needl
I get a lot of pitch deck submissions for this TechCrunch Pitch Deck Teardown series from people who are raising friend and family rounds, and I mostly pass on them. Often, these decks aren’t very good, but it’s important to remember that they don’t have to be. For a small round (say $200,000 or below),
The UK’s privacy watchdog has warned against use of so-called “emotion analysis” technologies for anything more serious than kids’ party games, saying there’s a discrimination risk attached to applying “immature” biometric tech that makes pseudoscientific claims about being able to recognize people’s emotions using AI to interpret biometric data inputs. Such AI systems ‘function’, if
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. Overheard at a VC/startup conference recently: Product market fit is like a product going around from weirdly shaped customer group to weirdly shaped customer group, like that old kid’s book “Are you
WhatsApp is used by more than two billion around the world, and is an important tool for many small businesses. But as they scale up, even WhatsApp for Business might not be able to keep up with their needs. That’s where WATI (WhatsApp Team Inbox) steps in. Built on WhatsApp for Business’ API, WATI has
While hydrogen is still relatively niched as a fuel for electric vehicles, a startup in China is jumping ahead to embrace it for autonomous driving scenarios. WeRide, one of the most funded robotaxi operators in China with investors including Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, said Tuesday it is joining hands with Hyundai to launch a “self-driving hydrogen-powered vehicle
Disney and the BBC announced today that Disney+ will be the new exclusive home outside of the U.K. and Ireland for the hit British sci-fi series “Doctor Who.” Beginning in 2023, new episodes of the series will be released on the platform in more than 150 markets, including the United States. BBC will continue to
Today after the bell, Alphabet and Microsoft will report their calendar third-quarter financial results. Given the breadth of industries that each of these companies touch, their performance will provide us with rich data concerning different areas of the technology landscape. The fun will continue tomorrow when Meta reports its own results. And later this week,
In films, screenwriters always include a moment known as the Promise of the Premise. It’s the part of the story where the audience settles in to the new world they’ve entered. One of my favorite examples is in the first Harry Potter movie, when Hagrid takes Harry to Diagon Alley, the magical shopping district that
Today, for a series of climate-related conversations organized by the global venture firm SOSV, we interviewed famed investor Chris Sacca, whose investment firm Lowercarbon Capital is managing $2 billion in capital across one fund that’s focused on nuclear fusion, another fund focused expressly on carbon removal, and the rest across a wide spectrum of bets.
Nothing today announced the upcoming launch of a brick-and-mortar retail store in London’s Soho district. The store will, of course, carry Nothing. In a less literal sense, one wonders precisely what the store will carry, given that the hardware startup has officially launched two products, with a third being revealed soon. GM Ryan Latham says