Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. The recent OpenView-Chargebee 2022 report had SaaS benchmarks as its focus, but also touched in passing on a topic I’ve been curious about: reverse
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Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Hey, folks. It’s Kyle, filling in this issue for Natasha, who’s taking a much needed break from the news cycle (and the spectacle that’s become Twitter). While it’s my first Startups Weekly column,
Hey, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap the top TechCrunch headlines from the past seven days. Get it in your inbox every Saturday AM by signing up here. Ready? Let’s go. most read Twitter had a week so strange that it could easily make up this entire newsletter, so
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. We thought that last week was a lot. It was, but this week was somehow more. More chaotic, rapid-fire change at a number of massive tech companies kept us on our toes. So,
It’s a busy time in tech, with billions of dollars of value incinerated in recent days: FTX is at death’s door, while Twitter, recently sold at a price that no longer made sense once the transaction closed, is either slouching toward insolvency or not, depending on how you vet its new owner’s recent comments. But
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If you had to sum up the 2022 venture capital market in one word, that word could be contradictions. Venture funds have record dry powder — deployable capital on hand — and yet funding continues to steadily decline. There is seemingly more talk of backing women and people of color in the industry than ever,
According to layoffs.fyi, more than 23,000 tech workers have been laid off so far this month. For comparison, the site tracked 12,463 layoffs in October. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced the first major job cuts in its history this week, eliminating 11,000 jobs. Like Twitter, Stripe, Brex, Lyft, Netflix and other tech firms based in
In parallel with the FTC’s ominous warning to Elon Musk’s Twitter yesterday — that ‘no CEO or company is above the law‘ — the microblogging platform’s lead regulator in the European Union is on its case in the wake of senior staffers in charge of security and privacy compliance walking out the door. Graham Doyle,
YouTube is introducing a new “Live Q&A” feature that is designed to make it easier for creators to interact with viewers during livestreams. When creators start a Q&A, the prompt will appear as a pinned message in the chat. Viewers can then submit their questions and creators can select one and pin it, so viewers
According to layoffs.fyi, more than 23,000 tech workers have been laid off so far this month. For comparison, the site tracked 12,463 layoffs in October. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced the first major job cuts in its history this week, eliminating 11,000 jobs. Like Twitter, Stripe, Brex, Lyft, Netflix and other tech firms based in
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. Hoooo boy. As Alex would say: This week has been a long year. You just know it has been a pretty wild ride when Meta can lay off 13% of its staff,
Walk through any public park these days and you will see a hell of a lot more dogs than you might have done three years ago. The loneliness of the pandemic lockdowns led to an explosion in pet ownership. Plus, The demographic of pet ownership has shifted. Whereas previously it was Granny or Grandpa who
The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some serious belt tightening amid broader economic headwinds, no divisions are safe from cost cutting —
After Netflix’s historic launch of an ad-supported tier, a very unexpected move from the streamer, Netflix will make history again with its first-ever livestreaming event starring comedian Chris Rock. The company announced on Thursday that Rock’s live comedy special is set to stream in early 2023, with more details to be announced later. “Chris Rock
Vincent Aiello Contributor Spencer Fane attorney and business owner Vincent Aiello helps businesses solve legal problems to secure revenue flow and reduce business risks. Whoever said you can’t have your cake and eat it too should have called their accountants and lawyers first. These professionals often receive inquiries from founders, equity investment firms and venture
Miguel Fernandez Contributor Miguel Fernandez is CEO and co-founder of Capchase, which provides non-dilutive financing to SaaS and comparable recurring-revenue companies. More posts by this contributor Use alternative financing to fuel VC-level growth without diluting ownership A few years ago, founders only had two options when starting a company — bootstrap yourself or turn to
Kuda, the London-based and Nigerian-operating startup taking on incumbents in the country with a mobile-first and personalized set of banking services, is expanding to the U.K. by offering a remittance product to Nigerians in the diaspora. The digital bank has seen some success since launching in Nigeria in 2019. Kuda claims to have up to
DeviantArt, the Wix-owned artist community, today announced a new protection for creators to disallow art-generating AI systems from being developed using their artwork. An option on the site will allow artists to preclude third parties from scraping their content for AI development purposes, aiming to prevent work from being swept up without artists’ knowledge or
Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Mum’s been the word since on which companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million investment
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. Tech reporting is a lot of things, but it sure ain’t boring, as the chaos around Twitter, crypto, and layoffs continues. We’re just trying to hang on for dear life to try
Mental health problems — and the tech products which aim at them — come in all shapes and sizes. There are “mental wellness” products like Calm and Headspace. On the more severe side of things there is Cerebral, Betterhelp and, of course, marketplaces for actual, card-carrying therapists. If you have more moderate mental health problems
Syneroid recently raised a $500,000 round of funding to bring something halfway between microchips and dog collars to market. The company is finding some interesting slices of the market, but the deck, overall, leaves a few things to be desired. We learn more from mistakes than from perfection, so I figured it’d be a great
One of the most popular activities at a TechCrunch conference is watching top-notch early-stage founders square off in a pitch competition. Seriously, who doesn’t love a pitch-off? And the Crypto Pitch-off is just one more compelling reason to go to TechCrunch Sessions: Crypto on November 17 in Miami. Let’s take a look at the judges
Twitter’s painstakingly layered infosphere looks to be light-speeding back to chaotic noise under new owner Elon Musk. The billionaire is no fan of meritocratic signals nor, it seems, a friend to genuine information — preferring anyone pay him $8/m to have their account on his microblogging social network badged with a check-mark that looks like
Maybe you’ve heard of Keyo. Perhaps you saw the initial round of press the firm did in 2017 — roughly two years after its founding. Or maybe you saw it pop back in 2020, riding the wave of news around Amazon’s lukewarmly received hand-scanner tech. You may have wondered precisely what’s been going on with
Amagi, which offers cloud broadcast and targeted advertising software to scores of media and entertainment giants, has raised a large new funding round as it looks to expand its tech offerings and invest in an AI-powered personalization stack. General Atlantic led a new round of over $100 million, which included about $20 million in secondary
There are a lot of changes afoot for SpringTime Ventures as it looks to deploy its freshly closed second fund. For one, the Denver-based firm is pivoting away from its original focus on its home state of Colorado, despite being the only local fund in two of the state’s 10 unicorn companies. It’s also now
Crypto is not having a good week, as Bitcoin crashed to under $17,000 — its lowest level in two years. The stock market continues to post declines as layoffs abound. Meanwhile, inflation recently reached a 40-year high. For those looking for a safe place to park their cash and actually earn a decent amount of
Cleantech startup Airly wants to help communities around the world improve air quality with affordable sensors and software that provides actionable insights. Based in London and Krakow, the startup announced today it has raised $5.5 million. The round was led by firstminute capital and Pi Labs, with participation from returning investors like the Sir Richard