Amid economic uncertainty, founders should know what makes VCs skittish Rebecca Bellan 13 hours The past few months have hit the startup community where it hurts — the balance sheet. With inflation rates at record highs, a recession on the horizon and threats of a long winter by venture capital giants like SoftBank, VC money is
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Meta announced today that it will now let users post their NFTs across both Instagram and Facebook. Users can connect their wallets like Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Wallet to post digital collectibles minted on Ethereum, Polygon and Flow. “As we continue rolling out digital collectibles on Facebook and Instagram, we’ve started
Millions around the world suffer strokes every year, and millions more are in recovery from one they’ve suffered. Regaining the use of affected limbs and capabilities is a long road, but one that can be shortened by intensive rehabilitation efforts — which Neurofenix has shown can take place in the home rather than during frequent
Al Yankovic, the 62-year-old parody artist known as Weird Al, is getting his own equally weird biopic this fall. The trailer for “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” gives a first look at the movie, exploring the wacky world of Weird Al, his hilarious cover songs and his Polka obsession. “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” premieres
African genomics startup 54gene has laid off 95 employees, or about 30% of its LinkedIn-sourced 290+ employees. A company’s spokesperson confirmed the news after several sources informed TechCrunch of the layoffs last week. Founded in 2019 by Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong, the three-year-old startup seeks to address the gap in the global genomics market where less
StarTree, a company building what it describes as an “analytics-as-a-service” platform, today announced that it raised $47 million in a Series B round led by GGV Capital with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and CRV. In an email interview, co-founder and CEO Kishore Gopalakrishna said that the proceeds will be put toward doubling
Tahem Verma Contributor Tahem Verma is the co-founder and CEO of Mesha, a smart management tool for web3 startups and DAOs. The crypto bear market shows no signs of letting up, and it has already taken its pound of flesh from more than a few emerging web3 and crypto projects, not counting the ones it
Mermade Seafoods is out to disrupt the $8 billion global scallops market with its circular cellular agriculture technology approach for producing cultivated scallops. The Israeli company was founded in July 2021 by CEO Daniel Einhorn, CTO Dr. Rotem Kadir and COO Dr. Tomer Halevy. Einhorn, who has Navy — which explains his love of the
Snapchat is bringing its “Dual Camera” feature front and center on the app’s main camera toolbar. Starting today, the feature will be available for iOS users on iPhone XS/XR or above, with Android compatibility rolling out in the coming months. As its name suggests, dual camera lets Snapchat users take photos and videos using their
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous
Aston Martin is using its upcoming Valhalla high-performance plug-in hybrid to develop a playbook for its future EVs. Executives said that the 937-horsepower Valhalla supercar exhibited at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on Sunday showcases lessons in driver engagement, visual effects and sound that could surface in its first EV in 2025. “If we get
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden earlier this month, puts the U.S. on the path toward realizing its carbon reduction goals, in part by spurring its EV market. It has also plunged that same market into short-term chaos by requiring entire supply chains to be restructured in just a few
Here’s what investors are looking for when writing the first check into a fledgling startup Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours Covering Five Flute’s fundraising and tearing down the deck the company used to raise its $1.2 million seed round had me wondering: How the hell do investors decide whether to invest in a company at the
Life is too short to listen to a 3-hour conversation between successful normal human Mark Zuckerberg and the farcically neutral Joe Rogan, so I’m taking a different tack: scrolling very fast through an extremely long transcript and picking nuggets more or less at random. Here’s what Zuckerberg thinks about various things. (These quotes have been
Akasa Air, India’s newly launched airline that began operations earlier this month, exposed the personal data of thousands of its customers because of a technical glitch that affected its login and sign-up service. The exposed data, discovered by cybersecurity researcher Ashutosh Barot, included full names, gender, email addresses and phone numbers of customers signing up
Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the keycaps on their keyboards. Chances are, they are white with black text or black with white text and that’s about it. Like with all things (mechanical) keyboards, though, there are seemingly endless choices. For a long time, the most sought-after keycaps were those manufactured
Welcome back to Found, where we tell you the stories behind the startups. Super Troopers premiered at Sundance to a receptive, giggling crowd but if you judged it based on its Rotten Tomato score and reviews, you’d think it flopped. Writer, director, comedian, and recent founder Jay Chandrasekhar never felt right about the critiques from
Hello, hello! We’re back with another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly break down the top stories to hit TC in the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here. Our most read story this week was about Stable Diffusion, a “new open source AI image generator capable
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Want to save some dosh on TechCrunch+? Use the code “EQUITY” at checkout for a big discount on annual subscriptions! Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann are back and as a three were in good spirits with more
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. The bets are no longer just on Wall Street — they’re in your group chats, book clubs and that awkward shuffle that happens when everyone’s trying to get out of the door
For years, observers have thought that consumers would be better off leasing EV batteries than buying them outright — because the batteries are prone to degradation, because new technology will turn the old ones obsolete, because someday you might be able to upgrade your car’s battery with a better one and so on. Thing is,
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by
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. Central and Eastern Europe have had less venture capital at their disposal than their GDP or population could warrant. But with new funds lured
Whether you are signing up a huge supplier, hiring an employee or thinking of making an investment, reference calls are absolutely crucial. Before I learned how to do them properly, they were purely factual in nature, “Hey, did Jim work with you from 2011 to 2013? What was his job title?” For a very long
Meadow, a leader in building tools for cannabis dispensaries, is expanding out of California. Since its founding in 2014, the company has focused its efforts on its home state, but recently partnered with Michigan-based Wellflower. The company retooled its cannabis platform for the Michigan market and now offers the service state-wide. “California is challenging,” CEO
Today is Women’s Equality Day, otherwise known as the day women were granted the right to vote. There’s nuance to the date, of course, as Indigenous women weren’t guaranteed that right in every state until 1962 and Black women weren’t allowed to vote until 1965. This story of delayed progress is still seen in every
The bets are no longer just on Wall Street — they’re in your group chats, book clubs and that awkward shuffle that happens when everyone’s trying to get out of the door at the same time at the end of class. Community investment clubs are nothing new, but a renewed interest in decentralization and the
The first pitching machine dates back well over 100 years. Obviously things have come a long way since that injury-inducing, gunpowder-fueled machine made its debut at Princeton University, but most modern systems are more or less the same. A ball is manually or mechanically dropped into a spinning wheel or wheels, which propel it toward
Amazon Prime Video and DirecTV struck a multiyear agreement that allows business owners to stream “Thursday Night Football” for their patrons. Amazon’s “TNF” broadcasts, including pregame, halftime and postgame coverage, will be available to more than 300,000 sports bars, restaurants, retail stores, hotel lounges, casinos and sports books, among other venues across the U.S., regardless
Darpan Munjal Contributor Darpan Munjal is the founder and CEO of Squadhelp. I was ready to put my entrepreneurial hat to rest. I had spent years building what I thought was shaping up to be a fashion e-commerce giant for the Indian marketplace. We’d raised pre-Series A funding of $4 million, led additional rounds and