You’d be hard pressed to find a game that doesn’t include some form of microtransactions these days, especially in mobile games. It just makes sense for gaming companies — an immensely lucrative source of revenue, the microtransactions market was worth at $60 billion in 2021, and projected to hit $106 billion by 2026. Typically offered
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Founders are keener to get cash than VCs to deploy capital, DocSend data shows Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 1 day Today’s venture capital market feels strange because it isn’t uniform. While some companies are still able to raise mega-rounds, reach unicorn status, and even attract lots of new capital in sectors that have seen their
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. Spotting new trends is one of my favorite parts of my job. But I like it even more when several trends converge into a
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. At this point, it’s clear that no one agrees on anything. Half my sources say that early-stage venture completely is uncorrelated to the public stock market, while the other half say that
Advocates and organizers had been preparing for Roe v. Wade to be overturned since the U.S. Supreme Court draft decision leaked in early May. But Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of period care company August, still felt heartbroken when the decision became official in late June. “One of the things that always made me passionate about policy
Hello and welcome to a special edition of Equity! Today, Alex sat down Brian Heater, a long-tenured TechCrunch denizen, our hardware editor, podcast extraordinaire, and genial chap. He also put together a really neat robotics-focused event that we’re hosting next week. The event is online, and free, which means that everyone can come and hang
Hey, everyone! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap the most read TechCrunch stories from the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here! The most read story on the site this week was, once again, unfortunately, about layoffs — this time at Microsoft. While the company plans
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
Nov.18 — Ford has unveiled the Mustang Mach E, an all-electric SUV and next generation of the iconic mustang brand. Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow reports from Los Angeles
Money doesn’t need to be protected from sudden vibrations or direct sunlight, so the term “dry powder” strikes me as a poor metaphor for the mounds of cash investors were dropping on startups just a few months ago. “What’s crazy to me is that some of these companies are still in the seed-stage backed by
As venture capital grew around the world, tracking the fintech market was a fine way to understand the general health of the VC world; when venture was getting bigger, so too was fintech fundraising. Worth around a fifth of all venture dollars invested last year, fintech startups raised nearly unfathomable sums of capital but with
Big tech companies are facing increased scrutiny in South Africa for dominance abuse and anti-competitive behavior, just months after the country’s competition regulator, the Competition Commission (CompCom), started an inquiry into the conduct of online intermediation (b2c) platforms. In its initial findings, the regulator has established that Apple, Google, UberEats, Airbnb, Booking.com, and South Africa’s
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and
Lightyear, a U.K. fintech startup that promises consumers commission-free trading on U.S. and European stocks, is officially extending to Europe from today. To power the expansion, which will see Lightyear land in 19 new markets including the Baltics and much of Western Europe, London-based Lightyear has also raised $25 million in a seres A round
Deci, a startup company with 50 employees who are developing a platform to build and optimize AI-powered systems, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series B financing round led by Insight Partners with participation from Square Peg, Emerge, Jibe Ventures, Fort Ross Ventures, and ICON that brings the company’s total raised to $55.1
Julie Gionfriddo Contributor If an early-stage startup is ready to raise money but its valuation hasn’t been established yet, a convertible note can serve as a good fundraising option. A convertible note is a debt instrument that typically converts into equity at a later date. Investors who invest in a note are effectively loaning money
Black founders raised 1.3% of last year’s $330 billion worth of U.S. venture investment, totaling just over $4.3 billion. So far this year, Black founders have raised a smaller 1.2% of the $125 billion invested. The past few months have seen private market investors reduce their investment pace as a possible recession looms, but that
Is it really written in the stars? This week, Bumble launched weekly customized astrology content in-app, with astrologer Aliza Kelly taking on the task of helping you find a star-crossed soulmate. Dubbed “Astrology Tuesdays,” Bumble users in the U.S. can go to the new astrology channel within the conversations screen in Bumble’s Date mode. There
If you’re feeling confused about the state of startup investing, join the club. Public company shares have been relentlessly hammered in recent months amid rising fears of a recession, yet startup funding seems as brisk as ever and, more surprising, to us, VCs are still routinely announcing enormous new funds as they have for many
A proposal put forward by European Union lawmakers in May, to establish a legal framework to make it easier to share electronic health records and other medical data — across borders and care institutions and with researchers and developers of innovative health products — should be revised to ensure citizens’ health data is stored locally,
The anonymous Q&A app NGL climbed to the top of the App Store by tricking its users with questions it claims are sent in by their friends and by charging for useless hints about who supposedly wrote those messages. But many of the questions users receive aren’t from real people; they’re generated automatically — an
Nucleus Genomics, a genetic testing company focused on calculating a patient’s risk of certain diseases, is adding $14 million on to their initial seed funding round. With this round the company has raised, in total, $17.5 million. This “seed plus” funding round was led by Alexis Ohanian’s 776. Ohanian is joining investors like Founders Fund,
Merchants building businesses on giant marketplaces often have to think inside the marketplace’s box, but Medusa, a one-year-old e-commerce startup from Denmark, is going after e-commerce platforms, like Shopify and WooCommerce, with its open source alternative aimed at the JavaScript developer community. Co-founders Sebastian Rindom, Oliver Juhl and Nicklas Gellner started the company a year
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. Time to do the Friday dance! We’ve mentioned our virtual TC Sessions: Robotics event a few times, but we’ve got some good news for events fans. Hang on to your blockchains and
Citing “disturbing” levels of power used by cryptocurrency miners, a group of Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren is urging the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to crack down on the controversial industry. The letter, signed by four senators and two representatives, calls on regulators to compel cryptominers to disclose their carbon
With Twitter pressing for a quick trial, Elon Musk’s lawyers are making a case to slow things down. In the lawsuit Twitter filed against its would-be owner, the company argued that it would only need four days to prove that the court should require Musk to follow through with his agreement to buy it for
Rhys Spence Contributor Rhys Spence is head of research at Brighteye Ventures, a European edtech-focused fund, where he works with portfolio companies to help address priorities, with a focus on internationalization and HR. More posts by this contributor European, North American edtech startups see funding triple in 2021 The unbundling of professional learning and entrepreneurship
Can a smartphone still be cool? They were, once upon a time, in those days when they were more luxury than ubiquity. But what happens when everyone has one — and, more to the point, we all pretty much have the same one? Phones aren’t fashion. They’re not clothes or shoes or even cars. Chances
Dec.02 — The U.S. proposed tariffs on roughly $2.4 billion in French products, in response to a tax on digital revenues that hits large American tech companies including Google, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Bloomberg’s Laura Davison reports on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia.”
After the 2008 financial crisis, a new slate of regulations aimed at protecting consumers and businesses opened the floodgates for a surge of fintech companies to develop into household names over the last decade. Now, it might be healthcare’s turn. Part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Consumer Reform and Protection Act, passed in 2010, stated