Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about infinite pessimism in the crypto markets. This week, we’re talking about parties and tattoos and booze and fun. If you want to get this in your inbox every Thursday, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. Exit opportunity It’s no secret at this point that
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Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. Instead, I think that changes within a particular startup can be used as benchmark questions for their larger market; in other words, we can use the micro to better understand
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. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the
The startup, valued at $2.2B, has sights set on an IPO — but certainly not a SPAC Jaclyn Trop 9 hours Rimac Group made headlines in June after it raised €500 million ($537 million) in a Series D round led by Goldman Sachs and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The deal valued the Croatian startup at
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. Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. Instead, I think that changes within a
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. My home country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants to have 100 French unicorns by 2030. Economy minister Bruno Le Maire, 10 homegrown decacorns. But shouldn’t
As video-led podcasts become highly favored by listeners, Podcastle, which was primarily an audio recording and editing studio, is introducing a new feature that enables podcasters to conduct high-resolution video interviews or solo recordings. Now, Podcastle will allow users to invite and video record up to ten guests through the Chrome browser or the Podcastle mobile
Jan.22 — Tesla Inc.’s market value has climbed above Volkswagen AG’s for the first time to more than $100 billion, a threshold that will trigger a huge payout for Elon Musk if he can sustain the feat for months. Bloomberg’s Craig Trudell has more on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Scooter and micro-mobility company Bird has to fly at a slightly higher altitude — at least if it wants to keep its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listing. The company issued a press release on Friday noting that it had received word from the NYSE that its share price was “not in compliance” with the
The testing campaign for NASA’s super big, super expensive Space Launch System is now complete, the agency declared on Friday. All that’s left now for the rocket is launch the Artemis I demonstration mission to the moon, the first in a long line of planned missions to eventually return humans to the lunar surface by
The news that funding for Black founders is falling was no shock to the Black community, much of which was raised with the aphorism, “when white America catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia.” U.S. startups received VC funding of around $75 billion in Q1 and about $50 billion so far in Q2, despite investors pulling back and
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) products have become incredibly popular with users, and both startups and tech behemoths such as Apple have taken notice. But BNPL companies have attracted some controversy, too, for encouraging people who are less financially secure to take on debt without fully explaining the associated risks. Kasheesh, a fintech startup that’s
The co-founder and CEO of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, had a Steve Jobs moment when he stood in front of an auditorium in New York City and announced the launch of Saga, an Android web3-focused smartphone. “This is something that I fundamentally believe the industry needs to do,” Yakovenko said. “We didn’t see a single crypto
As a veteran startup worker who has been laid off during economic downturns, it’s dissonant to hear investors say this is a good time to launch a software company. They’re not wrong, however. An analogy: In California, nearly 10,000 wildfires burned more than 4 million acres two years ago, causing billions of economic damage and
A federal appeals court froze the FDA’s ban on Juul products Friday after the company sought an emergency administrative stay. On Thursday, the U.S. regulator took sweeping action against the e-cigarette maker, effectively killing its access to the U.S. market. The temporary stay will be in place essentially to buy time until the case can
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. Hey, folks, and welcome to the Friday edition of Daily Crunch. As you might’ve seen, the Supreme Court issued a major decision on abortion today, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade in declaring
Zomato has acquired Blinkit, a struggling 10-minute grocery delivery startup, in a $568.1 million all-stock deal as the loss-making food delivery firm looks to broaden its offerings at a time when its shares are trading far below last year’s debut price and less than half of the all-time highs. The Gurgaon-headquartered firm — which reached
OSOM and Nothing have quickly become two of the most fascinating companies operating the smartphone space in recent years. Nothing is the latest project from OnePlus cofounder, Carl Pei, while OSOM is largely composed of former Essential employees looking to launch their own own thing in the wake the company’s messy dissolution. That Pei purchased
Zendesk this morning agreed to sell itself to an investor consortium for $10.2 billion in cash, or $77.50 per share. The deal comes months after the U.S. software company declined a $17 billion offer. The Zendesk saga of 2021 and 2022 has been complicated, full of twists and turns. That it is closing out its
Hello from America, where we are digesting some pretty big news. Given the portent and weight of what’s going on today, it may feel a bit weird to sit down and read about billions of dollars of someone else’s money. But this is a technology startup and financial news site. So, to work. Just know
Deon Nicholas is the CEO and co-founder of Forethought, the AI company whose mission is to transform customer experiences with human-centered AI. Forethought has raised over $100 million in venture capital, including from NEA, which led Forethought’s $9.52 million Series A. Hear from NEA’s Vanessa Larco on what convinced the firm to invest in Forethought,
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today Natasha and Alex were on the mics, kicking back and riffing through the biggest technology stories of the week. Our dear Mary Ann was off this week, but will be back in short order. What did we
Vibrant Planet — which is creating an “operating system for forest restoration” — comes as a pleasant surprise, and not one I expected. Climate tech, while relatively new, has settled into two camps: hardware and software. And while Vibrant Planet is definitely a software play — from its cloud focus to its per-seat licenses, it’s
Last year we covered how “&Open” (yes, “ampersand open,” pronounced “And Open”) had raised a raised $7.2 million seed to make it easier for brands to send gifts to customers to boost loyalty and engagement. According to one study customers who feel emotionally connected to a brand after receiving gifts have a 306% higher lifetime
As Google works on reconfiguring its adtech stack to move away from cookie-based ad targeting to something else that’s not yet fixed but which it claims will be better for individual web users’ privacy — and after Apple’s move last year to lock down third party tracking of app users on iOS, also on a
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman joins Emily Chang for more on Apple’s plans to release a much-anticipated Tap-to-Pay feature on the iPhone later this year, giving merchants an alternative to Block’s Square technology.
Brex’s announcement last week that it would stop serving small-to-medium-sized businesses shocked — and upset — many in its suddenness and delivery. The fintech decacorn, which started its life as a provider of cards to startups and SMBs, began notifying customers last week that they would be cut off from Brex’s services as of August
For nearly all fintech startups, lending has long been the end game. A notice from India’s central bank this week has thrown a wrench into the ecosystem, scrutinizing just who all can lend. The Reserve Bank of India has informed dozens of fintech startups that it is barring the practice of loading non-bank prepaid payment
For those of us who’ve been a little bit wobbly on the mental health front over the past couple of years, there are a bunch of options starting to crop up. The on-demand chat-based therapy options are one, and at-home ketamine-assisted treatments are another. We’ve seen Mindbloom and Fieldtrip Health taking pole position, and recently,
Evinced is on a mission to make as many web properties accessible as possible, and to do that means getting that work done as early as possible — which means integrating with the development process from the beginning. The company is continuing this “shift left” mentality with $38 million in new funding that it plans