Middesk, a platform designed to automate business verification and underwriting decisions, today announced that it raised $57 million in a Series B round co-led by Insight Partners and Canapi Ventures with participation from Sequoia, Accel and Gaingels. Co-founder and CEO Kyle Mack said that the new capital will enable Middesk to triple its headcount to
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Telecommunications provider AT&T quietly dropped HBO Max as a bundled perk for new AT&T customers on its top unlimited wireless plan, AT&T Unlimited Premium. The company launched the new plan this week, which replaced Unlimited Elite. AT&T confirmed the new plan doesn’t include the streaming service but didn’t provide a detailed explanation regarding its decision.
Nathan Beckord Contributor More posts by this contributor How to build and maintain momentum in your fundraising process How to break into Silicon Valley as an outsider Iddo Tal has an infectious enthusiasm for fundraising. He believes that when startup founders know how to raise money, they can find the freedom to approach investors with
Felix WIlliams is the founder and managing director of Lagomaj Capital. Since starting the St. Louis, Missouri-based venture capital firm soon after completing high school, 23-year-old Williams has backed dozens of companies — with a special interest in agtech and biotech and including a couple of very large tech companies that he’s not at liberty
Free messaging app Telegram is getting into the subscription game. Founder Pavel Durov confirmed today a paid offering is coming later this month which will go above and beyond the current free experience — so a premium offer — without, per the post on his Telegram channel, any negative changes to existing features for (non-paying)
Hybrid Cloud Up Time (HYCU), a self-described “backup-as-a-service” company for customers managing hybrid and multicloud environments, today announced that it raised $53 million in a “majority equity” Series B round led by Acrew Capital with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Atlassian Ventures and Cisco Investments. In an email interview with TechCrunch, CEO Simon Taylor said
The e-commerce market is on track to pass $5.5 trillion in revenues this year, which speaks not only to how much consumers are shopping online these days, but also to how many businesses there are out there now selling to them. Today, a startup from Gothenburg, Sweden called Juni is announcing $206 million in funding
ComfortDelGro, a Singaporean taxi operator, announced Thursday its partnership with Alipay+, enabling tourists from Malaysia and South Korea to use their mobile wallet apps Touch ‘n Go eWallet and Kakao Pay to pay the cab fare in Singapore. “With Singapore reopening its borders, we are looking forward to having tourists come visit us,” said CEO of ComfortDelGro Taxi
Shares of DocuSign are off 25% in pre-market trading today after it reported earnings last night, pushing the value of shares in the e-signature company under pre-COVID levels. Given that the market is valuing DocuSign at a cheaper price than it did in early 2020, you might think that it is struggling. Hardly. Coming off
The world of AI-powered drug discovery keeps expanding as the capabilities of machine learning grow. One approach that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago is simulating the complicated interplays of two interlocking molecules — but that’s exactly what drug designers need to know about, and exactly what Charm Therapeutics aims to do with its
According to Crunchbase, more than 17,000 tech workers have lost jobs since the start of this year. That’s painful, but for perspective: TechCrunch tracked more than 100,000 tech layoffs between August and December 2008. In my experience, founders and investors usually come out unscathed on the other side of events like these. For below-the-line employees,
Mike Tong Contributor Mike Tong has over a decade of experience leading GTM strategy and operations for tech and data companies as part of McKinsey TMT, AtSpoke, Splunk and the VC firm B Capital. In 2019, I led the sales team and growth strategy for a venture-backed AI company called atSpoke. The company, which Okta
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of Work Bank, plans to make an equity investment of up to €25 million ($26.43) into the Partech Africa Fund II (PAF II) by the Paris-based VC firm Partech. The IFC said in the disclosures that it’s eyeing a stake not exceeding 20%. The agency said
The UK’s competition watchdog has published its final report on a comprehensive, year-long mobile ecosystem market study — cementing its view that there are substantial concerns about the market power of Apple and Google which require regulatory intervention. Back in December, its preliminary report on the market study also identified concerns and discussed potential remedies
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. When did it become Thursday? About 15 hours ago, that’s when! Welcome to the 9th of March 2022, and another, extra crunchy Daily Crunch. Serve it with some real cow milk that
Cow’s milk continues to be a staple of human nutrition. Pediatricians recommend it for infant growth, and for the most part, it has more protein than alternative “milks.” However, this dairy delight isn’t tolerated by all people, and the process from cow to dinner table is a known strain on environmental resources. Enter Brown Foods,
Even as India is increasingly adding generation capacity from solar power, setting examples for many other developing nations, there’s a large population of the South Asian nation that is yet to join the clean energy bandwagon: Indian households. Less than a percent of Indian homes has rooftop solar systems. Such slower adoption could dampen Prime
Roughly a year ago, Google announced the launch of Vertex AI, a managed AI platform designed to help companies to accelerate the deployment of AI models. To mark the service’s anniversary and the kickoff of Google’s Applied ML Summit, Google this morning announced new features heading to Vertex, including a dedicated server for AI system
Larger banks and other financial service providers are getting a lot more serious when it comes to competing with upstarts that are disrupting their businesses with fresher approaches and newer technologies. Today, one of the companies helping those larger banks with that task is announcing a big round of funding to double down on that
Google has released Android 13 beta 3, and while there aren’t any major changes in this version, that’s probably the point of it as the version has reached platform stability. This means that there won’t be any significant changes to Android 13’s APIs, and developers can tune their apps for the version when it rolls
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai talks about where he sees Google’s next $1 trillion in value and plans to evolve search and AI. He also weighs in on the future of the metaverse in the aftermath of controversies involving Meta’s Facebook. He speaks exclusively with Bloomberg Technology’s Emily Chang for the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.
Amid an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into inaccurate statements to investors, Faraday Future has received a preliminary request for information from the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ’s request for information is related to the SEC probe, according to a securities filing submitted by the electric vehicle startup Thursday. Faraday said it’s
Dubbing is a lucrative market, with Verified Market Research predicting that film dubbing services alone could generate $3.6 billion annually by 2027. But it’s also a laborious and costly process. On average, it can take an hour of recording studio time for five minutes of narration; one calculator pegs the price at $75 per minute for
Meta is scaling back its plans for its augmented reality (AR) glasses and is pivoting its Portal smart display device away from the consumer market, according to a new report from The Information. The report notes that the company had originally planned to launch the first version of its AR glasses, which are codenamed Project
Earlier this year, the news of multi-factor authentication attacks began to surface. MFA is supposed to be a technique to limit attacks. If someone gets hold of a password, an MFA request usually prevents them from getting any further, but this year’s attacks showed that even MFA can be vulnerable under the right circumstances. Xage
Last year, U.K. cybersecurity startup CybSafe, a “behavioral security” platform, raised a $7.9 million Series A. This SaaS product with a per-user-based, subscription licensing model has a “behavior-led” platform that manages people-related security. In other words, it uses behavioral science and data analytics to help employees be more cybersecurity aware. Users get microlearning content and
Amazon is tapping into augmented reality in an attempt to appeal to sneakerheads shopping its site. The retailer this morning announced a new feature called Virtual Try-On for Shoes that will allow customers to visualize how a pair of new shoes will look on themselves from multiple angles using their mobile phone’s camera. The company
With more and more people ordering food from home — a trend that gathered momentum at a time when it was safer to eat at home than in restaurants — the proliferation of so-called “ghost kitchens” is continuing apace. These kitchens focus on takeaway orders and need a layer of technology to keep things running
Product research generally involves determining whether an idea for a new product might be successful and how to best develop and sell that product. It’s a straightforward process, in theory, but the basic definition belies the barriers that can crop up. Research is often costly — software-as-a-service companies spend an estimated 23% of their revenue
Jailed Kremlin critic, Alexey Navalny, has hit out at adtech giants Meta and Google for shutting off advertising inside Russia following the country’s invasion of Ukraine which he argues has been a huge boon to Putin’s regime by making it harder for the opposition to get out anti-war messaging. The remarks came after Navalny was