A chill has descended onto the global startup market, albeit not evenly. Venture capital totals are sagging in most geographies, and falling share prices for tech companies large and small have soured sentiment on the future value of high-growth and often cash-hungry startups. The end of the lengthy startup boom that first formed in the
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Twitter announced today that it has rebranded its Twitter Media website to “Twitter Create.” The social media giant says the website is a new hub for creators to access resources, product information and tips for getting the most out of Twitter. With this new rebrand, the company says it wants to make it easier for
The startup says most companies’ carbon footprint math is bogus Tim De Chant 7 hours When Wenbo Shi started Singularity Energy, a carbon intelligence platform that today raised a $4.5 million seed round, he never thought he would focus the company on a greenhouse gas. But one conversation with a customer changed the way he
PlanetScale, the highly scalable MySQL database service founded by the co-creators of the increasingly popular Vitess open source project, today announced a series of updates that push the platform beyond its basic database features by adding new enterprise features and new tools to improve the developer experience. The first of these new features is PlanetScale
Is the beauty industry ready to wean itself off single-use plastic? Shellworks is betting on it. Targeting cosmetics brands, the London-based biotech startup has scooped up a $6.2 million seed round to prove it can scale its petroleum-free, compostable packaging, which “performs like plastic” but breaks down in about a year, the company claims. Shellworks’
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is something I look forward to every year. The students and young entrepreneurs who submit their extremely early-stage projects to this global competition are like the seeds of future startups and potentially world-changing projects. This year’s winner, V Bionic, created a robotic glove to help patients with neurological damage recover faster at
Dating platform Bumble is looking to enhance its non-dating social features with a further investment into its Bumble BFF feature, first launched in 2016. This friend-finding feature currently uses the same swiped-based mechanics to connect people looking for platonic relationships, but will soon expand to include social networking groups where users can connect with one
It’s Demo Day time! Today marks the 30th Demo Day for Alchemist, the enterprise-focused accelerator that helped grow companies like LaunchDarkly, Rigetti Computing, and Privacera early on. As an enterprise accelerator, the companies Alchemist backs generally focus on selling things to other companies as opposed to selling straight to consumers. Some of the companies might
Nowports, an automated digital freight forwarder in Latin America, has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round which values the company at $1.1 billion. For the unacquainted, digital freight forwarders use digital tools that improve communication and efficiencies in the shipping process, among other things, to help shipments get where they need to
So you want to know what’s going on with Elon Musk and Twitter, but you thought maybe it’s a little too late to ask your tech-obsessed buddies for the low-down. You’ve come to the right place. Last month, in perhaps the year’s biggest tech news story yet, Elon Musk announced his intent to buy Twitter
Chrysler’s new EV will create a new category, drawing upon lessons learned from designing the brand’s minivan, according to chief design officer Ralph Gilles. “Chrysler was one of those brands that was honestly on the OR table, and we decided to reinvest in it big time,” Gilles said at the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility conference last
Firework, a San Mateo livestreaming commerce company, secured $150 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The company says it is now valued at $750 million. In 2021, Firework raised $55 million to value it at $230 million. Firework has now taken in more than $235 million in funding since it
Robotics are playing a growing role in the world of e-commerce logistics and fulfillment — where they are seen not just as a way to speed up operations but to drastically reduce the costs of running them — and today a startup developing software and hardware specifically in the area of robot picking is announcing
Google Maps’ Street View feature was created 15 years ago, and since then, has added more than 220 billion Street View images from over 100 countries and territories. Many of us have taken advantage of its capabilities, especially scoping out unknown locations before heading there in person. To celebrate the anniversary, the company announced upgrades
Monday May 23, 2022, and we’re listening to our brand-new podcast called the TechCrunch Podcast. In it, we talk to TechCrunch writers about the stories they’re most excited about. The first episode is live now, featuring Darrell and Taylor talking about … UFOs‽ — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top 3 Hey, you, get into
French startup moka.care has raised a new $16 million Series A funding round (€15 million). The company is focused on mental well-being in the workplace. It offers a full-fledged service that sits in between employees and HR departments. Left Lane Capital is leading today’s funding round. Existing investor Singular is participating once again. VC firm
Instagram is rolling out a “visual refresh” for its branding this week, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The company is introducing a slightly tweaked brighter new logo, typeface and full-screen marketing layouts. Instagram says the refresh is designed to embrace continued evolution and to help it “create more immersive and inclusive
Actiondesk is a new spreadsheet solution for the software-as-a-service era. It connects with the databases, CRMs and SaaS tools that you already use so that you can build dashboards and generate reports without having to manually import data. The startup raised a $3.9 million seed round from Tiger Global, Bling Capital, Y Combinator, Speedinvest, FundersClub,
A host of major European tech founders and investors are today backing the launch of OneUkraine, a new charity providing sustainable humanitarian relief for the Ukrainian people. OneUkraine will be supporting Ukrainians at home and abroad, delivering humanitarian aid, and aiming to rebuild the tech and broader infrastructure of Ukraine by SMEs and startups on
Andrea D’Ambra Contributor Andrea D’Ambra is a partner in Norton Rose Fulbright’s New York office and the U.S. head of Technology and the U.S. head of eDiscovery and Information Governance. Susana Medeiros Contributor Susana Medeiros is an associate in Norton Rose Fulbright’s New York office and member of the information governance, privacy and cybersecurity group
SwipeRx, a platform for pharma professionals, said Tuesday it has secured a $27 million Series B round led by Indonesia’s MDI Ventures, with participation from the Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, Susquehanna International Group and existing backers. Pharmacies in Southeast Asia were largely fragmented, mom-and-pop shops operating in silos when the company —
TikTok is ramping up its competition with Twitch, YouTube, and others with this week’s launch of TikTok LIVE subscriptions, a new program that will allow creators to generate recurring revenue via payments from their top fans. Similar to the offerings from rival streaming sites, the new service will offer subscribers a range of perks including
Over the weekend, rumors began flying that chipmaker Broadcom was interested in acquiring VMware, the company best known for commercializing the virtual machine concept that gave birth to cloud computing. Bloomberg first reported the potential deal on Sunday. VMware will not come cheap. It had a market capitalization in the neighborhood of $40 billion before
Swedish payment giant Klarna is going to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming days. Today’s news comes a few days after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was going to cut its valuation in order to raise fresh capital. The company currently employs around 7,000 people. Cutting 10% of the company’s workforce
If I were to make a list of things that I didn’t think needed to get smarter, bike pedals would be somewhere near the top of the list. And yet, when Redshift Sports showed me its shiny (literally!) new pedals, I had one of those “omg this makes so much sense” moments. In a nutshell,
Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi’s shareholders have voted to delist the company from the NYSE. The decision is a long-expected result of the company finding itself in hot water with the Chinese government after a rushed and later troubled public-market debut in the United States. Didi went public in the middle of 2021 in an offering
Weeks after laying off about 30% of its staff, MainStreet is said to be raising another round of funding at a $200 million valuation, sources tell TechCrunch. The news is significant in that MainStreet, which helps other startups uncover tax credits, raised $60 million in March of 2021 at a post-money valuation of $500 million.
The District of Columbia has just announced fresh litigation targeting Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for his role in the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse episode — alleging it has evidence the Facebook founder was personally involved in the failures that led to the incident. The District is alleging breaches of the Consumer Protection Procedures Act
E-commerce is an $85 billion business in Latin America, and as that market is poised to essentially double in three years, the current consumer demands to receive orders on time and packaged correctly will only increase. For decades, e-commerce giants, like Amazon and MercadoLibre, have perfected the logistics and delivery technology for their marketplaces, but
The UK’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws. The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of