Technology turned out to be a boon for pets during the pandemic. Without ready access to vets, pet owners turned to mobile apps to keep track on their pet’s health, often via educational content, and in some cases that was linked to insurance providers. The behavior has lit up the VC world as startups roll
admin
TechCrunch is excited to announce Swyft Cities won the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2022 pitch-off and is fast-tracked into the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. Beyond Aero is runner-up. The Mountain View-based company is committed to improving transportation through the use of autonomous, lightweight, fixed-cable vehicles. The company says that its solution offers a
How much difference a year makes. In April 2021, TechCrunch published a venture capitalist’s take that “the era of the European insurtech IPO will soon be upon us.” At the time, the perspective made some sense. After all, just last June, this column explored the rapid-fire fundraising in the insurance technology startup market, declaring that
Twitter has announced that it’s rolling out Super Follows-only Spaces. Creators who offer Super Follows subscriptions can now host Spaces exclusively for their subscribers. The social media giant says this new option will give creators a way to “offer an extra layer of conversation to their biggest supporters.” Subscribers globally on iOS and Android will
ChargeLab, a Toronto-based startup that builds software to operate and optimize electric vehicle charging equipment for fleets and commercial customers, has raised a $15 million Series A round. The round was led by King River Capital and notably includes participation from strategic investor ABB E-Mobility, a spinoff of technology company ABB that focuses on electric
Reflecting the growing investor interest in HR technology startups, Fetcher, the talent acquisition platform formerly known as Scout, today closed a $27 million Series B funding round led by Tola Capital with participation from G20 Ventures, KFund and Accomplice. The new money — $7 million in debt and $20 million in equity — brings the
If meme stocks can be a thing, what’s to stop audio meme sharing from going viral!? Hoping to storm the ear-bending arena of social audio and win friends amid the gamer/creator crowd is Voicy — a Netherlands-based startup that’s building a platform for user-generated audio snippets (typically a few seconds long), offering tools to create
Thursday May 19, 2022, and it’s the last day of our in-person Mobility event. Tomorrow we take the journey to the mean streets of the world wide web, and you can still join us virtually! — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top 3 Tl;dr: We know you don’t have 32 minutes to read Meta global
Historically, the relationship between landlords and tenants can be a contentious one. At the same time, the experiences of managing a property, and renting one, are not always smooth. Belong, a startup that aims to address both these issues while giving renters a way to save toward home ownership, has just raised $50 million in
Snapchat is preparing to introduce a new parental control feature dubbed “Family Center,” which will allow parents to see who their teen is friends with on the app as well as who they’ve been messaging with over the past seven days, and more. Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel first teased the planned offering during an interview
Jiajun Zhu, co-founder and CEO of autonomous robot company Nuro, joined TechCrunch onstage during TC Sessions: Mobility on Wednesday to discuss how the startup aims to revolutionize commercial autonomous delivery. The company is most well-known for its cute self-driving delivery vehicles, which operate on roads, not sidewalks, and are purpose-built to carry pizzas and packages
The IPO window has all but closed for technology companies in the wake of a massive downturn in the market, but an opening still remains for some, in the form of SPACs. Near — a data intelligence company that has amassed 1.6 billion anonymized user profiles attached to 70 million locations in 44 countries —
In the developed world, almost anyone can get financing for, say, a car lease. But in an emerging economy like South Africa, the only people who own cars or can even get a car lease are the people who already have something to collateralize, or a payslip to work off. As a result, small businesses,
WhatsApp is continuing its push into the business market with today’s news it’s launching the WhatsApp Cloud API to all businesses worldwide. Introduced into beta testing last November, the new developer tool is a cloud-based version of the WhatsApp Business API — WhatsApp’s first revenue-generating enterprise product — but hosted on parent company Meta’s infrastructure.
Back in March, I wrote about how BoxedUp pivoted to enable high-end video production gear sharing and its $2.3 million seed round. At the time, the company’s founder David Boone stuck out, so when I started the pitch deck teardowns, I knew I wanted to feature BoxedUp in one of the installments. Today, we’re taking a close
Tech valuations have endured stark declines this year. But after continued selling, it’s now possible to argue that the selling has gone too far — that tech valuations are now suffering more than is warranted in the wake of the 2020-2021 tech stock bubble. U.S. stocks opened lower today, adding to a miserable year’s trading.
Meta’s recently crowned president of global affairs, Nick Clegg — who, in a former life, was literally the deputy prime minister of the U.K. — has been earning his keep in California by penning an approximately 8,000-word manifesto to promo “the metaverse”: aka, the sci-fi-inspired vapourware the company we all know as Facebook fixed on
How was your first day at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022? We hope you’re fully caffeinated and ready to roll because day two is packed with groundbreaking tech, opportunities galore and more top-notch programming. Finish your coffee, peruse the event agenda and plan your day. We took the liberty of highlighting just some of the presentations
When ZincSearch founder Prabhat Sharma worked as a solutions architect at AWS, he helped customers implement a lot of tools on top of AWS infrastructure services. He noticed that most of the solutions that were designed to help companies sift through log data were from a different era, and those that weren’t, hadn’t really caught
Berlin-based Zolar has bagged €100 million (~$105M) in Series C funding to expand its supplier network for small solar systems to meet rising demand for clean energy. Germany is particularly exposed to the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine as it remains heavily dependent on Russian gas imports — meaning consumers there face
A little bright spot in a market that was already struggling with declining sales well before a global pandemic, supply chain crisis and inflation concerns struck. The North American market saw a small – but hopeful – 4% increase in shipments over the same time last year, per new numbers from Canalys. The primary driver
Max Schireson Contributor Max Schireson, the former CEO of MongoDB, is an executive-in-residence at Battery Ventures, where he helps advise the firm’s cloud and data portfolio companies on a variety of strategic and tactical business issues. More posts by this contributor Tracking the explosive growth of open-source software The Money In Open-Source Software “Are you
Indonesia’s 60 million blue collar workers contribute 20% to its gross domestic product, but they face a lot of uncertainty. Many are forced to bounce from job to job, some fall victim to scam job postings and without a steady employment history, are unable to qualify for financial services, say the founders of Pintarnya. That’s
New York Attorney General Letitia James will launch an investigation into the role that social media and online message boards played in the tragedy that unfolded in Buffalo over the weekend. On Saturday, an 18-year-old shooter opened fire at a Tops supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three others. In online materials, the suspected shooter
New Relic, which has long been known for its observability platform, is entering the security market today with the launch of a new vulnerability management service. Aptly named New Relic Vulnerability Management, the service aggregates data from botth its own native vulnerability detection system and third-party tools, giving security, DevOps, SecOps and SRE teams a
It’s been a year since Octave Klaba, the founder of OVHcloud, acquired Shadow following a commercial court order. After a stabilizing period, the company is now ready to launch a new plan, a new service and a new B2B offering. Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. People can pay a monthly subscription fee
I tried out the brand new Withings ScanWatch about six months ago, and concluded that it was a great smartwatch for people who prioritize their health over wearing a tiny iPhone-like device on their wrists. Today, the French company announced a classier-looking version of the same watch, borrowing design language from dive watches of yore.
In 2010, Bastian Gotter invested up to $200,000 into IROKOtv, an African video-on-demand company Jason Njoku, his friend and co-founder, launched in Lagos, Nigeria. For the next couple of years, Gotter, as CFO, was instrumental in turning IROKO — after raising over $30 million from VCs, including Tiger Global — into a household name in
Amazon Labor Union President Christian Smalls joins Emily Chang after testifying before members of Congress about his efforts to unionize Amazon workers across the country, and meeting with President Biden.
Joby Aviation, a California-based company developing electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOL) for commercial passenger service, announced the acquisition of Avionyx, an aerospace software engineering firm, on the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility stage on Wednesday. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Joby did say that it was an acqui-hire, which