Payments and software startup SpotOn has closed on $300 million in a Series F financing that values the company at $3.6 billion. Dragoneer Investment Group led the latest round, which included participation from existing backers Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), DST Global, Franklin Templeton and Mubadala Investment Company, as well as new investor, G Squared. The investment
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Discord has provided more insight into how the shooter who opened fire in a Buffalo, New York supermarket over the weekend used its service prior to the tragic act of violence. The shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, is charged with first degree murder in the mass shooting, which left 10 people dead and three injured. In
Attention Mobility enthusiasts! It’s been 3 long years since our last in-person mobility event, but the day has finally come. Welcome to Day One of TC Sessions: Mobility 2022! Get ready for two days of programming dedicated to taking a deeper dive into the future of transportation and to meet the people who are shaping
Stripe — the payments giant valued at $95 billion — is on a product sprint to expand its services and functionality beyond the basic payments that form the core of its business today. Today the company took the wraps off Data Pipeline, an infrastructure product that will let its users create links between their Stripe
Here’s a rare sight: Google has been hit with a €10 million fine by Spain for serious breaches of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which found it had passed information that could be used to identify citizens requesting deletion of their personal data under EU law, including their email address; the reasons
In recent years, YouTube has been working to transform its platform into more of a shopping destination with product launches like shoppable ads or more recently, the ability to shop directly from livestreams hosted by creators. Now, it’s furthering that investment with new features for live shopping experiences. At yesterday’s YouTube Brandcast event, where the
For years, scientists and engineers predicted that lithium-ion batteries would get a boost if they could just add more silicon. In the lab, the prediction held, but only for a short period of time. The material had a downside — it became brittle after repeated charging. Sila seems to think it’s solved the problem. The
Heartex, a startup that bills itself as an “open source” platform for data labeling, today announced that it landed $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Redpoint Ventures. Unusual Ventures, Bow Capital, and Swift Ventures also participated, bringing Heartex’s total capital raised to $30 million. Co-founder and CEO Michael Malyuk said that
Dating app Hinge is introducing a new “Self-Care Prompts” feature that is designed to inspire initial conversations between matches about self-care priorities. Hinge’s in-app prompts are conversation starters that users answer as part of their profiles and are displayed to potential matches. The prompts are designed to allow users to showcase their personality instead of
Construction as an industry has evolved with civilization through the ages. But today, it’s one of the few industries that have one foot firmly planted in the past, even as the other tries to step into the future. Construction’s digital transformation journey is only just beginning, and the sector offers a ton of space for
CipherMode Labs CEO and co-founder Sadegh Riazi has been working with encryption his entire career. He studied it as part of his PhD. He was part of the Microsoft SEAL team that worked on improving homomorphic encryption and making it more efficient. What he found was that while homomorphic encryption allows you to work with
Meet Palette, a software-as-a-service startup that is going to be particularly interesting if you’re also running a software-as-a-service startup. The company has built a modern tool to design, manage and optimize sales commission plans for your internal team. Earlier this year, the startup raised a $6 million funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Liquid
Zenly, the popular social app with 35 million monthly active users, released a complete redesign just last month. But it turns out that this was just the first part of a bigger change at the company owned by Snap. Zenly is going to compete with the likes of Google Maps and Apple Maps as it
Ardy Esmaeili Contributor More posts by this contributor What US startup founders need to know about the R&D tax credit When it comes to remote employment, employees and employers both face a plethora of benefits and pitfalls. While the cultural pros and cons have been covered, considerations from a setup and maintenance standpoint largely haven’t
Singapore-based venture firm Jungle Ventures is digging deeper into Southeast Asia and India with the close of its fourth fund. Fund IV totals $600 million, with $450 million for new investments and $150 million earmarked for follow-up investments in its portfolio companies. The fund’s close brings Jungle Ventures’ total assets under management to over $1
One of the promises made by web3 entrepreneurs is putting data back in the hands of owners through decentralization. Singapore-based CyberConnect is among a handful of blockchain startups working to fulfill this vision, and it has recently closed a Series A financing round totaling $15 million. The lead co-investor of the round is Animoca Brands,
TechCrunch is excited to announce the six companies pitching in person and onstage at TC Sessions Mobility 2022. Hailing from around the United States and the globe, founders will pitch on the main stage, for four minutes, followed by an intense Q&A with our expert panel of judges. The judges for this pitch-off will be
While valuations of public software-as-a-service businesses have been taking a hammering of late, as investors cool on the sector amid a wider, post-pandemic tech stock sell off, SaaS startups still need to raise funding to scale their budding businesses — or, well, they hope they’ll be able to do so on reasonable terms despite these
It’s Tuesday, May 17, 2022, and we are currently in the midst of an existential crisis; aren’t we all, when we are being very honest with ourselves, a little bit spambot at heart? Tomorrow, TC Sessions: Mobility kicks off. Last chance saloon to buy tickets for our in-person event Wednesday and Thursday, or the virtual
The importance of designing accessibility in software from the ground up has only been emphasized by the pandemic, and as a consequence Fable’s on-demand accessibility experts have proven their value many times over. The company has raised $10 million to scale up and pursue its goal to “make Inclusive Product Development the status quo,” as
In a new tweet fired at Twitter before market open, Elon Musk has reiterated that his $44BN deal to buy the social media platform is on hold over the issue of spambots. But now he’s tacitly accusing the company of lying over the proportion of fake/spam accounts on the platform, claiming its CEO “publicly refused
Mercedes-Benz announced today that Sila’s energy-dense silicon anode is slated for an extended-range version of the electric G-Class that’s due out in 2025. Sila said that its silicon anode material can boost energy density by 20% to 40% over existing cells, enabling a longer range from battery packs that occupy the same physical space. That
Lounge, a team communication startup that was looking to reimagine the future of work with features designed for remote and distributed workforces, has now found an exit after Slack entered its same market last year with competitive voice and video tools. Launched by former Life360 employees last year, Lounge confirmed it’s been acquired for an
Koyeb has evolved quite a lot since I first covered the startup. The company is still focused on serverless infrastructure. But it now offers a general purpose serverless platform that you can configure through a simple ‘git push’ command, or using Docker containers. The company’s serverless platform is now available as a public preview with
Ming-Chi Kuo is one of a handful of Apple analysts whose reports always warrant a second look, regardless of how strange they might seem at first blush. We’ve heard plenty of reports that the company is testing its own version of a foldable device, in its customary style of being fashionably late to the party,
Instabug, a startup that aims to help mobile developers monitor, identify and fix bugs within apps, has raised $46 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners. The raise comes just over two years after the startup raised $5 million in a seed round led by Accel, which doubled down on its investment
Arrived has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Forerunner Ventures to give people the ability to buy shares in single-family rentals with “as little as $100.” Returning backers include Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos; Good Friends, a venture fund run by the CEOs and co-founders of
When The New York Times got its hands on some of Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter, a company that he is in the process of purchasing, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Musk knew what he was buying. Per the Times’ reporting, we learned that Musk expects to bolster Twitter’s revenue to “$26.4
Vivun was built by Matt Darrow, a guy who cut his teeth in pre-sales at Zuora. He believed that pre-sales teams had a lot to offer to the organization, but there really wasn’t any software to capture that knowledge. That’s why he built Vivun. The company is helping to define a new software category, which
The world of web development continues to become increasingly more democratized — and more creative — thanks to innovations in “headless” systems that give more flexibility around how a site can look and function: a middle ground between using rigid templates and building and maintaining every single component of a web’s tech stack from the