TechCrunch Startup Battlefield is expanding. The tech ecosystem has grown exponentially in size and possibility since the early days of Startup Battlefield and it’s time that we grow along with it. That’s why we’re proud to announce TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200, a new era of our exciting startup community competition. Showcasing global founders This October,
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Construct Capital co-founders and general partners Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt continue to dive into innovation that some investors may not think is so sexy, but actually runs behind the scenes so that our food gets to grocery stores every week and our packages arrive when they say they will. And this time, they have
Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is now facing “internal scrutiny” at the company after pressuring U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail to kill a story about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. The revelations come in an explosive new report from the Wall Street Journal detailing a coordinated campaign to discourage the tabloid
At its AWS Summit San Francisco, Amazon’s cloud computing arm today announced a number of product launches, including two focused on its serverless portfolio. The first of these is the GA launch of Amazon Aurora Serverless V2, its serverless database service, which can now scale up and down significantly faster than the previous version and
For years grocery retailers have been using data driven forecasting to help them predict demand to figure out which products to reorder to keep shelves stocked. That’s nothing new. But Berlin-based startup Freshflow is targeting a particular slice of this market: It’s built an AI-powered forecasting platform to help retailers optimize stock replenishment of fresh,
Cultivated meat, grown in a bioreactor rather than out on the range, might be one of the big food trends of the decade. But it’s relying on tech built around multiplying yeast and bacteria cells, not animal tissue — and Unicorn Biotechnologies wants to change that with new equipment created with mass food production in
Eye-tracking has long been one of the those computing holy grails. Whether it’s accessibility concerns, opening up new form factors or just trying to put a novel spin on the ways we interact with our devices, decades of consumer electronics are littered with attempts to use the gauze to unlock a new form of input.
Front’s cap table reads like an honor role of investors. CEO and co-founder Mathilde Collin raised funds from numerous Silicon Valley firms and individual investors. On April 27 she’s speaking on TechCrunch Live to share her strategy that allowed her company to raise funds from less traditional VCs. One of those VCs is also speaking
In mid-2020, short-term rental startup Lyric Hospitality shuttered most of its locations in what was widely viewed as another pandemic casualty. But the San Francisco company — which was out to help folks who struggled to decide between staying in a hotel or an Airbnb — wasn’t ready to go down without a fight. It
Swiss-Hungarian end-to-end encrypted cloud services provider Tresorit has added a new string to its security bow: It’s started offering E2E encrypted email as a subscription add-on for business users of third party email service providers. Tresorit’s E2EE module enables subscribers to send and receive strongly encrypted email messages via their usual email provider — with
Immigrants to a new country can often be cash-rich. The problem is, is that they have no credit history in their new country. Plus, a consumer cannot take their credit file from one country to another. Furthermore, credit bureaus are rarely coordinated or joined up across countries. The upshot of this is that those that
As humanity prepares to return to the Moon (“to stay,” as they remind us constantly), there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to make sure astronauts are safe and productive on the lunar surface. Without GPS, navigation and mapping is a lot harder — and NASA is working with lidar company Aeva
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Happy 20th of April, 2022, which has no particular significance and we are not making any jokes. It’s been a strange news day, but never fear, we have some great stories for
Ordinary Folk, a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-Series A funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring and expand into Hong Kong while scaling in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Sean Low, the startup has two main platforms: Noah is
Over the last few days, my WeChat has been inundated with people reminiscing about the first post they ever published on the app’s newsfeed, which marked its 10-year anniversary this week. The newsfeed feature, called Moments, is like a social network that lives within the WeChat super app. Unlike many other social networks, which either
There were a lot of lean years for IBM when the company posted 22 straight quarters of declining revenues, an agonizing period that stretched from 2012 to 2017. Even over the subsequent years, meaningful growth was hard to find. But for the second straight quarter, Big Blue has begun to change the narrative, posting revenue
The UK has announced a bundle of consumer protection and competition reforms which could see platforms that fail to tackle fake reviews fined up to 10% of their global annual turnover. Also incoming: Stronger powers for the national competition regulator to prevent tech giants from being able to buy up startups or smaller rivals with
The e-commerce market in Latin America has been gaining traction over the past two years and is poised to double in size and be valued at more than $100 billion by 2025. And like in the United States and elsewhere, customers in LatAm expect that when they submit an order online, it arrives at their
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: I didn’t win the
Carta data shows breadth of slowdown, and early-stage startups are hardly immune Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 7 hours The comedown from venture capital’s torrid 2021 is sparing few startups. New data from Carta, a provider of shareholder management services to private companies, indicates that the slowdown in venture capital activity is not constrained to a
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that the company is going to tweak its ranking algorithm to highlight original content more on its platform. Following the announcement, a spokesperson for the social media giant told TechCrunch in an email that Instagram is making changes to its ranking algorithm to prioritize the distribution of original content,
Plastic foam like Styrofoam is a ubiquitous, harmful, and nearly immortal single-use material that is long overdue for a good, green replacement — and Cruz Foam is here to supply it. The startup creates a durable yet backyard-compostable packing foam out of shrimp shells produced (and discarded) by the seafood industry. It recently extended its
Amazon Web Services (AWS) today launched a new program, AWS Impact Accelerator, that will give up to $30 million to early-stage startups led by Black, Latino, LGBTQIA+ and women founders. The Amazon company claims that the three-year initiative will help recipients build successful businesses while “accelerating” growth in their respective markets. But critics contend that
The last couple of years have seen a boom in carbon calculation startups, and long may it reign. (We need all the help we can get to avoid the disaster of global warming and climate change). Included among those startups are those like https://plana.earth/ or https://www.planetly.org/ But many of these new companies, as welcome as
European Union lawmakers have taken a step closer to agreeing rules to standardize how a range of mobile gadgetry is charged. Today MEPs in the European Parliament’s internal market and consumer protection (IMCO) committee adopted their position on a Commission proposal announced last fall, ahead of a full vote by the parliament next month to
The future of Bolt, the Estonia-based ride-hailing company, in Tanzania is hanging in the balance following a new 15% service fee order that came into effect Friday last week. Bolt, Uber’s main rival in Europe and Africa, in response to queries by TechCrunch, said it had reached out to relevant stakeholders including the Land Transport
Everstage founders Vivek Suriyamoorthy and Siva Rajamani For sales reps, commission plans are often complicated and lack transparency, leading to accounting errors and frustration. Everstage, a sales commission platform, solves that, letting sales rep see exactly how much they earned. It also has features to estimate how much commissions they can potentially make from their
As consumers’ interest in the environment and nutrition rises, food-tech companies join the race to invent meat alternatives. In 2021, alternative seafood companies received $175 million in investment globally, increasing 92% from 2020. A South Korean startup called CellMEAT, which develops cell-based shrimp, has secured $8.1 million (10 billion KRW) Series A funding to compete
When it comes to presentation creation, PowerPoint and Keynote remain the de facto tools by incumbent advantage. PowerPoint has over one billion installs and 500 million users alone, thanks to Microsoft’s longtime bundling of Office with certain Windows editions. But this hasn’t stopped startups from trying to disrupt the status quo. Besides Prezi, there’s Pitch,
Platforms like Figma have changed the game when it comes to how creatives and other stakeholders in the production and product team conceive and iterate around two-dimensional designs. Now, a company called Gravity Sketch has taken that concept into 3D, leveraging tools like virtual reality headsets to let designers and others dive into and better