Istanbul has become a city to watch when it comes to casual gaming startups, boosted by the likes of Peak (acquired by Zynga for $1.8 billion) and Dream (valued at $1 billion in a funding round last year). Now, a new startup is announcing a major round of funding to make its own mark on
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Burnt Finance is a crypto startup which, as a stunt, burnt a Banksy artwork and but then the NFT they’d minted for it for $400,000, double what it cost on the ‘normal’ open art market. Based on the idea that auctions for NFTs could be improved, it went on to raise $3 million for a
Cash flow is a major pain point for small businesses in Africa. Long payment cycles, which can take 30-90 days after services or products have been rendered, and little or no capital, of which research says 85% of African small and medium businesses are subject to, are the main culprits of cash flow issues. Many
Customer service tickets tend to fall into the same few buckets — returns, refunds or quality control questions. Not only are these repetitive, but it leaves little time for customer engagement on more complex requests, like relaying information on products or helping a customer find the best product for them. Maja Schaefer and Matt Ciolek,
Tado, the German smart home startup that specializes in thermostats and more recently moved into flexible “time of use” energy tariffs based on loadshifting technology, is today announcing the next step in its life as a business. It’s going public by way of a SPAC deal. GFJ ESG Acquisition, a German SPAC entity focused specifically
Supply chain logistics — getting components and eventually finished products from A to B to C — is one of the most critical parts of running a business, not least because it is one of the most complex, involving dozens of companies, hundreds of combinations and permutations, accounting for world events outside of your business,
Another regulatory brick in the wall for Apple: The iPhone maker agreed this weekend to changes to its App Store in the Netherlands focused on dating apps, agreeing to allow local developers of dating apps to be able to offer non-Apple based payments (via Reuters). In December, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM)
French startup Exotec has raised a $335 million Series D round in a new round of funding led by Goldman Sachs’ Growth Equity business. Following today’s investment, the company has reached a valuation of $2 billion. Exotec sells a complete end-to-end solution to turn a regular warehouse into a partially automated logistics platform. It’s a
nCore Games has raised $10 million in a new financing round as the top Indian gaming firm gears up to launch web3 offerings, its top executives said Monday. Animoca Brands and Galaxy Interactive, two high-profile investors in the crypto space, led the funding. Polygon, a popular layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution, and Hyperedge Capital also
Early-stage startup founders have just a few ways to recruit and retain employees: Offer a competitive salary Create a role that harnesses their interests/talent Give them a stake in the company. In most cases, equity will not leave employees with substantial wealth. But even the most embittered worker will think twice about walking away from
Korean technology giant LG makes everything from televisions (they announced some new ones at CES), washing machines and fridges, to, well, it’ll probably take less time to list the things they don’t get involved in. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the company has a robust interest in innovation, then, and LG Nova is
Whatever you do, don’t refer to LG’s incubator program LG Nova as a corporate venture capital (CVC) outfit. LG Nova is the pointiest tip of the spear for LG, the company’s experimental playground to work with startups to explore spaces where the corporation has spotted areas ripe for future growth. Backed by a relatively large
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Among many of the entrepreneur catchphrases out there, the one that annoys me the most is: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” The phrase may be meant to make people with
Shanea Leven Contributor Shanea Leven is co-founder and CEO of CodeSee, a developer platform that helps developers and development teams better understand codebases. “Raising money is catastrophically challenging for female founders, and even harder for Black female founders.” It’s a bold, even damning statement — one I made in a recent discussion speculating what’s to
Meta is shutting down a video speed-dating service it had tested over a good part of last year, the company informed the service’s users via a recent email. Last April, the company formerly known as Facebook confirmed it was testing a new dating service called Sparked, which was developed by its in-house incubator, the NPE
Payments company Checkout.com isn’t just a unicorn — it has closed a $1 billion Series D founding round. Following today’s round, the company is now valued at $40 billion. That’s a stark increase compared to last year’s valuation. With its Series C round, the company raised $450 million at a $15 billion valuation — it represents
Singapore-based industrial robotics firm Sesto this week announced a $5.7 million raise, featuring TRIVE, WTI GmbH and SEEDS Capital (Enterprise Singapore’s VC wing). The round follows a similarly sized $4 million Series A, back in 2018. Sesto has had a busy few years since that round — as have many in the industrial robotics category,
UBITS, a B2B online learning platform for upskilling employees in Latin America, has raised $25 million in funding led by Riverwood Capital. Julián Melo and Marta Forero founded UBITS in Bogota, Colombia, in 2018 after the pair came up with the idea of “creating the Netflix for corporate training for LatAm.” They applied to Y
The creator of one of the earliest and most enduringly iconic virtual worlds is returning to his roots. Second Life’s founder Philip Rosedale will rejoin the company he founded in 1999 as a strategic advisor after High Fidelity, the spatial audio company Rosedale co-founded in 2013, invested in Second Life’s developer Linden Lab. The deal
Embedded finance continues to be the engine driving the growth of fintech, with one group of companies building core banking, payments and other financial technology, and a much bigger group tapping that technology through APIs to build customer-facing businesses. Today, one of the bigger players on the core technology side — Global Processing Services —
Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner Partner Andrey Spektor speaks with Ed Ludlow about the closing arguments during the Elizabeth Holmes trial and upcoming jury deliberations.
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for January 14, 2022! I suppose that this has been the week of Wordle, in that everyone and their dog are tweeting their scores and results.
Checkout technology company Bolt continues to make quick work of attracting new capital. The company announced Friday $355 million in Series E financing to give Bolt an $11 billion valuation, according to sources close to the company. Bolt’s one-click checkout product aims to give businesses the same technology Amazon has been known for since 1997,
Following news that the FTC’s antitrust suit against Meta cleared a critical hurdle earlier this week, the agency is apparently also taking a sharp interest in the company’s VR business. Bloomberg reports that the FTC and multiple state attorneys general are probing Meta’s virtual reality division for “potential anti-competitive practices.” New York reportedly leads the
Daasity, an e-commerce analytics and data company, secured $15 million in Series A funding as it continues developing its approach to helping consumer brands better leverage their customer data to make smarter decisions. VMG Catalyst led the oversubscribed round and was joined by existing investors Cove Fund, Exeter Capital, 1855 Capital, Mooring Ventures, Okapi Venture
EV charging continues to be a high-growth business, for obvious reasons. Since 2007, one of the largest players has been ChargePoint, the floated US company which with a widespread EV charging network. But plenty of startups are snapping at its heels. One of them is Germany-based HeyCharge, which realised there was a problem with how
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday episode, a run-down of key news headlines, startup funding rounds, and whatever else is popping in the worlds of startups and tech. Happily this week, we did not
Like you, I check NFT marketplace volume a few times each day to keep tabs on the burgeoning market for buying and selling digital signatures on various blockchains that point to images and the like. We’re very cool. Mostly, the data is steady. OpenSea volumes tend to lead the space, with other, smaller NFT exchanges
Steve Alexander Contributor Steve Alexander is SVP and CTO of Ciena, a networking systems and software company that works with operators and content providers across the globe. Meta’s stated mission is to seamlessly connect disparate environments like work, social media and gaming so it can allow people to effectively live and work in the virtual
Similar to other industries embracing contract work, Lawtrades is giving legal professionals a way to become independent and run their own virtual law practices. Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia started the company in 2016 with an initial focus on startups and small businesses, trying to find product-market fit (as one does), but finding that legal