Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. With a holiday-impacted week behind us, we hope that you are ready for the next few weeks of busy news. Because starting in the back-half of December, the world is going to slow
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CNBC reported this morning that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his role at the social media company. Dorsey is the CEO of both Twitter and Square, a financial company that serves both consumer and corporate customers with payment, cash management and transference services. Twitter’s stock rose on the news that
Being in control of customer data is one of the ways retailers, like Amazon, Spotify and Netflix, are able to tap into consumer behavior and create customized experiences whenever a user logs in. Those are some of the reasons Amazon, in particular, is poised to grab 50% of the U.S. e-commerce market this year, and
Thought Machine, a 2014 (Xoogler) founded startup that sells cloud-based b2b banking services, has closed a $200 million Series C round and announced that it’s achieved unicorn status (aka, passing a $1BN valuation). The new funding follows an $83M Series B round last year — when it described its market cap as “increasing healthily”. The
It was only in June that Motorway – a U.K. platform on which professional car dealers can bid in an auction for privately owned cars for sale – raised $67.7 million in a Series B round. It’s now raised a $190m Series C funding round led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ Growth, a leading Silicon
Ion Yadigaroglu Contributor Ion Yadigaroglu is managing partner of Capricorn Investment Group and a GP of Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund. He is an early investor in iconic deep tech companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, Saildrone, QuantumScape, Joby Aviation, Helion Energy, Twelve, Electric Hydrogen, Redwood Materials and others. He serves on the board of nonprofit Ceres
Uber will halt its ride-hailing service in most of Belgium tomorrow following a court ruling Wednesday that extends a 2015 order banning its p2p UberPop service to also cover professional drivers providing its ride-hailing service. Uber told us that it is studying the detail of the ruling to decide whether to appeal the decision with
It’s always been a slight puzzle why AngelList never really properly took off in Europe, especially when, a few years ago, there was such a dearth of funding options for poorly served European startups. But the reasons are fairly simple when you look at them. For starters, the US tech industry boomed in the last
When TechCrunch asks Flowrite if it’s ‘Grammarly on steroids’, CEO and co-founder Aaro Isosaari laughs, saying that’s the comment they always get for the AI writing productivity tool they’ve been building since late summer 2020 — drawing on early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API, and attracting a wait-list of some 30,000 email-efficiency seeking prosumers keen
Apple and Google have been fined €10 million apiece by Italy’s competition and market authority (AGCM) which has found they did not provide their users with clear enough information on commercial uses of their data — in violation of the country’s consumer code. The regulator also accuses the pair of deploying “aggressive” practices to push
Fintech startup Jefa has raised a $2 million seed round to build a challenger bank with a product specifically designed for women living in Latin America and the Caribbean. The company has managed to attract 115,000 women on its waitlist and participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield last year. Investors in Jefa include The Venture Collective,
Happy Friday! The TechCrunch crew is still in a modest period of repose thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, but we wanted you to have numbers to chew on all the same. So, this morning, we’re taking a brief look at Samsara’s IPO filing. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on
Riding a scooter in Paris will soon feel incredibly… slow. The City of Paris has announced that scooter sharing services should restrict the maximum top speed to 10km/h (that’s 6.2mph). That decision comes following a number of pedestrian injuries that involved a scooter. Paris has been an important market for scooter sharing companies. It’s a
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 Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. And this week, it was all about
U.S. consumers now have the choice to use Klarna’s “Pay Now” service to pay immediately and in full at any online retailer where Klarna is available. This adds to the global retail bank, payments and shopping giant’s stateside offerings, where Klarna has doubled its customer base to more than 21 million customers. In addition to
As part of an ongoing antitrust investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox by the UK’s competition regulator, the adtech giant has agreed to an expanded set of commitments related to oversight of its planned migration away from tracking cookies, the regulator announced today. Google has also put out its own blog post on the revisions —
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: Any advice on visa
Travel and tourism are slowly starting to move again in the wake of Covid-19 crashing over the world and sending us to shelter in place. Today a company focused on experiences — museum visits, skydiving, local cooking classes and more — is announcing a round of growth funding on the back of seeing its own
It’s been almost a year since the EU’s executive announced it would propose rules for political ads transparency in response to concern about online microtargeting and big data techniques making mincemeat of democratic integrity and accountability. Today it’s come out with its proposal. But frankly it doesn’t look like the wait was worth it. The
Camlist, a video marketplace for pets, has raised $1.3 million in a pre-seed round, funding that the startup plans to use to develop its platform and grow its workforce — as it looks to expand its reach in the UK, its second market (after the U.A.E.), which it entered earlier this year. Unlike other marketplaces,
Voice AI company SoundHound is set to go public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC transaction at a nearly $2.1 billion valuation in early 2022, blank check company Archimedes and its target announced. The last time you heard SoundHound’s name might have been several years ago when it was considered a lesser-known Shazam competitor. Now
It’s that magical time of year. No, I’m not talking about the upcoming holiday season. Instead, it’s time for AWS’s annual customer extravaganza re:Invent, which starts next week. The conference is always a newsy event with tons of new features and products being announced. It’s also a time for AWS to pull together the press,
It’s been well over two years since the UK’s data protection watchdog warned the behavioural advertising industry it’s wildly out of control. The ICO hasn’t done anything to stop the systematic unlawfulness of the tracking and targeting industry abusing Internet users’ personal data to try to manipulate their attention — not in terms of actually
Nigeria’s informal trade sector, worth over $244 billion, has more than 40 million micro, small and medium businesses. Most of these businesses operated offline until a few years ago when startups brought about digitization by providing infrastructure and a gamut of e-commerce and financial services. One-year-old Sabi — a spinoff from Rensource, an African energy
Sales of plant-based alternatives, like dairy and meat, are surging in the global market, and Perfeggt wants to do the same for the egg. The Berlin-based foodtech company is poised to debut its chicken-less egg product in the first quarter of 2022 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Today, the company announced it raised $2.8 million
Cellular growth medium is a component of cellular agriculture that enables lab-grown meat to be made at a lower cost. However, the traditional ways of making these growth factors, or reagents, are costly themselves, which makes large-scale manufacturing difficult. On average, reports show that lab-grown meat costs about $50, but that new technologies could bring
Meet Pyxo, a French startup that has been thinking a lot about single-use plastic food packaging for the past three years. The company wants to offer a service that makes it as easy and as cost-efficient to use reusable food storage containers at scale. The idea behind Pyxo comes from a fair at the Tuileries
As many of the top cryptocurrencies seem to temporarily stabilize near all-time highs, users looking to speculate on tokens that are a bit more volatile are searching across exchanges to find deals. Amsterdam-based startup TabTrader has been capitalizing on this search with a platform that aggregates prices and token availability across dozens of exchanges. While
Life science company Longevica said Wednesday it is launching an open research tool so scientists and research institutions can access a data set that tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is the latest effort from the biotechnology company, which is researching mechanisms of healthy aging and life extension.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri will testify before the Senate for the first time as part of a series of hearings about online safety for children and teens. Per The New York Times, Mosseri’s hearing will take place on December 6. Mosseri’s upcoming testimony comes after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote a letter to Facebook