Walmart-backed Flipkart is acquiring online pharmacy startup SastaSundar to enter the healthcare segment in India as e-commerce battle intensifies in the world’s second largest internet market. Flipkart said it has signed definitive agreements to acquire a majority stake in SastaSundar, but did not disclose the size of the deal. Eight-year-old SastaSundar was last valued at
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As machine learning becomes a more integral part of running businesses, the model-building process still requires iteration and experimentation. Comet has created an entire platform to get models from idea to product, and today the company announced a $50 million Series B. The investment comes on the heels of the company’s $13 million A round
During the garage-stage and Zoom-room days of a company’s life, fluidity can feel key to idea creation. The lack of contractual obligations is baked into how we understand the origin stories of the most famous startups. We celebrate rapid pivots, love scrappy MVPs over perfectly polished platforms and pay attention to repeat entrepreneurs who raise
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Good news, everyone: Mary Ann is back! Yes, after a short absence we have our third Friday host back where she belongs. Namely right in front of a microphone, talking to us. And
Cybersecurity platform Expel, which specializes in threat detection and response, today announced that it has raised a $140.3 million Series E funding round co-led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG, which also led the company’s $50 million Series D round in 2020, and Paladin Capital Group, which led Expel’s Series A round in 2016. New
Meet Cron, a new calendar app for the Mac that wants to bring some innovation to this space. The startup directly mentions Sunrise as an inspiration for those of you who still remember it. Sunrise used to be a popular calendar product that was acquired by Microsoft. Cron has attended Y Combinator’s winter back of
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spending in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes
Matt Cohen Contributor Founder and managing partner at Ripple Ventures, Matt Cohen is a business operator turned early-stage investor. More posts by this contributor Founders must learn how to build and maintain circles of trust with investors Matthew Mendelsohn’s accession to become Yale’s new chief investment officer marks a milestone for the rise of university
The decision by Sequoia to become a registered investment adviser (RIA) and move to a “singular, permanent structure,” in its own words, landed with a splash in the U.S. venture capital market. But perhaps it shouldn’t have made quite as many waves as it did. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every
In January, Sabre, the travel technology company that probably managed at least some aspects of your last flight and hotel bookings, announced a 10-year partnership with Google Cloud that would see it spend about $2 billion on Google’s cloud platform over that time. Sabre, like so many companies of its size, has long operated its
Warsaw-based Packhelp has been riding the boom in ecommerce and on-demand delivery to scale a business that helps even the smallest brands wrap their wares in eye-catching custom packaging, while counting giants like H&M and UberEats among its customers, too. Since being founded back in 2015 — launching its custom packaging design platform in 2016
The TechCrunch Experts program had an active week! Joey Noble, community manager for Demand Curve, returned with a teardown of Customer.io’s homepage with insights you can apply to your own company’s website, and Jonathan Martinez shared his essentials for creating an optimal growth marketing tech stack. With the new year almost upon us, I interviewed
The market for crypto-focused investing is growing rapidly. News that Paradigm put together a $2.5 billion fund the other day is a reminder of the scale of funds now available to startups looking to build on the blockchain. Andreessen Horowitz has a mega-fund in the market as well, while Coinbase Ventures is setting a blistering
Walkie-talkie, a social audio platform developed by Picslo Corp, has raised a $3.25 million seed round led by Heroic Ventures. The round included participation from TI Platform Ventures, LDVP, Partech, Diaspora Ventures, Breega, and Kima Ventures. The Clubhouse-like app launched two years ago and currently has 1.2 million active users. Picslo Corp CEO, Stephane Giraudie,
It’s common these days to launch an enterprise startup based on an open source project, often where one the founders was deeply involved in creating it. The beauty of this approach is that if the project begins to gain traction, you have the top of the sales funnel ready and waiting with potential customers when
Startups geared towards men’s sexual health have been doing a brisk trade for a few years now. But while the early wave of tech businesses mostly aimed to provide (easier) access to pharmaceuticals for treating health issues like erectile dysfunction (e.g. Roman), perhaps also offering hormone tests and bespoke vitamins claimed to reduce hair loss
Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it would stop accepting Visa credit cards issued in the U.K. due to high interchange fees on transactions. The company gave a deadline of January 19 and is offering consumers who primarily use Visa cards £20 off a purchase as an incentive to update their preferred payment method. The
Ranga Bodla Contributor Ranga Bodla is the head of industry marketing for Oracle NetSuite and responsible for driving overall strategy and go-to-market success across all of NetSuite’s industries. Funding for startups is on fire. But sometimes to get that funding, particularly after the seed round, startups need to have their financial house in order. In
Twitter is rolling out its in-app tipping feature to all Android users above the age of 18, following the iOS launch in September. The social media giant says the “Tips” feature is geared toward users looking to get a little financial support from their followers through Cash App, Paypal, Venmo and Patreon directly through the
One of the most noticeable — and noted — effects of climate change has been its impact on how other events in the environment — be they natural or man-made occurrences — play out: forest fires burn more violently and for longer; floods happen more often and are more severe when they do; and so
The Pentagon announced a limited request for bids for a new cloud initiative today that replaces the cancelled $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract initiative. You may recall (or not) that it previously ran a winner-take-all bid it had dubbed JEDI (short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure). The new initiative goes by the much less catchy
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), an expert steering body which advises EU lawmakers on how to interpret rules wrapping citizen’s personal data, has warned the bloc’s legislators that a package of incoming digital regulations risks damaging people’s fundamental rights — without “decisive action” to amend the suite of proposals. The reference is to draft
Helaina, a company producing a first-of-its-kind infant milk, announced $20 million in Series A financing to usher in its next phase of growth that includes beginning the manufacturing and commercialization process for its first product. Food scientist Laura Katz, who also teaches food science at New York University, founded the company in 2019, and touts
In February, parents received a shock when a report from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform showed that some commercial baby foods were found to contain “dangerous levels” of toxic metals. This caused a flurry of information in the media on the impacts and what parents can do to avoid it, which included
Instagram has introduced a new “Rage Shake” feature that lets users shake their phones to report a problem with the app. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the launch of the new feature in a video on Twitter and explained how it works. “You ever use Instagram and it wasn’t working like it was supposed to?
Flytrex, the Israeli startup working with Walmart, Chilli’s, and others in North Carolina in pilots for a drone-based delivery service targeting suburban consumers, has picked up $40 million in funding to continue developing its hardware and software, and more business partnerships, as it awaits regulatory nods to expand its service to more markets in the
Switzerland-based privacy tech startup, Nym Technologies, which is trying to commercialize an old idea for privacy-centric infrastructure (mixnets) by combining it with buzzy crypto incentives, has closed $13 million in Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto-focused fund, following a $6M raise we covered back in the summer (also loosely pegged as a Series A).
Looking for a new apartment is either a leisurely thing to do or something that has to take place quite quickly. When you don’t reach anyone in the leasing office, you often move on to the next one on the list, even if it was one you would have considered. Zuma wants to ensure that
Zoom is great and all, but talking to a lot of two-dimensional humans on computer screens is hardly the future we were all dreaming of. PORTL agrees, and under the catchy slogan “if you can’t be there, beam there,” has carved out a new slice of the market, where you can holographically teleport your image
Travel is back, at least according to experts who say travel bookings for over the Thanksgiving holiday are showing to be even higher than pre-pandemic levels. Anyone who loves travel or is that friend who always plans the best vacations, Fora has a tool for you. The company was co-founded by onefinestay’s Evan Frank, Virtuoso