Jennifer Smith Contributor Jennifer Smith is CEO and co-founder of Scribe, a Princeton and Harvard Business School alum and is a technology investor and adviser formerly at McKinsey and Greylock Partners. When building a startup, you’re making what feels like a million decisions on timing — when to launch to time the market, when to
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In the latest sign that that the tech industry is pivoting towards climate and sustainability, Atlantic Food Labs – an offshoot of the Berlin fund Atlantic Labs headed by long-time tech investor Christophe F. Maire – is relaunching as FoodLabs, with a dedicated €100m FoodTech fund to invest in food, health, and sustainability startups. Founded
Ahead of its launch on October 19, it seems as if retailers and Google are playing a game of chicken about who can leak the most information about its two upcoming flagship phones; the Google Pixel 6 and Google Pixel 6 Pro. Google’s Pixel line of smartphones has traditionally been the flagship of the Android armada
Disney’s newest digital service, Disney Genie, is launching on October 19 at Walt Disney World Resort. The service, first unveiled in August, is an update to the company’s earlier line reservation tools for Disney’s parks, allowing guests to plan and update their itineraries, book time slots for the most popular attractions, and optionally purchase paid
Mono, an African startup that helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, has raised a $15 million Series A round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. The round, led by Tiger Global — the VC firm’s third major investment in Africa this year after Flutterwave and FairMoney — also had participation from new investors
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson isn’t a book that lauds ecoterrorists. In fact, it mostly manages to avoid the subject across its many pages. Yet, at the center of its speculative account about the eponymous ministry and its leadership over the next few decades, the dark side is the linchpin for
French startup Swile has raised a $200 million Series D funding round led by SoftBank International Group. With this funding round, the startup has now reached unicorn status, meaning that Swile has a valuation of $1 billion or more. Swile provides a payment card for employee benefits, such as meal vouchers, gift cards and sustainable
Just days after Voodoo acquired Beach Bum, another French mobile gaming company has news to share. Homa Games is raising a $50 million Series A round led by Northzone. The company partners with indie game studios and acts as a publisher. Other investors in today’s funding round include Singular, King, the founders of FuboTV and
Ariel Katz Contributor Ariel Katz is the co-founder and CEO of H1. More posts by this contributor The health data transparency movement is birthing a new generation of startups The epic fall from grace of Elizabeth Holmes holds lessons for everybody from CEOs to investors, commercial partners, the media — social or otherwise — and
Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride. The pace of change over the last few decades is only set to accelerate in the coming years, as improvements in biology, medicine, spacecraft, manufacturing, software and more continue to transform the very foundations of society, economics and politics. We cover these innovations pretty much daily
Sep.21 — Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky shares his thoughts on how travel will change after the pandemic, employees continuing to work from home, cracking down on “party houses,” and his company’s push to help house up to 20,000 Afghan refugees. He speaks with Bloomberg Technology’s Emily Chang.
The BaaS market is evolving rapidly and so are the options for companies who wish to quickly spin up new financial services by leveraging these bank-in-a-box APIs. We recently took a look at who the ideal customers and partners are for banking-as-a-service startups … And today we’re going to dig deeper into the different flavors
We’re just weeks away from COP26, the big environmental policy confab where scores of world leaders will descend on Scotland and determine the future of the planet, answering the question, “Should we all die or live?” That’s meant a whole truckload of new books on the subject, as well as renewed attention to older works
PideDirecto, a Mexico-based company, is developing a platform that enables local businesses in Latin America to sell directly to their consumers and deliver orders in less than 30 minutes. Hussein Fawzi and Ronni Samir launched the company with Anders Steiner and Antonio Nacoud in September 2020. Fawzi, Samir and Nacoud knew each other from Iraq
When you think about service meshes, a somewhat esoteric cloud native tool designed to stitch different microservices together, you might not think it’s the most lucrative side of the Kubernetes led cloud native market, but you would be wrong. Today, Solo.io, a Cambridge, Massachusetts service mesh startup, announced a $135 million Series C at a
Shares of IsoPlexis, a company creating tools to zoom in on the flurry of protein activity surrounding a single cell, began trading on Friday. The company aims to raise about $125 million with the IPO, which will be used to build the commercial team and advance the company’s plans to play a bigger part in
Increasingly, conversations about big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence are going hand-in-hand with conversations about privacy and data protection. Now, a startup that is building tools to make it easier for engineers to implement the two simultaneously is announcing a round of growth funding to continue expanding its operations. Gretel AI, which lets engineers
No one’s going to tell you when your startup has reached product-market fit — there are no flashing lights, no siren, no balloons falling from the ceiling. “Especially for first-time founders, assessing product-market fit at a stage where it’s mostly anticipation can be as much art as science,” writes News Editor Darrell Etherington, who interviewed
Medley, the group coaching platform that focuses on both personal and professional development, announced the close of a $3.7 million seed round led by A16Z today Connie Chan and Anne Lee Skates of Andreesen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Aglaé Ventures, Foundation Capital, Ciara Wilson, Jen Rubio, Dara Treseder (Peloton). and Sanyin Siang
Webrazzi, the main tech startup media title in Turkey, has acquired Tech.eu, the long-time tech startup site in Europe. The pooled entity of Webrazzi and Tech.eu will now offer combined editorial, data, and research platforms offering news and market intelligence. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Launched in 2006 by Arda Kutsal, Webrazzi
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 spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.
Ryan Narod Contributor Ryan Narod leads marketing at Mutiny, a no-code AI platform that helps marketers convert their top-of-funnel demand into revenue, without engineers. Your target customers may discover your website through ads, search, word of mouth or offline channels like direct mail or events, but when they arrive, 99% of them usually skim your
Pets continue to be big business, and Alpha Paw is the latest to draw investor attention. The Austin-based company raised $8 million in Series A funding, led by Nordic Eye, after bootstrapping for the past three years. CEO Ramon van Meer took over the company in 2018 via an acquisition and is working with his
As competition for creator talent heats up, Snap today introduced a series of new tools, programs, and features that will enable creators on its platform to generate revenue. These include the expansion of a Gifting feature to worldwide creators, the expansion of the Creator Marketplace to include Snap Stars (top creators with verified accounts), the
Remember when a Twitter contractor deactivated Donald Trump’s personal account for 11 minutes in 2017? Opal co-founder Stephen Cobbe says that is one example of an instance where certain employees were provided too much access to the inner-workings of the company. His company, based in San Francisco and New York, is working with enterprises to
Four search engine rivals to Google have called on European Union lawmakers to address the tech giant’s continued dominance of the market by setting rules for search engine preference menus, arguing that the tech giant’s ability to set damaging defaults is continuing to limit how easily consumers can switch to a non-Google alternatives. In an
Outsourcing engineering has become more common in recent years, so we’re starting a new initiative to profile the software consultants who startups love to work with the most. Founders and other startup leaders, just fill out this quick survey with a few more details to help us find the right ones. For our first profile,
Dave Mullen Contributor Dave Mullen is an investor at SVB Capital, where he focuses largely on fintech, proptech and insurtech. Dave was previously an investor with Wells Fargo’s principal investment arm and is currently the proptech vertical lead for the EVCA. Venture-backed fintechs raised a record $30.8 billion in the second quarter of this year,
Insurance in Kenya and Africa at large remains a marginal product, with levels of penetration across the continent half the world average as a percentage of GDP, and premiums per capita 11-fold lower than the world average, according to a recent report by McKinsey and Co. (and that’s including the outsized market of South Africa;
Guestio closed on $1.5 million in seed funding for its platform that simplifies the booking process for podcasts. Founder and CEO Travis Chappell said users can go on the platform and book guests for their shows at the click of a button in all kinds of topics and with shows big or small. Chappell is