Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week with Grace on the dials, which meant that we had a flat lovely time recording Equity for you. Of course, Equity is TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we dig into the most critical funding rounds, and natter about the key news items impacting startups. Before we hop into
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A number of high-profile investors are chasing to invest in Slice, a fintech startup that is attempting to expand the market for credit cards in India. Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to lead a round of over $100 million in the Bangalore-based startup, sources familiar with the matter told me. A number
The founders of Upmesh were building a game on top of Twitch’s API when they realized something about another group of livestreamers. Even though selling through Facebook Live has been gaining popularity in Southeast Asia for years, many vendors are still going through their comments afterward and using pen-and-paper to collect orders. Upmesh was created
Bradley Tusk Contributor More posts by this contributor A California judge just struck down Prop 22: Now what? When regulation presents a (rare) opportunity Let’s be really generous to Facebook and assume that 50% of what Frances Haugen just testified to before Congress was misconstrued in some way. Regardless, Facebook will argue their case (as
Throughout its history as a public company, Box has had a bit of a bumpy ride. The company was founded back in 2005 as a simple consumer file sharing service, but shifted a few years later to focus on enterprise and build a modern content management system for the still-developing cloud and mobile world. Once
Meet Graneet, a French startup that just raised a $2.8 million seed round (€2.4 million) led by Point Nine and Fondamental. Graneet is a vertical software-as-a-service startup focused on the construction industry and the myriad of small and medium companies in this industry specifically. It wants to build the definitive financial management solution so that
Riiid, a South Korea-headquartered AI-powered edtech company, acquired its Japanese distribution partner Langoo to expand its Japan footprint. The acquisition comes after the company’s latest $175 million Series D round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 in May. Riiid has said it will continue to fuel its global expansion with the funding. Langoo, Riiid’s partner in
Many of the problems we face today in biology and agriculture have been faced before — but not by humans. Somewhere in nature there is a microscopic creature that accomplishes naturally and efficiently what chemists and bioengineers are struggling to do at all — and Pluton Biosciences claims to have pioneered a way to find
Google announced Thursday that it would no longer allow ads or monetization for content that promotes climate change denialism. The policy change will apply to publishers, advertisers and YouTube creators, who will no longer be able to make money from content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Google
Microsoft announced today that it has acquired Ally.io, a software service that helps companies measure their progress against OKRs or objectives and key results, a common way the management measures both individual and company progress. The two firms did not share the purchase price. Microsoft plans to incorporate Ally into its Viva family of employee
The rise of privacy-oriented financial blockchain projects are going to be crucial if “DeFi” (decentralized finance) is to have any kind of future. We have come to expect privacy in our “normal” financial lives, so we will expect it in the blockchain and Crypto world, whatever some might claim.We saw murmurs of that starting to
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple is now under appeal, is today calling out the iPhone maker for giving itself access to an advertising slot its competitors don’t have: the iPhone’s Settings screen. Some iOS 15 users noticed Apple is now advertising its own services at the top of their
“Most of the technical content published misses the mark with developers. I think we can all do a better job,” author and developer marketing expert Adam DuVander says. That was the very realization that led DuVander to share what he had learned about marketing to developers in two ways: He recently launched a book, “Developer
Otto, a fintech startup which aims to allow people to tap into their vehicle’s equity for access to credit, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round of funding. The Dallas-based company is building a mobile platform that will essentially let people borrow against their vehicles at the same interest rate as standard credit cards.
Sean Herman Contributor Sean Herman is the CEO of Kinzoo, a kid tech company based in Vancouver, BC, and is the author of “Screen Captured: Helping Families Explore the Digital World in the Age of Manipulation.” In a blog post announcing plans to temporarily stop developing a new app targeted at children, Instagram head Adam
Data observability — necessary to keep tabs on infrastructure performing as it should; to see if apps are returning errors; and to ensure that critical business data is getting to where it needs to go — is becoming an evermore complicated task as organizations’ cloud-native data demands and data usage grow. Today a startup that’s
Tech giants have gotten worse at removing illegal hate speech from their platforms under a voluntary arrangement in the European Union, according to the Commission’s latest assessment. The sixth evaluation report of the EU’s Code of Conduct on removing illegal hate speech found what the bloc’s executive calls a “mixed picture”, with platforms reviewing 81%
When you’re exploring a city — whether one you’re visiting on your travels or your own — there are a number of tools that can help you find out where to go, what to see, and what to do, like Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor and others. But a startup called Welcome thinks that today’s set
Analysts say the value of e-commerce in Africa is expected to reach $29 billion next year, yet Africans still find it difficult to make international payments for products online. Cards, M-Pesa, bank transfer and mobile money, are the most common methods Africans use to make payments. But while various payment gateways have provided better experiences
Getsafe has extended its Series B round that it previously announced in December 2020. In addition to its original Series B round of $30 million, the company is adding another $63 million in fresh capital. Overall, Getsafe has raised a $93 million Series B round. Investors in today’s funding round include unnamed family offices as
If you’ve ever tweeted something innocuous that went on to kick off a firestorm of unwanted attention, you know full well that people on Twitter will fight about anything and everything — it’s the internet’s premier destination for high-speed, low-information opinion slinging, after all. Twitter has been working on ways to tone down the toxicity
Logicworks might not be a household name, but since 2012 it has been working with customers to help them move to the cloud and manage their workloads once they get there. By following that approach, the late stage startup is closing in on $100 million in revenue. Today, it announced a new Cloud Reliability Platform
Making sure mental wellness is part of your routine can be difficult, especially if you are already busy and stressed. MindLabs wants to make it easier with a combination of on-demand or live video classes and community features. The company announced today it has raised a $3.5 million seed round, almost eleven months after its
The adoption of telehealth services has boomed in the pandemic — with usage up 38-fold since January 2020, according to a report by McKinsey. While a lot of the attention has been on companies that are building the communications layer between consumers and clinicians, there are also a wave of companies building devices to expand
Founded in 2019, Singapore-based Greywing was created to help ship operators and other members of the maritime industry make critical decisions. It includes tools for crew change management, predictive reporting of potential risks like piracy and pandemic-related travel restriction updates. Today Greywing announced the launch of a new solution that will help vessel operators track
Twitter announced Wednesday that it would offload MoPub, the mobile ad platform it bought back in 2013, selling the company to mobile game and marketing software maker AppLovin. Twitter paid around $350 million for MoPub back in 2013 and will sell the company for $1.05 billion in cash. MoPub helped Twitter bring in around $188
For the last decade, battery chemistry company Sila has been working to replace the graphite anode in lithium-ion batteries with silicon, a material that’s easier to come by, more environmentally friendly and allows for a battery cell that’s denser and cheaper. In September, the company shipped its first commercial product with Whoop wearables. Now, Sila
OpenStack, the open-source project that gives large enterprises and public cloud providers the tools to run their own AWS-like private clouds in their data centers, today announced the release of OpenStack 24. Codenamed Xena, the release focuses on polishing many of the system’s sharper edges. It’s no secret that the OpenStack project, which now falls
Will Uppington Contributor Will Uppington is the CEO and co-founder of TruEra. The European Commission announced first-of-its-kind legislation regulating the use of artificial intelligence in April. This unleashed criticism that the regulations could slow AI innovation, hamstringing Europe in its competition with the U.S. and China for leadership in AI. For example, Andrew McAfee wrote
In preparation for the holiday shopping season, Amazon today convenient a new way to send gifts through its mobile app. Instead of entering in the recipient’s mailing address — a piece of information people often don’t know in today’s age of digital communications — Prime members can now send a gift to a friend via their