Sundae, a residential real estate marketplace that pairs sellers of dated or damaged property with potential buyers, has raised $80 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Fifth Wall and General Global Capital. QED Investors, Wellington Management, Susa Ventures, Founders Fund, First American Financial, Prudence Holdings, Crossover VC, Intersect Capital, Gaingels and Oberndorf
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YouTube has acquired social commerce startup Simsim, the Google-owned firm said on Tuesday. Neither of the firms disclosed the terms of the deal, but two people with knowledge of the matter told TechCrunch the Indian startup was valued at over $70 million. Simsim chief executive didn’t respond to a query about the acquisition Monday evening
The global Covid-19 pandemic had a chilling effect on a number of industries and their workforces, resulting in mass furloughs and layoffs. But now, with countries now taking steps back to “normal”, that has been leading, in many cases, back to a hiring surge. Today, SmartRecruiters, one of the companies that has built software to
Almost overnight, platforms that offer non-dilutive capital for recurring revenue businesses have become white-hot. It was only in March that Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — raised $150 million, but two months later had raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation. This fever is now reaching Europe, where today
If you spent any time this year desperately trying to figure out what the heck NFTs are, you probably have Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou to thank for that. His startup’s crypto trading card marketplace NBA Top Shot went viral earlier this year with users dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on digital NBA collectibles.
Edtech giant Duolingo set an initial price range for its impending IPO today. The unicorn expects to price in its public debut at $85 to $95 per share, selling 3,700,000 in the deal. Another 1,406,113 shares are being sold by existing shareholders, and 765,916 shares are being offered to underwriting banks as part of the
Commercial real estate tenants and property managers have to abide by strict liability rules that any vendor entering the property must have insurance certificates and meet other requirements. The approval process for this currently can take days and is still largely done on paper. Enter Jones. The New York-based commercial real estate startup is curating
Yin Wu Contributor Yin Wu, a three-time YC alum, is founder of Pulley, which offers cap table management tools that help companies better understand and optimize their equity. I’ve fundraised a lot. Tactically, fundraising is a skill like any other. You get better the more you do it. But practicing gets you nowhere if you
Zoom, a well-known video conferencing company, will buy Five9, a company that sells software allowing users to reach customers across platforms, and record notes on their interactions. As TechCrunch noted this morning, the deal is merely “Zoom’s latest attempt to expand its offerings,” having “added several office collaboration products, a cloud phone system, and an
As more consumers embrace plant-based diets and sustainable food practices, Rise Gardens is giving anyone the ability to have a green thumb from the comfort of their own home. The Chicago-based indoor, smart hydroponic company raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A round, led by TELUS Ventures, with existing investors True Ventures and Amazon
Despite being one of the earliest adopters of using the world wide web to disrupt how its business is done and connect with more potential customers, the recruitment industry ironically remains one of the more fragmented and behind the times when it comes to using new, cloud based services to work more efficiently. A new
Blackstone is acquiring a majority stake in Bangalore and San Francisco-headquartered edtech startup Simplilearn for $250 million. Simplilearn operates an eponymous online bootcamp to help people learn data science, AI, machine learning, cloud computing and other skills that are in demand in the market. The startup has partnerships with several universities and colleges including IIT
Zoom is taking advantage of the impressive rise in its stock price in the past year to make its first major acquisition. The popular video conferencing firm, which was valued at about $9 billion at its IPO two years ago, said Sunday evening it has agreed a deal to buy cloud call centre service provider
The need for more affordable housing has never been more urgent as a shortage in the U.S. housing market persists. Startups attempting to help address the shortage in a variety of ways abound. One such startup, Abodu, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Previous backer Initialized
Jen Young and Jeff Cavins were sitting in a beige conference room at a downtown Vancouver hotel, wasting away under fluorescent lights, an endless PowerPoint and a pair of sad Styrofoam cups of coffee between them. Young was there on a marketing contract. Cavins was a board member. They shared one of those looks that
TechCrunch virtually sat down with venture capitalist and Cleo Capital managing director Sarah Kunst at our latest Early Stage event last week. Kunst joined us to chat about preparing for raising capital in today’s frenetic fundraising environment, digging into the gritty mechanics for the audience. Cleo Capital invests $500,000 to $1 million into early-stage startups,
It seems like everything is being pushed online now, but network procurement stubbornly has remained an in-person or phone-based negotiation. Lightyear, an early-stage New York City startup, decided to change that last year, and the company announced a $13.1 million Series A today. The round was led by Ridge Ventures with participation from Zigg Capital
Ants and camels are famously resilient, but when it was time to select a name for a startup that offers open-source, cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the final candidate. Database technology is fundamental infrastructure, which partially explains why it’s so resistant to innovation: Oracle Database was released in 1979,
Reliance Retail said on Friday it has acquired a controlling stake in 25-year-old Indian search and discovery firm Just Dial for $469 million. The Indian retail giant, which leads the market, said it has acquired 41% stake in publicly listed Just Dial for $469 million and will make an open offer to acquire an additional
CockroachDB EC-1 Part 4: Competitive landscape and future Bob Reselman 8 hours Most database startups avoid building relational databases, since that market is dominated by a few goliaths. Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server have embedded themselves into the technical fabric of large- and medium-size companies going back decades. These established companies have a lot
John Flavin Contributor More posts by this contributor 2021 should be a banner year for biotech startups that make smart choices early Kevin O’Connor Contributor Kevin A. O’Connor, Ph.D., is a partner in the Intellectual Property practice group at Neal Gerber Eisenberg. After a record year for biotech investment in 2020 — during which the
Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE Ventures, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of
Halla wants to answer the question of how people decide what to eat, and now has $4.5 million in fresh Series A1 capital from Food Retail Ventures to do it. Headquartered in New York, Halla was founded in 2016 by Gabriel Nipote, Henry Michaelson and Spencer Price to develop “taste intelligence,” using human behavior to
Jul.11 — Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity space plane separates from the carrier as the vehicle rockets to an altitude of about 282,000 feet, or more than 53 miles (86 kilometers) above the Earth on Sunday. The vehicle carried billionaire Richard Branson and a crew of five Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. employees.
When you hire a marketing consultant, you don’t necessarily expect to wind up discussing your life’s purpose. Yet, that is what Spanish marketing expert and entrepreneur Alex Barrera often ends up doing with startup founders who hire him to help improve their pitch. They think they are going to get help convincing investors, and they
Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business. And if you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may or may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there’s a good chance that company is Blend. Founded in 2012, the startup has steadily grown to
ServiceMax, a company that builds software for the field-service industry, announced yesterday that it will go public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a deal valued at $1.4 billion. The transaction comes after ServiceMax was sold to GE for $915 million in 2016, before being spun out in late 2018. The company
Lee Li Contributor Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan and DouYin (now TikTok). The fintech sector has been hugely successful (and hugely profitable) for much of the last decade, and even more so during the
Dayna Grayson has been in venture capital for more than a decade and was one of the first VCs to build a portfolio around the transformation of industrial sectors of our economy. At NEA, where she was a partner for eight years, she led investments in and sat on the boards of companies including Desktop
In case you’ve not been paying attention, we’ll say it again: The global venture capital industry is on fire. The second quarter of 2021 was the largest single three-month period on record for dollars invested. The data coming in points to a worldwide boom. The United States’ startup market had a huge Q2, and investors