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The pandemic has hammered the travel sector over the past 12 months so you’d be forgiven for feeling a bit of pre-COVID-19 déjà vu at this news: Business trip booking platform TravelPerk is announcing a $160M Series D. The round, which is a mix of equity and debt funding, is led by London-based growth equity
Platforms like Shopify, Stripe and WordPress have done a lot to make essential business-building tools — like running storefronts, accepting payments and building websites — accessible to businesses with even the most modest budgets. But some very key aspects of setting up a company remain expensive, time-consuming affairs that can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses
Last year, Zynga bought hyper-casual game maker Rollic. Today, Rollic is a Zynga subsidiary, and it’s announcing the acquisition of another game studio called Uncosoft. Like Rollic, Uncosoft develops hyper-casual games and is based in Turkey (Istanbul in Rollic’s case, Izmir in Uncosoft’s). In fact, Rollic has already published a couple of Uncosoft games, most
The last year of pandemic living has been real-world, and sometimes harrowing, proof of how important it can be to have efficient and well-equipped emergency response services in place. They can help people remotely if need be, and when they cannot, they make sure that in-person help can be dispatched quickly in medical and other
Venture Day Minsk (organised by tech startup hub Imaguru) is run annually, but because of the pandemic and the political situation in Belarus it has gone virtual. Even Imaguru itself has had to switch to online-only operations after Lukashenko’s thugs shut down its physical space. If you want to support them, check out their startups,
Apr.26 — ARK Invest analyst Tasha Keeney discusses Tesla’s stock price slump after first-quarter earnings were reported and why she is still bullish on the electric car manufacturer. She speaks with Caroline Hyde on “Bloomberg Technology.”
TC Early Stage is back in July and we have a fantastic lineup in store that’s laser-focused on marketing and fundraising. That includes, but is not limited to, Sequoia’s Mike Vernal, whose portfolio companies include Citizen, PicsArt, Whisper, Threads, Houseparty and more. Vernal will be leading a discussion on tempo and product-market fit. The chat
With the Coinbase direct listing behind us and the Robinhood IPO ahead, it’s a heady time for consumer-focused trading apps. Mix in the impending SPAC-led debut of eToro, general bullishness in the cryptocurrency space, record highs for some equities markets, and recent rounds from Public.com, M1 Finance and U.K.-based Freetrade, and you could be excused for
YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok and Facebook’s Instagram have upended the film and TV industries, with a new wave of cinematographers, directors and actors leveraging innovations in technology to create new work and connect directly with billions of consumers to see it. Today, a startup is announcing some funding as it looks to make a similar
Barely more than eight months after announcing a $37 million funding round, Mux has another $105 million. The Series D was led by Coatue and values the company at more than $1 billion (Mux isn’t disclosing the specific valuation). Existing investors Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Cobalt also participated, as did new investor Dragoneer. Co-founder and
The European Commission has announced that it’s issued formal antitrust charges against Apple, saying today that its preliminary view is Apple’s app store rules distort competition in the market for music streaming services by raising the costs of competing music streaming app developers. The Commission begun investigating competition concerns related to iOS App Store (and also
After a steady stream of studio acquisitions in late 2019 and early 2020, Facebook has been a little quieter in recent months when its come to bulking up their VR content arm. Today, the social media giant breaks that stream, announcing their acquisition of Downpour Interactive, the developer of the popular VR first-person shooter Onward.
Tech companies in Silicon Valley, the geography, have had an incredible year. But one indicator points to longer-term changes. The internal rate of return (IRR) for companies in other startup hub cities has been even better. A big new analysis by AngelList showed aggregate IRR of 19.4% per year on syndicated deals elsewhere versus 17.5%
TechCrunch recently caught up with recent Y Combinator graduate Uiflow, a startup that is building a no-code enterprise app creation service. If you are thinking wait, don’t a number of companies already do that?, the answer is yes. But what Quickbase, Smartsheet and others are working on isn’t quite the same thing, at least from the
Eight months after former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer quit in the midst of a full-court press from the Trump administration against the Chinese-owned social media giant, TikTok finally has a new permanent leader. ByteDance’s recently hired CFO Shouzi Chew will be assuming the role as TikTok CEO while still holding the CFO role at its
Tapping the geothermal energy stored beneath the Earth’s surface as a way to generate renewable power is one of the new visions for the future that’s captured the attention of environmentalists and oil and gas engineers alike. That’s because it’s not only a way to generate power that doesn’t rely on greenhouse gas emitting hydrocarbons,
Joey Lei Contributor Joey Lei is director of service management at Synoptek. With more than 14 years of experience in engineering and product management, Lei is responsible for the development and growth of the Synoptek service portfolio and solution development with strategic technology alliance partners. More posts by this contributor How startups can leverage elastic
Blade, the French startup behind cloud gaming service Shadow, has been acquired by Octave Klaba’s fund following a commercial court order. Klaba is better known as the founder of OVHcloud, a French cloud hosting company. He’s acquiring Blade (and Shadow) through his investment fund Jezby Ventures — not OVHcloud. Shadow is a cloud computing service for
Restoring and preserving the world’s forests has long been considered one of the easiest, lowest-cost and simplest ways to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s by far the most popular method for corporations looking to take an easy first step on the long road to decarbonizing or offsetting their industrial operations.
Ariel Katz Contributor Ariel Katz is the founder and CEO of H1, a global healthcare platform that helps life sciences companies, hospitals, academic medical centers and health systems connect with providers, find clinical research, locate industry experts and benchmark their organization. In the early 2000s, Jeff Bezos gave a seminal TED Talk titled “The Electricity
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. First and foremost, Equity was nominated for a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate it. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we’ll keep doing our thing and making each
Machine learning is capable of doing all sorts of things as long as you have the data to teach it how. That’s not always easy, and researchers are always looking for a way to add a bit of “common sense” to AI so you don’t have to show it 500 pictures of a cat before
Conventional wisdom over the last year has suggested that the pandemic has driven companies to the cloud much faster than they ever would have gone without that forcing event with some suggesting it has compressed years of transformation into months. This quarter’s cloud infrastructure revenue numbers appear to be proving that thesis correct. With The
A US/Israeli startup, Sorbet — which is tackling what companies do with the financial risks as employees accrue Paid Time Off (PTO) — has raised $6 million in a Seed funding round led by Viola Ventures, with participation by Global Founders Capital, Meron Capital. The economics of Paid Time Off is relatively hidden in the
German startup Vivid Money has raised a new $73 million Series B funding round (€60 million) led by Greenoaks with existing investor Ribbit Capital also participating. Following today’s funding round, Vivid Money has reached a valuation of $436 million (€360 million). Vivid Money could be considered as a Revolut competitor designed specifically for the Eurozone.
Apr.27 — Ripple co-founder and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen says the lack of regulatory clarity has impeded the U.S. cryptocurrency market. He speaks during an interview with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller and Amanda Lang on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Phil Edmondson-Jones Contributor Phil Edmondson-Jones is a principal at Oxx, the specialist SaaS VC backing Europe and Israel’s most promising B2B SaaS businesses at the scale-up stage. Once the uncool sibling of a flourishing fintech sector, insurtech is now one of the hottest areas of a buoyant venture market. Zego’s $150 million round at unicorn
While waiting for full first-quarter venture capital results for fintech startups to drop, we knew that they were going to be outsized. The Exchange previously explored the pace at which huge venture rounds were invested into the startup niche, noting that by mid-March the fintech market had already recorded a record number of $100 million
Cybersecurity nightmares like the SolarWinds hack highlight how malicious hackers continue to exploit vulnerabilities in software and apps to do their dirty work. Today a startup that’s built a platform to help organizations protect themselves from this by running threat detection and response at the network level is announcing a big round of funding to