Take a close look at any ambitious startup and you’ll find pugnacity nestled in its core. Stubbornness and a bullheaded belief in the worth of what a company wants to bring to fruition is often the biggest driver of its success, and the people at such companies also tend to share this quality. So it
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In its latest ambitious digital policy announcement, the European Union has proposed creating a framework for a “trusted and secure European e-ID” (aka digital identity) — which it said today it wants to be available to all citizens, residents and businesses to make it easer to use a national digital identity to prove who they
Spotify today is expanding its investment in personalization features with the launch of dedicated in-app experience called Only You, which focuses on your favorite music and how you listen. The experience is similar to Spotify’s popular annual review, Spotify Wrapped, as it highlights the artists, songs, genres and other aspects of your music listening experience
Henry Shapiro Contributor Henry Shapiro is the co-founder of Reclaim.ai, an intelligent calendar assistant platform used daily by over 4,000 companies. Prior to founding Reclaim, Henry led product and marketing at New Relic. It was August 2019, and the fundraising process was not going well. My co-founder and I had left our product management jobs
Google has selected 30 startups to receive a share of its $2M Black Founders Fund in Europe, providing these companies with a spot of cash, some valuable cloud services, and a bit of good old-fashioned networking among the Google crew. The fund was announced last fall as part of a company-wide effort towards “building a
Twitter is updating its app to make its audio chat room feature, Twitter Spaces, a central part of the user experience. Today, the company will begin to roll out a dedicated tab for Twitter Spaces in the main navigation bar of its mobile app, initially on iOS to select users. The feature will see Twitter
Builders, creators and developers, this one’s for you! TechCrunch has always been about discovering fresh solutions and shining the light on exciting, new products that have the potential to make a difference. Our past hackathons have been the breeding ground for products like Alexa Shop Assist, Quick Insurance, reVIVE and GroupMe, which went on to
Gong, the revenue intelligence startup, has been raising capital at a rapid pace, and today the company announced another $250 million on a $7.25 billion valuation, a number that triples its previous valuation from last summer. Franklin Templeton led today’s festivities with participation from Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital and Tiger Global. The company
VC funds Frst and Fabric Ventures are teaming up to create Le Crypto Fellowship. With this program, the two firms want to find the next 10 crypto entrepreneurs in France. And they think they might foster the most promising crypto startups if they don’t have any preconceived idea and team yet. As Pierre Entremont from
Nextdoor, the app that helps neighbors connect, launched a new feature called Free Finds today, which will help people browse the free items available in their neighborhoods. Since the start of 2020, monthly listings to buy, sell, and give away items on Nextdoor have increased by 80%, but 25% of these listings advertised free stuff.
Razor Group. Branded. Thrasio. These are big names in the new wave of e-commerce companies taking the world by storm. Their business of acquiring small e-commerce brands that look promising and consolidating them is quite popular in the U.S. and Europe. The concept has sifted through those shores to Latin America and Asia, where companies
Although it’s a truncated holiday week here in the United States, there’s been a bushel of IPO news. This morning, we’re going to sort through the updates and come up with a series of sentiment calls regarding these public offerings. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or
WhatsApp will soon let you use the popular instant messaging app simultaneously on multiple devices, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said. The instant messaging app, used by over 2 billion users, also plans to add more options to its disappearing messages feature, top executives said. Zuckerberg confirmed to news outlet WaBetaInfo that multi-device support will
F8 Refresh, Facebook’s annual developer conference with a new twist — it’s more pared down than in years past, and virtual — is going to be kicking off later today, and ahead of that Facebook is unveiling some news: all businesses can now use the Messenger API to interact with users on Instagram. The feature
Berlin-based Tier Mobility has raised $60 million to help the e-scooter company expand its fleet and its network of battery charging stations in 2021. The funds, which come from investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, come just weeks after Tier was awarded the London e-scooter pilot permit, alongside Lime and Dott. With a major new city
Meet Lightyear, a new London-based startup coming out of stealth today. The company is building a stock trading app with a focus on creating a truly commission-free app. In addition to waving account fees and trading fees, Lightyear doesn’t charge foreign exchange fees either — up to a certain point. The two founders met when
David Teten Contributor More posts by this contributor 5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs How to attract large investors to your direct investing platform Paulina Symala Contributor Would you like to work with private equity and venture capital funds? There are relatively few jobs directly inside private equity and venture capital funds,
Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week. The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 billion when it raised $250 million
Twitter is looking to crowdsource its way out of misinformation woes with its new product Birdwatch which taps a network of engaged tweeters to add notes to misleading tweets. Today, Twitter announced that they are starting to roll out the Birdwatch notes to pilot participants across iOS, Android and desktop. The company launched a pilot
With wildfires becoming an ever more devastating annual phenomenon, it is in the whole planet’s interest to spot them and respond as early as possible — and the best vantage point for that is space. OroraTech is a German startup building a constellation of small satellites to power a global wildfire warning system, and will
When Cloudera announced its sale to a pair of private equity firms yesterday for $5.3 billion, along with a couple of acquisitions of its own, the company detailed a new path that could help it drive back towards relevance in the big data market. When the company launched in 2008, Hadoop was in its early
London-based Divido, a whitelabel platform for retail finance that integrates with ecommerce platforms (but can also support omni-channel) so retailers can offer consumers a ‘buy now, pay later’ option at the point of sale, has bagged a $30M Series B to fund international expansion. The funding round is led by global banks HSBC and ING,
As dating app Tinder and its parent company Match explore the future of personal connection through apps, it’s interesting to see what sort of ideas it tested but later discarded. One such experiment was something called “Tinder Mixer,” which had briefly offered Tinder users a way to join group video chats with up to eight
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Any unique immigration strategies
The news this morning that e-commerce marketplace Etsy will buy Depop, a startup that provides a second-hand e-commerce marketplace, for more than $1.6 billion may not have made a large impact on the acquiring company’s share price thus far, but it provides a fascinating look into what brands may be willing to pay for access
At today’s F8 developer conference, Facebook announced new capabilities for Spark AR, its flagship AR creation software. Since Spark AR was announced at F8 2017, more than 600,000 creators from 190 countries have published over 2 million AR effects on Facebook and Instagram, making it the largest mobile AR platform, according to Facebook. If you’ve
Iterative, an open-source startup that is building an enterprise AI platform to help companies operationalize their models, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by 468 Capital and Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert. Previous investors True Ventures and Afore Capital also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to
Kabuto, the French startup that designs and sells smart suitcases, is releasing a new suitcase today. Called the Kabuto Trunk, this is the company’s biggest suitcase to date. Unlike smart suitcases from other brands, this isn’t just a suitcase with a battery in it. In particular, there’s a fingerprint reader located at the top of
Think you’re living in a hyper-connected world? Huawei’s proprietary HarmonyOS wants to eliminate delays and gaps in user experience when you move from one device onto another by adding interoperability to all devices, regardless of the system that powers them. Two years after Huawei was added to the U.S. entity list that banned the Chinese
In its antitrust trial with Epic Games, which has just adjourned, Apple argued it doesn’t evaluate its App Store profit and loss as a standalone business. But today, the company put out new figures that indicate it does have a good understanding of the money that flows through its app marketplace, at the very least.