Convenience stores are ubiquitous — and they sell the vast majority of gas purchased by consumers in the United States. But as more Americans transition to electric vehicles, a major reason people visit convenience stores will disappear. Industry giant 7-Eleven is looking to capture this growing market of EV drivers. The company said Tuesday it
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Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly common part of how customer service works — a trend that was accelerated in this past year as so many other services went virtual and digital — and today a startup that has built a set of low-code tools to help enterprises integrate more AI into their customer service
The world of professional services has long relied on contractors to fill in for assignments and projects that might not be a part of the course of daily work, but are essential work nonetheless. Today, a startup that’s built a marketplace to make it easier for freelance developers, designers and others with technical skills with
Mario Ciabarra Contributor Mario Ciabarra, founder and CEO of Quantum Metric, is a computer scientist and tech entrepreneur helping organizations align the entire product lifecycle for many major global brands with a single version of customer-defined and quantified truth. Debt is a tool, and like any other — be it a hammer or handsaw —
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a lot in the world, and supply chains are no exception. A number of applications that aim to solve workflow challenges across the supply chain exist. But getting real-time access to information from transportation providers has remained somewhat elusive for shippers and logistics companies alike. Enter Project44. The 7-year-old Chicago-based company
Ads are coming to Twitter’s version of Stories, known as Fleets. The company announced today it will began pilot testing Fleet ads in the U.S., which will bring full-screen, vertical format ads to Twitter for the first time, allowing it to better compete with the vertical ads offered across social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram,
Another week, another unicorn IPO. This time, Sprinklr is taking on the public markets. The New York-based software company works in what it describes as the customer experience market. And after attracting over $400 million in capital while private, its impending debut will not only provide key returns to a host of venture capitalists but
A technical system underpinning the European Union’s plan for a pan-EU ‘digital pass’ for verifying COVID-19 vaccination or test status across the region has gone live today, with a handful of EU Member States connected to the gateway and more expected to follow ahead of a July 1 full launch. The idea for the EU’s
Just about every week there’s a blockbuster round coming out of South America, but in certain countries such as Ecuador, things have been more hush hush. However, Kushki, a Quito-based fintech, is bringing attention to the region with today’s announcement of a $86 million Series B and a $600 million valuation. “We never thought that
Zenyum, a startup that wants to make cosmetic dentistry more affordable, announced today it has raised a $40 million Series B. This includes $25 million from L Catterton, a private equity firm focused on consumer brands. The round’s other participants were Sequoia Capital India (Zenyum is an alum of its Surge accelerator program), RTP Global,
German startup Wefox has raised a $650 million Series C funding round led by Target Global. Following this funding round, the company has reached a post-money valuation of $3 billion. Wefox is a digital insurer focused on personal insurance products, such as household insurance, motor insurance and personal liability insurance. “It’s much more than we
Freight forwarding — the process of organising how and where items will be shipped around the world, and specifically the technology that underpins that work — continues to be a huge area of the logistics market, not least because of the huge boom in e-commerce in the last year, and because of the Covid-19-mandated need
Thousands of electric vehicle charging stations will be built around the country over the next decade. ChargerHelp!, founded in January 2020 by Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis, wants to make sure they stay up and running. The idea for the on-demand repair app for EV charging stations came to Terry when she was working
Meet June, a new startup that wants to make it easier to create analytics dashboards and generate reports even if you’re not a product analytics expert. June is built on top of your Segment data. Like many no-code startups, it uses templates and a graphical interface so that non-technical profiles can start using it. “What
Cloud kitchens are already meant to reduce the burden of infrastructure on food and beverage brands by providing them with centralized facilities to prepare meals for delivery. This means the responsibility falls on cloud kitchen operators to make sure they have enough locations to meet demand from F&B clients, while ensuring fast deliveries to end
Cookie pop-ups getting you down? Complaints that the web is ‘unusable’ in Europe because of frustrating and confusing ‘data choices’ notifications that get in the way of what you’re trying to do online certainly aren’t hard to find. What is hard to find is the ‘reject all’ button that lets you opt out of non-essential
Oren Yunger Contributor Oren Yunger is an investor at GGV Capital, where he leads the cybersecurity vertical and drives investments in enterprise IT, data infrastructure, and developer tools. He was previously chief information security officer at a SaaS company and a public financial institution. More posts by this contributor 6 CISOs share their game plans
MotoRefi has raised another $45 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs just five months after investors poured $10 million into the fintech startup to help turbocharge its auto refinancing business. The startup developed an auto refinancing platform that handles the entire loan process, including finding the best rates, paying off the old lender
Trying to buy a house in a competitive market is perhaps one of the most stressful things an adult can go through. Competing with a bunch of people all putting offers on a house that fly off the market in a matter of days is not fun. One startup that is trying to give home
Laura González-Estéfani Contributor Laura González-Estéfani is the founder and CEO of TheVentureCity, an international, operator-led venture acceleration model designed to make the global entrepreneurial ecosystem more diverse, international and accessible to fair capital. More posts by this contributor Miami won’t be the next Silicon Valley because we don’t need another one For many VCs, the
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week had the whole crew aboard to record: Grace and Chris making us sound good, Danny to provide levity, Natasha to actually recall facts, and Alex to divert us from staying on topic. It’s teamwork, people –
Landlords have sometimes looked on the tech-enabled spaces of the likes of WeWork and longed to be part of the cool kids – and attract that new wave of founders. Now a UK startup has come up with a way for Landlords to do this directly. Founded by Steve Coulson and Lucy Minton in 2018,
Extra Crunch Live is all about helping founders build better venture-backed businesses. Naturally, we do this by having candid conversations with founders and their investors. On an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with MaC Venture Capital founding managing partner Marlon Nichols and Wonderschool co-founder and CEO Chris Bennett. REGISTER HERE FOR
There was a time when this column was more than a never-ending run of IPO coverage. Then the unicorn liquidity cycle kicked off and it’s been a long run of public offerings ever since. This morning is no exception. Doximity filed to go public earlier today. You likely haven’t heard of the company because it
APIs make the world go round in tech, but that also makes them a very key target for bad actors: as doorways into huge data troves and services, malicious hackers spent a lot of time looking for ways to pick their locks or just force them open when they’re closed, in order to access that
Scotland is slowly but surely drawing attention in the UK’s startup space. In 2020, Scottish startups collectively raised £345 million, according to Tech Nation, and with nearly 2,500 startups, it has the highest number of budding tech companies outside London. Venture capital fundraises are also consistently on the rise every year. Scotland’s capital Edinburgh boasts
More than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, early-stage startups across the world are re-inventing how we work. But founders aren’t flocking to build just another SaaS tool or Airtable copycat — they’re trying to disrupt the only thing possibly more annoying than e-mail: the work meeting. On an episode of this week’s podcast, Equity
As AI has grown from a menagerie of research projects to include a handful of titanic, industry-powering models like GPT-3, there is a need for the sector to evolve — or so thinks Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI, who struck out on his own to create a new company a few months
Great news for typo-prone tweeters: Twitter Blue, a $2.99 monthly subscription, appears to be coming soon to a Timeline near you. Two weeks ago, researcher Jane Manchun Wong first reported that Twitter’s new subscription service is in the works. But yesterday, Twitter’s iOS App Store listing updated to list Twitter Blue as an in-app purchase,
The notion of digital transformation evolved from a buzzword joke to a critical and accelerating fact during the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes wrought by a global shift to remote work and schooling are myriad, but in the business realm they have yielded a change in corporate behavior and consumer expectation — changes that showed up