SAP CEO Christian Klein was appointed co-CEO with Jennifer Morgan last April just as the pandemic was hitting full force across the world. Within six months, Morgan was gone and he was sole CEO, put in charge of a storied company at 38 years old. By October, its stock price was down and revenue projections
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Stride VC, a London-based seed investment fund, has raised its second fund, which will be £100M ($138.6M) – identical to its first fund. The fund will invest primarily in London startups but also look at select European opportunities. The breakup of the LPs in the fund is 10% fund of funds, 60% other institutional, 28%
It looks like everyone and their mother is trying to reinvent the Brazilian banking system. Earlier this year we wrote about Nubank’s $400 million Series G, last month there was the PicPay IPO filing and today, alt.bank, a Brazilian neobank, announced a $5.5 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures (USV). It’s no secret that
Nathan Beckord Contributor More posts by this contributor The lightning-fast Series A (that was 3 years in the making) Founders seeking their first check need a fundraising sales funnel Domm Holland, co-founder and CEO of e-commerce startup Fast, appears to be living a founder’s dream. His big idea came from a small moment in his
The public markets give, and the public markets take away. Earlier this morning, enterprise cloud storage and productivity company Box got into a more public spat with some of its shareholders upset with its performance and management decisions. But while Box endures the more difficult chapters of being a public company, other companies are racing
Twitter this morning announced it’s acquiring Scroll, a subscription service that offers readers a better way to read through long-form content on the web, by removing ads and other website clutter that can slow down the experience. The service will become a part of Twitter’s larger plans to invest in subscriptions, the company says, and
We tend to think of venture capital in tens or hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, so it’s refreshing to find Evening Fund, a new $2 million micro fund that focuses on small investments between $50,000 and $100,000 as it seeks to help young startups with early funding. The new fund was launched by
In March 2020, Tame had a digital event suite for offline corporate events. But with the pandemic hitting, it did a hard pivot into providing a highly customizable virtual events platform, primarily used by companies for their sales events. The result is that it has now raised a seed round of $5.5m, a large round
Of the many frustrations of having a severe motor impairment, the difficulty of communicating must surely be among the worst. The tech world has not offered much succor to those affected by things like locked-in syndrome, ALS, and severe strokes, but startup Cognixion aims to with a novel form of brain monitoring that, combined with
Instagram is making its video Stories and Reels more accessible with the launch of a new “captions sticker” that will allow users to watch without having the sound on. The addition will not only make it easier for users who are hard of hearing or deaf to engage with video content, it also offers a
Education may well be the most important activity we conduct as a society — and it may also be the hardest space to build a startup in. Selling to school districts and universities is notoriously difficult, but enticing consumers is even harder. Learning takes focus, patience, tenacity and resources, and most consumers would prefer to
Remote work is no longer a new topic, as much of the world has now been doing it for a year or more because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies — big and small — have had to react in myriad ways. Many of the initial challenges have focused on workflow, productivity and the like. But
A Solid Power manufacturing engineer holds two 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid state battery cells for the BMW Group and Ford Motor Company. The 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid state battery cells were produced on Solid Power’s Colorado-based pilot production line. Source: Solid Power. Solid state battery systems have long been considered the
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You
Competitors Volvo AB and Daimler Trucks are teaming up to produce hydrogen fuel cells for long-haul trucks, which the companies say will lower development costs and boost production volumes. The joint venture, which is called cellcentric, aims to bring large-scale “gigafactory” production levels of hydrogen fuel cells to Europe by 2025. While the two companies
Sony and Discord have announced a partnership that will integrate the latter’s popular gaming-focused chat app with PlayStation’s own built-in social tools. It’s a big move and a fairly surprising one given how recently acquisition talks were in the air — Sony appears to have offered a better deal than Microsoft, taking an undisclosed minority
Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV is getting its own mobile app. The company announced the news today at its first-ever NewFronts presentation to advertisers, where it also shared that its over-the-top streaming businesses combined — meaning, IMDb TV, Twitch, live sports like Thursday Night Football, Amazon’s News app and others — have now
When the iconic American power tools company Stanley Black & Decker began looking for ways to improve the pipeline of diverse candidates that the company was reviewing for potential roles, it turned to an Israeli-based startup called Talenya for help. The company wasn’t alone in looking to startups for support in new hiring initiatives. Last
It’s a big morning for fintech startups today: Flywire, a Boston-based magnet for venture capital, has filed to go public. Flywire is a global payments company that attracted more than $300 million as a startup, according to Crunchbase, most recently raising a $60 million Series F last month. We don’t have its most recent valuation,
It’s widely known that Dell has a debt problem left over from its massive acquisition of EMC in 2016, and it seems to be moving this year to eliminate part of it in multi-billion chunks. The first step was spinning out VMware as a separate company last month, a move expected to net close to
Hangry, an Indonesian cloud kitchen startup that wants to become a global food and beverage company, has raised a $13 million Series A. The round was led by returning investor Alpha JWC Ventures, and included participation from Atlas Pacific Capital, Salt Ventures and Heyokha Brothers. It will be used to increase the number of Hangry’s
Last call, founders. Today is your last chance to save $100 on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising. Our last founder bootcamp event of the year takes place July 8-9, and it’s time to call on Saint Expeditus — the patron saint of procrastinators and programmers alike. He’ll help you kick
My mom cuts to the chase when she is describing my beat to others. In her words, I cover companies like Uber before they become companies like Uber. And honestly? I can’t exactly disagree with the description. The best feeling in tech journalism is telling a story about a startup before it becomes a household
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning, sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. TechCrunch isn’t a public-market-focused publication. We
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.”