During every economic boom, there are startup investors who appear on the scene from new corners. Some churn out; others earn the respect of the old guard over time. Jake Paul would be happy to be in the latter camp. Then again, the 24-year-old didn’t become a YouTube star by being conventional. Little wonder that
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A growing number of companies have emerged over the last few years determined to reduce waste in the electric vehicle battery market. Chief among these is recycling firm Redwood Materials, which has quickly expanded since its launch in 2017 by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel to become the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in North America. Now
Cazoo, the UK used-car sales portal that has been on a major fundraising tear in the last year, will be next company to pursue more growth by way of a SPAC: the company today announced that it will list on the NYSE by way of a business combination with AJAX I, a special purpose acquisition
“There is no doubt that over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords… they just don’t meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure,” said Bill Gates. That was seventeen years ago. Although passwords have lost some of their charm, they have so far survived many attempts to kill
EQT Ventures, an investment firm based in Europe, which has raised over €1.2 billion ($1.4B USD) announced that it has promoted Laura Yao to partner. At the same time, the firm announced it recently hired Anne Raimondi, former SVP of Operations at Zendesk as operating partner. The company is based in Stockholm with offices in
Cazoo is picking up significant capital today by teaming up with a SPAC in the U.S. at a $7 billion valuation, but it’s the end of the line for another big European name in used-car sales. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Berlin-based Frontier Car Group, which builds used-car marketplaces with a focus on emerging
Ajaib, the Indonesian investment app, has added $65 million to its Series A, bringing the round’s new total to $90 million. The extension was led by Ribbit Capital, the fintech investor that also led Robinhood’s $3.4 billion funding last month. Ajaib is Ribbit Capital’s first investment in Southeast Asia. The extension will be used to
Meet Singular, a new VC firm based in Paris that just finished raising its initial fund. The firm was founded by two former Alven partners — Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. They have some ambitious goals and an interesting investment model that could help them remain involved even during late-stage rounds. Overall, the firm raised
If you browse Instagram, you are probably familiar with the term “link in bio.” Links aren’t allowed in post captions, and users are only allowed one URL in their bios, so many create a simple website with multiple links for their followers. Linktree, one of the most popular “link in bio” services with more than
Procrastinators, last-minute decision makers and overwhelmed entrepreneurs heed this call! Your last chance to save $100 or more and attend both TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 bootcamps expires tonight! You’re dedicated to learning the essentials of building a solid early-stage startup, yes? That’s exactly what you’ll get at TC Early Stage 2021 (Operations & Fundraising: April
This morning, well-known robotic process automation (RPA) unicorn UiPath has filed to go public. The company’s S-1 filing comes after it raised billions of dollars while private, making it amongst the best-funded startups in history. Over the last year, for example, the company’s rapid-fired fundraising included its Series E and Series F rounds of capital, both
Hub, a productivity platform for technical pre-sales, has formally launched with $1 million in seed funding. CEO Freddy Mangum and CTO Karl Gainey founded Hub in 2020. The pair both had experience in technical sales and recognized the challenges of using spreadsheets to manage their business. They researched and surveyed sales engineers at big and
At this point, if you aren’t going public via a direct listing, traditional IPO or SPAC, are you even a growthy business? Every CEO I talk to at a startup that’s doing more than Series B-level revenue tells me that SPACs are circling, hungry for a deal so they won’t have to return collected capital
“Headless commerce” is a phrase that gets thrown around lot (I’ve typed it several times today already), but Vue Storefront CEO Patrick Friday has an especially vivid way of using the concept to illustrate his startup’s place in the broader ecosystem. “Vue Storefront is the bodiless front end,” Friday said. “We are the walking head.” In other
One of the biggest pain points for startups and small businesses is keeping up with back office tasks such as bookkeeping and managing taxes. QuickBooks, it seems, just doesn’t always cut it. Three-time co-founders Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold, and Jessica McKellar formed Pilot with the mission of affordably providing back office services to startups and
Mayfield partner Navin Chaddha and Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra met all the way back in 2003, well before Poshmark was even a glimmer in his eye. They stayed connected over the years, through Chandra’s sale of his startup Kaboodle to Hearst and after he left. At a breakfast one morning, Chandra told Chaddha
Robotic process automation platform UiPath added its name to the list of companies pursuing public-market offerings this morning with the release of its S-1 filing. The document details a quickly growing software company with sharply improving profitability performance. The company also flipped from cash burn to cash generation on both an operating and free-cash-flow basis
Denmark-based Motosumo has scored a $6M Series A raise led by London’s Magenta Partners, alongside existing investors. The new funding will go on doubling its network of spin class instructors across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, expanding its tech team and upping its marketing. The 2015-founded fit-tech startup has developed a system for measuring
Tim Kopp Contributor Tim Kopp is the chairman and CEO of Terminus, an ABM platform that powers high-performing go-to-market teams. There’s certainly no shortage of SaaS performance metrics leaders focus on. While all SaaS companies do, and must, home in on acquisition metrics, there’s also massive revenue potential within your current customer base. I think
While new headless commerce platforms are emerging all the time, Swell CEO Eric Ingram told me that it remains “really hard to do something new in e-commerce.” Specifically, he told me that most headless platforms (which offer back-end infrastructure separate from the front-end shopping experience) allow businesses to build a faster shopping experience, but they’re
Early this month Google quietly began trials of ‘Privacy Sandbox’: Its planned replacement adtech for tracking cookies, as it works toward phasing out support for third party cookies in the Chrome browser — testing a system to reconfigure the dominant web architecture by replacing individual ad targeting with ads that target groups of users (aka
Since the pandemic began, I have been pushing the limits of my imagination to try to picture what cities will look and feel like in the coming years. If your town looks like San Francisco, where I live, it’s a pressing question: Our once-bustling financial district is a ghost town, but even in outer neighborhoods,
When TechCrunch covered UIPath’s Series A in 2017, it was a small startup out of Romania working in a little known area of enterprise software called robotic process automation (RPA). Then the company took off with increasingly large multibillion dollar valuations. It progressed through its investment rounds, culminating with a $750 million round on an
After a few twists and turns and then ultimately cancelling its F8 developer conference last year over Covid-19 concerns, Facebook today announced a return of the event in a virtual-only format it is calling F8 Refresh. The company today said that it will be holding it as a one-day event on June 2. You can
Last October as Slack was preparing for its virtual Frontiers conference, the company began thinking about different ways people could communicate on the platform. While it had built its name on being able to integrate a lot of services in a single place to alleviate the dreaded task-switching phenomenon, it has been largely text-based up
Breega, a VC firm based in Paris, has announced the final closing of its third fund. The firm has managed to raise $130 million (€110 million). This is Breega’s third fund and is officially called Breega Capital Venture 3. The firm’s previous fund launched in 2015 with €45 million ($53 million at today’s exchange rate).
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. News was right back up to a dull roar this week, so we did our best to trim and hone and just bring you the most
Benitago Group, a startup looking to build a big portfolio of Amazon brands, is announcing that it has raised $55 million in new funding — $3 million in equity and $52 million across multiple credit lines for acquisitions. “We want to take these brands and growth them and run them a lot more efficiently,” said
One of the challenges that some would-be TikTok rivals have faced is that they often lack the same robust set of content creation tools, like filters, effects, and tools for repurposing others’ content — like TikTok’s Stitch and Duet, for example. It now appears that Snapchat is working to correct that latter problem, however, as
We’ve seen a lot of trend lines moving throughout 2020 and into 2021 around automation, workflow, robotic process automation (RPA) and the movement to low-code and no-code application building. While all of these technologies can work on their own, they are deeply connected and we are starting to see some movement towards bringing them together.