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
admin
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.
In January, localized payments provider PPRO became the latest fintech-as-a-service startup to hit a billion-dollar valuation when it closed $180 million in funding. As a mark of how payments and e-commerce continue to be major areas of focus in the global economy, today PPRO is extending that round by another $90 million and adding in
Design and marketing consultancy R/GA is expanding its Venture Studios program with the launch of a new Coalition Venture Studio focused specifically on supporting Black-led and Black-owned startups. The initiative is led by R/GA Entrepreneur in Residence Davyeon Ross, a Black entrepreneur who founded sports analytics company ShotTracker. The startup (which is backed by TechCrunch’s
What happens to hot fintech startups that have benefited from a rise in consumer trading activity if regular folks lose interest in financial wagers? That’s the question facing Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms that have ridden an upward cycle. Each has performed well in recent quarters: Robinhood by securing huge payment-for-order-flow revenues, while Coinbase’s
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey got called out by Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY) for tweeting during today’s congressional hearing on disinformation and extremism. The tech exec’s tweet was likely expressing frustration with the format of the hearing, which once again saw the tech CEOs forced to boil down their answers to complicated questions into simple “yes”
ActionIQ, which helps companies use their customer data to deliver personalized experiences, is announcing that it has extended its Series C funding, bringing the round to a total size of $100 million. That number includes the $32 million that ActionIQ announced in January of last year. Founder and CEO Tasso Argyros said the company is
Gorillas, the Berlin-HQ’d startup that promises to let you order groceries and other “every day” items for delivery in as little as ten minutes, has raised $290 million in Series B funding, at a valuation that surpasses $1 billion. The round is led by Coatue Management, DST Global, and Tencent, with participation from Green Oaks,
Mar.22 — Porsche AG Chief Executive Officer Oliver Blume talks about the semiconductor shortage and says the automaker could achieve 15% profitability again. He speaks to Matt Miller on March 19.
Ariane de Bonvoisin Contributor Ariane de Bonvoisin is an executive coach to top CEOs, startup founders and VCs. She has keynoted the Oprah conference, given a TED talk, and been invited to Google, Amazon, the World Bank, Union Square Ventures and Red Bull to teach about navigating change and founder and startup wellness. The business
Ryu Games, a startup that helps developers add cash tournaments to their mobile games, announced this morning it has raised $2.3 million in a seed round. The funds came from a number of investors, including Side Door Ventures, MGV Capital, Velo Partners and Citta Ventures. In addition, 500 Startups participated in the round. To see the
On Wednesday, a coalition of a dozen state attorneys general called on Facebook and Twitter to step up their enforcement of their community guidelines to curtail the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on their platforms. Their letter specifically identified 12 “anti-vaxxer” accounts that were responsible for a sizable 65% of public anti-vaccine content on Facebook,
On the heels of Jumio announcing a $150 million injection this week to continue building out its AI-based ID verification and anti-money laundering platform, another startup in the space is levelling up. Feedzai, which provides banks, others in the financial sector, and any company managing payments online with AI tools to spot and fight fraud
Online branded payments now run the gamut of anything from Spotify vouchers, Netflix vouchers, Neosurf, PaySafe cards, and everything in between. Consumers use them to pay for a variety of things. In Europe, they are an increasingly big business. Now, European branded payments company Recharge.com has raised €10m ($11.8m) in a debt funding round led
Meniga, the London fintech that provides digital banking technology to leading banks, has closed €10 million in additional funding. The round is led by Velocity Capital and Frumtak Ventures. Also participating are Industrifonden, the U.K. Government’s Future Fund and existing customers UniCredit, Swedbank, Groupe BPCE and Íslandsbanki. Meniga says the funding will be used for
Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than $50 million in new funding. Notably, two of the main investors are not venture capital firms but instead are two large tech companies: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre and San Francisco-based software
Rick Song Contributor Rick Song is co-founder and CEO of Persona. Since the dawn of the internet, knowing (or, perhaps more accurately, not knowing) who is on the other side of the screen has been one of the biggest mysteries and thrills. In the early days of social media and online forums, anonymous usernames were
You might expect that a startup that makes community building software would be thriving during a pandemic when it’s so difficult for us to be together. And Bevy, a company whose product powers community sites like Salesforce Trailblazers and Google Developers announced it has raised a $40 million Series C this morning, at least partly
Everybody says they want to build user-centric companies and products, but how exactly is that achieved? Talking and listening to users, of course — a task that is both unnecessarily time-consuming and cumbersome to organise, according to Axel Thomson, a former product manager at U.K. recipe-box subscription unicorn Gousto. His burgeoning startup, dubbed Ribbon, wants
Our picks for the most intriguing companies of Y Combinator’s latest batch were based entirely on substance and our endless expertise, so it’s time for something much more superficial. Here are the 11 best logos from the hundreds of companies that presented yesterday. Watching companies go by 60 seconds at a time for like 8
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, the Equity team brought on Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia and Hustle Fund General Partner Elizabeth Yin to talk about equity crowdfunding. It’s been about a week since the SEC increased the equity
Twitter today is announcing what the company calls a “strategic acquihire” of the API integration platform Reshuffle. The startup’s commercial technology, which allows developers to build workflows and connect systems using any API, will be wound down as a result of Twitter’s deal. However, Reshuffle’s entire team of seven, including co-founders Amir Shevat and Avner
When AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced in an email to employees yesterday that Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky was returning to run AWS, it was probably not the choice most considered. But to the industry watchers we spoke to over the last couple of days, it was a move that made absolute sense once you thought
Leveraging networks of “experts” online started out as a very manual online business. But it’s rapidly becoming more efficient as machine learning is applied to the whole business model. Indeed, in the UK alone $60bn is spent a year on using outside expertise. Large players in this space include GLG, Third Bridge, Guidepoint, and AlphaSights.