While funding for Italian startups has been growing, the country still ranks eighth in Europe by VC investment, according to Dealroom. Newly created Italian Founders Fund (IFF) hopes to help with the catching up, both in quantity and in quality. With €50 million to invest into 25 companies, it also positions itself as a sector
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Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5 million households with one, a lot of innovation in the pet category has focused exclusively on dogs. And even if the service serves both species,
You’re running out of time to join the Startup Battlefield 200, our curated showcase of top startups from around the world and across multiple industries. This elite cohort — 200 companies strong — absolutely owns (and slays) the exhibition floor at TechCrunch Disrupt. Tomorrow is the last day to apply to Startup Battlefield 200 We’re
Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator
BlackRock, an investor in Byju’s, estimates that its stake of Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing. The write-down in its estimations, disclosed in an SEC filing, makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory. BlackRock’s disclosure for the period ending March this year follows a
AI systems and large language models need to be trained on massive amounts of data to be accurate but they shouldn’t train on data that they don’t have the rights to use. OpenAI’s licensing deals with The Atlantic and Vox last week show that both sides of the table are interested in landing these AI-training
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Anna will be covering for him this week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Most interesting startup stories from the week As the end of 0% interest rates keeps taking its toll,
Former Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch issued a statement Thursday following his acquittal of criminal charges, ending a 13-year legal battle with Hewlett-Packard that became one of Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud cases. He was accused of falsely inflating revenues at the UK startup ahead of Autonomy’s $11 billion sale to HP in 2011. Commenting on
When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be looking for one. She thought
Investor demand has been so strong for shares of hot HR startup Rippling – over $2 billion worth of term sheets, it says – that it is allowing former employees to also participate in its giant, tender offer sale, the company told TechCrunch. But there is one big exception: it has banned former employees who
There’s a lot riding on next week’s WWDC 2024 keynote. The presentation’s stakes are far higher than your standard post-event market moves. The pressure for Tim Cook and crew to deliver the goods is, in a very real sense, even higher than it was in the lead up to last year’s Vision Pro announcement. On
Shopify has acquired Threads.com, the Seqiuoa-backed Slack alternative, Threads said on its website. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but said that the Threads.com team will join Shopify. Threads added that after the launch of Meta’s social network with the same name last year, the startup had “the opportunity to sell our
Founders: Need plans this weekend? What better way to spend your time than applying to this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt. With Monday’s deadline looming, this is a must-add for your weekend to-do list. Accepting both applications and referrals We’re accepting both quality applications and referrals for Startup Battlefield 200. If you are
EnerVenue, a startup that has developed an alternative to lithium-ion batteries for long-duration renewable energy storage, is raising $515 million in fresh equity, per an SEC filing seen by TechCrunch. The company is in the process of building a gigawatt-scale factory in Kentucky to produce its nickel-hydrogen batteries, an endeavor that’s estimated to cost $264
Apple is set to board the runaway locomotive that is generative AI at next week’s World Wide Developer Conference. Reports thus far have pointed to a partnership with OpenAI that will, among other things, help supercharge Siri. A fresh round of rumors reported by Bloomberg shed more light on the news expected to be unveiled
Long before product-led growth became a buzzword, Atlassian offered free tiers for virtually all of its productivity and developer tools. Today, that mostly means free access for up to 10 users and some other limitations. For startups, that’s a good way to get started with the company’s tools like Jira and Bitbucket, but they also
Carta, a once-high-flying Silicon Valley startup that loudly backed away from one of its businesses earlier this year, is working on a secondary sale that would value the company at $2 billion, TechCrunch has learned. Carta is working with the investment bank Jeffries on the sale and initially hoped to find demand for the offering
Amazon has agreed to acquire Indian video streaming service MX Player from the local media powerhouse Times Internet, the latest step by the e-commerce giant to make its services and brand popular in smaller cities and towns in the key overseas market. The two firms reached a definitive agreement for the deal on Wednesday evening,
New York-based Revel has made a lot of pivots since initially launching in 2018 as a dockless e-moped sharing service. The BlackRock-backed startup briefly stepped into the e-bike subscription business. It launched and now operates a handful of electric vehicle charging stations across the five boroughs. And it started an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hail service, in
In a research note, HSBC estimates that the Indian edtech giant Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing. The write-down in its estimation makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory. It follows a very rough year for the Bengaluru-based startup, which was India’s most valuable not long
It’s been 20 years since Shira Yevin, the lead singer of punk band Shiragirl drove a pink RV into the Vans Warped Tour grounds, the now-defunct punk rock festival notorious for being male-dominated. In response to the festival’s lack of female-fronted bands, Yevin’s band crashed the festival and set up an impromptu all-female stage. This
Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled its technology for a unique manufacturing approach to grow cells for industries, including cultivated meat. Today, the Emeryville, Calif.-based company said it’s ready to go to market with a bioreactor that will make that growth possible. Deniz Kent, Max Huisman and Declan Jones started the company in 2020 to
Carlo Kobe and Scott Smith believed so strongly in the need for a debit card product designed specifically for Gen Zers that they dropped out of Harvard and Cornel at ages 19 and 21, respectively, in 2021 to build a startup called Fizz. The pair wanted to go beyond creating a debit card for the
Climate change might be the most significant environmental disaster facing humanity, but it’s not the only one. In fact, humanity already faces five others out of a total of nine possible doomsday scenarios. With each line we cross, we jeopardize the planet’s ability to self regulate. This concept of planetary boundaries is helpful for scientists,
Twitch has come up with a solution for the ongoing copyright issues that DJs encounter on the platform. The company announced Thursday a new program that enables DJs to stream millions of tracks in a new DJ Category, giving them more clarity on which songs are safe to use in their streams. The only catch
An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts,
Dealt, a French startup formerly known as Mon Super Voisin, raised a €6 million funding round ($6.5 million at today’s exchange rate) a few months ago. More importantly, the startup went through an important pivot. And this funding round proves that this strategy was the right one. It’s an interesting lesson for early-stage founders who
TechCrunch has kept readers informed regarding Fearless Fund’s courtroom battle to provide business grants to Black women. Today, we are happy to announce that Fearless Fund CEO and co-founder Arian Simone will speak at the Disrupt 2024 Builders Stage in a fireside chat discussing her organization’s fight for racial equity. Fearless Fund was sued last
French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to let developers — and enterprises — fine-tune its generative models for particular use cases. The first is self-service. Mistral has released a software development kit (SDK), Mistral-Finetune, for fine-tuning its models on workstations, servers and small datacenter nodes. In the
It’s fair to say the Ai Pin launch didn’t go the way Humane planned. This week, the well-funded startup is dealing with another on a long list of mounting issues. The company Wednesday issued an email requesting customers discontinue use of its egg-shaped charging case. The warning was issued “out of an abundance of caution,”
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