Calling all early-stage startup founders. You have a mere 48 hours left to save on your ticket to engage with leading experts at TC Early Stage 2020 on July 21-22. No one’s born knowing how to build a successful startup, and this online event provides the essential building blocks you need to flatten your learning
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Karat is a new startup promising to build better banking products for the creators who make a living on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and other online platforms. Today it’s unveiling its first product — the Karat Black Card. The startup, which was part of accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, is also announcing that it has
The coronavirus pandemic has bruised and battered many technology startups, but it has also boosted a small few. One such company is Zoom, which has shouldered the task of keeping us connected to one another in the midst of remote work and social distancing. So, of course, we’re absolutely thrilled to have the chance to
The house of cards has well and truly collapsed for Wirecard, the German payments company that has been accused of accounting fraud. Today it announced that its German operation Wirecard AG was applying for insolvency proceedings in a Munich court, the Amtsgericht München, due to “impending insolvency and over-indebtedness.” It also issued a separate statement that elaborated to
The fact that Apple takes a 30% cut of subscriptions purchased via the App Store isn’t news. But since the company threatened to boot email app Hey from the platform last week unless its developers paid the customary tribute, the tech world and lawmakers are giving Apple’s revenue share a harder look. Although Apple’s Senior
Aug.07 — Scott Galloway, marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, comments on Facebook Inc.’s plans to merge its systems and let users exchange messages among all its different mobile apps. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Scarlet Fu and Caroline Hyde on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
The world is rife with me-too startups, which makes it all the more refreshing when a founder comes along that manages to find a broken market that’s hiding in plain sight. That’s what Mike Kennedy appears to be doing with Koala, a young outfit determined to update the stodgy world of property time-share management, wherein
The unicorn’s valuation range is not impressive Alex Wilhelm 7 hours Earlier today, insurtech unicorn Lemonade filed an S-1/A, providing context into how the former startup may price its IPO and what the company may be worth when it begins to trade. According to its new filing, Lemonade expects its IPO to price at $23
Facebook announced Thursday that it would introduce a notification screen warning users if they try to share content that’s more than 90 days old. They’ll be given the choice to “go back” or to click through if they’d still like to share the story knowing that it isn’t fresh. Facebook acknowledged that old stories shared
As perennial front runner for the title of probably-the-most-evil tech company, Amazon has a long way to go to rehabilitate its image as a take-no-prisoners, industry-consolidating wealth machine. In a bold effort to do so, the company announced today that it would buy the rights to Seattle’s KeyArena, an aging stadium currently under redevelopment in
Even before the pandemic pushed most employees to work from home, sales people often worked outside of the office. Salesforce introduced a new tool today at the Trailheadx Conference called Salesforce Anywhere that’s designed to let teams collaborate and share data wherever they happen to be. Salesforce VP of product, Michael Machado says that the
European lawmakers are eyeing binding transparency requirements for Internet platforms in a Digital Services Act (DSA) due to be drafted by the end of the year. But the question of how to create governance structures that provide regulators and researchers with meaningful access to data so platforms can be held accountable for the content they’re
YouTube is taking direct aim at TikTok. The company announced on Wednesday it’s beginning to test a new feature on mobile that will allow users to record 15-second long multi-segment videos. That’s the same length as the default on TikTok as well as Instagram’s new TikTok clone, Reels. Users in the new YouTube experiment will
In 2019, the global fertility services industry was estimated to be worth $14.8 billion with demand driven by the significant growth in the median age of first-time mothers, according to a Research & Markets report. Gina Bartasi, founder and CEO of NYC-based fertility center Kindbody, has pointed to macroeconomic trends responsible for the industry’s consistent
Api.video, a “developer-first” video platform that makes it easier for websites and apps to video features, has raised $5.5 million, in a seed round led by London venture capital firm Blossom Capital. Also participating is Kima Ventures and a number of angel investors. Previous backers include Octave Klaba (founder of OVH), Eduardo Ronzano (founder of
AWS today announced the beta launch of Amazon Honeycode, a new fully managed low-code/no-code development tool that aims to make it easy for anybody in a company to build their own applications. All of this, of course, is backed by a database in AWS and a web-based drag-and-drop interface builder. Developers can build applications for
Connect Ventures, the London-based seed-stage VC that was an early investor in Citymapper and Typeform — and more recently backed scaling startups such as Curve and TrueLayer — is announcing a new $80 million fund to continue investing in “product-led” founders. Backing the new fund is a combination of existing and new LPs including Top
Forecast, a new project from Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, is launching today to build a community around predictions. The iOS app will allow users to ask questions and then use in-app points to make predictions about what might happen in the future. Users can also create, discuss and view these crowdsourced predictions. At
Earlier today we took a look at two companies that have filed to go public, nCino and GoHealth. The pair join Lemonade in a march toward the public markets. But those three firms are hardly alone. We know that DoorDash filed privately earlier this year (it also raised a pile of cash lately, so its
At a time where IT has to help employees set up and manage devices remotely, a service that simplifies those processes could certainly come in handy. Apple recognized that, and acquired Fleetsmith today, a startup that helps companies do precisely that with Apple devices. While Apple didn’t publicize the acquisition, it has confirmed the deal
India’s antitrust watchdog has given its blessing to Facebook and Reliance Jio Platforms for their $5.7 billion deal. In a statement on Wednesday, the Competition Commission of India said it had approved Facebook’s proposed multi-billion-dollar investment in the top Indian telecom network. The announcement comes a week after the watchdog said it was accessing the
AWS today launched Amazon Honeycode, a no-code environment built around a spreadsheet-like interface that is a bit of a detour for Amazon’s cloud service. Typically, after all, AWS is all about giving developers all of the tools to build their applications — but they then have to put all of the pieces together. Honeycode, on
Hoxton Ventures, a London-based early-stage VC firm best known for backing British unicorns Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo, announced its second fund last week, coming in at just under $100 million. The firm’s self-proclaimed strategy is to seek out startups that can scale globally into “large, category-defining leaders” in nascent industries — A strategy that
For photographers and videographers spending a lot less time on location and a lot more time at the desk right now, one great use of time is going back through archives and backlogs to find hidden gems, and hone those edit skills. One recently-released device called the Loupedeck CT can make that an even more
A year after its initial release, Jumbo has two important pieces of news to announce. First, the company has released a major update of its app that protects your privacy on online services. Second, the company has raised an $8 million Series A funding round. If you’re not familiar with Jumbo, the app wants to
Apr.09 — Daniel Schreiber, chief executive officer and co-founder of Lemonade, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence on the insurance industry and trust issues in data privacy. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
After what felt like winter, investors say startup deals are back on — although the numbers suggest they never stopped. As Semil Shah of Haystack VC phrased it in a blog post, “It’s game on, pandemic or bust.” This is good news for founders and big funds, but the investment landscape becomes more complicated when
When we announced the formation of The TechCrunch List last week, we had no idea what response we would get to our proposal for founders to recommend their “first check” investors. While plenty of founders over the years had told us that they wanted such a database to rely on or to refer to other
Instagram is expanding its TikTok competitor known as “Reels” to new markets, following its launch last year in Brazil. Starting today, Instagram is rolling out further access to Reels in France and Germany, allowing users to record short, 15-second video clips set to music or other audio, then share them on the platform where they
When Dell bought EMC in 2016 for $67 billion it was one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history, and it brought with it a boatload of debt. Since then Dell has been working on ways to mitigate that debt by selling off various pieces of the corporate empire and going public again, but one