The company has raised $15.2 billion in the past nine weeks Manish Singh 8 hours It’s raised $5.7 billion from Facebook. It’s taken $1.5 billion from KKR, another $1.5 billion from Vista Equity Partners, $1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, $1.35 billion from Silver Lake, $1.2 billion from Mubadala, $870 million from General Atlantic,
admin
The venture capital industry is less transparent today than at any time in recent memory. For all the talk about expanding access and improving its sordid record on diversity, in reality, it has never been harder for founders to figure out who can even write a check to their startups in the first place. When
Kaia Health, a digital therapeutics startup which uses computer vision technology for real-time posture tracking via the smartphone camera to deliver human-hands-free physiotherapy, has closed a $26 million Series B funding round. The funding was led by Optum Ventures, Idinvest and capital300 with participation from existing investors Balderton Capital and Heartcore Capital, in addition to
The same day that Facebook removed a set of Trump campaign ads for violating the company’s rules against hate symbols, the president continued to push the envelope with his social media presence. On Thursday night, Trump shared a crudely edited video of two children with a fake CNN chyron reading “Terrified todler [sic] runs from
TechCrunch is focusing a bit more on the Boston-area startup and venture capital ecosystem lately, which has gone pretty well so far. In fact, we had originally intended on releasing this regional investor survey as a single piece, but since so many VCs took part, we’re breaking it into two. The first part deals with
The European Commission has reiterated its commitment to pushing ahead with a regional plan for taxing digital services after the US quit talks aimed at finding agreement on reforming tax rules — ramping up the prospects of a trade war. Yesterday talks between the EU and the US on a digital services tax broke down
Email is one of those things that no one likes but that we’re all forced to use. Superhuman, founded by Rahul Vohra, aims to help everyone get to inbox zero. Launched in 2017, Superhuman charges $30 per month and is still in invite-only mode with more than 275,000 people on the waitlist. That’s by design,
Plume, the Denver-based startup that provides hormone replacement therapies and medical consultations tailored to the trans community, could not be launching at a time when the company’s services are more needed. It’s no hyperbole to say that transgender citizens in the United States are under attack. Whether from government policies that are intended to defund
Over the past two decades, the venture capital industry has exploded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations. What began as a sleepy industry in Boston and Menlo Park has now expanded to dozens of cities the world over. The National Venture Capital Association estimates that VCs deployed more than $130 billion in 2018 and 2019, and thousands
Facebook’s Collections, which allow users to organize content found on Facebook — like posts, photos, videos, and more — are now becoming more broadly shareable. The company says it’s currently testing a feature in the U.S. market that will allow Facebook users to share curated collections with friends, contributors, or even the public. Prior to
DroneBase, a Los Angeles-based provider of drone pilots for industrial services companies, has raised $7.5 million during the pandemic to double down on its work with renewable energy companies. While chief executive Dan Burton acknowledged that the company was fundraising prior to the pandemic, the industrial lockdown actually accelerated demand for the company’s services. Even
As an increasing number of daily and essential services move to digital platforms — a trend that’s had a massive fillip in the last few months — having efficient but effective ways to verify that people are who they say they are online is becoming ever more important. Now, a startup called Payfone, which has
Mapillary, the Swedish startup that wants to take on Google and others in mapping the world via a crowdsourced database of street-level imagery, has been acquired by Facebook, according to the company’s blog. Terms of deal aren’t being disclosed. The Mapillary team and project will become part of Facebook’s broader open mapping efforts. Mapillary also
Flipboard is giving news publishers and other curators on the platform a new way to highlight content through a format called Storyboards. Until now, Flipboard has largely focused on its Smart Magazines, which are ongoing collections that mix human and algorithmic curation, allowing readers to dive deeply into and keep up-to-date on a given topic. Storyboards,
Sep.05 — Markus Villig, Taxify’s chief executive officer, discusses the company’s business model with Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Michael Fraser Contributor Michael Fraser is an Air Force Veteran and co-founder of Refactr, a DevSecOps automation platform that helps tech teams modernize towards IT-as-code. Conduct an online search and you’ll find close to one million websites offering their own definition of DevSecOps. Why is it that domain experts and practitioners alike continue to iterate
DoorDash has confirmed that it is raising “approximately $400 million” in a Series H round of funding. Earlier today, Axios reported that the company was looking for roughly $400 million round at a post-money valuation of $16 billion. DoorDash clarified in a statement provided to TechCrunch that the valuation is slightly under the $16 billion
Twitter tries to make audio tweets a thing, the U.K. backtracks on its contact-tracing app and Apple’s App Store revenue share is at the center of a new controversy. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 18, 2020. 1. Twitter begins rolling out audio tweets on iOS Twitter is rolling out audio tweets, which do exactly
Roger Duncan Contributor Roger Duncan is a former Research Fellow at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the former General Manager of Austin Energy. He is the co-author of the upcoming book, “The Future of Buildings, Transportation and Power.” The economic lockdown resulting from the coronavirus pandemic has had an
Three years ago almost to the day, Intercom announced that it was bringing former Intuit exec Karen Peacock on board as COO. Today, she got promoted to CEO, effective July 1st. Current CEO and company co-founder Eoghan McCabe will become Chairman. As it turns out, these moves aren’t a coincidence. McCabe had been actively thinking
Meet Vivid, a new challenger bank launching in Germany that promises low fees and an integrated cashback program. The two co-founders Alexander Emeshev and Artem Yamanov previously worked as executives for Russian bank Tinkoff Bank. Vivid doesn’t try to reinvent the wheels and is building its product on top of well-established players. It relies on
The UK has given up building a centralized coronavirus contacts tracing app and will instead switch to a decentralized app architecture, the BBC has reported. This suggests its any future app will be capable of plugging into the joint ‘exposure notification’ API which has been developed in recent weeks by Apple and Google. The UK’s
In another up for technology shares, software companies saw their values reach new heights today. The days trading comes after a selloff last week eased some of technology companies’ rebounds from their COVID-19 lows; stocks in tech companies have more than made up for their early-year declines in mid-2020, with the Nasdaq reaching 10,000 points
Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com’s shares rose 5.7% after opening at HKD $239 (about USD $30.80) during their first day of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange. JD.com had originally priced the shares for the secondary offering at $226. JD.com issued 133 million new Class A ordinary shares as part of the secondary offering and
Twitter is rolling out to its platform a new type of tweet — audio tweets — allowing users to share thoughts in audio form inside their feeds. The feature will only be available to some iOS users for now, though the company says all iOS users should have access “in the coming weeks.” No word
Scott Kinka Contributor Scott Kinka serves as CTO for Evolve IP. An award-winning, 20-year technology veteran with expertise in virtualization, cloud security and telecommunications, he designs the Evolve IP roadmap, leads its project team and works closely with customers and partners. Ryan Easter couldn’t believe he was being asked to run a pandemic business continuity
Hoxton Ventures, the London-based early-stage VC firm best known for backing British unicorns Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo, is announcing its second fund, which has closed at a little less than $100 million. That’s more than twice the size of the firm’s $40 million debut fund back in 2013, when new VCs setting up shop
Over the past few months, Yelp has been takin steps to help businesses reeling from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic — things like waived fees, virtual service listings and GoFundMe fundraisers (that last one had a mixed reception). But without getting into the question of whether the United States is reopening at the right
The alchemy for a successful startup can be hard to parse. Sometimes, it’s who you know. Sometimes it’s where you go to school. And sometimes it’s what you do. In the case of La Haus, a startup that wants to bring U.S. tech-enabled real estate services to the Latin American real estate market, it’s all
Adtech startup Admix is announcing that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The London-based company was founded by CEO Samuel Huber (previously owner of an indie gaming studio) and COO Joe Bachle-Morris (who previously worked in the ad agency world). The company is working to bring ads to games, esports, virtual reality