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This morning Chilean company Copec announced a corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, dubbed Wind Ventures. Wind will write checks worth between $1 million and $10 million into Series A, B, and C rounds, with an eye on startups that fit into the categories that its parent company works in, namely energy, retail, and mobility. According
Delali Dzirasa Contributor Delali Dzirasa is CEO and founder of Fearless, a full-stack digital services firm in Baltimore, MD with a mission to create software with a soul — tools that empower communities and make a difference. Building a business is hard; about 50% of businesses fail in the first five years. The early years
Over the past few months, COVID-19 has brought much of the fundraising community to a standstill. However, amidst it all India’s hyper0growth telco Reliance Jio Platforms has put its fundraising efforts into full gear. Over the past three months, Jio has raised over $15.5 billion from a cohort of investors that include prominent financial institutions
Fly Ventures, the Berlin-based VC that invests in seed-stage European startups within enterprise and deep tech, has raised a new €53 million fund. The firm writes initial cheques of between €500,000 and €1.3 million, and says it is on the hunt for startups developing “novel, advanced technology at the cutting edge of their respective sectors.”
“Eventbrite is in the unique club that nobody wants to be in,” says CEO and co-founder Julia Hartz. “Which is the first affected and one of the most directly affected businesses of the COVID-19 era.” Hartz, who co-founded the company with her husband Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage, joined ExtraCrunch Live recently to discuss moving
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Your humble Equity team is pretty tired but in good spirits, as there was a lot to talk about this week. But, first, three things to start us off: All that said, here’s what we talked about on
Twitter does not have a team dedicated to accessibility, the company confirmed after a developer alluded to the fact. It’s a baffling omission for a company that employs some 4,000 people and a CEO who is often heard talking about doing the right thing. This is not to say that Twitter is a wasteland for
Headless CMS company Contentful today announced that it has raised an $80 million Series E funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and a number of other new and existing investors. With this, the company has now raised a total of $158.3 million and a Contentful spokesperson tells me
French regulation on hate speech on online platforms has been widely deemed as unconstitutional by France’s Constitutional Council, the top authority in charge of ruling whether a new law complies with the constitution. It won’t come into effect as expected in the coming weeks. As a reminder, the original law said that online platforms should
Jul.30 — Gary Vaynerchuk, co-founder of VaynerMedia LLC, weighs in on who will get to a $1 trillion valuation first: Apple or Amazon. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Early-stage founders, July 21 – 22 is coming up fast and that means it’s time get ready for TC Early Stage — the virtual startup conference designed with you in mind. We’ve packed this two-day event with more than 50 breakout sessions covering topics and issues early-stage startup founders need to succeed — even more
Matt Martin Contributor Matt Martin is CEO and co-founder of Clockwise, a San Francisco-based software company. More posts by this contributor Recession-proof your software engineering career It all started with an email from a customer: “Do you know why Bain Capital Ventures is reaching out to me about Clockwise?” That email would mark the beginning
While a French online hate speech law has just been derailed by the country’s top constitutional authority on freedom of expression grounds, Germany is beefing up hate speech rules — passing a provision that will require platforms to send suspected criminal content directly to the Federal police at the point it’s reported by a user.
Loodse, a German Kubernetes automation platform, announced today that it was rebranding as Kubermatic. While it was at it, the company also announced that it was open sourcing its Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform as open source under the Apache 2.0 License. Co-founder Sebastian Scheele says that his company’s Kubernetes solution can provision clusters and applications on
France’s top court for administrative law has dismissed Google’s appeal against a $57M fine issued by the data watchdog last year for not making it clear enough to Android users how it processes their personal information. The State Council issued the decision today, affirming the data watchdog CNIL’s earlier finding that Google did not provide
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,
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,