Enterprise

When Pradyut Paul was a hardware engineering program manager at Apple, he saw firsthand the challenges of building and sharing hardware products using antiquated tools like email and spreadsheets. It was after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on expedited shipping after some designs were delayed that Paul realized there had to be a better

Digital lenders that share personal data of loan defaulters, with third parties, risk license withdrawal in Kenya after lawmakers added a clause – granting the banking regulator the mandate to revoke permits of operators who breach customer confidentiality – to the new law passed by the country’s National Assembly.  Typically, loan apps collect borrowers phone

It seems like every website has a chatbot of some kind to help answer simple questions without having to wait for a customer service representative. However, sometimes in the course of connecting it may take awhile, and as your attention shifts to something else, your time expires and you have to start all over again.

Socratic, an early-stage startup that wants to bring data to bear on a developer-focused task management system, announced a $3 million seed investment today from Unusual Ventures, Overtime.vc and a couple of industry angels. The company is also opening up public beta of the software starting today. It’s worth noting that Socratic received the investment

Financial statement audits are an essential part of doing business, but often are complex and can require documentation gathering, most times requiring email correspondence back and forth between the auditor and the company for files and information to complete the task. T.C. Whittaker, co-founder and CEO of Audit Sight, says companies can spend millions of

Klarna, the global retail bank, payments and shopping service, can now add “travel agent” to that list. The company announced Friday that it acquired Inspirock, an online trip planner using artificial intelligence and local expertise to enable Klarna’s 90 million users to quickly and easily explore a destination’s offerings and create personalized itineraries. Financial terms

Android 12 is now officially available for Google’s Pixel phones and will slowly roll out to others in the coming months. Chances are, you think of Android as a consumer product, but over the course of the last few years, Google has put a lot of work into making it an enterprise tool, too. It’s

IBM has been in the midst of a strategy shift with a focus on hybrid cloud and AI since Arvind Krishna was promoted to CEO in last year. Red Hat, the software company it purchased for $34 billion in 2018 has been at the center of it all. With the company reporting earnings yesterday, the

Ishveen Anand grew up in England playing sports all of her life, including during her time at Oxford. She wanted to do something sporty for a career and “fell in love” with sponsorship marketing. However, what she found was that the process was inefficient — the sports world was slow-moving in terms of brands getting

Enterprise engagement company Countable raised $12 million in Series A funding so that brands can more easily engage with customers, even in a way that shows a brand’s values and stance on issues. Existing investor Canaan Partners led the round and was joined by Ulysses Management and Global Catalyst Partners. In total, the company has

When Twilio bought Segment last year for a hefty $3.2 billion, you knew it was going to put it to work. Today at the company’s Signal customer conference, it announced a new omni-channel marketing tool built on top of Segment called Twilio Engage. Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt says the new tool is designed to take

It’s hard to build a publishing empire, and it’s just as easy to lose one. Newspaper magnates were mostly replaced by broadcast moguls, first radio and then TV and cable, and now of course, they are all fighting against the social media tycoons and streaming impresarios who want to capture our attention. Each generation of

Having a great idea isn’t enough when you’re starting a startup. You have to execute well on that idea by making the right decisions at the right time. In particular, you have to pick the right tech stack for your product. Without a good technical foundation, you can end up accumulating a lot of technical

If you’re interested in writing a post for TechCrunch or TechCrunch+, please join the Twitter Space I’m hosting today at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT. I’ll explain our editorial guidelines, the editing process and most importantly, the criteria we use to determine whether a post creates value for readers. This Space is not a forum

In April of this year, collaborative design powerhouse Figma launched a white boarding tool called FigJam. A separate tool and brand from Figma, FigJam allows users to brainstorm and iterate together in an infinite white board experience, complete with voice service to chat it out in the very same tool. For all intents and purposes,

Expensify filed to go public late last Friday, adding its name to the growing roster of technology companies looking to list during this period of hot valuations and strong recent debuts. GitLab, for example, went public last week. The devops giant raised its price range, priced above that interval, and then shot higher once shares

Organizations that have made the leap into using big data to drive their business are increasingly looking for better, more efficient ways to share data with others without compromising privacy and data protection laws, and that is ushering in a rush of technologists building a number of new approaches to fill that need. In the

Advice is not a new concept, but Intro is putting its spin on access to in-demand experts through personalized one-on-one video calls. The Los Angeles company was founded in 2020 by entrepreneur Raad Mobrem, who previously founded Lettuce, an operating system for small businesses that was acquired by Intuit in 2014. Raad Mobrem, founder of

It’s difficult for startups on a small budget to attract executives with the knowledge base to propel them forward, but Continuum, a talent marketplace for fractional employees, doesn’t think it should be. The remote-first company, which launched today, has been quietly developing a tool that matches venture-backed companies with executives who have been-there-done-that, but don’t

Clarifai wants to bring artificial intelligence into the lives of developers, business operators and data scientists so they can automate and accelerate their model development. Matt Zeiler founded the New York-based company in 2013 focused on computer vision. Since its $30 million Series B in 2016, Clarifai has been rolling out new capabilities and products

Security cameras, for better or for worse, are part and parcel of how many businesses monitor spaces in the workplace for security or operational reasons. Now, a startup is coming out of stealth with funding for tech designed to make the video produced by those cameras more useful. Spot AI has built a software platform

Dutchie, a four-year-old, Bend, Oregon company that charges cannabis dispensaries a monthly fee to create and run their websites and manage orders, is on a roll this year, raising its second large round of funding — this time a $350 million Series D at a $3.75 billion valuation. The new valuation is more than double

Evolution Equity Partners is targeting cybersecurity and enterprise software companies for its new Evolution Technology Fund II LP for which it announced Thursday a final closing totaling $400 million. The fund was oversubscribed and included new and returning institutional investors, corporates and family offices from the United States, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Richard Seewald,

On the one-year anniversary of Copy.ai’s launch on Twitter, the company, a GPT-3 AI-powered platform that generates copywriting tools for business customers, secured another round of funding. This time, the company brought in an $11 million Series A round, led by Wing Venture Capital, with participation from existing investors Craft Ventures and Sequoia, and new

In the global race for technical talent, companies are on the hunt for ways to speed up and scale the hiring process to snap up the best candidates before their competitors get to them. Today, a company that has built a solution to help with one aspect of that — the interviewing process — is

Nexla, a company that participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in New York City in 2017, has been building its data operations startup the old fashioned way. After launching in beta and securing a $3.5 million seed at Battlefield, it has proceeded to build a cash flow positive business. Today with a firm financial foundation

On the heels of Personio raising a big round yesterday, one of its competitors and another big startup in the area of HR has also picked up some fundning. Hibob, a London-based company that targets the mid-market with an all-in-one platform that handles various human resources functions, closed a Series C of $150 million. The

Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist, has revamped its internal communication product Twist. When I first covered Twist, I said it was like Slack without the annoying distractions. With today’s redesign, the company is doubling down on that idea. The result is an opinionated tool for internal conversations that should help you focus and

The startup myth goes something like this: You launch a startup in your dorm room, get into Y Combinator, find product-market fit, experience hockey-stick growth, raise some funding and expand the platform. Somehow your revenue hurtles toward $100 million and the company valuation flies to $1 billion. All’s right with the world. In reality, though,

Alviere, an embedded finance startup that aims to help any brand deliver financial products and services to its customers and employees, announced today it has closed $70 million of new funding. In April, New York-based Alviere closed a $20 million Series A led by Viola Ventures and Viola Fintech, with the participation of CommerzVentures, Mitsubishi