Fundings and Exits

The rise of neobanks has been fascinating to witness, as a number of companies in recent years have grown from merely challenging traditional banks to being massive players in and of themselves. Dave and Varo Bank are just two examples of such neobanks. Hear Dave co-founder and CEO Jason Wilk and Varo Bank founder and

Christina Cacioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta, will be on the SaaS Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to reveal how Vanta is redefining security and compliance automation and driving innovation through AI.  Under her leadership, Vanta has achieved a $2.45 billion valuation in just five years and has scaled rapidly to serve over 8,000 companies,

We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve finalized our dedicated Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and AI as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. To top it off, we’re thrilled to share we’ll be hosting a pitch competition this year called “The Space Challenge, powered by

Antonio Moraes, the grandson of a late prominent Brazilian billionaire, was never interested in joining the family-owned conglomerate of construction companies and a bank. Shortly after graduating from college, he founded one of Brazil’s first impact funds, which invested primarily in companies that made healthcare more accessible and affordable. But while attending Stanford University, where

Is a business coach really worth the investment? Execs often seek coaches to bolster aspects of their work, like communication skills and their productivity. At least anecdotally, these skills do appear to get better with coaching — a survey from the nonprofit International Coach Federation found that 80% of execs who hired a coach saw

OpenWeb, a New York startup whose tools help publishers engage users, has a unique problem. Its co-founding CEO reportedly won’t leave, even though it announced a new CEO. According to CTech, on Tuesday, OpenWeb’s chairman, Tim Harvey, sent an email to employees, saying he’s becoming CEO and thanking longtime CEO Nadav Shoval for his “incredible

No one likes standing in line. I was reminded of just how awful the experience can be last Saturday, while being herded like cattle through a two-hour queue for a nightclub in unseasonably cold weather. I’d not soon repeat the experience. Fortunately, there’s a startup for that. LineLeap, backed by Y Combinator, lets people pay

After multiple rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, Nuro is pivoting its business strategy to focus more on the startup’s core autonomous driving technology instead of owning and operating a fleet of low-speed, on-road delivery bots. The company said on Wednesday it would start licensing its autonomous vehicle technology to automakers and mobility providers,

Hormones play a massive role in when and how easily women can get pregnant, but research and resources in this area are lacking. Mira is looking to change that. Mira is an at-home, palm-sized hormone testing device women use to test their urine for their hormone levels. Mira’s corresponding app deciphers their results and spots

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects more than 366 million adults in the U.S. alone, according to a 2020 study, but beyond medicating with stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, there are few alternatives for people who suffer from the disorder. Therapy, education, and lifestyle changes are usually also advised, but those avenues can prove difficult

Can AI ever fully replace translators? Not likely. AI translations tend to lack the lexical richness of their human-translated counterparts, mainly because AI models make choices based on probability — not lived experience. Certainly, AI can produce “accurate” translations, but the translations lack the spice of life, like a textbook version of the source text.

While living in the U.S., the Trivedi family was looking for a solution to follow a ritual practice of worshiping at one of India’s Jyotirlingas — a holy representation of the Hindu god Shiva. After searching on YouTube for ways to offer flowers and other items ceremonially at the Indian temple one Sunday in 2023,

For some, AI fatigue is real — but clearly venture investors haven’t grown tired of the category. In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally, recent Crunchbase data found. Five of the six venture rounds of more than $1 billion raised in the first half of

Companies’ data architecture today looks nothing like it did 20 years ago, but monitoring and tracing tools haven’t followed suit, making it difficult for engineering teams to identify the root cause of errors and latency issues.  Israeli developer Eden Federman thinks the solution is distributed tracing, a more advanced observability method, but he found adoption

Elon Musk has denied a report that one of his companies, Tesla, has discussed sharing revenue with another of his companies, xAI, so that it can use the startup’s AI models. The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that under a proposed agreement described to investors, Tesla would use xAI models in its driver-assistance software (known

As a young immigrant in Brooklyn, Mo Shaikh often pondered over his father’s taxi earnings. His father would say he made $100, but Shaikh couldn’t understand why only $60 made it home. (The rest, he learned, went to intermediaries.) This early experience sparked his curiosity about financial systems, but also their shortcomings and the need

Bluesky keeps growing: The company announced that as of Friday morning, it had added 3 million new users, bringing its total user count to more than 9 million. In other words, the social platform’s user base has grown by around 50 percent in the week or so since a Brazilian court banned X (formerly Twitter).

Antonio Nuño, Fatima Alvarez, and Enrique Rodriguez have been friends since they were five years old. As teenagers, they became volunteers helping indigenous communities — first in Mexico, then in other countries — and saw that many of the women were artisans.  The trio came to realize that these artists “made very beautiful things in

BDO, the auditor for Indian edtech startup Byju’s, has resigned with immediate effect, marking the second auditor departure for the embattled startup in about a year and further intensifying concerns about its financial health and governance. In a scathing resignation letter, BDO subsidiary MSKA highlighted multiple issues with Byju’s, including significant delays in financial reporting,

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. You won’t find any Founder Mode discourse in this week’s newsletter, although the memes keep coming. Instead, here’s your usual dose of startup news, from oversized rounds,

Vay, a startup that has put a teleoperated twist to car-sharing in Berlin and Las Vegas, is expanding into commercial and business-to-business services buoyed by recent deals with French automaker Peugeot and Belgium-based Poppy. Vay isn’t a traditional ride-hailing or car-sharing startup, nor does it operate a robotaxi service. And yet, when customers in Las

Launching a phone company is a remarkably difficult — some even say foolish — thing to do. OSOM Products, which rose out of the smoldering ashes of Essential in 2020, is closing shop. Android Authority was first to report the news, after gaining access to an internal announcement from CEO Jason Keats. OSOM always had

For over two decades, Jay Chandarana relied on commercial banks to meet the day-to-day, working capital needs of his family business, the sesame seed exporter Dhaval Agri. It was an arrangement that basically worked: the company grew to have a 13% share of the country’s total exports, making it the largest sesame seed exporter in

For financial institutions, complying with regulations is becoming a costlier proposition. According to a recent poll, 76% of financial services firms increased their compliance expenditure from 2022 to 2023, with most blaming new laws. With the cost of compliance averaging out to around $10,000 per employee these days, many firms are searching for ways to

If you spend time on X or Threads, where snarky memes rise and fall, you’ve probably seen posts referencing “founder mode” over the last few days, like this: https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/C_eaQAxyIcV Or maybe this: You may even have seen this parody about “goblin mode.” The chatter ties to a recent blog post that Y Combinator founder and

Navin Chaddha, the leader and managing partner of 55-year-old VC firm Mayfield Fund, has a penchant for approaching venture investing in a way that deviates slightly from other established firms. When Mayfield raised a $955 million fund last year, Chaddha told TechCrunch the firm didn’t need a multibillion-dollar fund because “copying somebody else is strategy

At Uber, Gurjit Pannu remembers moving billions in cash across bank accounts globally, realizing almost immediately the importance of effective cash flow management.  Christian Sobkowski, meanwhile, recalls his days working in financial services, most notably at PayPal, where helped expand the company’s business across Europe. It’s no wonder then, that the two decided to come

Digital lending platforms have become an easy and swift alternative source of credit for microenterprises and individuals overlooked by traditional banking institutions. These platforms have turned into a lifeline for millions of underbanked and demand will keep growing, pushing the value of the digital lending platform market in the Middle East and Africa to reach

From idea to IPO, Disrupt charts startups at every stage on the roadmap to their next breakthrough. TechCrunch will gather some of the startup world’s leading companies — but our partners provide more than just financial support. Their presence at Disrupt gives new and prospective founders the tools, knowledge and community they need to build

Bootstrapped companies don’t come up in startup news as often as those backed by venture capital, as the former don’t have shiny funding rounds to flaunt. Fleet is a good example of a company that has never raised outside capital but has been growing steadily. The Paris-based company originally offered a way to rent hardware,