Fundings and Exits

Andreessen Horowitz’s partner Joshua Lu knows that, in the video game industry, you can never get too comfortable. When he was head of product at Zynga, he experienced the height of mobile games, working on hits like Words with Friends; then as a vice president at Blizzard Entertainment, he helped produce tentpole hits like Diablo

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Startups globally have faced challenges over the last couple of years when trying to exit, due to factors like a frozen IPO market and reduced attractiveness to buyers. In addition, large mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) deals have faced heightened regulatory scrutiny, particularly involving Big Tech or multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. Notably, a decline in venture investment within any startup

The South Korean startup ecosystem has grown over the last decade as major tech firms and venture capital from the West has sought to make inroads in the country. No surprise there: South Korea has long been one of Asia’s strongest economies. Startups here have enjoyed good access to funding, benefiting from Big Tech companies

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Stock-trading startup Public has acquired the brokerage accounts of Carta’s secondaries business, TechCrunch has confirmed. Carta, best known for its cap table management software, sits on a stockpile of data. It tried to expand into the bubbling hot secondary marketplace brokerage business, but in January, a startup customer publicly accused Carta of using the startup’s

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. This week was a bit of a carryover from the one before as Bolt’s drama keeps unfolding — another story to be continued. But capital also flew

A new service from the makers of the Mammoth app for Mastodon intends to bring the creator economy to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Sub.club, launching on Thursday, will allow creators on Mastodon — a decentralized Twitter/X rival — to offer paid subscriptions and content by way of premium feeds. In

Atlassian on Thursday announced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered meeting notetaker, screen recording tool and video hub. The company plans to integrate Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million last October. But maybe even more importantly, it also plans to integrate it into its recently launched Rovo

One of the people who successfully sued the National Association of Realtors (NAR) to change real estate commissions has co-founded a new real estate startup. It all began in 2017 when Josh Sitzer and his wife listed their home for sale in Kansas City. The couple was frustrated by the fact they had to pay

Fluid Truck, a startup that was founded to disrupt the commercial vehicle rental industry, has ousted its sibling co-founders – CEO James Eberhard and chief legal counsel Jenifer Snyder – according to sources familiar with the matter. The shakeup, which employees have described as a hostile takeover, was led by two minority investors on the

Last December, OpenAI announced it was opening applications for its second cohort of a six-week accelerator program it had kicked off in 2022. Then things grew very quiet. But OpenAI’s Converge 2 startup accelerator program did indeed take place, according to two sources familiar with the program. TechCrunch also confirmed that the Open AI Startup

After a long week of coding, you might assume San Francisco’s builders would retreat into the Bay Area’s mountains, beaches or vibrant clubbing scene. But in reality, when the week stops, the AI hackathons begin. In the last few years, San Francisco has exploded with AI hackathons. On any given Saturday or Sunday, technologists give

San Francisco-based data infrastructure startup Cribl has raised $319 million in a Series E funding tranche led by new investor GV (Google’s corporate venture arm) with participation from GIC, CapitalG, IVP and CRV. Bringing Cribl’s total raised to $600 million, the cash injection values the company at $3.5 billion — up around 40% from Cribl’s

In Latin American countries like Brazil and Chile, messaging platform WhatsApp has become one of the most popular apps to use to buy things online. It was even the e-commerce platform of choice in the region during the pandemic. But WhatsApp is designed to be a messaging platform, not an e-commerce site. A startup called

Some believe open source AI is a way to break out of the familiar proprietary software quagmire that the technology has predictably fallen into. Hugging Face’s Irene Solaiman and AI2’s Ali Farhadi will discuss this complex issue on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 — taking place in San Francisco from October 28-30. AI may

Inflection will cap free access to its AI chatbot Pi in the coming months, the startup tells TechCrunch. Users can also now export their conversations off the AI chatbot, as the new CEO shifts the company’s focus toward enterprise products. The usage caps come just a year after Inflection raised $1.3 billion to build out

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Mical Jeanlys-White built WealthMore out of frustration.  She spent years on Wall Street, building products at American Express and serving as a managing director at JPMorgan Chase. She realized the finance industry still had a long way to go when it came to helping consumers build and understand wealth.  “Seventy percent of Americans do not

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. Despite it being summer, this week was rich with announcements. Let’s dive in. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits: Niharika Kulkarni / NurPhoto / Getty Images No two businesses

This week on Equity are some deals that are unusual for a few reasons — some good, some… well, we’ll find out. First up is the $80 million round for Story, which is trying to apply that ol’ web3 magic to AI and talent management. As one investor puts it, “What Bitcoin did for money

Small businesses and startups often lack a dedicated travel desk, forcing executives and founders to rely on human assistants or consuming and cumbersome travel apps. Expedia’s former SVP of consumer product, Michael Gulmann, is betting on AI to bridge the gap. His company, Otto, emerges from stealth Thursday, with plans to launch an alpha version

When you really probe venture capitalists about investing in AI startups, they’ll tell you that businesses are experimenting wildly but are very slow to add AI solutions into their ongoing business processes.  But there are some exceptions. And one of them appears to be an area known as AI sales development representatives, or AI SDRs.

When advertising agencies create ads for clients, they don’t just make one advert, but potentially hundreds of iterations for a ream of platforms, and that can be pretty manually intensive. Creatopy, which automates ad-creation using AI, has now raised a $10 million Series A co-led by European VCs 3VC (based out of Austria) and Point

Meet Starpath, a startup that wants to make it possible for you to live on Mars one day.  Starpath is building robots that it hopes will be able to autonomously mine liquid oxygen from the moon. That liquid oxygen can then be used to develop fuel for spacecrafts, which could make it possible for humans

FireHydrant, an NYC incident management startup that launched in 2019, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Blameless, a former competitor. The companies did not share the purchase price. Both companies help SREs (site reliability engineers) deal with the daunting job of keeping software and websites up and running. When things go wrong, they help

Fabric Cryptography, a hardware startup by MIT and Stanford dropouts (and married couple) Michael Gao and Tina Ju, wants to make modern cryptographic techniques like zero-knowledge proof (which lets you prove things without giving up exactly what you know) and fully homomorphic encryption (which enables you to work with encrypted data without decrypting it) ubiquitous.

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a new wave of AI companies. It also brought attention to the companies that were already building in the space like Etched. Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast that his company “stands on the shoulders of giants.” While

Construction companies deal with a lot of documents — so many that it can be difficult to process and manage them all. According to one recent survey, a third of construction professionals found accessing documents to be a challenge in completing a project, while a fourth said that inaccurate project paperwork has contributed to a

ElevenLabs, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, is making its Reader app available across the world with support for 32 languages. The app, first released in June in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, lets users upload any text content — like articles, PDF documents or e-books — and listen