Fundings and Exits

For the past year, everyone’s been predicting that the muted exit environment and bone-dry funding market would bring a reckoning for many late-stage companies. We’ve been seeing layoffs and cost-cutting measures across the board as companies look to shore up their balance sheets. And now, an increasing number of companies are raising money at lower

Rapid (previously known as RapidAPI), a startup that built out an API marketplace valued at $1 billion last year, has laid off another 70 employees less than two weeks after letting go of 50% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned. An affected employee who wished to remain anonymous told TechCrunch that just 42 people remain

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Fri-Yay! If you’ve got some time on your hands today, get your Disrupt tickets — early-bird savings end in 7 days! Also, it seems a little daft to pick a fight against

Most early-stage startup founders, investors, technologists and all-around aficionados recognize and appreciate a great deal. We’re flagging this one, folks, because you have just one week left to take advantage of early-bird pricing on all passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place on September 19–21 in San Francisco. Disrupt is the startup world’s big tent,

Small to medium-sized enterprises contribute 60% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product. But companies in the D2C space still struggle to compete against bigger brands. Praktis wants to put them on a more level playing field. The startup, which handles everything from raw material purchases to order fulfillment for D2C brands and suppliers, announced today it

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Why, hello, Crunchers! We’re excited to tell you that today is Thursday! How fabulously exciting. Over on TC+, Haje has been hard at work trying to create the Perfect Pitch Deck. Oh,

It’s been over a year since macroeconomic headwinds started wreaking havoc on venture capital. Late-stage startups were the first to feel the blow, but the impacts continued to creep lower as 2022 went on. Now in 2023, it seems the uncertainty has made its way down to the seed stage — for some companies, at

Many employee engagement and retention tools were created with the assumption that workers spent most of their time at desks. But the majority of the global workforce is deskless, meaning that they are usually on the move and don’t have constant access to a laptop. A lot of them are also dissatisfied with their jobs,

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Wednesday is here, and we’re still getting excited about Disrupt later in the year. African startups: We’d love for you to apply to Startup Battlefield 200, and we’ve also opened our sale

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a duo, think about their work and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha Mascarenhas interviewed Sam Chaudhary, CEO and co-founder of ClassDojo,

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. May the twoth be with you — we never did understand that joke, to be honest. Maybe one of y’all can explain it to us. There’s still a bit of time left

Terrific news for anyone who lacks either the time or the budget to go whole-hog at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 19–21 in San Francisco. We’ve just released a fresh batch of Expo+ passes into the wild, so to speak. It’s a great option for anyone interested in seeing the next generation of early-stage startups

Citymapper is lowering the paywall around its premium features and introducing a new subscription plan purely for removing ads. The move comes less than two months after the popular transit and travel planning app was scooped up by mobility tech company Via. London-based Citymapper, which gives city-dwellers real-time transport and routing information across hundreds of

Ann Lai, a general partner at Bullpen Capital, has been fired from the firm, she says. The investor described the termination experience as “discriminatory and retaliatory” in a LinkedIn post published on Monday. Lai helped raise Bullpen Capital’s most recent fund, a $145 million investment vehicle, the first investment vehicle in which she was named

You blinked, and suddenly there are only two weeks left to apply to the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. Maybe you meant to submit — or finish — your application, but life is full of distractions. So consider this a timely reminder about the magnitude of this high-visibility opportunity. Don’t let it slip

Michael Dombrowski Contributor Michael Dombrowski is the corporate treasury lead at Rho and an investment advisor representative specializing in fixed-income investments and corporate cash management. The recent banking sector developments that sent founders scrambling for places to diversify their cash reserves left markets wondering if the Fed would follow these events with another rate hike.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, scientists, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs. It’s where you’ll find inspiration, gain knowledge, forge new relationships and discover tools to help you build

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within. The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken,

Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license when you left the house, but these days it’s not so easy: Identity fundamentally underpins how we engage with the digital world, and identity services can take on many forms (and, unfortunately, abuses). I’m excited to host a TechCrunch Live event with Persona

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Tech’s guiding principles these days aren’t too difficult to find: discipline, focus and cash conservation. But I’ve always found those same focuses to be especially in conflict with

Social media can be a great tool for startups to gain visibility and garner a following among investors and customers, but coming up with a winning strategy may seem like a daunting task. Each platform mandates a different strategy and comes with its own set of guidelines. More importantly, each draws an audience specific to

OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has picked up new backers, TechCrunch has learned. VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global picking up new shares, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have

I celebrated a friend’s birthday with a large group a few days ago and realized how hard it is to tell who can’t carry a tune when the entire room is singing the same song. The same holds true for B2B SaaS startups: because so many are generally focused on LTV:CAC ratios, it can be

Gary Sabin Contributor Most conversations around personas happen with the marketing or product teams. These groups use personas to define typical customers by their demographics, likes, values, backgrounds, goals, challenges, aspirations, etc. A persona profile includes a picture and some statements representing the person. It might include where to reach that person, especially for marketing

Founded in 2014, Blossom Finance was first intended for Muslim entrepreneurs in the United States. The microfinancing platform connects investors with small businesses using mudarabah, a shariah-compliant profit-sharing agreement. But founder Matthew Joseph Martin soon realized that the startup, backed by investors like Boost VC and Tim Draper, was serving a relatively niche market in

Chief, a professional network designed for women in leadership, has cut 14% of staff, or 43 jobs today, saying in an email seen by TechCrunch that the move is a response to the economy and that the outfit is restructuring to further focus on member experience. The layoff largely hit Chief’s U.S. employees as the

Igor Shaverskyi Contributor A finance nerd with a decade of experience across various industries, Igor Shaverskyi is a partner at Waveup, where he helps startups fulfill their growth potential. The VC landscape has undergone a tectonic shift in the past year. A year ago, 90% of VC meetings with startups would have been about growth,

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hi, folks! It’s Wednesday, and we’re running around like crazy, so let’s get to it! Wooooo! — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Can you see it?: Enterprise security company Lookout

The Exchange goes hunting to understand what a key group of fintech startups may be worth – or not Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 8 hours While the banking world watches American lender First Republic publicly convulse after its earnings report detailed a widespread evaporation of its deposit base, the startup world of neobanks is taking

Lookout’s long-running transition to becoming an enterprise security company is all but complete, revealing today that it’s selling its consumer mobile security business to Finland’s F-Secure. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded out of Boston in 2009, Lookout originally started out as a consumer-focused smartphone security and data backup business, garnering millions of