Fundings and Exits

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex enjoyed the warming climate and the fact that there are some positive vibes in the venture market as well. Hell, we even had a nine-figure round

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. Happy Thursday, Crunchers! If you’ve been to Disrupt before, you’ll remember we had a stage or two or three. This year, we’re going all out, with a bunch of tracks to tickle

Alex Circei Contributor Alex Circei is the CEO and co-founder of Waydev, a development analytics tool that measures engineering teams’ performance. More posts by this contributor Insider hacks to streamline your SOC 3 certification application 4 lessons I learned about getting into Y Combinator (after 13 applications) While the past few years saw a big

Generative AI, particularly text-to-image AI, is attracting as many lawsuits as it is venture dollars. Two companies behind popular AI art tools, Midjourney and Stability AI, are entangled in a legal case that alleges they infringed on the rights of millions of artists by training their tools on web-scraped images. Separately, stock image supplier Getty Images

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. Good morning, you glorious souls. Have you stretched today? As you’re settling in for the newsletter and the top stories from TechCrunch for today, can you grab yourself a glass of water?

The pace at which new billion-dollar startups are minted is in freefall. Given what we’ve seen recently concerning the late-stage funding market, we shouldn’t be shocked. As late-stage dollars retreat and capital served up in mega-rounds — deals worth $100 million or more — evaporates, the fuel that once lifted many a startup rocket into

General Atlantic has poured another $100 million in PhonePe, three months after leading a $350 million investment in the Indian fintech startup that has so far raised $750 million in an ongoing financing round. Walmart-backed PhonePe disclosed the investment in a filing with the local regulator on Wednesday. A company spokesperson confirmed the investment. The

When Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse was first unfolding, a belated disclosure colored some of the chaos: The bank spent most of last year without a chief risk officer, and the one who left sold more than $4 million of stock in the bank before departing. The new CRO, Kim Olson, who joined in January 2023,

Kobie Fuller, a partner at Upfront Ventures, had a notion that there are certain characteristics that every successful enterprise software company shares. You might think that’s not something that’s easily quantifiable or identifiable, maybe just something that any investor knows or senses when they see it. But Fuller decided to sit down and figure out

Legit Group, a cloud kitchen brand operator based in Jakarta, has its eyes on the rest of Indonesia after raising a $13.7 million Series A. The round was led by MDI Ventures, the venture capital arm of PT Telcom Indonesia Tbk, the largest telecom conglomerate in Indonesia. It included participation from Sinar Mas Digital Ventures

OfficeBanao, an Indian startup offering a workspace interiors platform to businesses in the country, has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed. In India’s competitive workspace interior market, traditional providers have long dominated the landscape, often requiring substantial investment of time and resources for clients to achieve their desired results. Furthermore, many of

Reach Capital, one of the first venture firms to focus exclusively on edtech, closed its last investment vehicle during an unprecedented boom within tech. The San Francisco-based venture firm saw an increase in digital infrastructure, remote learning and society’s ever fickle attention as an opportunity — and unsurprisingly, those same tailwinds then helped Reach close

ShelfLife’s founder learned that it doesn’t always go as planned Ron Miller 7 hours A startup begins as an idea, an inkling. Maybe the founder sees a pain point and thinks they can solve it with a bit of technology and shift an industry, but it doesn’t always go quite as planned. That’s what ShelfLife

I’m excited to announce the co-founder and CEO of Habi, Brynne McNulty Rojas, is joining me on an extra-special edition of TechCrunch Live on April 12 at 12 p.m. PDT. Brynne leads the hot real estate startup out of Colombia, which reached unicorn status last year with a $200 million raise. The topic is uncertainty.

That will be VC’s biggest fundraising question in 2023 Rebecca Szkutak 11 hours One of the biggest venture capital trends of the last few years was early-stage firms raising “opportunity” funds to make follow-on investments into their most successful bets. But amid a tougher fundraising market that impacts both VCs and startups, muted exit environment

It’s that time of the week, folks: Week in Review (WiR) time. If you’re new to WiR, it’s the newsletter where TechCrunch recaps the week in tech that was. We get it — you’re a busy person. We all are. So what better way to catch up on what’s happened than in a summarized, bullet-point

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. Y Combinator’s new era, with smaller batches, a refocus only on early-stage investing and a new chief executive, is in full swing. As The TechCrunch team sat through

You don’t need to move to San Francisco to launch a startup, but working here does have some advantages: moderate weather, natural beauty, great food, and sure, the world’s largest concentration of venture capital. Y Combinator’s Demo Day took place this week, and although the event itself was virtual-only, 86% of the founders in YC’s

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. Hello, and welcome to your Friday. Did the week drag on, or did it go by quickly for you? Or maybe you had today off. No matter, I’m here to bring you

I got excited — very excited — when I found out that Substack’s equity crowdfunding effort would result in it releasing financial results. Sadly, due to rules and the timing of the fundraise, Substack is not required to detail its financials for 2022, and so the startup released hard data for 2020 and 2021 along

Over 20,000 applications flew into Y Combinator, which ended up plucking out 282 startups for its latest batch. And now we’re getting our first look at them through Demo Day. The first day’s demos included a healthy dose of artificial intelligence and open source, which is different from years past that were dominated by new

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. Well, hello there! Haje is getting a head start on the weekend, so it’s going to be me and you for the next two days. I’ve been among the group of TechCrunchers

Staytuned Digital has $34 million in new equity and debt to continue developing a software suite for e-commerce brands with a goal of what co-founder Serge Kassardjian described as “the Salesforce suite for e-commerce stores.” “E-commerce has completely shifted and is moving to these emerging platforms, with Shopify being the biggest one,” he said. “In

Venture capital has traditionally been an industry that revolves around relationships. VCs invest in a startup’s idea but their conviction stems from the folks behind it. This largely makes sense because investing in a startup also usually entails entering a years-long relationship. But backing companies based on the allure of the founder hasn’t always worked

Lux Capital, known for investing in life science and frontier tech startups, is back in the market to fundraise for its latest vehicle — but this time without a dedicated late-stage entity. The firm is targeting over $1 billion for Lux Ventures VIII, according to meeting materials from the New Mexico State Investment Council (NM

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that has launched the likes of Instacart, Stripe and Airbnb, has broadened its investing lens in recent years, backing companies all over Africa and India, and beyond. As the tech downturn has continued, though, Y Combinator has shrunk its cohort size, stepped back from late-stage investing, and brought on a

Indian electric mobility startup Magenta Mobility has closed a $22 million Series A1 round, backed by $11 million each from Morgan Stanley India Infrastructure and BP Ventures. Magenta will use the all-equity investment to boost its existing logistics and last-mile delivery fleet operations. The Navi Mumbai-headquartered startup has a fleet of 800 three-wheeled electric cargo

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. Happy Tuesday Crunch, our crunchy compatriots. Today, there’s a ton of fun events-based updates for you. If you’re coming to Early Stage in Boston, Pitch to VCs there. Also, if you want

What is a fair price premium for a quickly growing startup? The answer is constantly changing, but recent history teaches us that it’s probably not more than 200% over public-market comps. It may even be closer to 100%. It’s not an academic question. Where the startup price premium benchmark settles this year could help determine

Data has emerged as one of the world’s greatest resources, underpinning everything from video-recommendation engines and digital banking, to the burgeoning AI revolution. But in a world where data has become increasingly distributed across locations, from databases to data warehouses to data lakes and beyond, combining it all into a compatible format for use in