Fundings and Exits

The funding landscape in Southeast Asia is still wintery, but one fintech managed to land a major round. Kredivo Holdings, which offers credit services to underbanked consumers in Indonesia and Vietnam, has raised $270 million in what it says was an oversubscribed Series D. The round was led by Japanese bank Mizuho Bank, a subsidiary

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: How can I return

Kakao Mobility, the ride-hailing subsidiary of South Korean messaging and internet giant Kakao, has made its first acquisition as it looks to raise its international profile. It has acquired Splyt, a startup out of London that works with apps in areas like travel, ride-hailing and finance to help them build out “super app” strategies by

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, you beautiful, strong, and smart people. So glad to have you with us! Let’s get to it! — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Image prompts: Microsoft is enabling

Ryan Neu Contributor Ryan Neu is the founder and CEO of Vendr, a SaaS purchase platform. Previously, he was a B2B SaaS sales leader at both InVision and HubSpot. More posts by this contributor Surviving the SaaS tsunami: Optimize your tech stack to reduce risk and free up cash flow The “Great Restructuring” continues and

Organizations dealing with large amounts of data often struggle to ensure that data remains high-quality. According to a survey from Great Expectations, which creates open source tools for data testing, 77% of companies have data quality issues and 91% believe that it’s impacting their performance. In light of that, unsurprisingly, business has been quite healthy

Duolingo, a language learning app with over 500 million users, is working on a music app, TechCrunch has learned. The Pittsburgh-based tech company currently has a small team working on a music product and is hiring a learning scientist who is an “expert in music education who combines both theoretical knowledge of relevant learning science

For many tech companies, investors are applying a new valuation method that has caught our eye: AI proficiency. The current wave of AI hype has two main flavors that I’m interested in. First, the struggle between tech titans to create, or at least invest in and support, the latest and greatest in intelligent computing services.

Before it crashed, Silicon Valley Bank was known to many startups and venture firms as the place to park their money or take out a capital line. But for emerging managers, it was a lot more than just a financial institution. Multiple emerging managers told TechCrunch+ that SVB was instrumental in helping them build their

How to test and evaluate demand for hardware products before you crank up the factory Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours Manufacturing real-life, tangible objects that you can touch is often a lot riskier than developing software. Once you’ve created 10,000 thingamajigs, it’s far harder to make changes to them than in the software world, where

W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. It’s too early to fully anticipate all of the consequences of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. But there is one prediction I am ready

Welcome to Week in Review, folks, TechCrunch’s regular recap of the week in tech. GPT-4, OpenAI’s text- and image-understanding AI, might’ve dominated the headlines over the past few days. But fresh drama around Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse emerged as well. We cover all that and more in this edition, so grab a coffee and settle

But there are reasons to be optimistic we’ll get a good crop of public offerings Alex Wilhelm 7 hours The IPO market thus far in 2023 has been a goose egg, and we probably won’t get any interesting IPOs for another quarter or two. This is incredibly sad for your friendly, local TechCrunch+ reporting crew

When Porsche partnered with venture studio UP.Labs, the mission was to create six startups over three years all designed to solve the German automaker’s biggest problems and be compelling enough as a standalone business it that can attract other customers. On Porsche’s list: software that helps manage and automate the performance of EVs. Pull Systems,

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 Friday Crunch! There’s a persistent theory in hardware that manufacturing overseas is the cheaper/better/more efficient option. You manufacture there, assemble somewhere else, and finally approve and get to market in the

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Today, we’re celebrating Equity’s 6th birthday! Thankfully, it fell during the easiest, slowest news cycle we’ve had since the beginning of the grocery delivery wars and WeWork. Just kidding. Alex and Natasha

PhonePe has raised another $200 million as part of an ongoing round, a deliberation that has now helped it pull $650 million in recent weeks despite the market slump, as the Indian fintech giant bulks up its war chest following the recent separation from the parent firm Flipkart. Walmart, which owns the majority of PhonePe,

Sidechat, the anonymous posting platform that began blowing up last year on college campuses, appears to have acquired a rival anonymous social platform, Yik Yak. While you may recall Yik Yak’s troubles from earlier years, where bullying and harassment ultimately led to an ignominious exit in the form of an acqui-hire by Square, the gossip

In the wake of the pandemic, more and more companies are relying on independent contractors to sustain and grow their businesses — and more people are turning to freelancing. According to a Fiverr poll, 45% of businesses are using more freelancers than before the pandemic. And Fiverr rival Upwork found that 39% of the U.S.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops,

Lenskart has signed a definitive agreement to raise $500 million from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, they said Wednesday, at the height of the market slump as the Indian eyewear retailer bulks up its offerings and scales to international markets. The investment, an extension to last year’s round, helps the startup retain its $4.5 billion

Meal delivery services can save time, and typically money, but imagine getting a Michelin-star meal delivered to your home. Enter meal delivery startup Entrée. Jon Bell and Jason Weingarten launched in Chicago last July with a Michelin-trained culinary team — led by Alex Carnovale of The French Laundry — preparing restaurant-quality meals that are packaged

One Impression, an Indian influencer marketing platform that does business in markets including Indonesia, Dubai, Europe and the U.S., has raised $10 million in a funding round led by the South Korean gaming company Krafton. The Gurugram-based startup is building an Amazon-like platform to help brands quickly find relevant influencers for their marketing campaigns. It

When I moved to San Francisco, the quirky rotunda at 532 Market Street was a Sharper Image store full of plasma balls and tourists trying out massage chairs. The E*Trade branch that took over the space closed a few years ago, but last August, it got a new tenant: Silicon Valley Bank. Sigh. Downtown SF

An entrepreneur might have the best idea since sliced bread, but if they’re unable to protect it with the relevant patents, trademarks, or copyrights, then there’s a good chance they won’t see the fruits that their labor otherwise might deserve. However, the intellectual property (IP) management process is fraught with friction, from the initial idea-evaluation

The Indonesian used car market is on a course for growth fueled by a number of trends: the increasing digitization in used car sales; a larger variety of finance options; and the COVID-19 pandemic, which pushed the idea of private car ownership.  Broom, an Indonesia-based auto-financing startup that wants to help used car dealers work more

No reason to panic more over VC fund performance — yet Rebecca Szkutak 9 hours Over the last year, the venture industry has had a tough time. Many feared that the bull market had pushed valuations to unsustainable heights and would result in a windfall of startup down rounds and cash burn, which would have

Signature Bank is the second casualty of the ongoing banking crisis in the U.S. The New York-based financial institution stopped operating abruptly on Sunday — customers will be made whole. Regulators said that Signature Bank also caused a systemic risk and could threaten the U.S. banking system. In other words, the government is stepping up

As Silicon Valley Bank collapsed before our eyes on Thursday, a founder told me that the world felt like it did when COVID-19 first bared its teeth. I scoffed at his analogy at first: are we really using a still on-going and devastating pandemic to describe the fall of a prominent bank? But then I

An auction for the remaining assets of the failed Silicon Valley Bank is reportedly underway, with final bids due this afternoon and a result potentially arriving late Sunday, according to Bloomberg. Bloomberg says that the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), which stepped in and shut down SVB on Friday as it was experiencing an unprecedented