Fundings and Exits

Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras is currently working to raise over a billion dollars in a weekend to help fund an emergency bridge credit line that he believes will help startup customers impacted by Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse be able to make payroll next week. Dubugras declined to comment on how much capital has been committed

Brett Adcock Contributor Brett Adcock is the founder of Figure, an AI robotics company building a general-purpose humanoid robot. Previously, he founded Archer Aviation, an urban air mobility company that went public at $2.7B and Vettery, a machine learning-based talent marketplace that was acquired for $110M. Yesterday, the U.S. experienced its second-largest bank failure in

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. Writer’s note: We’re breaking from our usual formatting this week because there was a once-in-a-generation collapse of one of the biggest banks in the country.

The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which served as lifeblood for startups, is also impacting firms 8,000 miles away. Dozens of young Indian startups backed by the likes of YC, Accel, Sequoia India, Lightspeed, SoftBank and Bessemer Venture Partners banked with Silicon Valley Bank, sometimes as their only banking partner, and couldn’t take out

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hi, Crunchers, Today, there’s only one story on everyone’s lips: The sudden and dramatic collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 40-year-old Silicon Valley institution. With $209 billion of assets under management

TechCrunch is currently busy reporting the hell out of the SVB crisis, but as we sort out the competitive landscape and learn more about how founders and their VC partners are reacting, I have a question: How are startups going to pay for stuff while the mess is sorted out? According to the government, “insured

Shares of Silicon Valley Bank are down sharply Thursday in the wake of the company’s announcement that it is raising additional capital by selling stock, taking a charge to roll over an asset portfolio to higher-yielding assets and extending its term-borrowing capacity. Given recent banking-related carnage in the tech and tech-adjacent worlds, there’s concern in

Some of Silicon Valley Bank’s customers are struggling to transfer funds out of their bank accounts, numerous sources tell TechCrunch. The seeming wave of attempted withdrawals comes after SVB announced yesterday that it lost $1.8 billion in the sale of U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities that it had invested in, owing to rising interest rates.

Welcome to our 40th Pitch Deck Teardown! Goodness, time flies. Of those 40, just three were angel rounds, so today, we’ll take apart the angel deck of MiO Marketplace, a platform for media publishers and buyers. The company raised $550,000 at a $3.6 million pre-money valuation. Breakdown of the pitch deck teardowns to date. Image

Using data to make better decisions faster helps startups in the crowded SaaS space improve product development, identify hidden market opportunities and complete work with fewer false steps, important priorities as these startups seek out a piece of the booming SaaS market, projected to increase by 19.7% over the next six years.   A Singapore- and

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Happy International Women’s Day! Did you know that the holiday was adopted by the UN 46 years ago? We read the Wikipedia article about IWD, and learned stuff. Try it — you

The tools of modern cinema have become increasingly accessible to independent and even amateur filmmakers, but realistic CG characters (like them or not) have remained the province of big-budget projects. Wonder Dynamics aims to change that with a platform that lets creators literally drag and drop a CG character into any scene as if it

Meet Elyn, a new French startup that recently raised a $2.7 million (€2.5 million) pre-seed funding round led by Headline and Sequoia Arc. The company wants to offer some flexibility when it comes to e-commerce online payments. Instead of paying for items before they are even shipped, Elyn lets customers try before you buy something.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hellooooo, Crunchers! We’re back for another round of tech news from your very favorite news site. It’s been a busy news day, and Haje is on deadline trying to finish this week’s

Approximately one in three restaurants will go out of business in its first year. For construction companies, that figure rises to 53%. But AI projects are the real heartbreakers: A Gartner study found that 85% are destined to fail “due to bias in data, algorithms or the teams responsible for managing them.” Unfortunately, the profound

Cash management — tracking who needs to pay an invoice and whether it’s been done — can make or break a business. Now, a startup building SaaS software to help finance departments manage this more intelligently is announcing some funding to expand after seeing strong demand. Growfin, a Singapore- and San Francisco–based fintech startup that

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. We hope you’re meeting the week with open arms, crunchers, and that the week loves you right back. Unrequited love from abstract conceptual measurements of time are so heartbreaking. Let’s kick this

Welcome to the final episode of Inside Startup Battlefield. Thank you so much for listening to our miniseries all about TechCrunch’s pitch competition. Now, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for — the winner is announced! In this episode, we get to know the winner of the 2022 Startup Battlefield competition. We’ll hear what’s

Last month, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest startup by private valuation, was involved in a hack that resulted in over ₦2.9 billion (~$4.2 million) missing from its accounts, according to local tech publication Techpoint Africa. According to the documents seen by the publication and reviewed by TechCrunch, unknown actors transferred the funds across 28 accounts in 63 transactions

To be successful, a business needs to have a plan for revenue in the short term and profitability in the long. Early-stage founders might be tempted to come up with half a dozen ways the company could make money. Don’t fall into temptation: Five unproven solutions don’t make one actual solution. Having said that, sometimes

TGIF, my TechCrunch homies. It’s that time of week again — the time for Week in Review, where we recap the past five days in tech news. As always, lots happened, so let’s dig in sans delay. Well, perhaps with a slight delay. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that TechCrunch Early Stage, TechCrunch’s

Time is running out for you to score the biggest savings on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 — the original and always-evolving conference dedicated to early-stage startups. Beat the March 10 deadline, and you’ll save up to $1,000 on General Admission, Founder, and Investor passes. Students and nonprofits — grab a deeply discounted pass for

Substack, a publishing platform known for its newsletter service, announced this week that it had crossed the 2 million paid subscription mark. Given the wealth of historical data we have concerning the growth of paid subscribers at Substack, the number got our attention. Substack’s simple business model also makes it possible to generate a few

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello, you crunchy Crunchers! If you’ve been slacking and not bought yourself a Disrupt ticket yet, that’s cool, we still love you. But here’s a hot tip: This is your last chance

The Northeast, and New England in particular, is known for its plethora of top colleges and universities. These hallowed halls contain multitudes of future entrepreneurs and, if you’re one of them, you can’t afford to rest on your laurels. Get yourself to TechCrunch Early Stage, a summit for early and aspiring founders taking place in

The best-known unicorns in the world are getting fit, showing that it is possible to trim losses while still posting growth. They are living experiments when it comes to corporations looking to get lean without cutting muscle. European fintech giant Klarna is working through a valuation reset and a change in investor priority ahead of

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. G’day, friends! Good to spend some time with you again. Come spend some time with our finely crafted words and god-awful puns. It’s a service we provide. — Christine and Haje The

Victoria Melnikova Contributor Alongside fellow Evil Martians, Victoria Melnikova builds devtools and commercial open source products and writes about her journey in tech. Despite the premise of open source software distribution being “free,” multibillion dollar companies like RedHat, MongoDB, GitLab and Elastic have already broken ground building profitable businesses with open source at their core.

Austin-based venture firm 8VC, led by controversial Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, has raised $880 million in its fifth fund. In a blog post published today, Lonsdale — who serves as 8VC’s general partner — said that his firm’s mission is “to fix a broken world.” While he did not specify which industries the new fund

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Have we told you lately that we love you? Well, we do. For ’tis March, and spring is almost here. Breathe in and check the <checks notes> smell of snow? Good heavens,