Fundings and Exits

In its quest to turn the culinary talents of passionate home cooks into small businesses, Shef, a chef-to-consumer marketplace, is now taking those efforts nationwide. Shef works with local cooks making authentic, homemade dishes and provides them with business tools, like menu formation and pricing, photography, how to create their bios and how to market

On a recent winter morning in New Delhi, Rajan Anandan and Pieter Kemps were pacing on the floor of a five-star hotel, quizzing a group of over two dozen young startup founders about their goals. One founder set eyes on getting the most downloads in the mobile gaming category. Another pledged to reach an annual

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. TikTok just can’t dodge the watchful eyes of the watchmen: Earlier this year, Taylor reported that a string of universities banned TikTok from devices. Last week, Paul reported that the European Commission

SoLo Funds has acquired over 1 million registered users and over 1.3 million downloads to make it “the largest and first Black-owned personal finance platform” to do so, Rodney Williams, co-founder and president of SoLo, told TechCrunch. The community finance company defines the claim “as a business-to-consumer personal finance banking solution, U.S.-based and Black-owned with

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. There’s another episode out of Inside Startup Battlefield, the podcast mini-documentary getting a behind-the-scenes look at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield. Maggie just dropped the new EP: Getting to know the Battlefield 200.

Emily Kramer is well known in the marketing world, both for her professional expertise and her voice. The entrepreneur was Carta’s former VP of marketing, and made headlines in 2020 when she filed a lawsuit that accused the company of gender discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination and of violating the California Equal Pay Act. Now, three

We’ve all looked at our credit card statements and seen the reference numbers that are just a string of letters, numbers and symbols that don’t mean much to the average consumer. Most times the statement shows where something was purchased and the company, but what happens when a company’s name on the statement doesn’t match

It takes a particular kind of chutzpah go up against the behemoths, especially when it comes to AR glasses. We already have Microsoft’s Hololens and Google Glass is being marketed as an enterprise device. But ThirdEye thinks its up for the challenge. ThirdEye is a spin-off of a project for the Department of Defense. Stealthily,

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. Talking to Storj about its new version made me curious about decentralized storage. On the one hand, there are factors that could help

It’s Friday (or should I say, Fri-yay.) You’ve made it. Give yourself a pat on the back — and then go read the rest of this issue of Week in Review, TechCrunch’s newsletter summing up the past seven days in tech (sign up here to get it directly in your inbox every Saturday). I’ll continue

Concerns about high burn rates among tech startups are not new; they did not spring into being suddenly in the fourth quarter of 2021, the final three-month period of the most recent startup boom. If you rewind the clock to 2014, investors were worried about tech startups losing too much money. Comments from Bill Gurley

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. Folks, we’ve got some really sad news for you. The weekend is here, which means that you have to stop working for a couple days. We know, it’s a tragedy. But don’t

Will your startup go public and grab a giant slice of your market, or is it a value-add that will be gobbled up by a hard-charging unicorn? “When you can’t quite make it to product-market fit, there’s a third choice that too many entrepreneurs, and their investors, overlook: selling out,” says Kittu Kolluri, founder and

Linda Greub Contributor When most people think of venture capitalists, they often think of investors, the people writing checks to fund startups. But that image is only one part of venture capital. In order to make those investments, venture firms must first have the money, which means they’re not only just the funders, they’re fundraisers,

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 Thursday, landlubbers and salty sea dogs! We’ve got some fun updates from the events team — Lauren S announced the TechCrunch Early Stage Audience Choice winners. And if you get all

There’s a pretty decent chance you’ve heard of a little company called Uber. It was a Crunchies finalist back in 2011 (for Best Location Application, alongside Runkeeper, Foursquare, Airbnb and Grindr), and it’s been doing rather well ever since. As I am writing this, Uber has a $69 billion market cap (nice) and it’s a global superstar

Leslie Crowe Contributor Leslie Crowe is talent partner at Bain Capital Ventures, where she provides strategic counsel to the firm’s portfolio companies on scaling successfully. There is no way to sugarcoat it: For many founders, 2022 was a tough year to be a boss, and 2023 is not shaping up to be any easier. The

Byju’s is weighing whether to wind down WhiteHat Jr, a coding platform that it acquired over two years ago at an enterprise value of $300 million, as the edtech group looks to cut expenses and eliminate a business unit that has drawn considerable criticism to the firm. The Bengaluru-headquartered firm, India’s most valuable startup at

Startups hoping to raise a nine-figure round in the future had best temper their ambition; venture funding events worth $100 million or more are going extinct — quickly. A few years back, nine-figure venture funding events were common. So much so that during my Crunchbase News days, we started to call them “supergiant” rounds to

Finch, a platform that helps companies connect to various HR apps, services and systems, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B round co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with participation from QED Investors, Altman Capital and PruVen Capital. Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Zhang says the new cash will be put

Tracksuit, a New Zealand-based brand tracking startup, wants to take on traditional market research players by offering a more affordable, accessible brand insights tool. “Market research and brand tracking has been around for a long time, and it usually consists of a consultant coming in on a quarterly or biannual basis with a 100-page slide

There’s a long history of choosing potential profits over doing the right thing Rebecca Szkutak 9 hours If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that VCs let their portfolio companies get away with a lot. No balance sheet? No problem; here’s a $32 billion valuation. No proven product-market fit and your last venture

Caroline Hogan Contributor Many startups are feeling the pressure in today’s uncertain economic climate, but for SaaS companies, the next 12 months could present major opportunities for growth: 70% of small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) globally are reporting higher investments in technology this year, according to Gartner Digital Markets. But businesses are changing where, how

Strive is an online learning platform that teaches kids to code, but it wants to do more than just that. Developed with an active learning model that lets students take the lead in classes, Strive wants to instill in them a lifelong love of STEM subjects. The Singapore-based startup announced today that it has raised

Cory Siskind Contributor My company just had its best quarter ever. As its founder and CEO, I am proud to say that I wasn’t there for most of it. I had a good excuse, though: I was on parental leave raising my first child. Since starting this company, I had not taken more than one

Startups are essentially machines that build MVPs (minimum viable products) that help answer questions and gradually de-risk the value proposition of the company. The key is that every MVP a company builds needs to be laser focused on answering a very particular question. If it does anything more than that, it’s time and effort wasted.

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. After tech’s massive exodus of talent, we’re starting to see laid-off talent start companies that are ambitious and aspirational in aim. I’m talking about the

A competitor slide is your opportunity to shine as a founder Haje Jan Kamps 1 day “We don’t have competitors,” some founders say. Or they might downplay how big a threat their competition is, assuming that talking about competition at all will ruin the magic spell they’re trying to cast over investors. But talking about

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. Okay, NOW it’s Friday. Got any fun plans for the long weekend? Haje is moving house (ugh), and Christine is browsing GIFs of puppies until her battery runs out. Probably. Most people

Achieving product-market fit (PMF) arguably ranks as both the No. 1 strategic objective and the biggest challenge for early-stage founders. Hitting this critical milestone tells you — and any investors you hope to attract — that there’s consistent, enthusiastic demand for your product. Everyone defines PMF differently, and that fact alone makes finding yours a