Fundings and Exits

Africa’s largest innovation hub Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB), is launching a $15 million accelerator program, dubbed The Edtech Fellowship Program, to back and support 72 startups across Nigeria and Kenya over the next three years, TechCrunch has learned. According to a statement shared by the firm, the accelerator program will support and amplify the impact of

‘The buzz and momentum for these companies is unlike anything I’ve seen before’ Mary Ann Azevedo 9 hours With so many fintechs laying off staff, it can be easy to assume that the entire industry is in distress. But that’s not the case. In fact, some companies are finding opportunity in the masses of layoffs.

Getting a credit card is something most Americans take for granted. In countries such as Mexico, it’s a much more difficult and less common endeavor. In fact, less than 20% of the population has access to a form of credit, with just an estimated 10% having credit cards. In recent years, a number of startups

Natural language processing (NLP), while hardly a new discipline, has catapulted into the public consciousness these past few months thanks in large part to the generative AI hype train that is ChatGPT. Alongside other NLP models such as Hugging Face’s Transformers, and Google’s LaMDA which is set to power its ChatGPT-rival Bard, there’s a palpable

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, and welcome to Hump Day! We’ve got a ton of amazing stories for you. Some are even about You. Have you always wanted to be more conscious about where you shop

Apkudo, a Baltimore-based startup developing a platform to help manage, sell and test connected devices like smartphones and laptops, today announced that it raised $37.5 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Closed Loop Partners’ Leadership Fund and Piper Sandler Merchant Banking with participation from MissionOG, Harbert Growth, Grotech Ventures, Lavrock Ventures and

Boston has long been one of the most important startup ecosystems in the United States. With major universities and a legacy of innovation, the city is a great place to start up and run a venture-backed business. TechCrunch Live is thrilled to be hosting an event featuring Boston-local investors and founders. TC City Spotlight: Boston

Most merchants in South Korea keep track of their international shipping logistics via email until their cargo safely gets to its destination. This includes all the administrative processes, from shippers to importers, and covers logistics, customs, charges and transportation booking.  Portlogics, a South Korean digital freight forwarder that offers a robotic process automation-based forwarding management

Turning a great idea into a viable startup takes patience, perseverance and more than a little luck. But when an idea originates in a lab — whether it’s AI, biotech, robotics or another deep tech research project — things quickly become tougher and much more expensive. So, how do you navigate the tricky transition from

Aspire, the Singapore-based neobank that wants to become the financial operating system for SMEs, has raised an oversubscribed $100 million Series C round. Investors included Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital SEA, along with Paypal, Tencent, LGT Capital Partners and returning investors.  TechCrunch last covered Aspire when it raised its Series B in 2021. Founded in 2018

The Indian insurance platform InsuranceDekho has raised $150 million in a Series A funding round as the more than a decade old firm eyes merger and acquisition opportunities at a time when the market slump has engulfed most startups in the South Asian nation. Goldman Sachs Asset Management and TVS Capital co-led the 13-year-old startup’s

Highbeam, a startup that provides banking features, credit and cash flow insights to e-commerce customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in debt from TriplePoint as it looks to expand the reach of its digital product portfolio. Co-founders Samir Shergill (previously at Microsoft, McKinsey and AppNexus) and Gautam Gupta (formerly of Shopify, Venmo and

The public transport sector in Kenya is largely traditional and a majority of operators, especially those in road travel, still require their clients to physically book tickets at their offices even when making advance travel plans. Others do not have provisions for seat reservation. Looking to bridge the gap, booking platforms are emerging in the

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

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. Just because you’re a startup doesn’t mean you can be careless with the data you’re handling, but enterprise-grade compliance and privacy used to

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. “San Francisco is back!” “It never left.” “It’s been long dead.” They’re all takes, none particularly good, yet all insinuating a degree of self-importance that

Startups usually run at a deficit while designing and building the product. But companies are designed to make money, and over time, as unit economics and customer acquisition costs improve, you’ll probably tip into the blue. Maybe. Hopefully. At the very least, that’s what your investors will be betting on. So that means your business

If your marketing plan doesn’t include TikTok, YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, well, can you really call it a marketing plan? Video content is vital for driving early engagement, which is why growth expert Jonathan Martinez (formerly of Postmates, Uber and Chime) shares four tactics for getting started: Leverage creator marketplaces. Produce short-form videos. Build

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. It’s Friday, and we’re slumping back in our office chairs with a hot cup of coffee after a week that’s been as slow as mid-winter molasses. For Black History Month, we are

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, Natasha Mascarenhas, Mary Ann Azevedo and Rebecca Szkutak got on the mic Our deals of the week included a look at a large new fund focused on Africa, a startup raising big bucks to address

Last year was a good 12 months of firsts for African tech startups. For the first time, the sector attracted over 1,100 unique investors in 2022, which in turn resulted in a record fundraising haul of $6.5 billion, according to data from Partech. In fact, even some of the excesses of 2021 were eclipsed when

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. Bonjour, crunchy folks! It was a bit of a tense morning at TechCrunch HQ this morning: The news broke that the company that owns TechCrunch, Yahoo, announced it is laying off 20%

French startup Blobr raised a $5.4 million funding round (€5 million) led by German VC firm 10x Founders a couple of months ago. The company calls itself the ‘Shopify for APIs’, which is a good way to sum up what it does indeed. Companies that have an API and want to start selling API access

Uber alums’ engineering analytics startup Hatica has raised $3.7 million in a funding round led by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, they said Thursday. The San Francisco-headquartered startup aims to boost the productivity and well-being of developers by helping them better understand how they are spending their time with detailed engineering analytics. “There was

The promise of alternative meat products has been under scrutiny lately, with articles in Bloomberg and the Washington Post questioning if it’ll ever be truly embraced by consumers. Other news like the drop in Beyond Meat’s stock price and mass layoffs at Impossible Foods have cast further questions on the industry’s future. Amid all this

Jacob Beckerman, a former investment logic engineer at Bridgewater Associates, grew frustrated using standard document apps like Acrobat and Microsoft Office to print out and mark up documents. He wondered why there wasn’t a way to read and write on a PC that felt as fluid as paper, which led him to experiment with PDF

A few years ago, Richard Schrems was working as a human resources consultant in Riyadh, and at one point sought to implement a tech-solution for his clients to help them better their huge teams, but couldn’t find a localized solution. Schrems told TechCrunch he needed a system that was employee-focused, but found many of the

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Becca are joined by Keta Burke-Williams, the founder and CEO of Ourside, a direct-to-consumer fragrance company. Keta talked about what got her interested in disrupting the behemoth — and outdated — fragrance industry and what it has been like

If you’d like to invest the same way that fintech influencers, including Austin Hankwitz, WOLF Financial, Breyanna Nava and Patrick Meng do, Follow can help you do that. The new social investment platform enables users to subscribe to a creator’s financial feed and set up an investment portfolio that mimics that particular person’s investment strategy.

The uptake of customer relationship management (CRM) tools has grown immensely over the last few years such that the market size is expected to experience a 12.5% compound annual growth rate, and to be worth $145.79 billion in the next six years. This growth is largely attributable to the uptick of online merchants using CRM