Fundings and Exits

Welcome 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. Investors these days want to see not only growth, but also a path to profitability — and it isn’t always easy for venture-backed startups

Sylvain Kalache Contributor Sylvain Kalache is the co-founder of Holberton, an edtech company training digital talent in more than 10 countries. An entrepreneur and software engineer, he has worked in the tech industry for more than a decade. Part of the team that led SlideShare to be acquired by LinkedIn, he has written for CIO

Back in January, Natasha covered Juro’s Series B round, which added $23 million to its coffers. Juro aims to put an end to contract negotiation madness, moving the workflows out of Microsoft Word and a handful of other sub-par tools to an all-in-one, web-based platform for contract negotiation-to-signature workflow. It seems like a very good

Last week, Ramp sent a message to crypto companies using its corporate card services saying that it is significantly lowering spending limits and mandating new requirements. Some users were temporarily suspended from spending altogether. “In light of recent unprecedented events in the cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFT and DeFi ecosystem, we are conducting a review of all

What a decade this year has been. While prediction pieces always come with a large asterisk because no one knows literally anything about what may play out in the future — such as massive shocks to large startup sectors — our perspectives about 2022 have aged … interestingly. Last year, Natasha Mascarenhas, Alex Wilhelm, and

When Female Invest launched in 2019, it did so with the goal of creating a community where women who wanted to invest in the stock market, but weren’t sure where to start, could gain the knowledge and confidence to take the plunge. Now, its users will be able to do so all within the Female

The market for corporate training, which Allied Market Research estimates is worth over $400 billion, has grown substantially in recent years as companies realize the cost savings in upskilling their workers. One PwC report found that teaching employees additional skills can save a company between 43% and 66% of layoff costs alone, depending on the

Some students at the MyTechBestFriend academy have always been a little suspicious of the program and its founder, Mary Awodele. Since its founding in 2020, a whisper network murmured that many of the materials taught by the academy were plagiarized from various other online programs, such as those from Google or Salesforce. Founded by Awodele

Dan LeBlanc Contributor Dan LeBlanc is the CEO and co-founder of Daasity, a data and analytics company built for omnichannel brands. For consumer brands, the holiday season is go time. The high-energy, two-month period that starts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) can account for as much as 19% of a brand’s total annual

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. Soooo you may have received the, erm, first edition of Daily Crunch yesterday, where we mentioned a certain conference, placing it in the wrong country. Whoops — we updated the headline. Sorry,

Ann Lai Contributor Ann Lai joined Bullpen Capital in 2020 as a general partner and has invested in and advised more than 30 early- to late-stage companies. Among all the buzzwords startups use when pitching investors and in their marketing, “data-driven” is nearly at the top of the pile. But what does being data-driven really

The logic behind many fintech companies’ automated decisions — decisions that determine whether a customer is approved for a credit line, for example — is hard-coded into their app’s backend. This means that if a head of credit, for example, wants to make a change to the lending criteria, they have to raise a ticket

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. What’s up, Crunchers! Haje is back from his away-ness, and we are chomping at the bit to bring you a wall of amazing stories from our dastardly team of TC wordcraftspeople. Let’s

In the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, users have been fleeing to other social apps like open-source microblogging platform Mastodon and niche communities like CounterSocial. Now, another social app called Hive is seeing a boost in sign-ups in response to the upheaval at Twitter. The app today finds itself in the top 20

The funding winter for the startup ecosystem may continue for another 12 to 18 months and the industry might have to grapple with a “lot of turmoil and volatility,” e-commerce giant Flipkart chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy has warned executives. “This is going to be tough next year. My estimate is that a lot of startup

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.

Rapid grocery deliver startups like Getir, Gopuff and Gorillas, once heralded as the next big thing in on-demand ordering, are running up against logistical challenges that might very well be insurmountable. Even faced with competition and sky-high operating costs, though, they’re taking what steps they can to stick around. Case in point, Gopuff today launched

Welcome 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. For SaaS companies, net dollar retention is on investor radar more than ever. But it shouldn’t eclipse gross dollar retention: If you are not

Just days after a bill that would codify same-sex marriage in the U.S. cleared a key hurdle in the Senate, Daylight, a digital bank that pitches itself as LGBTQIA+-friendly, announced a $15 million Series A round led by Anthemis Group with participation from CMFG Ventures, Kapor Capital, Citi Ventures and Gaingels. Daylight co-founder and CEO

Despite legacy venture capital firms continuing to raise bigger and bigger funds, LPs may have more luck focusing on the small stuff. Amit Kurz, a general partner at Israel-based fund of funds Sweetwood Ventures, thinks so. He told TechCrunch that last year he started to notice more and more tiny funds he wasn’t familiar with

When the downturn began, many VCs urged founders to slash their marketing spending. On its face, that’s an effective way to extend runway while cutting costs. Several months later, we’ve since learned that cutting marketing budgets doesn’t make early-stage startups healthier, but it is a great way for VCs to reduce burn rates across their

Today at TechCrunch’s crypto-focused event in Miami, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer discussed his business and the future market for non-fungible tokens. The digital assets, better known by the acronym “NFTs,” saw their stock rise during the 2021-era crypto boom. NFTs became synonymous with neo-wealth bubbling up from the blockchain economy, as a number of image

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! You’ve got one more day of just me before I take a well-deserved Friday off and Kyle fills in, so I have decided to make an extra-large version of Daily Crunch.

Narwhal, the company behind the popular monorepo-focused open source Nx build system for JavaScript code, today announced that it has raised an $8.6 million seed funding round co-led by Nexus Venture Partners and Andreesen Horowitz. A number of angel investors, including GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, also participated in this round. Founded by two former Google

If you follow #beautytok, #beautytube or any beauty content on social media platforms, you know that popular product trends are hard to keep up with. Summer International stays ahead of the game by identifying the most influential content creators, and working with them to incubate new brands. Founded in Singapore and based in Los Angeles

Proteins are the molecules that get work done in nature, and there’s a whole industry emerging around successfully modifying and manufacturing them for various uses. But doing so is time consuming and haphazard; Cradle aims to change that with an AI-powered tool that tells scientists what new structures and sequences will make a protein do

It’s time for another shout-out to recognize more of our partner companies that are dedicating their time and resources to make TC Sessions: Crypto — taking place tomorrow on November 17 in Miami — an awesome experience for everyone. The cure for FOMO: Buy your pass right now to keep your fingers on the pulse

Ring today announced that local government agencies will be able to have an official presence on the company’s Neighbors app. Beginning with the City of North Port and Pinellas County Government in Florida and the City of Fulton in New York, the new program will allow government organizations to provide safety information through Neighbors, the

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. Greetings on this fine Tuesday. There was a lot of news today, so I’m not going to waste time and instead will get right to what you came here for. — Christine.

Atmos, a startup which has built an online marketplace that teams up homebuyers with builders and land developers to design and build custom homes, has emerged from stealth today with $12.5 million raised in Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures. Founded in 2018, San Francisco-based Atmos touts that with its tech, homebuyers are