Fundings and Exits

Devin Abbott Contributor Devin Abbott was founder of Deco (acquired by Airbnb) and specializes in design and development tools, React and web3 applications, most recently with The Graph. It’s too early to predict all the implications of the recent Ethereum blockchain Merge, but it definitely addresses the most frequent (and valid) criticism of web3 regarding

Tech giants are increasingly looking for tech talent in Africa, where the number of developers reached 716,000 last year, up 3.8% from 2020, according to Google. In the last six months, Microsoft and Amazon have been on a recruitment drive that came along with enticing offers including relocation to their hubs in the U.S. and

After seeing a ton of venture capital investment flow into independent beverage startups recently, it was time to take a step back and see if this kind of company actually made sense as a venture investment. For one, the competition for space on grocery store shelves is fierce, eclipsed only by the fact people are

Hey, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, where every Saturday we recap a handful of the top TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. Want it in your inbox? Get it here! This week marked the in-person return of TechCrunch Disrupt, with our team taking the show back into the real world after two

In the midst of the pandemic, Pantheon Design, a maker of industrial 3D printers from Vancouver, BC, suddenly found itself getting orders from factories in the Midwest, the center of heavy industries. The reason? These manufacturers were having a hard time getting parts out of China as COVID-19 restrictions in the country squeezed global supply

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. Christine is in an airport lounge and Haje is perched on the corner of a cafe bench, as the TechCrunch team is in transit post-Disrupt today. We miss our work besties already

After attempting to sell its tech to large food service companies, cooking automation startup Jasper has shifted to direct-to-consumer. In a recent conversation, CEO Gunnar Froh told TechCrunch about the pivot and gave a general update on the company, a member of this year’s Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2022. When Gunnar founded Jasper several years

The amount of capital raised by Black entrepreneurs continues to decrease. The latest Crunchbase numbers show that Black founders raised $187 million in Q3, a staggering decline from the nearly $1.1 billion they received in Q3 2021 and a sizable drop from the $594 million the cohort raised in Q2. Black founders raised just 0.12%

Shares of Delhivery have dropped by over 32% since Thursday, tumbling below its issue price from May, after the Indian logistics firm posted muted quarterly business growth this week. Delhivery said this week that its supply chain service and truckload business volumes had shrunk in the quarter ending September. Shares of Delhivery plunged on the

When Uils launched in 2021, it was a car rental service for rideshare drivers. But after the founders realized that many rideshare drivers don’t have access to credit, particularly in Latin America, the Buenos Aires-based company pivoted to fintech, offering financial services to drivers through a behavioral scoring engine based entirely on a person’s driving

A month after Adobe announced its plans for acquiring Figma, the popular digital design startup, Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field sat down with our own enterprise reporter Ron Miller at Disrupt 2022 to discuss the deal and his motivations for selling to Adobe, a company that Figma’s own marketing materials have not always described

Banyan, a platform for product purchase data that allows customers such as banks, fintechs, hotels and merchants to automate expense management and more, today announced that it raised $43 million in a Series A funding round — $28 million in equity and $15 million in debt — led by Fin Capital with participation from M13,

Singapore-based Skuad helps companies hire employees in different countries while staying compliant with local employment regulations and processing cross-border payroll. The startup announced today it has raised $15 million in Series A funding. Skuad has signed up more than 350 employers so far, mostly from North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. This funding round, which

Here’s one of those questions you’ve probably never considered, but probably should: What goes on your fruit? Not out in the field — though obviously that’s something worth considering too — rather in that period between the picking and purchasing? Turns out pesticides aren’t just the stuff that gets sprayed out the back of a

Last year, MaxAB, the food and grocery B2B e-commerce and distribution platform serving a network of traditional retailers across Egypt and Morocco, raised its $55 million Series A in two tranches; the latter accompanied its acquisition of the Morocco-based and YC-backed WaysToCap. The moves signaled MaxAB’s ambition to dominate Egypt’s and North Africa’s B2B retail

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. The newsletter is a little later than usual today and for the next three days. Don’t worry, it’s for fun reasons: We want to be the first to tell you about the

Meet NXgenPort, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based startup that’s looking to remotely monitor cancer patients in between doctor visits using a port catheter. NXgenPort, which presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is building an implantable chemo port that features added sensors and remote connectivity functions. The port combines chemo-port efficacy with sensor technology to measure

Verlinvest, a family-backed, “evergreen”, growth fund investor, that has previously funded a few well-known consumer brands like Oatly, Vita Coco, Tony’s Chocolonely, Who Gives A Crap, Pedego, Chewy.com, Hint & others, is getting into the venture game. After putting around €50m into VC initiatives globally, it’s now embarking on being the kick-starter LP in a

After a rough year in the public markets, you might take today’s brilliant trading as good news. Any positive price movement is a win, right? Kinda. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index rose 3.4% today, while other major U.S. indices jumped smaller amounts in a hall-of-fame start to the trading week. (That the markets are turning

Stability AI, the company funding the development of open source music- and image-generating systems like Dance Diffusion and Stable Diffusion, today announced that it raised $101 million in a funding round led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. The tranche values the company at $1 billion post-money, according to

Byju’s said Monday it has raised $250 million in new funding from existing backers as the Indian edtech giant looks to navigate the market downturn that has forced the firm to postpone its initial public offering and cut thousands of jobs. The new funding valued the Bengaluru-headquartered startup at $22 billion, the same figure at

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.

There’s no better way to show you have high conviction in yourself as an investor than being the biggest LP in your $101 million fund, right? Especially if you name your firm Conviction, as Sarah Guo did after leaving Greylock following a decade of investing for the well-known venture group. Last week, she announced that

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. People leave jobs for all kinds of reasons, but when it’s a CFO departing a richly valued company as the company itself conducts layoffs, the exodus can be a sign of a

There’s no one who knows a company’s inner workings like a chief financial officer. So, when three high-profile CFOs leave their jobs at richly valued, late-stage startups in quick succession, we notice it. This week, OpenSea CFO Brian Roberts left the web3 company less than a year after taking the job. Days later, Brex CFO

Opeyemi Awoyemi, one of Nigeria’s well-known serial founders, is back with another outfit. It’s not a tech company this time — Awoyemi co-founded online jobs site Jobberman (which was acquired by ROAM Africa in 2016) and Whogohost, a bootstrapped hosting platform — but instead, a venture studio: Fast Forward Venture Studio. Awoyemi choosing this route

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. Hot damn, it’s happening: A bunch of the TechCrunch team are on airplanes, aeroplanes and other spellings of flying vessels to come join us in San Francisco for Disrupt. To say that

Beyond Meat plans to lay off about 200 employees, or 19% of its workforce, according to a regulatory filing disclosed Friday. The company cited declining sales and said the layoffs are “based on cost-reduction initiatives intended to reduce operating expenses…and target cash flow positive operations within the second half of 2023.” Beyond Meat expects the

Even the largest landfills in Indonesia are at (or nearing) capacity, and the government has set an ambitious target of 30% waste reduction by 2025. Waste4Change is one of the companies that wants to help by increasing rates of recycling and enabling better waste management. The startup, which currently manages more than 8,000 tons of

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. We just keep getting more excited about Disrupt, but it turns out there’s other stuff going on in the world. A lot of other stuff, in fact; it’s one of those days