Fundings and Exits

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. Due to excessively poor judgment, today’s Christine and Haje show is brought to you by Haje and Christine. Meanwhile, mark your calendar for September 23 at 10:00 a.m. PDT/1:00 p.m. EDT when

Crypto token prices have been trending downward for the past year, with BTC and ETH both down over 50% since last September. Yet despite the downturn in cryptocurrency prices, early-stage web3 startups have shown remarkable resilience in their valuations, Seth Ginns, managing partner and head of liquid tokens at digital asset investment firm CoinFund told

Ivorian payments-led fintech startup Julaya has extended its pre-Series A round by $5 million. The company, which facilitates B2B payments for businesses in Francophone West Africa, mainly via mobile money channels, has raised a total of $7 million in the financing round.  In 2019, West Africa reported the most live mobile money services in any

The crypto industry seemed to age several decades over the past bull run, maturing in some places while barreling ahead in ambitious new pursuits, including DeFi, NFTs and web3. And while scams continued to proliferate and hacker heists became a weekly occurrence, the space onboarded an onslaught of retail investors and fostered feverish excitement among

Amid the festivities at its fall 2022 GTC conference, Nvidia took the wraps off new robotics-related hardware and services aimed at companies developing and testing machines across industries like manufacturing. Isaac Sim, Nvidia’s robotics simulation platform, will soon be available in the cloud, the company said. And Nvidia’s Jetson lineup of system-on-modules is expanding with

A group of former Meta engineers is building a platform to help enterprises deploy machine learning models at the speed of big tech companies. Their startup, TrueFoundry, has raised $2.3 million in a funding round. The San Francisco, California-headquartered startup automates repetitive tasks in the machine learning pipeline to allow data scientists and engineers to

For more than half a decade, Zopper built a platform for small and medium-sized businesses, helping merchants with invoicing and payments through its point-of-sale platform. It sold that IP to PhonePe in mid-2018, but instead of joining the fintech giant, Zopper has been working on a new venture from scratch and independent of PhonePe. That

The ways in which we live and get around have evolved over the past few decades. For example, sales of e-bikes are outpacing sales of electric cars in the U.S., according to recent research. And, pre-fabricated and manufactured homes are gaining in popularity as housing shortages persist globally. It appears that their popularity is no

Michael Seibel is synonymous with Y Combinator’s growth over the past decade. He has opinions on bigger batch sizes, a growing standard deal, competition, the power of venture capital and why startup founders should be prioritizing more than just a check after Demo Day. Seibel spoke to TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, co-hosted by Natasha Mascarenhas and

Investors don’t care about your product. Not really. Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours Investors think a great deal about a great number of things when considering an investment: How big is the market? How good is the founder-market fit? Is it venture-scale? It’s natural for founders to live and breathe for their customers and product,

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. Too many subscriptions? Many of us are feeling this way, and so are companies: In a downturn, cutting unnecessary expenses is more important than

This ETH merge, are you a baker, shaker, staker or maker? If you are into web3, the biggest news of the week in tech was not the massive Figma-Adobe deal. No, the leading story of the last few days — arguably even the last few weeks — has been the Ethereum Merge. The Merge, an

One could probably argue that Floodgate, the Bay Area-based seed-stage venture firm, punches above its weight. The roughly 15-year-old firm has just around $500 million in assets under management — including a $150 million fund that it quietly closed in January — and it makes just a handful of new investments each year. Yet with

In a town hall with some members of their community, Launch House addressed the harassment and assault allegations surfaced by a Vox Investigation earlier this week. The startup, backed by A16z and Flybridge as well as a bevy of top investors, said that an independent investigation is underway. “We’ll let the investigation speak for itself,

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann jumped on the mic, with Theresa on backup, to talk through the biggest headlines. We started with a look at the Figma-Adobe deal, worth some $20 billion. TechCrunch’s news coverage is here,

Stop trying to make Polywork happen. It’s already happening. You may even be polyworking as you read this. Polywork is a venture-backed startup that is building a professional network to help people express their multihyphenated work lives. In other words, if you’re a reporter, who also podcasts, wants to write a book and would love

In a shot across the bow to the buy now, pay later (BNPL) industry, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today issued a report suggesting that companies like Klarna and Afterpay, which allow customers to pay for products and services in installments, must be subjected to stricter oversight. The CFPB — in a step

Welcome back to Found, the podcast that brings you the stories behind the startups. We talk to a lot of health tech founders on this show because there are countless ways the healthcare system, particularly in the U.S., needs to be disrupted. This week, we talked to Kelsey Mellard, who founded Sitka with the goal

When Olive launched in 2021, it aimed to eliminate waste from online shopping by enabling consumers to order from multiple sites and get products in one reusable package. Today, the company relaunches itself in the business-to-business space to work initially with apparel retailers on establishing a circular economy that delivers clothing and accessory orders in

We know that long-term leases aren’t the move anymore, but San Francisco–based Codi has a hotter take: neither is co-working. The company, co-founded by Christelle Rohaut and Dave Schuman, began in 2018 to create more flexible office space for companies whose employees want private, flexible workspaces. These days, the startup’s most disruptive belief is one

The global cultured meat market is poised to reach half a billion dollars by 2030; however, this kind of technology is still very much in the R&D phase for a lot of companies that have emerged over the past five years. Cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat, is animal meat, but instead of slaughtering

AC Ventures (ACV), a venture firm focused on early-stage startups in Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia, has reached the first close of its fifth investment fund (Fund V). The fund is targeting $250 million and has raised 65% of that capital so far, mostly from limited partners who invested in ACV’s previous funds.

It always feels good to get paid, so it’s no surprise that a payroll model like earned wage access (EWA), which lets employees withdraw their accrued wages at any time, has exploded in popularity. The pandemic certainly played a big role in helping people understand the benefits of being able to treat their accrued salaries

Opus Security, a cloud security orchestration and remediation platform, today emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding led by YL Ventures, with participation from Tiger Global and angel investors. CEO Meny Har tells TechCrunch that the proceeds will be put toward launching Opus’ platform in general availability, expanding the startup’s footprint in 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. Happy new week, startup nerds! Tomorrow (Tuesday), we have not one, but two Twitter Live events happening, and we’re excited about both of ’em. At 8:00 a.m. PDT / 11:00 a.m. EDT,

New data from Carta indicates that valuations for very early-stage startups are holding up better than we might have expected in the current slowdown. But while it appears that the price at which investors are willing to put capital into various startup sectors is at times becoming more expensive, the pace at which deals are

Companies (and VCs) spend billions of dollars on cybersecurity, but primarily focus on protecting infrastructure or endpoints. That’s not always the right approach in a world where — thanks to the pandemic — data is increasingly distributed across clouds, software-as-a-service apps, and storage systems. According to one 2021 survey, 61% of security leaders in the

Ed Zitron Contributor Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a media relations company. He also contributes to publications like Insider and The Atlantic, and has a newsletter. More posts by this contributor The Self-Driving Car Revolution Will Be Slow And Help Us All, But It Won’t Kill Driving Anytime Soon Imagine yourself working at

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. As you can tell by the headline of this episode, this is a bonus episode all about Y Combinator Demo Day (and the terms we heard most often during the two-day affair). Natasha

Tracking the growth and frequency of open source startups has been a long-running project at TechCrunch. This column joined the fun in the last few years, noting what seemed to be a rising wave of startups building open source projects that they later monetized. BuildBuddy built its service to work with Bazel, an open source