Fundings and Exits

Unicorns, Tiger, and bear markets! Oh my! Alex Wilhelm 7 hours Unicorn traffic jam, meet unicorn glut. Private-market tech companies worth $1 billion or more have long been an indicator of investor enthusiasm. The number of so-called unicorns minted in a particular period was a workable indicator of how hot the venture capital market was

The 2022 startup market might feel like a slowly unfolding train wreck, but there’s good news to be found — provided you are willing to take a longer-term perspective. Sure, startup layoffs are spiking, venture capital is slowing, and the stock market is a hot mess. Underneath each drumbeat of negativity, however, there’s more positivity

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. Last April, Alex and I reported CB Insights data showing that venture investment into mental health startups had dropped sharply in Q1 2022 compared

Whenever pro-rata rights are involved, you can always smell some drama. When a company raises a financing round, new and old investors often battle it out for the largest stake they can get. While this process can be competitive enough to be considered cutthroat, during the last decade’s bull market, it’s become more or less

The rest of the startup universe may be struggling to bring in funds, but it’s still a good time to get a robotic raise. Agtech is high on that list. The median age of farmers is 55 years old in the United States, and finding human help is increasingly more difficult of late. FarmWise has

During the pandemic, delivery startups — whether focused on groceries, essentials, or takeout — became the darling children of venture capital firms. Early on, mandates and closures put up barriers to physical shopping, but as time went on, customers became more used to the idea of shopping for everything from toilet paper to rotisserie chicken

Daniel Faloppa Contributor Daniel Faloppa founded Equidam after completing his M.Sc. in Finance and Investments at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, with the goal of making valuations less problematic for entrepreneurs and investors. In an analysis of the market, Justin Kahl and David George of Andreessen Horowitz showcase data on how public companies have

Biologists and other scientists are confronted these days with a deep sea of data and a bewildering panoply of tools to apply to it — many of which require a specialist to operate. Hiring one is a challenge and farming out the work may take months… but LatchBio offers an option that can have you

If you’ve ever had to get a construction permit, you know that the process can be very painful and time-consuming. There are many reasons for this, and they vary depending on where you are located and what you are trying to get built. Pulley is a San Francisco-based startup that wants to help speed up

Super, the Indonesian social commerce startup focused on small towns and rural areas, announced today it has raised an oversubscribed $70 million Series C. The round was led by NEA with participation from Insignia Ventures Partners, SoftBank Ventures Asia, DST Global Partners, Amasia, B Capital, TNB Aura, Bain Capital chairman Stephen Pagliuca, Goldhouse, and Xendit

LA-born startup TRIPP doesn’t want the metaverse to be a mere “shopping mall for virtual consumers,” its founder Nanea Reeves told TechCrunch. Instead, Reeves’ company is envisioning a metaverse experience that can “deepen connection to self, facilitate mental well-being and enable personal and collective transformation.” TRIPP’s vision for a mindful metaverse is already a (virtual)

Large construction projects often take a long time to finish, and subcontractors can get caught up in the flow of money, waiting, in certain circumstances, up to 80 days to be paid by general contractors. This not only causes delays, but also means subcontractors are essentially being asked to finance their portion of the project,

Following its $135 million Series D last week, Monte Carlo became the latest unicorn in a fast-rising category: data observability, which the startup defines as “an end-to-end approach to enable teams to deliver more reliable and trustworthy data.” If you are wondering how serious data quality issues are, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses has an

The appetite for genomic data continues to rise in the field of biotech and pharmaceutical research, but cost is still a factor — even sequencing a full genome now costs as little as $1,000. But with claims of reducing that cost by another order of magnitude to $100, Ultima Genomics may even further accelerate this

Onramp Funds, an Austin-based company providing financing to e-commerce sellers, secured $42 million in equity and credit to expand its working capital offering. CEO Eric Youngstrom founded the company in 2020 after a career at multicarrier shipping software company ShippingEasy. One of the problems with shipping at that time, back in 2012, was that you

HitPay has almost everything SMEs need to run their businesses. In addition to being an online payment gateway, it also offers tools like point-of-sale software with card readers, plugins, payment links and no-code online stores. The Y Combinator alum announced today that it has raised $15.75 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global,

Whether to power translation to document summarization, enterprises are increasing their investments in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said that spending climbed by

Welcome to The Interchange, a take on this week’s fintech news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. We’ve all been keeping up with the recent drama of Stripe vs. Plaid. Rather than rehash all that here, I’ll point you to some of our recent articles on the topic and just summarize:

Sequoia takes things seriously. The storied venture firm is known to react to macroeconomic events with grand memos aimed at portfolio companies and sometimes the entrepreneurship scene at large. Most recently, Sequoia created a 52-slide deck, first reported by The Information, titled “Adapting to Endure.” The document reads like a follow-up course to its infamously ill-timed

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Happily we were once again at full strength this week, with Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and Mary Ann Azevedo chatting, and Grace handling production. You can tell from the topic list today that we are in

News broke yesterday that Substack, the popular newsletter publishing tool, called off fundraising plans for a Series C after a raise at its price target failed to materialize. The company’s revenue base, when compared with its hoped-for valuation, was too small to support the numbers that the startup had in mind. This is not a

Early-stage proptech startups have a potential new source of capital in 1Sharpe Ventures, which recently closed its $90 million inaugural fund. Roofstock co-founder and chairman Gregor Watson and real estate investor Rob Bloemker started the venture firm in 2021, and had their first close last year. The pair say the fund was “oversubscribed.” For the

In every startup cycle, there are attempts to get consumers goods faster than ever before, the hope being that technology has improved to the point that such deliveries are financially possible. Infamous dot-com-era flameouts are now ancient history, but they do indicate just how long founders and their backing investors have been working on the

In Novembar last year, Frederic wrote about Lumigo‘s $29 million Series A round led by Redline Capital. The company makes a cloud-native application monitoring and debugging platform and has raised a total of $38 million since its launch in 2019. In the most recent installment of my Pitch Deck Teardown series, I am beyond excited

As members of the Terra community try to pick up the pieces from its currently defunct economy, Polygon is beckoning to the dozens of developers who had projects built on the inoperative blockchain. Polygon, a layer-2 blockchain built on Ethereum, has launched a “relatively uncapped multimillion dollar fund” so Terra-built projects can move to its

Synthesis Capital, the one-year-old London-based food technology and alternative protein investor, closed its first fund with over $300 million in capital commitments. The firm is led by former CPT Capital investors Costa Yiannoulis and Rosie Wardle, who have invested in the sector since its nascency in 2014, and biologist David Welch, and supports startups leveraging

a16z stands behind its words with fresh $4.5B crypto fund Alex Wilhelm 9 hours Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy. Consensus is expensive. There are cliches aplenty when it comes to making money, and many investing koans deal with doing the opposite of what the masses are up to

Every era is different, but here are some tips for our new normal Navin Chaddha 22 hours Navin Chaddha Contributor Navin Chaddha is managing partner at Mayfield, an inception and early-stage investor with more than 50 years of a people-first investing philosophy. More posts by this contributor Survival tips for startup founders living through their

A chill has descended onto the global startup market, albeit not evenly. Venture capital totals are sagging in most geographies, and falling share prices for tech companies large and small have soured sentiment on the future value of high-growth and often cash-hungry startups. The end of the lengthy startup boom that first formed in the

Nowports, an automated digital freight forwarder in Latin America, has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round which values the company at $1.1 billion. For the unacquainted, digital freight forwarders use digital tools that improve communication and efficiencies in the shipping process, among other things, to help shipments get where they need to