Fundings and Exits

The value of later-stage startups is in decline, data indicate. This particular market movement isn’t a surprise, but the scale of the contraction is worth noting. Forge Global, a secondary market for private-company shares, “said the prices of companies on its platform had fallen 19.9 per cent in February and March compared with the fourth

Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter on May 1, sign

What if you could buy a Peloton with pre-tax dollars? How about vitamins and supplements? Skincare products? Or even mattresses and massages? All of those may likely qualify as purchases you could make through a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) or Health Savings Account (HSA). Both types of accounts allow people to contribute pre-tax dollars that

Immigrants to the United States face myriad challenges besides having to learn a new language. In many cases, they are dealing with a foreign and complex financial system, may struggle with finding adequate housing and health care and just generally feel lost. Welcome Tech, a startup aiming to build “an operating system” for immigrant families

The United States is the world’s largest cannabis market, but as more European countries consider legalizing recreational use, investors are looking for opportunities in production, distribution and retail. Much like the U.S., laws governing this plant-based drug differ across the EU, which means entrepreneurs must navigate complicated legal frameworks even as they compete with an

Forecasting, also known as demand variability, has long been a hurdle for businesses reliant on the global supply chain. In a survey conducted long before the pandemic began (in 2015), large companies — those with revenues in the range of $500 to more than $1 billion — pegged variability as the top challenge that they

With lots of dry powder and growth reservoirs, 2022 might resist global trend Anna Heim 9 hours Could African tech be immune to the global funding slowdown? It sounds like a counterintuitive question to ask. “Africa, being home to several economies largely based on the export of natural resources, has historically been the opposite of

For the bulk of the past two years, the pandemic has put the kibosh on corporate travel of nearly any kind. This has dampened investors’ enthusiasm in travel and expense (T&E) startups, predictably, whose expertise lies in creating software for travel and other forms of expensing. But as the appetite for in-person events and interactions

Consumers want their packages faster, but not every business has the kind of supply chain technology as Amazon or Walmart. This is, until now. Shipium was founded in 2019 by a group of former Amazon Prime and Zulily supply chain builders. In particular, Jason Murray, co-founder and CEO, was with Amazon for nearly 20 years,

The blank-check boom that made real many electric vehicle manufacturers’ dreams of going public may be nearing a close. One such company, Faraday Future, is even in danger of being delisted, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week. Faraday Future, Lordstown Motors, Lucid Motors, Nikola, and Canoo — nearly

Also: Why edtech is a historically weak investment compared to other sectors Alex Wilhelm 9 hours Good morning! I am writing to you in the minutes before I have to pack up my writing and podcasting setups so that I can catch a few planes to San Francisco for Early Stage. (I’m moderating two sessions,

Global, local factors paint contrasted picture for LatAm startups in H1 2022 Anna Heim 7 hours That global venture capital slowed down in Q1 2022 might no longer be news to you. But global numbers can hide diverging realities around the world, and a closer look at regional data shows us that it is indeed

Back in March 2021, online payment processing giant Stripe announced that it had raised $600 million at a $95 billion valuation. The numbers made a splash when they were made public months after the deal leaked. That Stripe raised in early 2021 is notable. Some private companies that raised large sums of capital last year have

Deel, Firstbase show that supporting remote workers is big business Alex Wilhelm 7 hours If you rewind the clock to February of this year, Deel, a startup that helps customers hire in other countries, announced that it had built the ability to pay workers in crypto. Regardless of your view on the financial intelligence of

Processing claims at scale presents a challenge for insurers, particularly where the claims entail factors like complex underlying health conditions. According to data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the second-most common complaint that insurance customers made in 2021 was claim delays, ranked second after unsatisfactory settlement offers. The pandemic placed an additional strain

Aemi founders Hieu Nguyen and Kim Vu Social commerce sellers can be as small as one person selling products to their followers on social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook. Many don’t have a web storefront and instead rely on private messages to take orders and payments. This might not seem like enough to move

Uniswap Labs, the company behind the popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has launched a venture capital arm to invest in web3 projects. Uniswap Labs Ventures, the new division, will invest in companies across various stages and areas within web3, from infrastructure to developer tools and consumer-facing applications, according to the company. Investments will be made

Perforce Software has been building developer tools since 1995, a long time in the tech world. The company was acquired by Clearlake Capital in 2018, and over the last several years has been modernizing and expanding its reach through acquisition. Today, the company announced it intends to acquire Puppet, the infrastructure automation company. The companies

Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter on May 1, sign up here.

The company behind Axie Infinity, a popular crypto play-to-earn game, raised $150 million in funding this week to help reimburse users who lost funds worth about $625 million in a hack last week. Axie Infinity’s creator, Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis, had garnered wide acclaim for building the most-played NFT game of all time, with

The venture capital market could be seeing a shift in power dynamics away from founders and more toward investors, data indicates. The information, collected by DocSend, a service that founders often use to send information about their startups to investors, indicates that after a hot start in the year, investor interest is declining, leading to

Unicorn births are down, exits are down, and nine-figure rounds are taking on water Alex Wilhelm 20 hours The first quarter of 2022 brought a historically huge sum of investment for global startups, with the three-month period outclassing any quarter in 2018, 2019, and 2020, according to CB Insights data. But despite the fact that

Companies producing software are becoming ever more reliant on open source databases to build their programs, but it’s complex working with all these different products. Instaclustr, a California startup, wanted to change that by offering popular open source databases delivered as a service. Today, NetApp bought the company for an undisclosed amount. Instaclustr gives NetApp

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.  Technology news was entertaining this week, if nothing else. The fact that we started the week learning that Elon Musk had bought a material percentage of Twitter’s stock,

Truora, a Colombian user authentication startup, has raised $15 million in Series A funding co-led by two Silicon Valley-based venture firms. Propel Venture Partners and Accel led the investment for Truora, which valued the company at $75 million post-money.  Founded in August 2018, Truora was originally focused on background checks for gigster platforms. In 2018

Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter

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.  Saying goodbye to Q1 What a week. If you were plugged in to the startup news cycle recently, you’ve been busy. Y Combinator dropped hundreds of new startups

Startups are once again considering layoffs as a way to control cash consumption and attract new capital. News that Fast, a one-click checkout software provider targeting the e-commerce market, is offering sharp staff cuts to investors in hopes of securing new capital is notable, but a single data point. A public database tracking startup layoffs,

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Welcome to our Friday show! Our regular co-host Natasha was off this time, so Mary Ann and Alex linked arms with our producer Grace to blast our way through the news of the week. As

With SaaS becoming the standard for most business software, the security demands on SaaS companies are constantly increasing. Add users who need their data sandboxed from others or kept in a specific geographic region and the workload for development and security teams only increases. Antimatter, which is coming out of stealth today and launching its