Fundings and Exits

More Americans than ever want to escape the rut of a low-paying job, but quitting to pursue a new profession is a risky proposition. Pursuit has raised $10M in funding for a promising and potentially self-sustaining new model for training up new tech workers in which learners only pay they land a real position. The

Cross-border payments platform dLocal is one of the most notable Latin American startups in recent history — the company became Uruguay’s first unicorn in 2020 and went public on the Nasdaq in 2021. dLocal’s founders had first launched AstroPay, another digital payments platform that now has over five million users. Now, dLocal and AstroPay co-founder

The second day of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day is now behind us, and the TechCrunch team is recovering from watching hundreds of pitches in quick succession. Every accelerator demo day is a marathon, but the American group has worked with more startups over time, making its pitch sessions a veritable deluge of new

It’s not a coincidence that TechCrunch has covered more African startups in the last year than any period in our history. Many of those companies are Nigerian, and when we look at venture capital data, we can see why. The country had an incredible 2021 as the most active venture capital scene in Africa, collecting

Mosaic, which aims to change the way CFOs of high-growth companies operate, has raised $25 million in a Series B round of funding led by Founders Fund. Bijan Moallemi, Joe Garafalo and Brian Campbell started San Diego-based Mosaic in 2019 after meeting at Palantir Technologies, where they worked on building out that company’s finance organization

Day one of Y Combinator’s Demo Day confab for the Winter 2022 batch is over. We shook up our coverage this year, divvying things up by sector and geography. Our goal was to avoid a huge list, the sort that we compiled in years past. TechCrunch has notes on the ever-growing contingent of companies from

Andrew Gershfeld Contributor Andrew Gershfeld is a partner at Boston-based Flint Capital, an investment company supporting entrepreneurs from Israel, Europe and the U.S. at an early stage of their business. Around May 2020, nearly everything moved online, and investment pitches were among the first to do so. The entire milieu around startup funding shifted overnight.

Having reliable transportation is at the top of any gig worker’s list, but in Latin America, that’s not always easy to secure. Chile-based Migrante is working to change that. Initially starting in Venezuela, now with $30 million in Series A funding and $80 million in a debt facility, it is moving into both Colombia and

Singapore-headquartered esports startup Ampverse has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Falcon Capital. The company says this is the largest Series A raised by an esports organization in Southeast Asia, based on data from PitchBook and other third-party platforms. The round will be used to expand in Indonesia and the Philippines, acquire

We know that running a company is hectic, so we are giving Austin founders a couple extra days to apply to pitch at TechCrunch Live on April 6 at 11:30 am PT / 2:30 pm ET. The Austin tech scene is thriving and we are here for it. In addition to great panels, we also

Zepto, an Australian real-time account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments platform, said Monday it has raised a $25 million AUD Series A (about 18.8 million USD) co-led by AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners. The instant payment platform lets merchants make, manage and receive secure payments by connecting directly from the payer’s bank to a merchant’s bank.  The

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,

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.  Welcome to the weekend! We have a lot of ground to cover today, so pour some coffee, settle in, and roll with me. The great selloff? Remember when Amplitude

Infrastructure startups continue to attract venture dollars across the globe, especially in the case of payments infrastructure providers. No-code too also remains a draw. A startup that is a blend of the two can be found in Bogota, Colombia-based Simetrik, which just raised $20 million in a Series A funding round at a valuation “north

Historically, only institutions have been able to be part of REITs (real estate investment trust), which are made up of companies that own or finance income-producing real estate across a range of property sectors. A startup called Flock Homes wants to give landlords a similar ability to own shares of a portfolio that is made

Instacart is not done making news. Earlier this week, the well-known grocery delivery unicorn announced a software suite as part of a self-described third act. Today, Bloomberg reported that Instacart reduced its valuation from around $39 billion to $24 billion, representing a roughly 38.5% reduction in the company’s worth. Commentary indicates that the company’s new

Glance has acquired India’s Gambit as the Google-backed firm looks to supercharge its mobile games offerings and introduce NFTs to its Gen-Z users, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. Piyush Shah, co-founder of InMobi Group and COO of Glance, confirmed the acquisition but declined to share the financial terms of the deal. In an interview with

Ola said on Thursday evening it has reached an agreement to acquire Avail Finance, a financial services startup that serves the blue-collar workforce, as the ride-hailing giant looks to expand its financial services offerings. The two startups did not disclose the terms of the deal. Avail Finance had raised about $38.5 million (including about $4.5

Global plastic use is expected to double by 2040, with most plastic sent to landfills and only 13 percent recycled. According to CIEL (Center for International Environmental Law), plastic production and incineration could produce 2.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year by 2050.   To help end the global plastic pollution, Australian enviro-tech startup Samsara Eco has developed

For founders who want to work with people like them, New Era Capital Partners will fit that bill. Gideon Argov, Ran Simha and Ziv Conen were all building businesses before coming together at New Era. Simha is an engineer by trade, but went into finance at Lehman Brothers and a hedge fund before taking a

The Yuga Labs investor deck from February is a fascinating document, bringing together gaming, a new currency, and an ever-growing pool of digital assets that can be bought and sold by fans of Yuga’s well-known NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club. I ran through the deck last night and again this morning to get a

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. We had an illness on the team, so instead of recording our usual Wednesday deep-dive, we reached into our recent archives and pulled the audio from a Twitter space we did the other

At the end of “Planet of the Apes” (1968), the human protagonist realizes that the alien world he crash-landed upon is actually post-apocalyptic Earth. For many first-time founders in fundraising mode, the current market correction for publicly-traded tech companies has been similarly jarring. Once investors started shaving value from high-flying stocks, it changed the game

Vendr, a startup that aims to help its customers buy software products faster and at a lower cost, announced this morning it has acquired Blissfully, a startup that builds SaaS management tooling. Vendr raised a $60 million round led by Tiger last year, making it one of the high-growth software companies that the crossover investor

Christian Ebersol was working for a health insurance company when he became interested in carbon capture storage and plant-based food. After joining the entrepreneur-in-residence program at OMERS Ventures to figure out where his next move might be in those spaces, he started reading Marl Bittman’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable

Alloy Automation, a Y Combinator graduate focused on connecting different e-commerce tools, announced this morning that it has closed a $20 million Series A led by a16z. The startup characterized the funding event as brisk, a contrast to its 2021 capital event when it was harder for the company to secure funding. TechCrunch covered Alloy’s

New data collected by Crunchbase News indicates that the value of global unicorns has crested the $4 trillion mark. The valuation milestone is notable not merely for its scale, but its relative size. Compared to what? The value of the major tech companies of the West, namely the U.S. Big Five. Once they were known

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way for companies to raise capital, and investors are taking notice. Groundfloor, the first real estate crowdfunding platform to gain regulatory approval, announced today that it raised its first round of institutional capital since 2015. Brian Dally, a former mobile network exec, and Nick Bhargava, a co-author of the

Welcome to my new 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 turns into a

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is Saturday, which means it’s not a usual day for us to drop an episode. But what are we if not try-hards at heart? So, we’re back today. What do we have