Fundings and Exits

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.  Oh yeah, y’all, it’s the weekend and it’s a long one here in the United States as we have Monday off. As you read this I am

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week, Natasha and Alex and Mary Ann got together with Chris and Grace to rock our regular Friday news roundup. This time, however, with extra zip, as we’re staring down a long weekend that,

ICON, which creates homes using 3D printing, has raised an additional $185 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The financing is said to be an extension of ICON’s $207 million Series B that was announced last August. While the Austin-based company confirmed the latest raise, it declined to

News that Databricks crossed the $800 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold last year was impressive, but more notable was its growth rate of greater than 80% during the same period. That’s a wild expansion pace for a company of Databricks’ size, and it backed up its CEO’s general vibe that his team could weather

The UK’s cost of living crisis has been making grim headlines for months — with no respite in sight. Just this week, newspapers reported that inflation had hit 5.5%, a 30-year high, further pushing up prices for everyday essentials like food. Worse is yet to come as an energy price cap will end in April,

One way to survive a valuations trough is to grow like hell Alex Wilhelm 11 hours Big-data analytics unicorn Databricks is back in the news, disclosing a new revenue figure and its 2021 growth rate. TechCrunch has been tracking the company for years, curious about its growth and what its rising worth said about its

Imagine staying at an AirBnb and becoming so attached to a particular chair or tea set that you want to buy it. Instead of asking the property owner where it’s from and tracking it down, Minoan Experience let you order the product by scanning a QR code. Then it’s delivered to your home in a

Investor attention is focused on event companies lately, especially as pandemic restrictions ease around the world and events become in-person again. Just this year, we’ve seen companies like EventX, Twine, Vendelux and Zuddl announce either funding or strategic moves that enable them to vie for attendee attention. It’s not just a matter of going to

Nomad, a marketplace that aims to provide small-time rental property owners with “guaranteed rent,” has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley Bank Capital. The raise comes just six months after the Denver-based startup raised about $5 million in a seed round of funding. Nomad’s co-founders PJ O’Neil and

Spotify this afternoon announced two more acquisitions in the podcasts market, this time on both the measurement and analytics side of the business. The company is acquiring the podcast measurement service Podsights and the analytics platform Chartable for undisclosed sums. Measurement and attribution are still two of the biggest, unsolved challenges for podcast advertisers, Spotify

Genesis, which has built a low-code/no-code application platform specifically for the financial markets, announced today it has landed a $200 million investment led by Tiger Global Management. The financing comes 11 months after the company announced it had raised $45 million, as our own Ingrid Lunden reported last March. Interestingly, Genesis had raised less than

Small businesses are the backbone of Southeast Asia’s economy, but many struggle to secure working capital loans because they don’t have traditional credit records or collateral, say the founders of Funding Societies. The fintech, which claims to be the region’s largest SME digital financing platform, uses alternative forms of credit-scoring and has disbursed more than

Data indicate that the pace of startup value creation reached a fever pitch in 2021. According to venture capital data collected by PitchBook, prices spiked for startup equity across the maturity spectrum last year. The result of those rising prices was a huge gain in the pace at which paper wealth was generated. The rising

Alternative protein startups have attracted a lot of investor attention over the past couple of years and the trend looks set to continue. The latest startup with funding news is Next Gen Foods, the creator of plant-based chicken alternative TiNDLE. The company announced today it has raised a $100 million Series A that will be

Mental wellness startup MindFi operates throughout APAC, but wants to deliver “culturally competent” care in each of its markets. To do that, it develops programs for its app, available as an employee benefit, with local providers that take into account religion, gender stereotypes, racial representation, communication style and values, co-founder and CEO Bjorn Lee told

Upcycling polyethylene (the normal ubiquitous plastic we are all familiar with) into high-value plastics that can compete with “virgin” plastic (meaning plastics made directly from petro-chemicals) is a fiendish problem to solve. The fact that it’s been extremely hard to do so means billions of tonnes of plastic is never recycled, and it’s out there pouting the

The Indian government-run insurer Life Insurance Corporation of India filed draft papers with the market regulator on Sunday, announcing its plans to sell 5% of its shares to raise nearly $8 billion in the country’s biggest IPO. The Narendra Modi’s government plans to sell about 316 million shares in the wholly-owned insurer, the draft prospectus

In the beginning of the pandemic, we learned which companies were unprepared to handle a cataclysmic event. Now, as the world slowly starts to reopen in light of vaccinations, we’re learning which companies that soared during the pandemic also lost their discipline amid it. Over the past two years, tech rightfully became more critical than

The number of startups building buy now, pay later (BNPL) services is long. Just this year we’ve seen French BNPL startup Alma raise a $130 million equity round, BillEase raise $11 million for BNPL in the Philippines, Lipa Later raise $12 million for the same effort in Kenya, and ThankUCash raise $5.3 million for fintech

Utah-based proptech Homie has laid off one-third of its staff, according to reports. Hunter Richardson, former director of talent advisory and acquisition at Homie, posted on LinkedIn that he was among the one-third affected but declined to comment on his being let go. Homie was founded in 2015, and according to its CEO and co-founder

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 the full crew aboard today for our live taping, headed by our killer production team Grace and Chris, and hosting crew Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex. Overall, it was a success? Our streaming tech took us to

A startup hoping to reinvent regional air travel with an unusual vertical-takeoff aircraft has rebranded and raised a $12.4M funding round. Craft Aerospace will henceforth be known as Odys Aviation, and the money will go towards, among other things, a planned demonstration flight this year with a one-passenger prototype. The interesting “blown wing” approach to

Inflation in the United States came in a little over expectations: The consumer price index rose 7.5% last year, the largest figure in some decades. In response, expectations for monetary tightening in America are also running hot. And as interest rates rise, there’s an expectation that safer assets will become more attractive, and more speculative

For most people, mention of the word “taxes” conjures up unpleasant things like tedious processes, mountains of paperwork and shelling out a lot of money to the government. But one startup is on a mission to make taxes less…well, dreadful and an actual benefit. Mountain View, California-based Neo.Tax wants to apply machine learning to company

Financial apps are proliferating across Southeast Asia, making things like bookkeeping or securing an online loan easier. But this means fintechs need access to large amounts of data that they can use to verify customer identity, creditworthiness or aggregate information from online accounts. Brick wants to simplify the process with a suite of APIs that

Michael Redd Contributor Michael Redd spent 12 seasons playing in the NBA and on the U.S. Olympic team. He is now co-founder and chairman of 22 Ventures. The Theranos scandal demonstrates how quickly investors will fall over themselves to seize a golden egg deal. When investors pay so much attention to only the (supposed) big

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 our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex crawled through the Metaverse, leaning on Facebook’s latest earnings and

French startup Silvr has raised a $20.6 million (€18 million) Series A funding round and has opened a $128 million (€112 million) debt line for its activities. Silvr wants to offer new credit opportunities for e-commerce and software-as-a-service companies. Essentially, it wants to bring the Pipe and Clearco experience to Europe. XAnge, Otium, Bpifrance, Eurazeo

TechCrunch explored the changing state of the insurtech market last week, diving into category wins and losses from recent quarters and what’s ahead for the sector this year. Insurtech companies had a simply amazing fundraising year in 2021, setting records in both dollar and deal terms. But at the same time, the value of public

As proof that web3 is not some passing trend, blockchain infrastructure startup Alchemy announced today that it has closed on a $200 million Series C1 equity round that values the company at $10.2 billion. For the unacquainted, web3 refers to a decentralized web based on the blockchain. And put simply, Alchemy wants to do for