Startups

Embedded insurtech is still hot, as the $196 million in funding landed by bolttech proves. The company, which started in Singapore but now has operations around the world, said it is now valued at $1.6 billion. The funding was led by Tokio Marine, Japan’s first insurance company, and life insurance leader MetLife through its subsidiary

Christian Owens Contributor Christian Owens is executive chairman and co-founder of Paddle, a payments infrastructure provider for SaaS businesses. Following the valuation collapse of the last 12 months, the phrase “efficient growth” is reverberating around SaaS boardrooms worldwide. Every software leader is seeking to boost revenues, cut costs, and demonstrate a clear path to profitability.

The spotlight of hype has lit up many areas since autonomous driving had its own time in the sun, but progress in the technology is chugging along. It’s clear that the dream of not having to drive ourselves around is not dead, given the rising tallies of miles driven by bots, greater commercialization, and other

Generative AI — AI that can write essays, create artwork and music, and more — continues to attract outsize investor attention. According to one source, generative AI startups raised $1.7 billion in Q1 2023, with an additional $10.68 billion worth of deals announced in the quarter but not yet completed. There’s scores of competition, including

Aldagram, a startup out of Japan developing project management software for construction companies, has picked up a new strategic backer to help it build out its footprint across Asia and the Middle East. Panasonic, the consumer electronics giant that also develops solar panels, air conditioning units and many other products for its sizable buildings and

Chaitanya Vaidya Contributor Chaitanya Vaidya is the co-founder of Deeprisk.ai, holds a fintech AI patent and has been in the tech innovation space for more than a decade. With the rise of open-source AI models, the commoditization of this groundbreaking technology is upon us. It’s easy to fall into the trap of aiming a newly-released

Oghenetega Iortim built Nigerian-based cold chain startup Figorr after imagining better means of storage and transportation of temperature-sensitive products, following the post-harvest losses from his fresh agro-produce venture. Figorr (previously Gricd) runs IoT-powered solutions that provide businesses, especially those in healthcare and agriculture, with key data such as location, humidity, and temperature of highly-perishable products,

Camille Stewart Contributor Camille Stewart is the White House Deputy National Cyber Director for Technology and Ecosystem Security. Thomas Peng Contributor Thomas Peng is the Chief of Operations and Administration at the United States Peace Corps. Dear Tech Workers,  Careers are defined by moments. Sometimes, these moments are meticulously planned out, and carefully strategized —

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. This week, I look into three topics that don’t have to be an “either/or” situation: France or the U.K.; product-led or sales-led; psychedelics medicine

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex are closing out another news-filled week full of change, and since we did have the crew for one last chat, here’s what we got into: Before we signed off, we celebrated one

Michael Beckley Contributor Michael Beckley is a co-founder and CTO of Appian, where he drives the technical vision for the company, leads product and solutions marketing teams, and oversees customer initiatives. When the economy is tight, financial institutions are faced with several mutually-reinforcing challenges. The temptation for bad action on the part of customers increases.

How far has the psychedelics medicines industry come over the past 12 months? Well, it depends on where you look. If you look at the stock market, the view isn’t very good: the charts are all down and in the red, and all you can see are psychedelics companies tottering by, doing their best to

It’s called the sandwich generation for a reason. Millions of people in the U.S. are taking care of parents as they age or deal with illnesses. The constant demands of caregiving, often while working and raising children at the same time, can take a huge toll. It’s not uncommon for caregivers to feel overwhelmed as

It’s certainly been a minute but we’re bringing some of the TechCrunch crew across the pond during London Tech Week to meet up with UK-based investors and rising early stage founders. We’ll be hosting an intimate invitation-only cocktail hour on Tuesday, June 13so if you’ll be around, apply now for a chance to join us!

AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that can automatically sort recyclable material, today announced that it extended its Series C round to $99 million, thanks to an investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. That’s up from $91 million when the round closed in November. The extended Series C, which saw participation investors

Better Tomorrow Ventures’ Sheel Mohnot landed some of his biggest wins before he ever started a venture firm. The investor previously worked as a partner at 500, previously known as 500 Startups, where he raised and ran a dedicated fintech fund as well as helped build an accelerator. There he met his eventual founding partner

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 Google Day! There’s been a wall of interesting news coming out of the search-and-everything-else-too giant at its I/O event. Christine summarized everything Google has announced at I/O thus far, so that’s

The surge of interest in e-sports, online fantasy leagues and more extensive online financial infrastructure have made the concept of real-money gaming more popular among consumers and games developers. Today a startup called Triumph — which has built an engine, and accompanying SDK, to power real-money tournaments — is announcing $14.1 million funding to continue

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week we welcome Dominic Madori-Davis to the show as the new cohost of Found! The team is also joined by Allison Luvera and Lauren De Niro Pipher, the two founders behind Juliet, a boxed wine startup. Luvera and De Niro Pipher talked

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 Tuesday! Couple of quick things: Apply now to pitch at TechCrunch Live’s Atlanta pitch-off. Also, today’s head scratcher of an article is from Devin, who reports that Acapela lets anyone back

PayPal’s woes indicate the market doesn’t mind kicking fintech while it’s down Alex Wilhelm 7 hours PayPal’s shares are off around 11% this morning despite the company reporting better-than-expected revenue and profit in the first quarter. The company also raised its forecast for the year, though that was apparently not enough to sate investors. But

“The medium is the message” is the common phrase, but entrepreneur Alexis Traina believes that messages, themselves – text messages to be exact – deserve attention, too. Traina is the CEO and co-founder of HiNOTE, an app that helps people create messages, set over personalized backdrops of anything from a tipped-over wine glass to a

Time is relentless and, right now, it’s no friend to procrastination-prone early-stage startup founders. The application window for Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 slams shut in just one week. Can you afford to miss this potentially life-changing opportunity? We think not. Startup Battlefield 200 applications close in 7 days The elite

One constant theme we’ve been hearing from the big cloud infrastructure vendors this year is helping customers increase the efficiency of their cloud spend. Cloud bills have grown enormously as companies move more workloads. Combine that with a high level of economic anxiety, and a pronounced switch from a growth to efficiency mindset, and customers

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, we’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous

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 Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex got right into it – may the for……ce of tech news continue to be with us because wow we’ve never been busier! Here’s what we got into: An update on a

Shares of edtech company Chegg fell off a cliff this week after the company reported Q1 results that bested analyst expectations. But Q1’s results aren’t what made the company lose nearly half of its value. In its earnings call the company’s executives noted that ChatGPT was slowing its ability to add new subscribers, not only

Everything needs a home, and Garima Kapoor co-founded MinIO to build an enterprise-grade, open source object storage solution. The pitch sounds amazing: simple, high performance, and a native Kubernetes integration. I’m excited to announce I’m interviewing Kapoor and MinIO investor Mark Rostick of Intel Capital on MinIO’s growth and how the company manages serious competition.

Investors have raised expectations around SaaS profitability and growth since the downturn began. As a result, it’s even more important for founders to have a firm handle on the key metrics VCs are likely to consider before saying “yes” or “no.” In his latest TC+ article, Paris Heymann (partner, Index Ventures), shares formulas for calculating

Tellus, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed fintech company that claims it can offer people higher yields on their savings balances by using that money to fund certain U.S. single-family-home loans, is under scrutiny by the U.S. government. On May 2, as first reported by Barron’s, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs