Startups

When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be looking for one. She thought

Shopify has acquired Threads.com, the Seqiuoa-backed Slack alternative, Threads said on its website. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but said that the Threads.com team will join Shopify. Threads added that after the launch of Meta’s social network with the same name last year, the startup had “the opportunity to sell our

Long before product-led growth became a buzzword, Atlassian offered free tiers for virtually all of its productivity and developer tools. Today, that mostly means free access for up to 10 users and some other limitations. For startups, that’s a good way to get started with the company’s tools like Jira and Bitbucket, but they also

New York-based Revel has made a lot of pivots since initially launching in 2018 as a dockless e-moped sharing service. The BlackRock-backed startup briefly stepped into the e-bike subscription business. It launched and now operates a handful of electric vehicle charging stations across the five boroughs. And it started an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hail service, in

Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled its technology for a unique manufacturing approach to grow cells for industries, including cultivated meat. Today, the Emeryville, Calif.-based company said it’s ready to go to market with a bioreactor that will make that growth possible. Deniz Kent, Max Huisman and Declan Jones started the company in 2020 to

An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts,

TechCrunch has kept readers informed regarding Fearless Fund’s courtroom battle to provide business grants to Black women. Today, we are happy to announce that Fearless Fund CEO and co-founder Arian Simone will speak at the Disrupt 2024 Builders Stage in a fireside chat discussing her organization’s fight for racial equity. Fearless Fund was sued last

Google’s newest startup program, announced on Wednesday, aims to bring AI technology to the public sector. The newly launched “Google for Startups AI Academy: American Infrastructure” will offer participants hands-on training from AI experts and other support for companies solving problems in areas like agriculture, energy, education, public safety, healthcare, telecommunications, transportation, urban development, and

Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, has raised $30 million and let employees sell $100 million worth of equity to new and existing investors, including Khosla Ventures. The round brings the nine-year-old company’s valuation to $3 billion, a 50% increase from the $2 billion value it garnered in its Series D in November 2021. The

When Stacklet’s founders, Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu, came out of Capital One in 2020 to launch their startup, most companies weren’t all that concerned with constraining cloud costs. But in the ensuing years, as they experienced economic headwinds, first from the pandemic, and then rising interest rates, it became an imperative. As such, Stacklet’s

The Raspberry Pi 5, the small-but-mighty computer that has become quite popular with tech hobbyists and industrial companies, is now also an AI computer. The company just released the AI Kit, a $70 extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing. For this new extension module, Raspberry Pi

Monzo has announced its 2024 financial results, revealing its first full-year pre-tax profit. The company also confirmed that it’s in the early stages of expanding into the broader European market via a new base in Ireland. The news comes shortly after the U.K.-based neobank raised a couple of hefty tranches of funding, starting with $430

Benjamin Encz’s path to entrepreneurship was long and unusual. Having previously worked as an R&D engineer at FX companies Industrial Light & Magic and DreamWorks on films like “Transformers” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” Encz left the film industry in 2012 to join VC firm Social Capital as an engineer in residence. There, he

The StrictlyVC roadtrip continues! Coming off of sold-out events in London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, we’re heading to Washington, D.C. for a cozy-vc-packed, evening at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre on Tuesday, June 11 in partnership with Revolution. StrictlyVC events are known for delivering exclusive insights and fostering meaningful connections among top investors, entrepreneurs, and

With fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, Iceland receives more than its fair share of tourists — and of venture capital. Both are good reasons to pay attention to what’s going on and coming out of this unique island nation. “We need more pillars to our economy,” Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Higher Education, Science and

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket prices will increase, so act now to save up to $800 on admission to one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year. Disrupt

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app targets young professionals and students, particularly women aged 21 to 27, who seek genuine interactions. The company’s team claims it raised a $3 million friends

As a teen model, Katrin Kaurov became financially independent at a young age. Aleksandra Medina, whom she met at NYU Abu Dhabi, also learned to manage money early on. The pair bonded as students over what they viewed as a lack of a space for open conversations for people their age to have around financial

Don’t miss out: TechCrunch Disrupt early-bird pricing ends in 48 hours! The countdown is on! With only 48 hours left, the early-bird pricing for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will end on May 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT. This is your final call to secure your tickets and get up to $800 in savings. Why attend TechCrunch

As factories and manufacturing facilities have gotten “smarter” through sensors, robotics and other connected technologies, this has created a potential treasure trove of data that can be mined for insights on bottlenecks and other areas for improvement. Or maybe even to just expedite processes that would otherwise require significant manual spadework. But much of this

Andrew Loewen and Randy Schartner, co-founders of Hotelsbycity.com and former Priceline executives, just announced their latest project: Plannin, a global travel booking platform that empowers creators to monetize their hotel recommendations and share travel-focused content. As the creator economy continues to ramp up in value, estimated to generate $250 billion in revenue, Plannin wants to

After the Wirecard scandal, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin started to look more closely at young fintech startups that wanted to grow at a rapid pace — it’s better to be safe than sorry. In particular, N26, a Berlin-based banking startup that raised hundreds of millions of euros and quickly became a unicorn, has had a

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will be in San Francisco on October 28–30, and we’re already excited! This is the startup world’s main event, and it’s where you’ll find the knowledge, tools and connections you need to grow a successful business. Helping startups reach their full potential takes a global village, and we could not bring you

The dynamic duo behind the Grammy Award–winning music group the Chainsmokers, Alex Pall and Drew Taggart, are set to bring their entrepreneurial expertise to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Known for their chart-topping hits, Pall and Taggart have expanded their influence into the world of venture capital. In 2020, they launched Mantis Venture Capital, a firm managing

AI may not be up to the task of replacing Google Search just yet, but it can be useful in more specific contexts — including handling the drudgery that comes with performing everyday tasks, like scheduling meetings. That’s the premise behind the new startup, Skej, which offers an AI assistant you can loop into your

Time is running out for tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs to secure their early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024! With only four days left until the May 31 deadline, now is the perfect time to purchase your tickets and save up to $800 before prices increase. This event will be held in San Francisco, drawing 10,000

If 11 figures is your attention threshold, you may be interested in learning that the combined enterprise value (EV) of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023, according to Dealroom’s latest report on the Spanish tech ecosystem. As we’ll see, venture investment into Spanish startups also held up quite well, with €2.2BN raised across some

Last year, the fintech startup world — star of the 2021 venture capital heydays — began to unravel as VC funding grew tight. As we step into mid-2024, large chunks of the sector today are a downright mess, especially the banking-as-a-service area which, ironically enough, experts last year told us was the bright spot.  The

Meredith Whittaker has had it with the “frat house” contingent of the tech industry. I sat down with the President of Signal at VivaTech in Paris to go over the wide range of serious, grown-up issues society is facing, from disinformation, to who controls AI, to the encroaching surveillance state. In the course of our

Another week, and another round of crazy cash injections and valuations emerged from the AI realm. DeepL, an AI language translation startup, raised $300 million on a $2 billion valuation; Scale AI, a data-labeling platform for machine learning models, secured $1 billion as its valuation nearly doubled to $13.8 billion; and H, a fledgling French