Startups

Terra One aims to reduce the quantity of clean energy created significantly and then lost from the German grid owing to a lack of storage capacity. Lacking storage capacity is an entirely pressing need and one desperate for solutions, so it’s great to see companies thinking up ways to fix it and going after the

Shopping is fun, but making a decision on one set of skis among thousands of possibilities is not. That’s where Remark comes in. The two-year-old startup is helping shoppers buy with more confidence, said Theo Satloff, co-founder and CEO of Remark.  It does this by pairing shoppers with high-quality product experts via an asynchronous live

There are many ways countries can go about supporting their tech industries. In France it involves picking a yearly cohort of 120 high-potential startups — the French Tech 120 — including 40 private companies deemed as most promising, dubbed the Next40. The French secretary of state for Digital Affairs, as of this year, Marina Ferrari,

A new startup called Auggie is aiming to give parents a single platform where they can shop for products and connect with each other. The company’s new app, which launched this week, offers parents a platform where they can share product recommendations, shop vetted products and find community amongst each other to get real-time advice

Want to make a founder’s day, week, month, and possibly career? Refer them to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024! Applications close June 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT. TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 is the world’s preeminent competition for early-stage startups. It’s also the absolute best way for an entrepreneur to get the most out of

If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some inside scoop on how the iconic accelerator goes about choosing companies from someone who knows best: Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator. The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. hosted Tan Wednesday for a one-on-one interview with Teresa Carlson, a General Catalyst board

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized

Hey there, Series A to B startups with $35 million or less in funding — we’ve got an exciting opportunity that’s tailor-made for your growth journey! If you’re looking to elevate your presence at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 without breaking the bank, look no further than our ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program. Why should you consider ScaleUp

Another fintech startup, and its customers, has been gravely impacted by the implosion of banking-as-a-service startup Synapse. Copper Banking, a digital banking service aimed at teens, notified its customers on May 12 that it would be discontinuing bank deposit accounts and debit cards on May 13. In a letter to customers, CEO and co-founder Eddie

It’s not often that you hear about a seed round above $10 million. H, a startup based in Paris and previously known as Holistic AI, has announced a $220 million seed round just a few months after the company’s inception. The reason why this company managed to raise so much money so quickly is that

Consolidation is here in cybersecurity, as bigger players in the space pick up startups that will help them grapple with the ever-expanding attack surface for enterprises as they move more activity into the cloud. In the latest development, CyberArk — one of the army of larger security companies founded out of Israel — is acquiring

Hard tech startups generate a lot of buzz, but there’s a growing cohort of companies building digital tools squarely focused on making hard tech development faster, more efficient and — well, a whole lot more like software development.  California-based Rollup is the latest startup to come out as part of this ensemble. While the company

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing SoLo Funds, a fintech company that enables peer-to-peer lending, alleging that the company used “digital dark patterns” to deceive borrowers and illegally took fees while advertising to consumers that there were no fees. “The CFPB is suing SoLo for using digital trickery to hide interest and fees on

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying to sell their innovative tech through old-school methods like repeated cold emails and calls. Khanna, a former product marketer, and Hughes, a former sales manager,

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims that could pay off in a big way. Biotech has been creeping out in recent years to touch adjacent industries, as companies find how much

A few years ago, you couldn’t go to a fintech meetup without ending up in a conversation about embedded finance. In 2020, we even wrote that embedded finance might represent fintech’s future. The distribution strategy lets fintech companies integrate their services into other products and services, which in turn gives users access to new features

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over $12 million. The startup has built infrastructure and a unified API that enables companies to access raw data from virtual meeting platforms like Google Meet,

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow has proposed a settlement with investor Activant Capital this week, which could put an end to a lawsuit brought by Activant. The investor accused Breslow of adding $30 million to Bolt’s balance sheet in the form of personal debt and removing board members when they urged Breslow to repay it. Activant

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated handyman to take care of all the random tasks on a homeowner’s to-do list. The company raised $9 million last June in a Series A

Chang She, previously the VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, has years of experience building data tooling and infrastructure. But when She began working in the AI space, he quickly ran into problems with traditional data infrastructure — problems that prevented him from bringing AI models into production. “Machine learning engineers and

PayHOA, a previously bootstrapped Kentucky-based startup that offers software for self-managed homeowner associations (HOAs), is an example of how real-world problems can translate into opportunity. It just raised a $27.5 million Series A round in an environment where nearly $30 million Series A rounds are no longer common. PayHOA founder and CEO Mike Bollinger has

Embedded finance is usually what we hear about when brands and non-financial businesses want to offer financial products or services — like banking, insurance, lending and payments — to provide a better user experience for customers. Layer is leaning into that better user experience, but with embedded accounting. Its customers are those, like Square or

Climate change is not just about removing carbon from the atmosphere or making more fuel efficient cars. It’s also about the food we eat. That’s the focus of PeakBridge, a global fund manager in the agri-foodtech sector. It recently closed on $187 million in capital commitments for its PeakBridge Growth Fund II to invest in

When Keith Rabois announced he was leaving Founders Fund to return to Khosla Ventures in January, it came as a shock to many in the venture capital ecosystem — and not just because Rabois is a big name in the industry. It was surprising because unlike in many other fields, venture capitalists don’t traditionally move

If you use Slack at work, you’ve likely noticed that the number of channels you’re invited to proliferates incessantly.  David Sacks, one quarter of the popular “All In” podcast and a renowned serial entrepreneur whose past companies include Yammer –  an employee chat startup that sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012 –  says

Early-stage rounds continue to account for the majority of investments in the European startup market, and on Tuesday one of the biggest firms in the region announced a new fund to bolster that trend. Accel has raised $650 million to back startups from seed to Series A across the U.K., the Continent and Israel. The

StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider content from the Silicon Valley and global VC scene while creating meaningful connections over cocktails and canapés with leading investors, entrepreneurs and executives. And TechCrunch is excited to join forces with key players in the London investment community at our next StrictlyVC event. We’re pleased to have Saul Klein, co-founder

Pepper, the e-commerce platform for food distributors, continues to edge into Sysco and US Foods territory by giving smaller, independent distributors a technology leg up.  The company developed an ordering system specifically for independent food distributors that supports catalogs of over 100,000 items and enables these companies to launch mobile apps and websites so that

Bluesky is now allowing users to personalize their main Discover feeds. The social network is rolling out an updated version of its app that lets users offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so they can better customize it using “Show more like this” and “Show less like this” buttons in a post’s menu to choose

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look, I know this is our startups weekly newsletter, and as the most valuable company in the world, Apple is kind of the ultimate “not a