Startups

Some of the biggest Indian startups are taking a haircut in their valuations — at least in the eyes of their investors — as some backers adjust their estimates amid the weakening global economy. BlackRock has cut the valuation of Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup at $22 billion, to nearly half at $11.5

When you play a game, how do you play it? Monopoly or Settlers of Catan around the dining table? Mario Kart on your Nintendo Switch? Assassin’s Creed on your Xbox? Among Us on your phone? Usually, they are games with a physical form, a console or an app. Artie is gearing up to shake up

The expense involved in recruiting, training and onboarding a new employee who turns out to be a poor fit could be equivalent to 50% of that person’s first-year salary. According to Anastasiia Kuzmenko, head of talent acquisition at Flyer One Ventures, “the biggest difference between hiring in a healthy economy and hiring now is that

Anastasiia Kuzmenko Contributor Anastasiia Kuzmenko is the head of talent acquisition at Flyer One Ventures, a CEE-focused international investment firm. Navigating the current economic storm, startup founders have to focus on the key resource for their early-stage startup to survive and grow — the people. The biggest difference, however, between hiring in a healthy economy

Back in February, Northspyre announced it had raised $25 million to bring costs under control for big building projects. (TechCrunch’s Mary Ann Azevedo mentioned the fundraise in her fintech newsletter.) It’s a huge industry with powerful potential — so how does a company like that tell the story of what it’s building? We’re lucky enough

Following the hype train isn’t always a bad thing Rebecca Szkutak 9 hours Being an artificial intelligence company has become the soup du jour of startup land. Companies are scrambling to either incorporate AI into their existing business model or change up their marketing so whatever they were already quietly using AI to do is

It’s estimated that over $400 billion are spent annually to run customer contact centers around the world. To cut costs, in recent years, contact centers have embraced AI and automation; research from The Harris Poll indicates that 46% of customer interactions were already automated as of 2021. That’s good news for the vendors selling contact

Sam Parr, founder of HubSpot-acquired newsletter and media brand The Hustle, doesn’t watch “Succession” because “it’s too real” (and because he prefers watching comedy compared to behemoth business billionaires fighting). But when he announced his new project, Hampton, an invite-only club for chief executive officers, the references started rolling. It’s specifically one Succession quote that

It turns out that if you have an active customer audience invested in the long-term viability and success of your platform, you can crowdfund a venture-sized extension round. Substack, a venture-backed subscription media platform popular with writers and known for its email service, has collected more than $5 million in pledges for an extension to

A consortium led by Lifelong Group has acquired the distressed firm GoMechanic months after the Sequoia India-backed startup admitted “grave errors” in financial reporting. Lifelong Group, which serves several major players in the automotive industry including Hero and General Motors, said it won the bidding to acquire GoMechanic, whose investors scrambled for a sale earlier

Building credit is hard when it’s difficult to even get credit. And while it’s not impossible to get loans or credit cards, they are usually offered at high interest rates to the people who can least afford to pay them. One Austin-based startup is out to help people build — or get — credit without

As a part of its continued quest to inject generative AI into all its products, Microsoft today introduced Security Copilot, a new tool that aims to “summarize” and “make sense” of threat intelligence. In a light-on-the-details announcement, Microsoft pitched Security Copilot as a way to correlate data on attacks while prioritizing security incidents. Countless tools

Denis Shafranik Contributor Denis Shafranik is the co-founder of Concentric, an early-stage venture firm. Most founders are so laser-focused on convincing investors to invest that they don’t fully consider the due diligence process that comes after. But as the funding landscape becomes tougher, it pays to know what kind of investor you’re dealing with, and

If the past few years, and even the past week, has reminded us soundly of anything — it’s that the startup world will never be predictable. To meet the changing startup landscape, we’re refreshing and re-imagining TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in a big way, with more of what you love and new ways to accelerate your growth.

Douwe Osinga and Jack Amadeo were working together at Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s venture to build tech-forward cities, when they arrived at the conclusion that most spreadsheet software doesn’t scale up to today’s data challenges. Data science tools like Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks do, but they tend to be too inaccessible to the layperson — at

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, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

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 whole gang together this week, which was fitting given the sheer number of news stories that we simply had to get through. So, what did Mary Ann and Natasha

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. When The Cure’s frontman Robert Smith said he was “sickened” by Ticketmaster fees, many of us felt vindicated. The platform then refunded some fees,

As tech companies large and small shed staff in hopes of better aligning their income statements to a new market reality, it’s clear that cutting costs to delight investors is the new norm. But there are other ways to make the investing public happy, including smashing growth and profitability expectations. The Exchange explores startups, markets

Snap quietly acquired Amsterdam-based 3D scanning studio Th3rd in the second quarter of last year, at a time when the company was looking to bolster its AR-powered commerce ambitions. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to TechCrunch that four team members from Th3rd, who are based in the Netherlands, joined Snap as part of the

The quickening pace of tech layoffs is creating growing uncertainty for workers, but it’s giving investors access to a new wave of technical and entrepreneurial talent. There’s no simple test to determine which aspiring founder can turn their idea into a billion-dollar business, but VCs who know which questions to ask can uncover the right

OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now browse the internet — in certain cases. OpenAI today launched plugins for ChatGPT, which extend the bot’s functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the worldwide web. Available in alpha to ChatGPT users and developers on the waitlist, OpenAI says that it’ll initially

The natural world has produced many of our most important medicines, but instead of looking under a leaf or rock for the next big cancer drug, Pragma Bio is searching within the human body — its swarm of resident microbes, to be precise. With its novel approach and a fresh $10 million in funding, the

Beam, a five-month-old startup out to more easily help general contractors pay subcontractors and get paid themselves, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Accel. Both the startup’s founder and lead investor previously spent years working at payments giant Stripe. Before starting Beam in October of 2022, Adam Eagle had spent

Southeast Asia’s mental health startups are getting more investor attention. Last week, Intellect announced a strategic investment from IHH Healthcare, Asia’s largest private healthcare group. Now Thoughtfull, another digital mental health platform focused on Asia, has raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round led by Sheares Healthcare Group. Sheares is a wholly-owned subsidiary of

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. Welcome to Humpday Crunch! Today we’re sad that Aloria passed away on Sunday, as Lorenzo reported. She was a veteran of the cybersecurity community, especially the one in New York, her home

The back half of 2023 is expected to unlock the technology IPO market. Whether the public-offering window opens later this year or early in 2024, TechCrunch+ expects to see a few familiar names in the mix from the HR tech space. And perhaps some less familiar names. Regular TechCrunch readers are likely familiar with HR-tech

Early-stage founders need mentorship and support to build a successful startup, and conventional wisdom says, “Get thee to an incubator or an accelerator!” However, the two programs are not interchangeable — they serve very different purposes — and there are roughly 500 accelerators and 1,400 incubators in the U.S. alone. Which type of startup program

For most of the Information Age, companies that wanted to scale invested in server farms and hired teams to keep them running. At one of my first startup jobs, I walked in one day to find two sleeping co-workers who’d spent the night configuring servers at a co-locating facility 60 miles away. Soon after, when

At its annual GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announced a set of cloud services designed to help businesses build and run generative AI models trained on custom data and created for “domain-specific tasks,” like writing ad copy. Under the brand Nvidia AI Foundations, each individual cloud service — Nvidia NeMo for language models and Nvidia Picasso