Startups

French startup Roundtable has raised a $3.2 million (€3 million) funding round from a hundred business angels. That’s quite a large group of individual investors — but that’s because Roundtable runs an angel investment platform for European startups. Backed by eFounders, the company takes care of the administrative, legal and financial processes involved with startup

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. 🚚 Trucking is a vital industry and yet the majority of operations are operating on outdated platforms. AtoB thinks it has the solution and its co-founder says the company is essentially Stripe

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Trucking is a vital industry and yet the majority of operations are operating on outdated platforms. AtoB thinks it has the solution and CEO and co-founder Harshita Arora says the company is essentially Stripe for transportation. I’m excited to have her and Eric Tarczynski of Contrary Capital speaking on an upcoming TechCrunch Live taking place

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Maybe it’s the fact that “Succession” is back next week, or maybe it’s the fact that Silicon Valley just experienced its first banking crisis, but

Amid the venture industry’s funding slowdown in 2022, nontraditional investors like hedge funds and private equity firms ran for the hills. Many assumed that corporate venture capital funds would, too — but they didn’t. These strategic backers remained consistent in 2022 and, according to PitchBook data, actually increased their presence in venture deals. In 2022, CVCs

The comedown from the venture capital boom of 2021 has shaken up much of the startup world, but the dearth of capital has shown up sharply in one particular niche: fintech. CB Insights data indicates that after reaching a peak in 2021, funding to fintech startups across the world dropped a drastic 46% to $75.2

It’s too early to determine whether SVB’s downfall heralds a new era for venture capital, but based on anecdotal evidence, off-the-record discussions and chats with co-workers, it seems like we’re back to business as usual as far as pre-revenue startup fundraising is concerned. Not a scientific sampling, but I noticed that several investors signaled this

Nonprofit FORGE is bringing ‘nearshoring’ to US startups Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours There’s a persistent theory in hardware that manufacturing overseas is the cheaper/better/more efficient option. You manufacture there, assemble somewhere else, and finally approve and get to market in the United States. But it turns out that it’s possible to manufacture closer to

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 Thursday, Crunchers! An agreement among a group of the nation’s largest banks to deposit some $30 billion with First Republic Bank could save its bacon, Christine reports, and over on TC+,

Course Hero, a tutoring business last valued by investors at $3.6 billion, has cut 15% of staff, or 42 people — its first round of layoffs in 17 years, TechCrunch has learned from numerous sources. A spokesperson confirmed the layoffs, saying that “the layoffs are happening as a part of a strategic effort to set

There’s a long-standing debate in the world of logistics robotics. On one side stand the greenfield folk, who insist that the best possible experience is one built from the ground up, with these automated systems at its core. Brownfield proponents, on the other hand, point to the time and money required for a full rebuild.

Walter Thompson Contributor Editorial Manager Walter Thompson edits staff and guest articles for TechCrunch+ and manages TechCrunch’s guest contributor program. Previously, he worked at a number of startups in various roles and as City Editor of Hoodline. He is the host of The Golden City, a podcast about San Francisco. More posts by this contributor

In another sign that the current VC appetite for AI is insatiable, Adept, a startup building AI that “enables humans and computers to work together creatively to solve problems,” yesterday announced that it raised $350 million in a Series B funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital with participation from Addition, Greylock, Atlassian

Dakotah Rice, the founder of investing platform Pollit, was sitting on his couch Thursday watching CNBC as he does every morning. Then, his phone started ringing — and didn’t stop. “I started getting texts and calls from my investors saying, ‘Look, you should move your money out of Silicon Valley Bank, something’s going on there,’”

Intellect, the Singapore-based mental health platform that now serves over three million users in 20 countries, is getting ready for a new phase of growth after striking a strategic partnership with IHH Healthcare, Asia’s largest private healthcare group. IHH Healthcare will work with Intellect to develop and customize digital mental health programs for its patients,

Alongside GPT-4, OpenAI has open-sourced a software framework to evaluate the performance of its AI models. Called Evals, OpenAI says that the tooling will allow anyone to report shortcomings in its models to help guide improvements. It’s a sort of crowdsourcing approach to model testing, OpenAI explains in a blog post. “We use Evals to

Pet ownership has steadily increased through the years, with many people bringing pets into their families during the past three years. That, in turn, boosted the pet industry itself, with the market’s value increasing from $90 billion in 2018 to over $120 billion in 2021. Of that, $50 billion was spent in the U.S. on

Silicon Valley Bank’s clients received a surprising email in their inboxes late Monday evening from the bank’s new CEO Tim Mayopoulos stating that the institution was not only open, it was also business as usual. “Silicon Valley Bank, N.A. is open and conducting business as usual,” the email, obtained by TechCrunch from multiple sources, read.

As the situation is starting to solidify around Silicon Valley Bank, many international companies that interacted in one way or another with the regional U.S. bank are now trying to understand the implications of the bank failure. Regulators in Canada and Germany have decided to freeze Silicon Valley Bank’s branches in these respective countries —

Puneet Gupta Contributor Puneet Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of Amberflo.io. He was formerly a general manager at AWS. I spent several years as a general manager at Amazon Web Services and my teams launched two Tier 1 services: Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon OpenSearch. Like every product at AWS, these were scaled with a

Global payroll provider Deel plans to provide $120 million of its own cash off its balance sheet to support startups’ payroll operations in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank shutting down. It has teamed up with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Y Combinator – both of which are investors in Deel – to offer the support

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.

The dust has yet to settle in the largest bank run in U.S. history, a collapse that in just 48 hours dismantled the tech startup-focused Silicon Valley Bank. But already a debate is raging in the venture capital community and investors are picking sides. On Friday, a group of more than two dozen venture capital

Serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Garry Tan is less than three months into his new job as the CEO of Y Combinator, one of the most famed accelerator programs in tech. And it seems like it’s been an eventful onboarding process thus far. Along with pretty much every other corner of the startup world, YC

W elcome 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. Enterprise cloud spend is holding up well, but large companies are looking into vendor consolidation. This makes cloud marketplaces an increasingly relevant sales

Engineers at Polymath Robotics were working late Wednesday night on multiple projects when co-founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher noticed chatter about Silicon Valley Bank in a YC founder WhatsApp group.  The conversation was related to an article published that day about SVB’s plan to launch a $2.25 billion share sale and an agreement by General

Earlier this week, venture investors and startups ran from Silicon Valley Bank, a financial institution that started the week solvent and closed it being shut down by regulators. While its failure affects the accounts of startups and venture investors that banked with it, SVB’s demise also has an impact on another service startups frequently used

No one can predict the follow-on effects of a moment like this. We are in uncharted territory. I write this twice-weekly newsletter on a tight deadline, so when I saw a press release that started with “Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, was closed today,” I realized I might need to pivot. To protect SVB’s

Mythic, an AI chip startup that last November reportedly ran out of capital, rose from the ashes today with an unexpected injection of fresh funds. Mythic this morning announced that it closed a $13 million financing round led by existing investors Atreides Management, DCVC and Lux Capital alongside new investors Catapult Ventures and Hermann Hauser