Startups

As many as 2.8% of Africans are insured, which is less than half the global average of 6.3%, making it the least insured continent in the world. Despite the abysmal number, there’s some good news. According to a McKinsey report, most African countries have experienced double-digit insurance growth in CAGR in local currency over the

There’s a lot of noise right now about how generative AIs like ChatGPT and Bard are going to revolutionize various aspects of the web, but companies targeting narrower verticals are already experiencing success. Writer is such a one, and it just announced a new trio of large language models to power its enterprise copy assistant.

Startup competitions are a mainstay in Silicon Valley, and there probably isn’t a VC or founder out there who hasn’t heard of TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield. From the TechCrunch Podcast Network comes Inside Startup Battlefield — a four-episode miniseries that takes you behind the scenes of one of tech’s most anticipated startup competitions. Each episode

Ahoy, all. Welcome back to the latest edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we point you to some of the most-read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning (which, not for nothin’, used to be cartoon time for this Gen Xer)? Here’s the link. And

Jon Siegler Contributor Jon Siegler, co-founder and chief product officer of LogicGate, has over a decade of experience in designing customer-centric enterprise risk and compliance systems. Many cybersecurity professionals, if not all, have experienced that “after the breach” feeling — the moment you realize you’ll have to tell your customers their personal information may have

All startups have to navigate the turbulent economic climate of 2023. But whether your company can survive depends on a lot of factors, including the viability and originality of your idea and the amount of cash you have in the bank. There are ways to merely survive, of course, to hunker down and weather the

Air taxis make up most of the hype surrounding eVTOLs — electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles — despite their long path to market, steep upfront costs and plethora of regulatory hurdles. Ryse Aero Technologies, an Ohio-based startup building aircraft that are akin to flying ATVs, thinks eVTOL tech could be put to better use

Word of mouth and other ‘free’ marketing channels often don’t scale well Haje Jan Kamps 9 hours My heart sinks when I talk to a startup founder who proudly declares having a customer base that’s grown to 1,000 people organically. Being scrappy and frugal are great qualities to have as a startup, but your investors

Back in August, our own Ron Miller covered the $6 million seed round of Spinach, a company that’s building out its meeting tool designed specifically for engineers using agile methodology to run stand-up meetings online. It caught my eye at the time: There is no shortage of meeting tools, and I was curious about what

Funding to U.S.-based AI companies with at least one woman founder has steadily increased over the past few years, according to Crunchbase data. Last year, such companies raised $3.61 billion out of the $23.5 billion allocated in total to U.S. AI startups, or around 15.38%. That is a steady year-over-year increase. In 2021, for example,

This is a tale as old as time: a small e-commerce owner wants to build a great landing page for their company, but the available tools only get them so far, and they don’t have the funds to hire a developer. This is where Replo comes in, offering a low-code web platform and marketplace so

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello, you crunchy delights, Dunno ’bout you, but we’re getting a little excited about our TC Early Stage event in Boston on April 20, and Darrell just announced the first group of

Compliance is a must but also a means to an end Anna Heim 9 hours SaaS startups are working on acquiring enterprise clients earlier than they used to, and this is changing their road map. “What I’ve seen is more and more companies are launching with table stakes enterprise features [ … ] whereas those

The rise of streaming architectures — frameworks of software components built to ingest and process large volumes of data from multiple sources — is driving the demand for better reliability and performance. Engineering teams often encode data to improve app performance by using what are known as “message envelopes.” But these add complexity — and

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. What’s up, Crunchy readers! True crime has its grip on us all, and Lorenzo’s review of “Tracers in the Dark” is fascinating. In the book, the author covers how cops go after

Generative AI reminds me of ball bearings: the technology is relatively inexpensive, highly adaptable and a proven way to reduce friction. Investors have taken notice: CB Insights reports that VCs poured $49 billion into AI last year, a 40% jump from the year before. The hype so far has largely centered on chatbots and avatars,

Nix, the open-source tool for creating reproducible builds and deployments, is becoming increasingly popular among developers, but it’s not always the easiest service to work with. It’s maybe no surprise then that we’re now seeing a new batch of startups that aims to bring Nix to more developers by building the tooling necessary to bring

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello, Crunchers! Our fave read today was Connie’s piece with advice for startups that have the government as their target customer. In honor of Black history month, we want to share some

Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s February, and that means two things: you can stop wishing people happy new year, and “Succession” is officially back next month. As always, you can find me on Instagram or Twitter when I’m not

Sashank Purighalla Contributor The promise of lower hardware costs has spurred startups to migrate services to the cloud, but many teams were unsure how to do this efficiently or cost-effectively. Developers at startups thought they could maintain multiple application code bases that work independently with each cloud provider. Now they’ve realized it is too time-consuming

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. “It’s not either usage-based or subscription pricing,” VC firm OpenView wrote in its second State of Usage-Based Pricing report. These hybrid approaches call

Information is power, especially when you’re just beginning your startup journey. Whether you’re in the idea stage or building on the friends-and-family plan or preparing to pitch investors, it’s imperative to understand the shifting VC funding landscape as you plan for future growth. It’s no secret that funding is harder to come by in this

The venture secondaries market has been on the same roller-coaster ride as the broader VC market over the past few years, but it looks poised to break away in 2023. Like venture capital as a whole, the secondaries market was hot in 2021 as a bunch of new players — sound familiar? — entered the

In October last year, Sendy, a Kenyan logistics scale-up, wound up its supplies service, which enabled retailers to purchase FMCGs directly from manufacturers, saying it was directing all its focus on its end-to-end fulfillment offering. Months later, the company is ceasing on-ground operations in Nigeria, one of its four markets in Africa. This means that

Samooha, a startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration platform, today announced that it raised $12.5 million in a funding tranche backed by Altimeter Capital and Snowflake Ventures, among others. CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan says that the cash infusion — Samooha’s first — will be put toward product development and hiring; the plan is to grow the

There’s no denying that the robotics startup world has taken a hit during the ongoing economic downturn. Recent numbers prove what we’ve all suspected for some time. But two things are true: 1) The lull is temporary; and 2) While robotics isn’t recession-proof, construction might as well be. This is certainly a theme of late

Most of the pitch deck teardowns to date (here’s a handy list of the more than 30 we have published so far) have been for institutional funding rounds, typically in the millions or tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars raised. Those are interesting to look at, of course, but I also know that many

French startup Seyna is slowly building an all-in-one platform for insurance brokers so that they can create, sell and manage insurance products from scratch. And the company is launching a new product called Seyna Claims. As the name suggests, Seyna Claims empowers insurance brokers so that they can handle claims themselves. Seyna is an insurtech

Disclo CEO and co-founder Hannah Olson was diagnosed with Lyme disease when she was in college. At the time, she didn’t really see herself as someone with a disability, even though it meant spending hours each day hooked up to an IV. When she entered the workforce, she soon was confronted with the difficulties of

Digs, a Vancouver, Washington-based startup that is developing a collaboration tool for homebuilders and their vendors, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $7 million seed funding round from Fuse, Flying Fish, Betaworks, Legacy, PSF, GFR, and others. The company was co-founded by Ryan Fink and Ty Frackiewicz. For Fink, this is his second attempt at a home-centric