Startups

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI can help usher in “unbelievable abundance,” but he says he wants to ensure that such abundance is shared. Toward that end, Altman has embraced a theory of 19th century political economist Henry George, who in his own lifetime worried about wealth amassing in the hands of the few following

Female-focused telehealth startup, Teal Health, is popping up today to announce an $8.8 million seed round with a roster of heavy hitting investors on board — including (Serena Williams’) Serena Ventures, (Chelsea Clinton’s) Metrodora Ventures, and (Laurene Powell Jobs’) Emerson Collective. The February 2020-founded San Francisco-based startup’s first product will be a service that supports

Brain researchers have relied on devices called microelectrode arrays for decades, but the technology behind these tools is increasingly outdated. Precision Neuroscience is building a modern alternative that’s not only an order of magnitude better, but far less invasive to put in. With a newly raised $41 million in the bank, they’re all set to

Showing that there’s real investor enthusiasm for identity management platforms, Saviynt, which enables companies to secure apps, data and infrastructure in a single platform, today announced that it raised $205 million in debt from AB Private Credit Investors’ Tech Capital Solutions group. Founder Sachin Nayyar, who returned to Saviynt as CEO this week alongside newly-appointed

Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I’m back, I’m drinking an iced Americano maybe because I miss Alex, maybe because I just feel different today, and I’m ready to start our week together. Here’s what I got into on today’s Equity

A not-so-humble brag here, so brace yourself. The programming at TechCrunch Early Stage — April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts — is gonna be off the proverbial hook. How do we know? We read hundreds of applications from experienced founders and startup ecosystem experts eager to participate in Audience Choice for a chance to present at

Founded by two insurance industry veterans, Eazy Digital wants to give small insurance companies in Southeast Asia the same advantage as their larger competitors. Its SaaS platform lets insurers digitize many parts of their operations, enabling them to scale up more efficiently. The Bangkok-based startup announced today it has raised $850,000 in an oversubscribed seed

Much hope remains after the crypto winter almost froze the sector: the Luna crash, the bankruptcy of Celsius and the arrest of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for alleged fraud. Then there was the venture pullback amid an economic downturn. In 2021, web3 startups globally raised a record $29.2 billion. By 2022, that number dipped to $21.5

Americans spent nearly $20 billion on pizza deliveries in 2021. Most of us could probably bake one at home, but speed and convenience are powerful incentives at dinnertime. The potential of AI tools like ChatGPT creates a similar dilemma — should companies license large language models without modifications, or customize them and pay much higher

Finance people live and breathe spreadsheets, Mayfield’s Rajeev Batra was telling me. We were talking about our upcoming TechCrunch Live event featuring him and Cube’s Christina Ross, and Rajeev was explaining how he sees Cube’s position in the marketplace. Christina Ross co-founded the company in 2018 in a bid to provide a solution to CFOs

Startups selling dev tools over the last few years have seen the pendulum swing. On one hand, developers rarely need anyone’s permission to start using their tools, which resulted in teams within the same organization using wildly different tech stacks. On the other, a growing number of companies are attempting to limit this chaos at

Earlier this month, we reported that investors’ sentiments surrounding venture capital activity going into this were more reserved than upbeat. Investors believe the market correction, which caught up with the continent in the second half of 2022, will spiral into this year. But before that, there was shared optimism that African startups would raise more

Earlier this week, I wrote a story about EV charging company Orange and how it is taking a different approach to putting chargers everywhere. Instead of a few high-speed chargers, it makes it easy for multifamily dwellings (think apartment buildings) to put charger sockets everywhere there might be EVs, taking care of billing and such

Conor Burke spent much of his career in the back office of a big bank in Ireland. His team was tasked with digitizing the onboarding process — particularly document-heavy manual review workflows — that were costing the bank millions of dollars every year and not catching fraud. According to him, the biggest challenge was figuring

Method, a startup that aims to make it easier for fintech developers to embed repayment, balance transfers and bill pay automation into their apps, today announced that it closed a $16 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator (Method’s a Y Combinator graduate), Abstract Ventures, SV Angel and

German insurtech startup Getsafe is adding a fourth market with today’s product launch. In addition to Germany, Austria and the U.K., Getsafe is now going to offer insurance products in France. The company will first offer a home insurance product. Getsafe is trying to disrupt the insurance market with a focus on digital-first insurance products.

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! We’re pretty excited about Matt’s TechCrunch Live, where he talks to Cambly about how the company found profits after failing to raise a Series A. Mark your calendar for February

Working with, microservices-based development environments presents a unique set of testing challenges. Richard North developed an open source solution called Testcontainers in 2015 to help ease this problem for developers. Today, the open source project is used by companies like Uber, Netflix, Spotify and Capital One. North and co-founder Sergei Egorov (who was a co-maintainer

Terra Drone said today it has raised $14 million in Series C funding from Wa’ed Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, marking the VC firm’s first investment in Asia.  The Japan-headquartered company, which builds drone software, hardware and uncrewed aircraft traffic management software, said the new capital brings its total raised to $97

One of the most remarkable things about construction robotics is the sheer breadth of tasks that can potentially be automated. As I’ve noted before, the entire category is a prime target for robotics startups, given that it fills all of the big Ds of automation — dull, dirty and (quite often) dangerous. It’s also one

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry is facing budget constraints and reductions in headcount as a result of the pandemic and the broader slowdown in tech. Companies have tightened up their budgets for SaaS purchases, looking to keep cash on hand while growing more efficiently. That’s why Kush Kella and Ahmed Sharif founded Vartana (which my colleague

Electric vehicles accounted for nearly 6% of all new cars sold in the U.S. in 2022, an increase from 3.1% the year before, and that number will continue to grow over the coming years. While it’s still a young industry, the ecosystem surrounding EVs — from EV charging and installation to insurance products and parking

The same day Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, McKinsey snatched up an enterprise-focused AI firm, Iguazio, for a relative steal. The consulting giant reportedly paid around $50 million for Iguazio, a Tel Aviv-based company offering an MLOps platform for large-scale businesses — “MLOps” referring to a set of tools to deploy and maintain machine learning

Eugene Y. Mar Contributor Eugene Y. Mar is a partner with Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco, leading the firm’s Technology Industry Group. Thomas J. Pardini Contributor Thomas J. Pardini is a senior associate with Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco, representing clients in intellectual property litigation. Tech companies and startups

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. It kind of feels like tech forgot its umbrella. Like, it remembered to pack its water bottle, wear the right shoes and layer up, but

You know what it’s like — you’ve been on vacation and you’ve taken 28 million photos, and you just want to select the best 12 so you can make a calendar. Ain’t nobody got time for that — and that’s what GoodOnes is here to help you with. The app is in early access mode

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. Happy Friday! Join us in wishing Lorenzo a very warm welcome to the team! He’s joining our crack team of cybersecurity reporters, working alongside Zack and Carly. He just published his first

Thoma Bravo, the private equity and growth capital firm, today announced that it would spend $1.8 billion CAD (~$1.34 billion) to acquire Magnet Forensics, a Waterloo-based company making software used by defense forces and businesses to investigate cybersecurity threats. Magnet Forensics will be purchased by a newly created corporation controlled by Thoma Bravo, Morpheus Purchaser

In late-2020, Presso pivoted. It made a lot of sense at the time. People weren’t traveling much and therefore weren’t particularly hung up on getting their business attire dry-cleaned. Certainly the hospitality industry — which had been identified as a major potential revenue sort –0 had effectively ground to a screeching halt. Around that time,

Copilot, a platform aimed at helping companies, including marketing agencies, accounting firms and law firms, run and grow their businesses, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by YC Continuity and Lachy Groom at a $100 million post-money valuation. Co-founder and CEO Marlon Misra said that the funds