Startups

Successful startup founders do not spring fully formed from the head of whatever god or goddess keeps tabs on entrepreneurs. It takes time to educate yourself, learn essential skills and acquire a smart, connected network. Here’s the great news — TechCrunch Early Stage, taking place April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts, is designed to help both

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: What are some fast

Founded by Ece Kural and Furkan Bayraktar, Scrintal is a visual note-taking and collaboration tool. The Sweden-based company’s product combines visual canvases with documentation to help professionals and teams go from idea to presentable work on the same screen — think Miro meets Notion meets a slew of other tools companies use to keep their knowledge

Open source password management platform Bitwarden has made its first known acquisition, snapping up a fledgling Sweden-based startup called Passwordless.dev, which specializes in helping developers integrate passwordless authentication technology into their software. The news comes shortly after 1Password and LastPass rival Bitwarden announced its first outside funding since its inception in 2015, securing $100 million

Good Meat announced today it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency to use serum-free media for the production of its cultivated meat. The brand, which is the cultivated meat division of U.S.-based food startup Eat Just, says it is the only cultivated meat producer in the world with the ability to sell

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. Good news — we are back with another round of events for TechCrunch, and we have early-bird tickets available to our Early Stage event in Boston in April. Woohoo! Today, we also

The early stages of building a startup is no cakewalk even during a strong economy — much less during the uncertain one we’re currently living in. If you’re an aspiring or newly minted founder, you’ll find invaluable information, guidance and support — at an early-bird price you can afford — during TechCrunch Early Stage, a

Before founding The Edit LDN, Moses Rashid frequented sneaker festivals and exhibitions to buy limited edition shoes. But Rashid, who describes himself as a “huge sneakerhead,” was often disappointed by the shopping experience. “I found it crazy that I was dropping $850 on a pair of sneakers but I wouldn’t even get a bag to

ShareChat, the Indian social media startup backed by Twitter, Google, Tiger Global and Temasek, has laid off 20% of its workforce — or over 400 employees — just a month after eliminating more than 100 roles. The startup informed its employees about the decision on Monday morning. It deactivated access to accounts and wiped out

An increasing number of organizations are adopting microservices, the loosely-coupled, independently-deployable services that together make up an app. According to a 2020 O’Reilly survey, 77% of organizations had adopted microservices as of then, with 29% reporting that they were migrating or implementing a majority of their systems using microservices. The widespread microservices adoption has spawned

Byju’s has made a key change in its sales strategy, moving away from a business practice that attracted the edtech giant criticism over the years. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, India’s most valuable, said on Monday its sales people no longer visit students’ homes to pitch to their parents. Instead, the entire sales workforce now works from

When Constantin Robertz was working at Zalora, he was involved in moving warehouses six times as the e-commerce company outgrew its logistics infrastructure. This inspired him to co-found Locad, a logistics provider for omnichannel e-commerce companies that connects its network of third-party warehouses and shipping carriers with a cloud-based platform referred to its “logistics engine.”

Historically, environmental health and safety software hasn’t been a massive market — at least compared to others in the software-as-a-service segment — and it’s admittedly not the most enthralling startup category. But that’s changing, according to a new survey released by research firm Verdantix. EHS software acts as a data management system for capturing and

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 took me a while, but I’m realizing that my startup love language is discussing any attempts to standardize the opaque and often informal world

Venture capitalists may control capital, but one currency that they’re always in search of is an elusive, evolving one: deal flow. Betting early on the next big startup is enough to cement the entire return of a fund (and then some) — and help that plucky investor make a name for themselves. This reality makes

We spend a lot of time praising tech investors and entrepreneurs for their risk appetite. But why don’t we put startup workers on the same pedestal? Who’s taking on more risk: A Stanford grad who leveraged their network to raise a seed round or an immigrant worker who relocates to an expensive city for a

Investment giant BlackRock announced Friday it is taking a minority stake in venture-backed fintech startup Human Interest. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Human Interest’s digital retirement benefits platform allows users “to launch a retirement plan in minutes and put it on autopilot,” according to the company. It also touts that it has eliminated

Venture capital funding continued its slump through the end of 2022, and there aren’t any real signs things are going to pick back up for a while. That means more doom and gloom ahead for startups looking to fundraise. Many startups that tried to avoid raising a regular round in 2022 — or turned to

Life has been pretty brutal in hospitality over the past couple of years, but that hasn’t stopped Mint House from bubbling to the top with a series of tech-forward apartments. Under the slogan of “The comfort of home. The luxury of a hotel. Tech-enabled and tailored to you,” the company is trying to make being

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), or integrated circuits sold off-the-shelf, are a hot topic in tech. Because they’re relatively affordable and can be programmed for a range of use cases, they’ve caught on particularly in the AI and machine learning space where they’ve been used to accelerate the training of AI systems. The global FPGA market

Emerging markets tend to go in and out of vogue. First, Austin was the next biggest thing, then Atlanta and, more recently, Miami. Pittsburgh has yet to have its moment, but all the signs are there that it could be next. Having local expertise in the category every VC wants to invest in right now

Stripe, a richly valued payments startup, has cut its internal valuation yet again, according to sources familiar with the manner. It is now valued, internally, at $63 billion. The cut, first reported by The Information, puts Stripe’s internal per-share price at $24.71, down 40% since peaking. The 11% cut comes after an internal valuation cut

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 from a very rain-drenched, the Cure-themed, semi-goth-and-sad Silicon Valley (Haje) and a lovely, sunny and warm day (Christine). It’s hard to imagine one from the other, and so here we are,

Abby Miller Levy Contributor Last year was when we all got the wake-up call about longevity. From major reports published on the impact of longevity by the National Academy of Medicine and McKinsey to every leading newspaper, public discourse highlighted how our global healthcare, financial and housing infrastructure was failing to serve a rapidly growing

You don’t need to be an economist to appreciate the myriad forces placing downward pressure on startups today. Setting aside the legions of investors keeping their powder dry, is your yearly revenue growing faster than the inflation rate? What percentage of your sales team has experience working during a downturn? Amidst the angst, there’s some

Investment giant Fidelity announced today that it has acquired Shoobx, a venture-backed fintech startup, for an undisclosed amount. Jason Furtado and Stephan Richter founded Boston-based Shoobx in 2013, according to Crunchbase. The pair went on to raise a known $10 million in funding for the company with investors such as Austin-based Scout Ventures and Steve

The need for data observability, or the ability to understand, diagnose and orchestrate data health across various IT tools, continues to grow as organizations adopt more apps and services. (Nearly 10% of businesses now have more than 200 apps to manage, according to a recent Okta study.) In a large-scale survey of IT decision makers

About a decade ago, Donghwan Kim helped his cousin, a ceramist, look for sales channels, like flea markets, to sell his ceramics. But they had a hard time locating a suitable platform, so after about a year, Kim decided to create a marketplace for handmade goods himself in South Korea called Backpackr. Today, Backpackr, which

Anthropic, the startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees that’s raised over $700 million in funding to date, has developed an AI system similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that appears to improve upon the original in key ways. Called Claude, Anthropic’s system is accessible through a Slack integration as part of a closed beta. TechCrunch wasn’t able to

E-commerce in Southeast Asia is very fragmented, with consumers having their choice of marketplaces, e-commerce sites and social commerce. Many prefer to buy from large marketplaces, says FLIK co-founder Ahmad Gadi, because those platforms offer promotions and cashback deals. But for direct-to-consumer brands, marketplaces aren’t the best way to get consumer data or foster brand