Startups

Some. Good. News. The latest Crunchbase data shows that Black startup founders in the United States raised around $264 million out of the total $33.6 billion in venture capital allocated in Q4 2022. That’s an uptick from the $178 million — or 0.43% — the group raised in Q3. In total, U.S. Black founders raised

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 is always nice to start a new year with a dose of optimism — as long as it is warranted. After reviewing

Raphael Mukomilow Contributor Raphael Mukomilow is partner and head of growth at Picus Capital. His focus is later-stage and growth investments.  Pierre Bourdon Contributor Pierre Bourdon is an investor at Picus Capital. After the challenging year that was 2022, one might think that the coming months are not looking great for VCs or founders. But,

HealthAtom is aiming to be the go-to cloud-based operations system for small and midsize healthcare companies across Latin America (LatAm). Although the company has been around since 2012, this is the first time it has announced fresh capital, in the amount of $10 million. HealthAtom’s medilink and dentalink software suites let clinics create schedules, manage

It’s impossible to plan for everything that can go wrong while building a startup. A definitive founder’s guide would have to include chapters like, “So you’ve hired the wrong person,” or, “Five ways to tell if an investor is lying to you.” A definitive guide would have to include chapters like, “So you’ve hired the

Apartment living can be a lonely life, but OneRoof is here to change that. The company offers a hyperlocal social network app meant to connect people in the same residential building around common interests like hobbies and to even organize around a common goal. The pre-revenue company has grown up a lot since we profiled

There isn’t much hope that 2023’s fundraising environment will be better for startups than last year’s. It seems likely that it will get worse before it gets better — even at the earliest stages, which have largely been insulated thus far. But for burgeoning companies capable of building business models that reflect current conditions and

Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor Growth hacking is really just growth testing Why growth activation matters Without customers, there can be no business. So how can you drive new customers

Profet AI, a Taiwanese startup that makes auto machine learning software for manufacturers, announced today it has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Darwin Ventures. Returning investors Hive Ventures, AUO and SVTI also participated, along with Harbinger VC and Jensen Capital Management. Founded in 2018, Profet AI’s customers include

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. Hello, and welcome to the middle of the week. CES is starting tomorrow, so bookmark TechCrunch’s dedicated CES page to catch up on all the happenings. Now, onto the news!  — Christine

Natalia Holgado Sanchez Contributor Natalia Holgado Sanchez is head of capital markets at Secfi, an equity planning, stock option financing and wealth management platform for startup executives and employees. I am not sure about you, but lately I’ve been hearing the same chatter from friends and colleagues at startups. It’s usually a version of: “Will

The “Pineapple Express” that dropped several inches of rain over the Bay Area last week left the ground saturated. The next storm front expected to arrive tomorrow is expected to bring disruption and destruction on a massive scale. It’s a decent metaphor for our startup ecosystem: Just as there aren’t enough sandbags in San Francisco

Yuval Krigel Contributor Yuval Krigel is an associate at YL Ventures who focuses on deal sourcing, technological due diligence and providing value-add support to the firm’s portfolio companies. The massive valuations and funding rounds of 2021 left some room for optimism around the state of the Israeli cybersecurity industry in 2022, instilling a sense of

Corey Massella Contributor Corey Massella is a partner at UHY LLP and is managing director at UHY Advisors. He has more than 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, tax and business advisor, and as a specialist in SEC accounting and audit services. Economic uncertainty, market volatility, rising interest rates, inflation and the ongoing Ukraine-Russia

Holden Spaht Contributor Holden Spaht is a managing partner at private equity firm Thoma Bravo. A new year is upon us, and with it comes uncertain, and uncomfortable, market conditions. Accompanying those conditions are equally uncomfortable decisions. For startup founders, determining which path is right for their business may require fundamentally rethinking the way they

Victoria Treyger Contributor It’s been quite an eventful year. Fintech has fallen a long way from the highs of 2021, and while 2022 was largely about the reset of the funding environment, 2023 is going to be a year of recalibration for fintech companies. The great news is that large enterprise and midmarket companies care

Securing funding is a stressful endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. We recently sat down with three VCs to figure out the best way to go about spinning up an investing network from scratch and negotiating the first term sheet. Earlier this week, we featured the first part of that conversation with James Norman

The grocery delivery company reportedly suffered a 75% valuation cut compared to its $39B peak Anna Heim 12 hours As much as we like to end the year with some good news, what we are hearing from grocery delivery company Instacart is not exactly that. According to The Information, citing “two people familiar with the

Blair Silverberg Contributor Blair Silverberg is co-founder and CEO of Hum Capital, a financial services company using technology to accelerate the fundraising process. More posts by this contributor The right questions to ask investors when fundraising in a down market 8 steps for building a financial model to calculate your fundraising needs For many founders

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 the pros

The promise of increasing developer efficiency, not headcount Anna Heim 12 hours More than half of professional developers have CI/CD, DevOps and automated testing tools and services available at their organization, Stack Overflow’s 2022 developer survey uncovered. However, Stack Overflow noted, only 38% of the 34,906 respondents reported having a developer portal to make it

The Equity crew is kicking off your week with a special episode from our sister podcast, Found, the stories behind the startups. Co-hosts Darrell Etherington and Becca Szkutak spoke with Alice Albrecht from re:collect, a software tool that augments creativity by helping people focus, recall and connect their ideas. The conversation covered a lot of ground, from how

Looking back, 2022 was quite the year for some investors and not in a good way. Mistakes made in the boom period of the past couple of years led to many write-downs, but the most egregious example of abysmal investing practices this year was FTX, the bankrupt and disgraced crypto exchange. In fact, while we

Andre Maciel Contributor Andre Maciel is the founder of Volpe Capital. He formerly worked with J.P. Morgan, and was a managing investment partner at SoftBank. Jennifer Queen Contributor Jennifer Queen is the founder of Pina, a PR firm focused on startups and venture capital firms. Latin American venture capital and growth investments through 2018 had

Indian fintech Money View said on Monday it has raised $75 million in a new funding round, its second this year, despite the market slump as it looks to scale its core credit business and build more products in the South Asian market. Apis Partners led Money View’s Series E funding round, valuing the Bengaluru-headquartered

Three years ago, Mila showed up on Kickstarter with its smart air purifier. The company created an air cleaner with a choice of different filters to suit the use case (and price point) customers were interested in, along with an impressive array of sensors built into the device itself. Today, the San Francisco-based company announced

For the last 24 months, Thomvest Ventures recorded headcount data for 150 Series A to C enterprise SaaS startups, and we have the numbers. This report prepared by Eddie Ackerman, Thomvest’s strategic finance operating partner, looks at startup hiring velocity since February 2021 by region, company type and, notably, how much time passed since last

Reliance has backed the Philadelphia-based AI and robotics startup Exyn, the Indian conglomerate disclosed in a stock exchange filing on Thursday, making further inroads in startups globally. Reliance Strategic Business Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries, has acquired a 23.3% stake in Exyn for $25 million, the Indian firm said. The Indian firm’s investment

Rajan “Raj” Moonesinghe (right) and his brother Johann Moonesinghe (left) pictured with their cousin (center). Image Credits: Johann Moonesinghe For years, Austin has made headlines as an evolving tech hub where startups, large companies and investors alike have flocked to set up a presence. But as 2022 closes, the Texas capital is in the news

We’ve seen attempts at gathering all cards (credit, debit, loyalty, etc.) in one before, but Card Blanch claims to have a fresh take on the concept and closed just shy of half a mil worth of angel investments with a very elegant deck. The company gets a few parts of the slide deck right that