Startups

It hasn’t been a kind year for blockchain-based startup activity. In addition to an asset-price correction during a general venture capital slowdown, web3-focused tech upstarts have also had to deal with a series of intra-industry crises that have, at times, dominated technology headlines. The Terra/Luna mess comes to mind. As does the meltdown of Three

Many startups are overvalued. But because they are also well-stocked with cash, they haven’t had to raise new funding at a lower or flat valuation — yet. However, new data from Carta found that cracks are starting to show. Startup equity infrastructure platform Carta found that a record number of startup employee stock grants — which

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. Today’s prize (a muted ‘hrmph!’ and a solemn nod) for best headline goes to Devin, and given that we’re sneaking up on Black Friday, we have some of the best tech deals

Google Cloud has partnered with SuperGaming to offer the Indian gaming startup’s proprietary gaming engine, SuperPlatform, to developers worldwide, the latest in a series of recent steps from the Android-maker to expand focus into the gaming industry. The cloud arm of the search giant said Thursday that as part of its partnership, it will offer

Dat Bike is on a mission to put more electric bikes on Vietnam’s roads. The startup said today it has raised $8 million led by returning investor Singapore-based firm Jungle Ventures, just seven months after its first round of funding was announced. GSR Ventures and Delivery Hero Ventures also participated in this round, along with

Things are bleak in the tech sphere as we close out a year defined by plummeting stocks, persistent mass layoffs and a fall from grace for major social media companies. Yet Stanford dropout Teddy Solomon’s story of co-founding Fizz is so reminiscent of Facebook that he was introduced to his investor and now-CEO Rakesh Mathur

Shares of Delhivery hit an all-time low of 317 Indian rupees ($3.88) Wednesday, cutting its market cap to $2.8 billion, falling below the valuation at which it raised capital from private investors in 2021, as the Indian logistics firm grapples with the aftermath of a bulk deal sale and muted growth report. Shares of the

Almond is aiming to modernize obstetrical-gynecological (OB-GYN) care for birthing people who want something more “modern,” full service and comprehensive than the standard provider offers. Fresh out of Y Combinator, the company just announced a $7 million seed round. “The patient experience today is slow, it’s incomplete, and ultimately it’s delivering not great outcomes,” said

Pitching a startup to investors without a personal recommendation isn’t a terrible idea — as long as you’ve done your research first. Tetra Insights co-founders Michael Bamberger and Panos Rigopoulos raised a $5 million Series A last year, and the duo said cold outreach was a key part of their strategy. “When I changed my

Leta, a Kenyan B2B supply chain and logistics SaaS provider launched last year to optimize fleet management, is looking for growth opportunities in West Africa, even as it scales operations in its existing five markets. Leta’s proprietary route and load optimization technology is designed to boost efficiency in the delivery of goods to customers, and

Let’s start with the supposition that the venture-founder compact is built almost entirely on trust, especially early on. Sure, due diligence matters in the investment process, but lying about your capabilities can undercut the founder-investor relationship — and in extreme cases, to the detriment of the larger, global startup market. In the wake of Elizabeth

If you follow NASA’s many interplanetary and orbital missions, you’re no doubt familiar with Thomas Zurbuchen, the agency’s associate administrator of science. He also oversees NASA’s science program with a total budget approaching $7 billion a year. That’s a mighty big number, but there’s an even bigger reason why we’re thrilled that Dr. Zurbuchen will

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. Well, that didn’t take long. In late October, I wrote about how the tide is shifting on tech layoffs, highlighting that 70% of layoffs that

Peyton Carr Contributor Peyton Carr is a financial adviser to founders, entrepreneurs and their families, helping them with planning and investing. He is a managing director of Keystone Global Partners. More posts by this contributor How much tax will you owe when you sell your company? With a Section 1045 rollover, founders can salvage QSBS

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week, Alex and Natasha discussed the latest and greatest of this consuming news cycle. Our goal with the episode, as always, is to go beyond what you may see in a 140-character-take

A new bankruptcy filing, first reported by CNBC, shows that FTX’s corporate funds were used to purchase homes in the Bahamas among other personal items. The details arise less than a week after the now infamous crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy — a decision that founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said he regrets. FTX’s

Jack Selby, a former PayPal exec and the longtime managing director of Thiel Capital who attracted some attention years back for his low-key largesse, has a new, $110 million venture fund that he intends to invest mostly in his adopted state of Arizona, where Selby has lived since 2002. The debut vehicle of the firm,

If someone offers you a seat on a rocket, you don’t ask which seat. So goes one of Silicon Valley’s favorite platitudes, one that you can trace back (at a minimum) to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. The idea is that if you are given a shot at working

In a major first, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration just offered its safety blessing to a cultivated meat product startup. It completed its first pre-market consultation with Upside Foods to examine human food made from the cultured cells of animals, and it concluded that it had “no further questions” related to the way Upside

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 your…checks the top right of the screen…Wednesday. Several of our TechCrunch colleagues headed to Miami today for the TC Sessions: Crypto event tomorrow. Given the past week, it

Evernote, the note-taking and task management app founded over 20 years ago, has been acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons. In a post on Evernote’s newsroom, Evernote CEO Ian Small said that Bending Spoons will take ownership of Evernote in a transaction expected to close in early 2023. “For Evernote, this decision is the

After a particularly slow summer, the mood in venture capital seemed to change with the season come Labor Day. By the end of September, it felt that maybe the worst had already come in terms of this year’s falling venture funding numbers. Investment volume had stopped declining and was starting to make up ground. Investors

The social commerce market is already worth more than $13 billion in Southeast Asia, but the checkout process is filled with friction. Many sellers don’t have online storefronts and instead use social media and messaging apps, which means payment is made by switching to banking apps or wallets. This means low conversion rates, say the

Yahaha, a Helsinki- and Shanghai-based immersive, user-generated, low-code gaming platform founded by a group of Chinese gaming vets, made a splash in January when it announced a cumulative $50 million in funding ahead of its alpha launch in April. Now, with 100,000 creators and hundreds of thousands of players, it’s raised a further $40 million

Owl Labs, a startup developing a linuep of AI-powered meeting hardware, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series C round led by HP Tech Ventures (HP’s venture capital arm) with participation from Sourcenext, Matrix Partners, Spark Capital and Playground Global. The closing of the tranche marks the start of a strategic partnership

Last week, many investors were left with egg on their faces after FTX’s valuation went from $32 billion to zero in a New York minute. VCs were left wondering, “What the hell happened?” And they’re still wondering, “Wait — did I do something wrong? Is it me?” Why yes, actually, it is you. People are

Grant Easterbrook Contributor Grant Easterbrook is a fintech consultant based in Amsterdam. His work has been cited in the media over 150 times. He also co-founded Dream Forward, which was acquired in 2020. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the fintech phenomenon. Companies such as E*TRADE, Rocket Mortgage, and TurboTax began to disrupt the

One day in 2020, I published an article about a Chinese hardware maker which would have otherwise been a typical funding story. Instead, I got a complaint from its PR asking me to remove all mentions of “China” from the piece. The startup wanted to be called “American” on the basis of its having a

India initially made its name in the tech world years ago when it staked out reputation as a key hub for business process outsourcing. Now that legacy has taken a very different turn in fintech with outsourcing of a very different kind, with the emergence of embedded finance technology. In the latest development, Lentra, an

Welcome 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. The recent OpenView-Chargebee 2022 report had SaaS benchmarks as its focus, but also touched in passing on a topic I’ve been curious about: reverse