Startups

The digital landscape is evolving so fast that one’s four-year degree can hardly keep up with the myriad platforms and APIs emerging every day. That’s why Skills Union wants to connect tech startup workers looking to level up with an array of field-specific experts over live video. Online professional training isn’t new; it’s not uncommon

Nexta, an Egyptian startup that plans to launch its banking app in the coming months, has secured a $3 million investment from eFinance Group, a state-owned provider of digital payments solutions. This news follows the $2 million pre-seed round Nexta announced this March, which Egyptian early-stage VC Disruptech led. Last year, Nexta obtained a provisional

Chief co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan started the company because they had experienced first-hand being women executives without a ton of support. They created a community of female leaders that is now 20,000 strong, with 60,000 sitting on waitlists, but just don’t call these women ‘girl bosses.’ The two women appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt

After a whirlwind month of spewing racism, antisemitism and just straight oddities, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, announced his intention to buy right-wing extremist “free speech” platform Parler. Coincidentally, we’re sure, the app’s CEO is George Farmer, who is the husband of Kanye’s new best friend, conservative political pundit Candace Owens. In

From one perspective, DoorDash is a bargain today. The same goes for Coinbase, UiPath, AppLovin, Oscar Health, Bumble and Qualtrics. Indeed, if you pick nearly any 2021 technology IPO and compare its debut price to where it trades today, you will find that the market is offering yesteryear’s standouts at a massive discount. So much

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. Greetings from the TechCrunch office! Yes, it turns out we have an office, even though we haven’t seen the inside of it for a good long stretch. We are here doing some

Tipping in the U.S. is a critical part of how the wheels turn in the service economy. One service area that’s been very overlooked, however, is the world of last-mile delivery — a service job that falls between the cracks when it comes to tipping because those who deliver products typically don’t work for the

It’s time for procrastination to stop here. Well, it is if you’ve put off buying your pass to TechCrunch Disrupt. Today is your final opportunity to avoid paying full freight. Nobody likes full freight, just sayin’. You can still save $700 if…and only if…you buy your pass before the deal expires precisely at 11:59 p.m.

For cash-strapped SaaS startups trying to reach scale, the math doesn’t look great. A slump in the public markets has dragged the entire sector down, but customer acquisition isn’t getting any cheaper. In the meantime, runways are shrinking like a wool sweater in an electric dryer, and teams that hope to fundraise better have some

“The 2022 venture capital market” is nearly a misnomer, as each quarter that passes seems to bring with it a new normal for startup investment. The pace of quarterly change in how venture investors are disbursing capital is making full-year numbers almost misleading. The change inside of 2022, in other words, may at times mask

Perhaps unsurprisingly, new PitchBook data found that U.S. companies with all female founders are raising less capital this year than the last amid current economic woes. Last year, women raised around 2.4% of all venture capital allocated, a figure that stands at 1.9% through Q3 of this year. That number becomes even lower and even

Christian Owens Contributor Christian Owens is CEO and co-founder of Paddle, a payments infrastructure provider for SaaS businesses. Scaling a SaaS company is tougher today than in the past few years. Whatever stage your company is at, a near 70% drop in the value of public SaaS stocks, increasingly limited access to funding and shrinking

Venture debt was never meant to be used to bail a company out of financial trouble. And yet, when venture capitalists started to pull back from equity investing earlier this year because frothy market conditions made them realize that valuations were too high, it became a topic of discussion again. Across the industry, from founders

Being in the business of convincing people that they deserve a vacation is hard. Being in the business of convincing people that they can co-own a vacation house and enjoy it at the same time can be deceptively harder. Getaway — different from another venture-backed Getaway, which sells escapes to tiny cabins in the middle

Tick-tock, startup fans. We’re just days away from TechCrunch Disrupt on October 18–20 in San Francisco. If you’re still perched on that fence, we have five more reasons why you should pry open the wallet, dust off the credit card and get yourself to the Moscone Center and build a better business. Buy your pass

Pillow aspires to be an all-in-one platform that helps even newbie users save, spend and invest in crypto currency. The Singapore-based startup announced it has raised $18 million in Series A financing co-led by Accel and Quona Capital, with participation from Elevation Capital and Jump Capital. The app currently has more than 75,000 users in

For the first time in years, it felt like venture capitalists slowed their cadence this summer. In days of yore, such “summer slowdowns” were par for the course, as investors took long holidays in August, leading to a general paucity of VC activity. Then the market went nuts for a few years, and such breaks

Wolfgang Rückerl Contributor These days, a blockchain startup founder should expect to navigate challenging waters. Even in the best of times, founders must both prepare for a bull market and be ready for possibly bearish territory. Having a solid roadmap, real-world use cases and a war chest are only a small part of a blockchain

French startup Homa has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. Quadrille Capital and Headline are leading the round. Homa partners with indie mobile game studios so that their games are perfectly optimized to become a hit game on the App Store and Google Play. In other words, Homa builds tools that help third-party

Neobanks are wagers that modern, digitally native services can supplant the traditional banking landscape. Founders flocked to the idea, investors wrote myriad checks, and despite how far along we are in the neobanking boom, startups are still being formed today to attack the problem space. Lately, we’ve seen neobanks focused on targeted niches, often segmented

Foxglove, a startup building an infrastructure stack for robotics, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Eclipse with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors including Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. The proceeds bring Foxglove’s total raised to $18.7 million, which CEO Adrian Macneil says is being put

Workmate, a Singapore-based on-demand staffing platform, has been acquired by Persol Asia Pacific, one of the region’s largest HR service providers. Workmate focuses on frontline and essential workers, and the acquisition will allow it to expand its HR solutions throughout the Asia Pacific. Workmate currently operates in Thailand and Indonesia and is expanding operations into

We’re on the home stretch, startup fans. TechCrunch Disrupt kicks off in less than 10 days and runs from October 18–20. This message goes out to all the last-minute decision-makers. It’s the final week you can save serious cheddar on a Disrupt pass. It’s go time. Buy your pass before October 14 at 11:59 p.m.

An increasing percentage of the code that companies use to develop software is open source. In a 2018 survey by Tidelift, a software supply chain management platform, 92% of professional software developers said that their apps contained open source libraries. While that’s a positive trend  — open source confers a wealth of benefits, not least

Cloudflare last week announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups that build on its software, Cloudflare Workers. But this isn’t a corporate venture fund and that sum is not company money. Rather, it’s an initiative in which the cloud infrastructure company curates a group of its startup customers and presents them to venture capitalists,

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. I think it took maybe three days after I roasted our rather dry M&A season for the news cycle to prove me wrong. This week we saw Naver acquire Poshmark, Duolingo buy

In the early days of a startup, everyone is on the same page. But there’s no way to know how well a founding team will get along by the time a company reaches maturity. Set aside the romantic notion that startup teams consist of visionary mavericks who are building the future in real time; they’re

Fintor, a fintech startup making it easier for non-accredited investors to invest in real estate properties, has just launched its mobile app for both iOS and Android. It also just raised a $6.2 million extension funding round from its existing investors, including Public.com, Hustle Fund, 500 Global, VU Ventures, Graphene Ventures and angel investors such

This week on The TechCrunch Podcast we talked with Dom about how conservative VCs are using their dollars to shape the world, and we spoke with Taylor about how the Musk train just keeps on rumbling along. On the topic of billionaires… “A big chunk of the conversation that is missing is just that it’s

Basketball isn’t the only heat you’ll find in Miami, a city rapidly becoming known for its emerging tech development and investment in the hot crypto sector. It’s why we chose it as the destination for our first TC Sessions: Crypto on November 17. We have an outstanding agenda lined up with leading movers and shakers