Startups

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. Hi again! Wondering if you have a preference between “Friday Eve,” “Pre-Friday” or just stick to Thursday? We are very gently leaning toward Little Friday, but tweet us your favorite post–hump day

We think you’ll be as amazed as we are by the collective creativity, ingenuity and technical prowess of the Startup Battlefield 200. Out of thousands of applications, only 200 early-stage startups made the final cut, and you’ll find all of them — and only them — exhibiting on the TechCrunch Disrupt show floor on October

On paper, the federal government looks like an ideal customer for an enterprise startup: Its seemingly endless budget doesn’t fluctuate with market conditions and it’s always in the market for new tech. But it’s a slog to break into, and for a long time, startups and VCs didn’t seem to want to associate with it.

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. Happy Wednesday! Haje is enjoying a well-deserved day off, but I’m here to dive into some news with you. Let’s join hands and jump in at the same time, shall we? —

Neeva, an ad-free search engine launched last year by a former engineer and executive best known for spearheading Google’s advertising tech business, is about to land in Europe. The Mountain View, California-based company officially launched a subscription-only search engine in its domestic U.S. market in June last year, later going on to add a free

“Growth at all costs” was fuel to 2021’s funding fire as venture capitalists poured money into startups spending oodles of cash on everything from overhiring to inefficient customer acquisition. But amid this year’s downturn, venture capitalists decided — to say, at least — that torching cash in the name of growth maybe wasn’t their best

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. Good to have you with us again, as the TechCrunch train continues to rumble along the tracks. It’s gonna be a fun and busy week, so let’s dive straight in with the

Some purchases provide near-instant time to value (TTV), like buying an umbrella on a rainy day, or hiring a glazier to replace a broken window. Cybersecurity startups, however, often experience long TTV, as enterprise customers often require several sales calls and a bespoke onboarding process. To boost adoption and reduce churn, VC Ross Haleliuk shares

Euler Motors, an Indian startup that designs and builds commercial electric vehicles, has raised $60 million in a new funding round as it works to ramp up its production capacity and broaden its offerings. Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC led the New Delhi-headquartered startup’s Series C funding. Blume Ventures, Athera Venture Partners, QRG, ADB Ventures and

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. Oc-flippin-tober? You’ve got to be mock-tobering us. It’s a sobering experience, though, to see the who-ber year fly by like that! Ahem. Forgive the incoherence, we are entering TechCrunch Disrupt silly season

Welcome to Q4, friends. If you were hoping to begin the final chunk of 2022 with good news, tough. We’re starting the quarter off with rough data instead. Sure, we’re waiting on data dumps from CB Insights, PitchBook, and Crunchbase about Q3 venture capital aggregates, but one particular bellwether indicator that we track here at

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous

Venture capital has been on a roller coaster this year. It came into 2022 riding the wave of the strongest year for venture deployment on record, just before the stock market plummeted and dragged venture down with it. As the third quarter comes to a close, things have started to get really interesting — again.

Jason Schoettler Contributor Raising a Series B for any startup is challenging right now, with many VCs pulling back on investments — funding for Series B rounds across all sectors fell 55% in August compared to a year earlier, for example. But raising a Series B for a hardware startup can be even tougher. It

India’s market regulator has tightened disclosure norms for firms looking to file for an initial public offering after lackluster performance of more than half a dozen tech startups in the past year and a half. Firms looking to raise funds from public offers will now be required by law to disclose their key performance indicators

Embedded insurance — selling coverage at the same time as another product or service — is on the rise. According to data platform Dealroom, it accounts for a growing share of all policies sold, and startups in this space raised nearly $800 million in 2021 alone. Having recently polled investors on all things insurtech, we

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Before we get into this week’s show notes, some programming notes: OK, now to the show. This week, Natasha, Mary Ann and Rebecca took the mic, with Theresa on production duty, to talk

It’s demo day season. This morning marked the kickoff of VC firm 500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day, which saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches to prospective investors — and customers. Participants ran the gamut from fintech and sustainability to edtech and developer tools, and several stood out from the rest of

Truepill, a platform that helps other companies offer diagnostics, telehealth services and prescriptions, has conducted its fourth layoff of the year. Sources say the layoff impacted around 65% of the existing staff across the engineering, human resources, design, IT and finance teams. The layoff comes around two months after its last round, which impacted about

In sub-Saharan Africa, only 33% of the urban population has access to public transportation, compared to 75% in Europe and North America, according to UN statistics. That means that most of the continent faces challenges chasing new job opportunities, going to school, accessing healthcare and just having a night on the town. This lack of

Una Brands, an e-commerce aggregator focused on brands in the Asia-Pacific region, announced the first close of its Series B round at $30 million today. The funding was led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC Ventures. Headquartered in Singapore, Una Brands has a presence in Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, China and the United

Digital mortgage lender Better.com continues to lay off staff, and seemingly in as callous a way as possible. Indeed, whereas most companies try to avoid repeated layoffs, the outfit — which gained notoriety by laying off about 900 employees over Zoom on December 1, 2021 — has since been laying off smaller groups very systematically,

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: Is there a way

Cloudflare, the security, performance and reliability company that went public three years ago, said this morning that it will help connect startups that use its serverless computing platform to dozens of venture firms that have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion in the companies out of their existing funds. It’s a smart, splashy

During a recent Twitter Space, M13 Partner Anna Barber and I looked back at the dot-com crash in search of lessons operators can use to avoid missteps founders have made in past downturns. In our chat, Barber spoke about how founders can better align with investors and employees while managing uncertainty, the dangers of growing

Kumo, a startup offering an AI-powered platform to tackle predictive problems in business, today announced that it raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia, with participation from A Capital, SV Angel and several angel investors. Co-founder and CEO Vanja Josifovski says the new funding will be put toward Kumo’s hiring efforts

Services that help folks make, share and profit from creative works — Maven to Bounty to Substack to Patreon to Canva — have proliferated and grown in recent years. The rise of creator-focused startups was not an accident; instead, a secular trend of more accessible software for more diverse areas of creative work was met

Code-generating systems like DeepMind’s AlphaCode, Amazon’s CodeWhisperer and OpenAI’s Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot service, provide a tantalizing look at what’s possible with AI today within the realm of computer programming. But so far, only a handful of such AI systems have been made freely available to the public and open sourced — reflecting the

The more coupon codes we can find for online shopping the better, but Harry Dixon, Rory Garton-Smith and Elliot Rampono thought something was missing: the ability to house all of the various savings we receive in one place. “Marketing channels have become saturated and everyone is trying to figure out their own channels,” CEO Dixon,

Happy Sunday, fellow startup nerds. Today we’re talking about risk in the gambling sense of the word. You see, there’s a way for unicorns to avoid painful dilution when they next raise capital, and it appears that a good number of the world’s billion-dollar startups are taking the wager. But new data indicates that the