Startups

Nibiru, a new crypto derivatives protocol co-founded by Tribe Capital GP Arjun Sethi, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding at a valuation of $100 million, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Tribe Capital, Republic Capital and Kraken invested in the seed round, a source said, requesting anonymity as the information is not

The growing market for sales tools has given rise to a curious cottage industry: DevOps startups specifically targeting the software used in sales and marketing functions. (Here, “DevOps,” refers to tools that automate processes between software development and IT teams.) It’s become a blossoming sector all its own, with vendors selling DevOps platforms for software

“You had one job” might be funny when a birthday cake decoration goes wrong, but if we’re talking about executives who don’t show up for board meetings, the stakes are much higher. “Disengaged or dysfunctional boards aren’t just bad for CEOs and LPs; they’re bad for everyone,” writes Matt Blumberg, co-founder and CEO of Bolster,

‘No amount of salespeople or engineers can save you in the long run if your customers don’t love your product’ Anna Heim 15 hours When founders are laying off staff and cutting costs to face the downturn, it may seem like odd timing to tell startups to take their product as seriously as ever. In

John Zic Contributor John Zic is a partner and founding team member at EQUIAM. He spends most of his time wrestling with fragmented and imperfect private market data in a never-ending effort to derive market-beating investment signals. Shachi Shah Contributor Shachi Shah is director of business operations at EQUIAM. She is passionate about leading design,

A cloud kitchen — also known as a ghost kitchen or a shared kitchen — offers restaurant owners and food entrepreneurs a commercial kitchen space at a reduced cost for food delivery and takeout. This trend has been circling around the restaurant industry. More food entrepreneurs are turning to cloud kitchens to reduce their operation

Investors are spending 24% less time looking at pitch decks in 2022, compared to 2021. On average, you have just under three minutes to convince them to take a meeting with you. In fact, for decks that fail to raise funding, investors give up in just 2 minutes and 13 seconds. That’s not a lot

One of the most pressing issues the U.S. has to prepare for, perhaps, is the future it faces after the toppling of Roe v. Wade. Come the midterm elections, voters will weigh in on candidates and, consequently, measures that will dictate abortion access and other human rights issues. The role venture capital must play in

Keeping up with tax compliance for cryptocurrency can be tricky, especially since many laws are new (or haven’t been written yet). That’s why Binocs was founded. Users integrate their exchanges and wallets, and Binocs provides a tax report and other accounting details. The startup announced today that it has raised $4 million to expand in

Matt Blumberg Contributor Was anyone else as appalled as I am by the contents of Connie Loizos’ recent article, Coming out of COVID, investors lose their taste for board meetings? The stories and quotes in the article about investors reducing their interest and participation in board meetings, not showing up, sending the junior associate to

Speech recognition remains a challenging problem in AI and machine learning. In a step toward solving it, OpenAI today open-sourced Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system that the company claims enables “robust” transcription in multiple languages as well as translation from those languages into English. Countless organizations have developed highly capable speech recognition systems, which

Synthetic speech tech startup Murf gives a voice, literally, to content creators of all sizes. Murf, which now has a library of more than 120 human-parity AI voices across 20 languages, announced today it has raised $10 million Series A funding led by Matrix partners. Participation came from returning investors Elevation Capital and several prominent

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. Hey there, you deep-fried morsels of delight. Deep fried, because that’s the thing that made you crunchy. No? Because this is the Daily Crunch? The TechCrunch team got so competitive in this

“To be able to shitpost, you have to understand the subject matter really well,” Antimatter founder Jonathan Libov deadpans. “In a sense, shitposting is the highest form of consciousness.” Silly as it may sound, Libov is onto something. With a five-person team and a bit of venture funding, Antimatter is building the most memey educational

Metafy, a marketplace for video game coaching, laid off 23% of its staff last week, primarily impacting product, design and engineering teams, founder Joshua Fabian confirmed in an e-mail to TechCrunch. The layoff impacted 12 full-time employees. A Notion page has been created for those looking for their next jobs. Metafy has raised over $30

Swiftly Systems entered unicorn territory after announcing today that it grabbed another round of $100 million, this time in a Series C. The new funding was led by BRV Capital Management. If you’re feeling some déjà vu, you would be right: this is the second $100 million the retail technology company has raised in the

Xpeng, a Chinese smart electric vehicle startup, has launched its anticipated advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that automates some driving functions in urban environments. City Navigation Guided Pilot (City NGP), an expanded version of Xpeng’s NGP, which performed tasks like assisted driving on highways based on the navigation route set by the driver, is being

There’s never a dull moment in the cryptoverse. Blockchain, DeFi and web3 technologies continue to evolve rapidly in a world of wild extremes. How extreme? Consider these two examples. The Terra ecosystem disappears in a multi-billion-dollar crash-and-burn while traditional investment firm Andreessen Horowitz closes a $4.5 billion crypto megafund. Then you have crypto’s ongoing regulatory

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

Getting a bunch of bananas and avocados from your favorite 15-minute grocery delivery company at 3 a.m. might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but some of these companies are finding themselves in somewhat of a cost-related pickle in such a low-margin business. While covering the recent news of Misfits Market acquiring Imperfect Foods,

Video of a sidewalk delivery robot crossing yellow caution tape and rolling through a crime scene in Los Angeles went viral this week, amassing more than 650,000 views on Twitter and sparking debate about whether the technology is ready for prime time. It turns out the robot’s error, at least in this case, was caused

Last month, Varo Bank celebrated the two-year anniversary of obtaining its national bank charter. The move made Varo the first-ever all-digital nationally chartered U.S. consumer bank. The startup launched its banking services aimed at younger consumers comfortable doing all their banking online in 2017. It has raised nearly $1 billion since its 2015 inception and

Will Ross and William Steenbergen were AI researchers at Stanford working on climate and atmospheric modeling and reinforcement learning, respectively, when they began to collaborate on wildfire modeling and hurricane modeling initiatives for the insurance industry. They were surprised to learn how big of a difference there was between what the data told insurers to

You know what’s a huge pain where the =sum()don’t shine? Financial reporting, planning and analysis. I often go on and on (and on and on) about startups not getting their financials and operating plans right in their startup pitch decks, so … not gonna lie, I picked Austrian startup Helu.io, which completed a €9.8 million

345 backers dug into their pockets to the tune of more than $700,000, but the scooter they backed – the Model Eleven – will never see the light of day. The company is offering its backers three options to make up for it, including a full refund, or a different model electric scooter. Hardware can

Fintech startup Ratio secured $411 million in equity and debt funding to continue developing what it calls “a new flavor” of buy now, pay later that combines payments, predictive pricing, financing and a quote-to-cash process. Co-founder and CEO Ashish Srimal founded Ratio in 2021 with CTO Mason Blake, and they have been heads down ever

Cryptocurrency transactions in Indonesia hit $60 billion last year, according to the country’s commodities futures trading agency. Crypto exchange and marketplace Reku has been riding the wave with what it says are the lowest fees on the market, and a platform that is aimed at both newcomers and experienced traders. Today, the startup, founded in

The quest to define what exactly a web3 use case looks like hasn’t always been easy, but has allowed plenty of founders to get creative in building out products designed to tap the ethos of decentralization and the business opportunities of the creator economy. Arpeggi Labs, a new crypto startup focused on using blockchains to

Groundcover, a performance monitoring platform for cloud apps, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Zeev Ventures with participation from Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe Ventures. The new capital brings the startup’s total raised to $24.5 million, which CEO Shahar Azulay says will be used to “raise awareness”

If you’re a university- or college-level student who believes the future of finance is crypto — or even if you’re just crypto curious — pack a bag and head to Miami for TC Sessions: Crypto on November 17. Why? Well, for starters, TechCrunch (of Disrupt and Startup Battlefield fame) brings its considerable talent for attracting