Startups

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Money attracts money, as the saying goes. This week seemed to confirm it, with a couple startups announcing new rounds of funding only months after their previous

Buying a home has always been complicated. You have to figure out how much money to put down and how that down payment will affect a monthly mortgage bill. Then there are the closing costs and fees. Kevin Bennett launched Further to try to help make the financial process easier to navigate — especially for first-time

In 2014, Ivan Crewkov moved his family from Siberia to the U.S. as his startup, Cubic.AI, was preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for its smart speaker. A week before the campaign was supposed to go live, Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker, rendering Cubic.AI essentially dead in the water. “It was a disaster,” Crewkov

MealMe, a unified API that embeds food and retail ordering into consumer apps and websites, announced on Thursday that it secured $8 million in Series A funding. The newly raised capital brings the total amount raised to $16 million.  MealMe has undergone several changes since its launch in 2019. Initially, it was a consumer app designed

Watch as we announce the runnerup winner of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition – Startup Battlefield 200.TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 is the world’s preeminent startup competition with alumni like Vurb, Trello, Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Tripit, Redbeacon, Qwiki, Getaround, and Soluto. Startup Battlefield 200 showcases the top 200 startups from around the globe, across multiple industries every

Estonia-based startup Modash has raised a $12 million Series A led by henQ, a Dutch VC firm that prides itself in “funding the odd ones.” And what’s odd about Modash, according to CEO Avery Schrader, is that its team “has a really strong opinion in a space that nobody really has much faith in anymore.”

For its most recent Camp, VC and accelerator Betaworks was on the lookout for startups building native applications made possible by AI. The program was first announced in May. To explain this focus, managing partner John Borthwick wrote at the time that while things like AI chatbots and writing assistants exist, “we aren’t yet living

The time has finally come to announce the five finalists of the Startup Battlefield. It all started earlier this year when the TechCrunch editorial team selected 200 companies from thousands that applied. From there, the team then chose the 20 finalists who pitched this week onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to investor judges and packed

An articulate, alluring pitch presentation is a big part of successfully fundraising, and yet it’s relatively uncommon for founders to get candid feedback on how they communicated the problem, their solution, and their path to success.During the Pitch Deck Teardown, Index Ventures Partner Sofia Dolfe, Lux Capital General Partner Deena Shakir, and Greycroft Partner Marcie

The AI boom has spurred massive demand for graphics processing units (GPUs). As many enterprises seek to integrate AI technology into their systems, providers of GPU infrastructure are helping businesses get access to the chips they need. In the latest development, GMI Cloud, a San Jose-based startup that provides GPU cloud infrastructure, has raised an

One fascinating trend these days is an area that has a number of names: national-interest startups, American Dynamism, New World. These startups are creating technologies in areas that are meant to be built, used, and create jobs in the country of origin, like the US. They cover everything from aerospace and critical infrastructure to government,

For anyone who parties or goes out dancing, the risk of accidentally taking adulterated drugs is a real one. MabLab, presenting today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, has created a testing strip that detects the five most common and dangerous additives in minutes. Co-founders Vienna Sparks and Skye Lam met in

A few months after acquiring equity management company Easop, Remote, an HR platform for managing geographically distributed teams, is doubling down on its focus on managing equity compensation with a new product, Remote Equity. Remote already makes it easy for companies to work with talent all around the globe. Companies can hire workers based anywhere

While many venture investors, and likely their LPs, were hoping IPOs were going to come back in 2024, that hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to in the next two months. NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman isn’t surprised. Friedman said at Axios’s BFD event on Tuesday that while on paper the public markets have been experiencing a spectacular year

We’re just 24 hours away from one of the most highly anticipated tech events of the year! Excitement is building as we prepare to welcome the global tech community to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024! Brace yourself for a week of vibrant energy lighting up San Francisco! Disrupt 2024 runs from October 28-30, but the excitement will

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is three measly days away and we can’t be any more pumped. Here’s an insider’s guide to everything you need to know to have a successful Disrupt experience. Registration and early badge pickup Sunday, 10/27: 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.Early badge pickup — skip the line on Monday by grabbing your badge

A new app called Screenable will help parents introduce their children to technology by turning an iPhone or iPad into a starter phone. The app is designed to grow over time with a child, as it offers different modes for kids of different ages.  For starters, the app’s “Dumb Phone” mode essentially turns an iPhone

We’d like to thank SAP for their support. Make sure to catch their Roundtable session: “Visionary Companies Embrace Innovation to Thrive in the Fast-Paced Economy” on Tuesday and Wednesday. Speakers from The Webby Awards and Silicon Zombies will be on panels at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Breakout sessions, and we thank those companies for their support.

Only 3 days to go! Moscone West in San Francisco will host 10,000 startup and VC leaders at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 from October 28-30. This event promises to inspire, spark new ideas, and cultivate meaningful connections. Final days to lock in your savings! Don’t miss your chance — you have until October 27 at 11:59

We’re excited to announce that Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the popular blogging platform WordPress, will be taking the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. When Mullenweg first started working on WordPress, he was a 19-year-old jazz enthusiast and photographer in Texas who noticed the blogging software that he used had been stagnating — so he

Lumen Orbit has closed an oversubscribed, eight-figure seed round of more than $10 million, a source familiar with the details told TechCrunch. That would make it one of the hottest deals, if not the hottest deal, of the most recent Y Combinator batch. The Redmond, Washington-based startup is pursuing a moonshot idea to build a

Each year, supply chain disruptions cost the global economy trillions of dollars. In a recent McKinsey poll, nine in ten businesses said they had encountered logistics challenges over the past 12 months. Headwinds have only grown stronger as chaos reigns in key shipping corridors. Attacks on freighters continue in the Red Sea. Flooding is disrupting

With TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 just days away, we’re gearing up for an incredible three-day event packed with interactive sessions! From October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco, dive into Q&A conversations with a panel of industry experts around the most pressing issues and cutting-edge tech trends to help empower your growth. Don’t miss your

Last week, police surveillance startup Flock Safety announced that it had bought drone startup Aerodome. The acquisition price was over $300 million, according to sources in the venture world. The number has not been previously reported.  Both Flock Safety and Aerodome are backed by Andreessen Horowitz and have raised over $680 million and $28 million,

Matt Peters has spent more than a decade working for cybersecurity vendors. He was a team lead at Check Point, climbed the corporate ladder to VP of worldwide operations at FireEye, and spent over four years at Expel, a managed detection and response firm, as chief product officer. Peters says a surprising common thread ran

The fundraising landscape is shifting fast, and in 2025, the old rules no longer apply. Startups navigating flat, down, or extension rounds must be more strategic than ever in securing their next round of capital. Traditional metrics like $100 million in revenue for an IPO or $1 million ARR for a Series A are becoming

Federal regulators have cleared the path for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to share U.S. airspace with planes and helicopters — a win for the burgeoning industry and a timely decision for startups like Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation that are expected to launch air taxi networks commercially in 2025.  The Federal Aviation Administration

Paccurate co-founder and CEO James Malley likes to joke that once you get into supply chain tech, the category doesn’t let you back out. Ten years ago, Malley and Patrick Powers were working together as consultants when they started getting asked the same question over and over. Their clients were asking for help reducing the

With TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 less than a week away, we’re thrilled to announce the complete list of companies behind the Side Events, set to amplify the excitement for thousands of attendees and Silicon Valley residents. From casual happy hours to insightful discussions and energizing morning runs, Disrupt Week — spanning October 26 to November 1

On TikTok, Daze’s most popular video has been viewed 8 million times. Across TikTok and Instagram, the startup behind a new messaging app aimed at Gen Z has seen around 48 million combined views. Prelaunch, the app’s waitlist is already bursting with roughly 156,000 sign-ups. Driving the demand for this next-generation alternative to iMessage and