Startups

Y Combinator says it has intentionally shrunk the number of startups within its accelerator for the Summer 2022 batch. As first reported by The Information and independently verified by TechCrunch, Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 cohort — currently in action — boasts nearly 250 companies, down 40% from the previous cohort, which landed at 414 companies.

Sprig, a startup offering tools for user and software product research, today announced that it raised $30 million in a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, First Round Capital, Elad Gil and Figma Ventures. It brings the company’s total raised to $90 million, which CEO Ryan Glasgow says is being put toward expanding Sprig’s service

Large-scale and mid-sized enterprises and businesses are increasingly adopting — and offering — software-as-a-service platforms as they seek to increase their revenue and parlay their growth into greater efficiency. Now a young startup, Emitrr, is aiming to bring the benefits of this model to small and local businesses in the U.S. Emitrr claims to help

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. Monday is here, and we are excited to throw ourselves into another week of summertime tech news. Apropos summer — as the VCs stop answering their phones in favor of drinking elderflower

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As the fintech venture market goes, so goes the venture market itself. Why? Because fintech investment has historically made up around one-fifth of every venture dollar invested — at least in recent years. And after both fintech investing and venture capital itself went a bit bonkers last year, both are dealing with a new, more conservative

Figuring out the right text prompts to yield the best results with AI systems like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 has become a science in its own right. Now a startup is looking to let “prompt engineers” cash in with an online marketplace that sells these finely tuned phrases. PromptBase, launched in June, allows users to sell

Bootstrapped startups, or companies that use their own revenue or existing cash flow to fund growth instead of relying on external capital sources, sit in a very separate box than venture-backed startups. By nature of asset class, bootstrapped startups prioritize revenue to keep alive, while venture-backed startups prioritize growth to keep investor buy-in for future

Clearco, a Toronto-based fintech capital provider for online companies, tells TechCrunch that it has laid off 125 people, or 25% of its entire staff. Those impacted will receive severance pay, a two-year window to exercise equity and job transition support from the leadership team, according to Clearco. The company did not say which teams and

Yousuf Khan Contributor Yousuf Khan is a partner at Ridge Ventures. Prior to joining Ridge, he was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, CIO and vice president of Customer Success at cloud-based AI platform Moveworks, as well as CIO of Pure Storage, Qualys and Hult International Business School. More posts by this contributor 10 tips

The U.S. Senate earlier this week approved the CHIPS Act, which includes $52 billion to subsidize domestic semiconductor production. It still has to struggle its way through the bureaucracy (here’s a quick refresher), but clearing the Senate is a huge and important step toward the American chip fabrication industry getting a serious chunk of cash.

Kristen Corpion Contributor Kristen Corpion is the founder of CORPlaw, a Miami-based law firm serving fast-growing technology companies and entrepreneurs as fractional general counsel. More posts by this contributor When should an early-stage startup hire a full-time lawyer? Non-fungible tokens may be revolutionizing the way we own and transact with digital assets in the 21st

A compromise in Congress is forming among Democrats to tinker with the tax code, generate revenue by other means and apply those revenues to climate-change-related investments and deficit reduction. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, if it passes, would institute a minimum tax rate for large companies and close the carried interest loophole. TechCrunch explored

Fly.io co-founder and CEO Kurt Mackey says that developers don’t really understand the term edge computing. They just know they want to run their applications closer to the user to make them more responsive. He believes that the traditional way of doing this with a content delivery network (CDN) is a flawed approach, and he

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, Daily Crunchers! Personal story time: I came to the U.S. on an IR1 visa — also known as a “green card” — after having been married to an American for more

Ax Sharma Contributor Ax Sharma is a security researcher and reporter. His areas of interest include open source software security, malware analysis, data breaches and scam investigations. If combating attacks and hijackings of legitimate software on open source registries like npm weren’t challenging enough, app makers are increasingly experiencing the consequences of software self-sabotage. A

Our foodchains are notorious for being not-exactly-amazing for the amount of carbon they crank into the atmosphere. Root Global just raised a round of funding in a bid to become what it calls the ‘carbon OS’ for the food industry. It builds software to help companies up and down the food value chain get to

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. What is up, you delightful beings. Today, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Instagram. Devin wrote about how the platform just keeps getting worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok,

It seems everything is doom and gloom in the U.S. venture market, between startup layoffs and declining venture deal counts to an essentially moribund exit environment. But there are bright spots, one of which being the Southeast region, which is on track for its best year yet. The Southeast region had its best quarter for

Neon, a startup providing developers with a serverless option for Postgres databases, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series A-1 round led by GGV with participation from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Founders Fund and angel investors. In an email interview with TechCrunch, CEO Nikita Shamgunov, who described the tranche as “oversubscribed,” said

Bennett Carroccio Contributor Bennett Carroccio is the co-founder and CEO of Canal, the connected commerce platform transforming the way products are sold online. The biggest startups in the world are laying employees off. The yield curve has become inverted, inflation is at 8.6%, and economic pessimism is the highest it’s been since 2009. For e-commerce

Chartbeat, a website that tells publishers about their readers, is getting the private equity treatment. Launched out of Betaworks in 2009, the service offered real-time analytics back when Google Analytics made you wait 24 hours to see who was clicking around your site. Eons later, private equity firm Cuadrilla Capital has swooped in to buy

Startups that solve the supply-chain and operational challenges of players in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry–by helping buyers access products from sellers on a single platform–keep attracting venture capital from investors. Cartona, one of the major players digitizing the traditional trade market, including mom-and-pop stores, FMCG producers, wholesalers, and distributors in Egypt, has raised

Here’s a look at just some of the ways early-stage founders can learn to build, grow and fund their startups at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 18–20 in San Francisco. Word to the budget-wise: don’t miss out on early-bird savings. Buy your early bird pass before prices go up on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT and

The fintech funding boom of the past several years saw huge amounts of capital flowing into so-called neobanks, digital financial companies offering banking services to markets general and niche. The overarching idea behind the push made sense — many traditional banks are IRL-first and digital second, and their brick-and-mortar way of doing things engendered costs that

Ride-hail startup Alto thinks the current gig worker-based market is inherently broken. Drivers’ salaries are squeezed by the costs of owning and maintaining a vehicle; riders aren’t guaranteed a high-quality service; cities have had to deal with angry taxi drivers; and the app-based companies themselves that have undercharged users to expand into new markets are

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. Fri-yay! Grab your calendar and mark November 17, 2022, on it, and then snag yourself an airline ticket to Miami, Florida. That’s right, TC Sessions continues, with a Crypto special event. It’s

I won’t use this space to dissuade anyone from launching a startup, but founders should embrace the fact that investors are looking for reasons not to give you money these days. Perhaps you don’t have much revenue. Or maybe, too much of your cash flow depends on a single customer. Oh, and when are you

A lot of promising companies come out of work by researchers at universities, or even grad students who have struck on some new innovation. But the transition from tech-focused research group to product-focused startup isn’t easy to make; fortunately three experts in the matter joined us at TC Sessions: Robotics to discuss a few ways

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. Well hello again! It’s Thursday — heat waves are heat wavin’, and all of TechCrunch is psyched about a fun and engaging Robotics event today. That’s not all that’s happening, though. We’ve