Startups

Digit, the bipedal robot developed by Agility Robotics, will continue to evolve and improve, including the addition of a head and some digits of its very own, according to co-founders Damion Shelton and Jonathan Hurst. Just don’t expect Digit to talk or have digits that look like human hands. Digit, which was introduced in 2019,

The idea of starting Healthie, a software company meant to help healthcare companies and startups handle back-office operations, came to co-founder Erica Jain after witnessing her parents struggle with weight loss but lack of access to a comprehensive care team. “What Healthie is building is akin to the way that Stripe changed the way e-commerce

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. Oh hey, and welcome to the Daily Crunch for Wednesday! Today, the whole office is proverbially abuzz with robotics. Proverbially, because we’re not sure we actually have an office at this point,

Yamin Durrani Contributor The past couple of years were all about huge valuations and less about needing to prove peak operational efficiency across the entire business. Even if you didn’t experience this first-hand as a startup founder or employee, the sheer amount of funding dispersed just last year proves my point. This year’s a bit

Everyone loves an underdog, which is why investors and tech journalists are so fond of discussing startups that launched during the Great Recession of 2008, like Airbnb, Uber, WhatsApp, Mailchimp, Square and Venmo. It’s possible that your pre-seed, pre-revenue startup could similarly defy gravity, but in July 2022, it’s going to be difficult to find

Platforms, not point solutions, might lead the way Kyle Wiggers 14 hours The market for HR tech, which runs the gamut from workforce management to applicant recruitment and tracking systems, has proven remarkably resilient in the face of both pandemic and economic headwinds. In fact, some would argue that it’s precisely because of these headwinds

Lori Cashman Contributor Lori Cashman is a managing partner of Victress Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in high-growth companies meeting the needs of the evolving consumer market. In the world of venture capital, we’re always talking about cash. You hear phrases like “cash burn,” “cash runway” and “cash on hand” every day

Some of digital health’s best-capitalized startups are struggling. A string of healthcare unicorns have announced layoffs over the past few weeks, including Ro, Cerebral, Forward and Calibrate. While these companies are all targeting different corners of the healthcare world — from direct-to-consumer healthcare to virtual mental health support — the layoffs show a similar response

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. Presumably you’ve been in the nightclubs (or at least your living room with the music turned to 11) doing the Robot and other amazing dance moves all weekend. Continue the 🤖 fun

Matt Cohen Contributor Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures, was the founding investor of Turnstyle Solutions, which was acquired by Yelp in 2017. More posts by this contributor VCs and university endowments should partner to make venture more diverse Founders must learn how to build and maintain circles of trust with investors

In late June, Modsy, on online interior design services startup, abruptly ceased offering design services, laid off its designers, and left customers with unfinished renovations and project orders in process. The company returned some service order charges and promised to refund furniture deliveries to those who completed a form. But more than two weeks later,

If solving the problems of autonomous driving were a question of money, it’d have been solved long before now. That’s the primary argument of Don Burnette, co-founder and CEO of autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics, which has expanded its business and hit milestones with a fraction of the funds that bigger players like Waymo have.

Founders are keener to get cash than VCs to deploy capital, DocSend data shows Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 1 day Today’s venture capital market feels strange because it isn’t uniform. While some companies are still able to raise mega-rounds, reach unicorn status, and even attract lots of new capital in sectors that have seen their

Advocates and organizers had been preparing for Roe v. Wade to be overturned since the U.S. Supreme Court draft decision leaked in early May. But Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of period care company August, still felt heartbroken when the decision became official in late June. “One of the things that always made me passionate about policy

Money doesn’t need to be protected from sudden vibrations or direct sunlight, so the term “dry powder” strikes me as a poor metaphor for the mounds of cash investors were dropping on startups just a few months ago. “What’s crazy to me is that some of these companies are still in the seed-stage backed by

Julie Gionfriddo Contributor If an early-stage startup is ready to raise money but its valuation hasn’t been established yet, a convertible note can serve as a good fundraising option. A convertible note is a debt instrument that typically converts into equity at a later date. Investors who invest in a note are effectively loaning money

Nucleus Genomics, a genetic testing company focused on calculating a patient’s risk of certain diseases, is adding $14 million on to their initial seed funding round. With this round the company has raised, in total, $17.5 million. This “seed plus” funding round was led by Alexis Ohanian’s 776. Ohanian is joining investors like Founders Fund,

After the 2008 financial crisis, a new slate of regulations aimed at protecting consumers and businesses opened the floodgates for a surge of fintech companies to develop into household names over the last decade. Now, it might be healthcare’s turn. Part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Consumer Reform and Protection Act, passed in 2010, stated

Stripe is the latest high-profile fintech company to take a massive valuation cut as the market downturn begins to hit the sector especially hard. Last valued at $95 billion, the payments processor has cut the internal value of its shares by 28%, sources told the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that the valuation cut

Nuro, the autonomous vehicle delivery startup that is valued at more than $8.6 billion, is closing its Phoenix facility as it shifts its commercial strategy away from the desert metropolis and toward the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston. Nuro told employees that the Phoenix Depot location would be closed by October 1, according to

When Andrew Hines started Canvas Medical in 2015 he couldn’t have predicted that telehealth would go from niche to norm or that a pandemic would inspire entrepreneurs to launch a new fleet of digital health startups that needed fresh infrastructure. He just knew he wanted to build software for physicians like his wife, who wasted

From Bitcoin’s valuation getting pummeled to data breaches at Axie Infinity and layoffs at huge exchanges, crypto isn’t exactly having its best moment. But in many countries in Latin America, where much of the population craves a better financial future, investors are still bullish about crypto’s transformative power. To understand how Latin American startups are

It seems like every time a demo day ends, there’s a new one waiting around the corner – and as you know, TechCrunch is no stranger to covering them. Oftentimes these events are filled with traditional seed-stage tech companies based in Silicon Valley. But today, we’re highlighting the demo day for a new wave of

Coding school Holberton today announced that it has entered into an agreement to be acquired by African Leadership Group (ALG). The seven-year-old company, with physical schools across the globe in addition to its core online platform, will split in two. Holberton’s technology platform will become part of ALG’s existing ALX online learning platform and the

Metal and carbon fiber company Markforged (best known for its Digital Forge platform) announced today that it acquired Digital Metal to further increase its lineup of machines that can produce metal parts. The company was previously owned by Swedish metal powder manufacturer Höganäs AB. The acquisition highlights Markforged’s push into additive manufacturing for industrial customers,

Despite the venture capital asset class sitting on historic levels of dry powder, many investors aren’t deploying it, leaving their portfolio companies scrambling for financing. Venture funding has been declining across the board this year, but the tone of how this temporary pullback could impact companies is starting to change. The mood at the beginning

The enterprise is bullish on AI systems that can understand and generate text, known as language models. According to a survey by John Snow Labs, 60% of tech leaders’ budgets for AI language technologies increased by at least 10% in 2020. And one vendor, OpenAI, says that its premiere language model, GPT-3, is being used

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Klarna’s announcement that its long-expected funding round has come to a close brought with it one of the steepest valuation resets in memory, at least as far as operating businesses are concerned. Now worth $6.7 billion after raising $800 million, the European BNPL provider is worth a fraction of its self just last year, though

Companies from across the industrial spectrum often rely on a migrant workforce, with data from the International Labour Organization indicating that some 169 million workers travel abroad for employment. But being away from their domestic jurisdiction and financial infrastructure presents a host of challenges, including what is probably the most important part for the worker