Startups

Gaetano Crupi Contributor Gaetano Crupi is a partner at venture capital firm Prime Movers Lab. He serves on the boards of OCEANIX, Atom Computing, Conscious Cultures and MycoWorks. Over the past few months, investors from Sequoia to YC have sounded the clarion call to get their portfolio companies preparing for winter. At this stage, it

Summer is whipping right along with Memorial Day and the Summer Solstice already in the rear-view mirror. We’re rounding the corner into the next long holiday weekend here in the U.S., and here at TechCrunch, that can mean just one thing. It’s time for our July 4th, two-for-one flash sale! Starting today you can buy

Google has invested in Progcap, an Indian startup that provides working capital to small and medium-sized businesses, the firms said Tuesday, making a new push into a category that has attracted the attention of Facebook and Amazon in recent years. The investment is part of a $40 million fresh funding Progcap has raised, it said.

David Campbell Contributor David Campbell is the CEO and co-founder of Tropic, an infrastructure platform that helps companies better optimize SaaS purchasing. With a recession looming and economic headwinds showing no sign of abating, many companies are scrambling to cut costs. Software is a prime category for optimization, and many organizations are paying 50% more

Paul Fifield Contributor Paul Fifield is the CEO and co-founder of Sales Impact Academy. If you’re still thinking of a four-year degree as a requirement for your revenue teams, you’re missing out on a huge talent base. The reality is that when it comes to sales, the vast majority of the skills and knowledge one

Kelsey Mellard Contributor Kelsey Mellard is the founder and CEO of Sitka. The news of Emily Weiss moving to the role of chairwoman of Glossier from her former position as CEO was riddled with gender biases in how it was covered by the media. Even the more balanced coverage still highlighted that she is currently

Frederik Mijnhardt Contributor Frederik Mijnhardt is the CEO of Secfi, an equity planning platform for startup executives and employees. Last year was a great one for startups. It was a record year for companies going public, valuations for pre-IPO companies were skyrocketing, and fundraising also shattered records. But 2022 is going to be quite different.

Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. Instead, I think that changes within a particular startup can be used as benchmark questions for their larger market; in other words, we can use the micro to better understand

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. My home country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants to have 100 French unicorns by 2030. Economy minister Bruno Le Maire, 10 homegrown decacorns. But shouldn’t

The news that funding for Black founders is falling was no shock to the Black community, much of which was raised with the aphorism, “when white America catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia.” U.S. startups received VC funding of around $75 billion in Q1 and about $50 billion so far in Q2, despite investors pulling back 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. Hey, folks, and welcome to the Friday edition of Daily Crunch. As you might’ve seen, the Supreme Court issued a major decision on abortion today, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade in declaring

Deon Nicholas is the CEO and co-founder of Forethought, the AI company whose mission is to transform customer experiences with human-centered AI. Forethought has raised over $100 million in venture capital, including from NEA, which led Forethought’s $9.52 million Series A. Hear from NEA’s Vanessa Larco on what convinced the firm to invest in Forethought,

For those of us who’ve been a little bit wobbly on the mental health front over the past couple of years, there are a bunch of options starting to crop up. The on-demand chat-based therapy options are one, and at-home ketamine-assisted treatments are another. We’ve seen Mindbloom and Fieldtrip Health taking pole position, and recently,

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, folks! Me again. As I’m sure it had you on the edge of your seat, I’m pleased to report that the team wasn’t completely dissatisfied with my inaugural work (it’s here

Universities turn to robots to address labor shortages and explore new businesses Rebecca Bellan 7 hours The relatively controlled environments of university campuses have long served as ideal testing grounds for autonomous technology, and they’re proving particularly effective for sidewalk delivery robots. In the latest move to introduce autonomous delivery to college campuses, early last

The past decade has seen Black founders raise a vanishingly small portion of venture capital funding. How to fix the problem? That question is always met with the same answer: Allocate more capital to Black entrepreneurs. But that has yet to happen. In fact, Black founders receive less than 1.5% of all VC funds, whether

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. Is it Wednesday already? The calendar tells me that it is. (Fun fact: My apartment’s so full of date-displaying smart displays that it’s a struggle not to trip over them.) Time sure

Vignesh Chandramouli Contributor Vignesh Chandramouli, a partner at Oak HC/FT, focuses on growth equity and early-stage venture opportunities in healthcare. For years, automation has been a key driver of transformation across industries, changing the way companies and entire sectors operate. However, healthcare, a $4.1 trillion industry, has fallen behind. For an industry that constantly innovates,

CloudQuery CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Pats helped launch the startup because he needed a tool to give him visibility into his cloud infrastructure resources, and he couldn’t find one on the open market. He built his own SQL-based tool to help understand exactly what resources he was using, based on data engineering best practices. After

Lev Kerzhner Contributor Lev Kerzhner leads Saragus Agency, which provides corporate storytelling services to startups, companies, entrepreneurs and investor groups. Over the past two years, I’ve designed dozens of presentations for a variety of companies at various stages of fundraising — from startup SAFE rounds, to VC rounds and IPOs. In this article, I will

Strapi, an open source content management system (CMS), today announced that it raised $31 million in Series B funding led by CRV with participation from Flex Capital, Index Ventures, and angel investors including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. With the capital, CEO Pierre Burgy tells TechCrunch that the plan is to launch a new product,

For the last several years, Appsmith has been quietly building an open source platform for internal development teams to build the custom apps they need. These are business applications that companies tend to build themselves to give them access to data in a more streamlined and visual way. While the company frames it as low-code,

During its WWDC keynote, Apple announced a bevy of changes and updates to its hardware and software. In the mix were anticipated improvements to its various operating systems and computers — and plans to expand its fintech footprint. Apple has been growing as a consumer finance company for some time, most famously thanks to its

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. When does a startup stop being a startup? It’s a tougher question than it seems — tech companies have found that there’s power in

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. It’s Friday, June 10, 2022, and Haje is on the road, so it’s just me today. Before I let you enjoy the weekend, there are a few housekeeping items to address. First,

Nathan Beckord Contributor More posts by this contributor How to build and maintain momentum in your fundraising process How to break into Silicon Valley as an outsider Iddo Tal has an infectious enthusiasm for fundraising. He believes that when startup founders know how to raise money, they can find the freedom to approach investors with

Shares of DocuSign are off 25% in pre-market trading today after it reported earnings last night, pushing the value of shares in the e-signature company under pre-COVID levels. Given that the market is valuing DocuSign at a cheaper price than it did in early 2020, you might think that it is struggling. Hardly. Coming off

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. When did it become Thursday? About 15 hours ago, that’s when! Welcome to the 9th of March 2022, and another, extra crunchy Daily Crunch. Serve it with some real cow milk that

Amid an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into inaccurate statements to investors, Faraday Future has received a preliminary request for information from the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ’s request for information is related to the SEC probe, according to a securities filing submitted by the electric vehicle startup Thursday. Faraday said it’s

With more and more people ordering food from home — a trend that gathered momentum at a time when it was safer to eat at home than in restaurants — the proliferation of so-called “ghost kitchens” is continuing apace. These kitchens focus on takeaway orders and need a layer of technology to keep things running