Startups

Yahya Bouhlel started coding in his early teens. Within this timeline, he interned at several companies in Palo Alto, California. Most of his work revolved around building apps and iPhone games. When he came home to Tunis, he met many students who wanted to build products like him each summer. And it was one such

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. On this beautiful June 8, 2022, we celebrate Dominic-Madori Davis joining the TechCrunch team. Check out her first article on the site and her first TechCrunch Plus feature, and give her a

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: How do we qualify

Embedded finance — where financial services companies and others bring in different kinds of fintech technology by way of APIs to enhance their own offerings with more data and functionality — remains a growing opportunity, both to help fuel new business and to help incumbents get up to speed with their disruptors. In the latest

One of Better.com’s former executives has filed a lawsuit against the online mortgage lender, alleging that the company and its CEO Vishal Garg misled investors when it attempted to go public via a SPAC, reports the Wall Street Journal. Sarah Pierce served as executive vice president of customer experience, sales and operations at Better.com before

All jokes about robot armies and SkyNet aside, robotics are set to profoundly impact the future of how America works. And not in just a few industries, but across an ever-growing swath that includes agtech, automotive, construction, labor, logistics, healthcare and more.  Automation is inevitable, and yet advancements in technology often result in lower wages

Lagos and San Francisco-based Klasha has received an additional $2.1 million to complete its $4.5 million seed round. The startup, which provides multiple products for the cross-border commerce space in Africa, raised this new financing from a group of international investors co-led by American Express (AMEX) Ventures, the strategic investment group of American Express. This

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. Today is Monday, June 6, 2022, and in case you didn’t know, it is also Apple’s WWDC conference, which is what Haje and our other colleagues are focused on today, so you

Curtis Townshend Contributor More posts by this contributor Are early-stage funding rounds out of control? Companies are valued based on metrics. Those with better metrics are valued higher, and those with worse metrics are valued lower. None of this is controversial, but it’s also not helpful for getting started — metrics alone don’t help you

For years, Africa’s credit infrastructure has lagged behind the rest of the world due to low credit coverage from its bureaus. Per a World Bank report, only 11% of Africa’s population have their credit information recorded by private credit bureaus. And for those who are banked, only 17% have accessed loans. Thus, there’s a real

The United States is perhaps one of the best countries to start an urban air mobility company. You only have to look at how fast well-funded startups like Joby Aviation, Wisk Aero and Lillium are building and testing electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft. However, South Korea, which lacks the venture capital, entrepreneurial

Welcome to The Interchange, a take on this week’s fintech news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Buy now, pay later has become nearly ubiquitous here in the U.S. As such, companies that offer that technology to merchants are unsurprisingly growing more competitive with each other. Case in point. This past

After a month that saw nearly 16,000 tech workers lose their jobs, June is off to a similar tumultuous start. Startups across all sectors, from healthcare to enterprise SaaS to crypto, are laying off portions of staff and citing, seemingly, from the same notes: it’s a tough market, a time of uncertainty, and a correction

Hello all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap some of the top stories to cross TechCrunch over the last 7 days. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday, sign up here. The most read story this week was about, get this: a DeLorean. As in the Back to

From black swan memos and heart-to-hearts to not-so-subtle emails asking for on-the-record confirmations that your startup does, indeed, have revenue, investors have a lot to say about the downturn. Yet, it’s a quieter and more realistic truth that has landed my attention as of late: For diverse founders, the downturn is nothing new. Some investors,

Well, this is straight from the desk of “didn’t see that coming,” but search engine toolkit company Ahrefs just told me they’ve been working on their very own search engine on the sly, plowing $60 million of resources into its own search engine, called Yep. It’s a unique proposition, running its own search index, rather

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. Happy Fri-yay the 3rd of June 2022. Or, as this cursed pandemic is still doing its thing, perhaps it’s March 824, 2020, who knows. Whatever is happening in your world, we hope

As a child, Marceau Michel always asked for a quarter. He knew if he kept asking for a quarter, he’d have a dollar one day. Then he’d be well on his way to having two — a slow but purposeful build toward amassing his own little fortune. Today, at the helm of the Black Founders Matter venture

Global venture capital firms are pouring money into the semiconductor startups developing the next generation of chips. Semiconductors, which have become a valued asset, are used in virtually almost every industry, including 5G networks, automation, the Internet of Things, financials, smart homes, smart cities, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality and self-driving cars. Sunghyun Park, a

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, and welcome to June 2, 2022. Where we are sitting, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and we are celebrating adding Becca Szkutak to the TechCrunch team. She’ll be

The number 48 holds significance in Chinese numerology — it represents a determination to prosper, especially when it comes to business. We can all relate to that, amirite? And 48 holds significance right here and right now, because that’s how many hours you have left to save up to $1,500 on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt

I’m excited to announce SureImpact won today’s City Spotlight: Columbus pitch-off! Winning a free exhibition space at TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 and a spot in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200, the Ohio-based company pitched alongside Skuld and Healia Health on TechCrunch Live earlier today. Founder and CEO Sheri Chaney Jones pitched to two fantastic judges — Anna

Poparazzi, the anti-Instagram social app that hit the top of the App Store last year, is today, for the first time, detailing the growth stats for its business, its future plans and its previously unconfirmed Benchmark-led Series A round. The L.A.-area startup now reports its iOS-only has seen over 5 million installs in its first

Code Intelligence, an automated application security testing platform based in Bonn, Germany, that focuses on fuzzing, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Tola Capital. Existing investors LBBW, OCCIDENT, Verve Ventures, HTGF and Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub, also participated in this round, which brings the

Many businesses looking to set up pan-African operations are often met with the challenge of establishing payment services that are appropriate for each country they go to. Most of the payment services merchants working in the continent have solutions that are limited to specific regions, meaning that businesses have to sign deals with multiple providers

Ammar Bandukwala Contributor Improving the efficiency of your software engineering team has many advantages, prime among which is the ability to make up for problems in other areas. Whether you’re facing budget constraints, having problems sourcing and retaining talent, or simply want to boost product iteration, focusing on increasing your engineering efficiencies will yield strong

Railway, a startup building a software deployment platform tailored for engineers, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures and angel investors including Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. The capital brings Railway’s total raised to $24 million, which founder and CEO Jake Cooper

Egypt-born and Dubai-headquartered mobility startup SWVL is planning to lay off 32% of its workforce it said in a statement today. The company’s LinkedIn profile shows it has over 1,330 employees. Letting go of over 30% of its workforce means that around 400 people will lose their jobs at the mobility company. Tech companies, private

Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that helps developers remove the bottlenecks in their machine learning training pipelines, today announced that it has raised a $7.8 million seed round. The round includes a total of 30 funds and angels, including the likes of Sequoia Capital India, Blackbird, Folklore and Skip Capital, as well as Y

About 80% of household retail in sub-Saharan Africa is delivered through informal channels, which perennially face several challenges like stockouts, leading to an instability in earnings, and a lack of attractiveness to financiers. These challenges befall millions of micro-retailers across the continent, and Betastore, a B2B retail marketplace for informal retailers, is working to resolve