Startups

Jill Gunter is no stranger to crypto — she’s seen the market through its ups and downs, conducting research on blockchain protocols, working at multiple crypto startups and co-founding her own, and investing as a crypto VC at Slow Ventures. Gunter first started following the crypto space in 2011, when she was working in the

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. The Great Resignation, the economic trend of people quitting their jobs in pursuit of other opportunities, has been greeted by a harsh reality: the Great Reset. This week, a spate of tech

Hi friends. In case you missed it last week: I’m Greg, and I’m handling Week in Review now that Lucas is off with Anita building their new crypto-focused podcast/newsletter, Chain Reaction. I’m teeeechnically supposed to be on vacation today, but I figured it was probably not cool to throw the newsletter to someone else ONE

Startups need capital and often fundraise from investors. This requires pitching, numbers, stats and a story. And the time has to be correct. The key to timing is easy, according to this CEO: Fundraise when your confidence is high. Each week on TechCrunch Live, investors and entrepreneurs share lessons learned from personal experiences. And Front

The era of free money is now officially behind us: The United States Federal Reserve raised a key interest rate benchmark by 0.50%, or 50 basis points, this week. Startups have long basked in the sun of effectively zero-cost money. As a result of a historic period of low rates, the comparative attractiveness of investing

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Friday, May 6, is here. The only thing important about that is the “Friday” part – and we are eager and curious to see what this weekend has in store for us,

The market for startup investment has changed. From the hottest year in startup venture capital history to a period of pessimism, how did we get to where we are today? The following digest of TechCrunch coverage looks to answer that question. We start with a historical run of stories beginning last December, threading through the

The pace at which venture capitalists are deploying funding across the globe slowed yet again in April. Venture capital dollar volume, as tracked by Crunchbase News in a new report, peaked in November 2021. Since that apogee, the value of venture investments has ticked lower in most months before dropping another $5 billion from March

The NFT ecosystem continues to chug along, but the vast majority of volume is still moving through the centralized halls of NFT marketplace OpenSea, leaving crypto VCs eager to find new channels. Katie Haun’s new firm, Haun Ventures, has led its first deal in NFT startup Zora Labs. The $50 million funding round values the

Before you open the doors for due diligence: Is your financial house in order? Bill Petty 8 hours Bill Petty Contributor Bill Petty is a partner at Tercera. He is responsible for sourcing, executing and monitoring investments in third-wave services businesses. Are you a founder looking to raise capital? If so, before you open the

It used to be getting from prototyping to manufacturing meant long, expensive trips to places like Shenzhen and a whole lot of trial and error. Fictiv was founded back in 2013 to address some of the biggest pain points of bringing products to market. The San Francisco startup runs what it calls a Digital Manufacturing

Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation has unveiled a fleet management system that can be used to help optimize operations for the startup’s trucking and ride-hailing products. Aurora announced the platform, named Aurora Beacon, alongside its first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, during which the company presented investors with a series of milestones on its path

Alon Laniado Contributor Alon Laniado founded tech-enabled human services startups Fitmate Coach and PathMotion. Previously, he was a Bain & Co. strategy consultant and a U.K. Treasury policy adviser designing employment schemes. Utilizing AI and other automation tools to enhance the delivery of human services can make exclusive services like career coaching available to more

Folk, the next-generation CRM started by European startup studio eFounders, is going live today. If you’ve paid attention to TechCrunch, I’ve already covered Folk in the past. Since then, the product has evolved a bit and is now ready for prime time. “The biggest SaaS [software-as-a-service] category is CRM. The highest valuation in the SaaS

The more of our world we share with robots, the more important it is to help them find their way. Founded in 2016, navigation is at the heart of what London-based SLAMcore does. In fact, it’s right there in the name — SLAM being a common robotics acronym for “Simultaneous localization and mapping.” The company

Will Y Combinator one day fund 1,000 companies per batch? Its president, Geoff Ralston, doesn’t think that’s impossible. But for the tech press, the possibility creates a conundrum: We can do our best to pick favorites, but we can’t cover every single promising startup in its early days. This situation, it turns out, creates an

Traceable AI, a startup offering services designed to protect APIs from cyberattacks, today announced that it raised $60 million in a Series B round led by IVP with participation from BIG Labs, Unusual Ventures, Tiger Global Management, and several undisclosed angel investors. The new capital values the company at more than $450 million post-money, and

Gooood [your time of day] startup fans! It’s a brand new week and we’re flippin’ psyched that it’s… wait, it is May? How’d that happen? In any case – May 2nd 2022, here we go. Spring is a good time to do a bit of a spring clean; we loved Zack’s guide to how to

After a week of making headlines, one-click-checkout startup Bolt has issued a public response to questions about how it’s faring in the competitive space. CEO Maju Kuruvilla issued a blog post today acknowledging that the company “has become very popular in the media these past few months.” In case you missed it, last week the

QED incubated this auto financing company in 2016 and Kevin Bennett became CEO in 2018 and soon after raised its first seed round. It started as MotoRefi, and rebranded in November 2021 to Caribou. But the mission remains: Transforming consumers’ financial relationship with their cars. Since the founding, Bennett has raised $74 million for the

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. There’s a clash happening in the early-stage market. In one world, late-stage investors are reacting to tech stonk corrections by clamoring toward the early-stage investment world, forcing seed investors to go even

For investors, one factor will almost always stand head and shoulders above the rest: Your TAM (total addressable market) needs to break at least $1 billion. But alongside a massive addressable market, investors are also looking to see that you have existing customers, even they’re few in number, who truly love your product. However, communicating

BNPL is not a new concept; it’s just taken off in recent years and become far more mainstream. Buy now, pay later lets people do exactly what its name suggests — buy something and pay for it later. The difference between BNPL and credit cards is that rather than charge the full amount of a

One thing I love about fintech is the promise of unlocking more tools for more people. In a broad sense, the current era of fintech has done just that — people around the world now have access to financial services that were earlier either completely out of reach before, or, at a minimum, prohibitively expensive.

Earlier this month at TechCrunch Early Stage, I talked to Frederique Dame, an investing partner at GV, about product-market fit. A standing-room-only crowd packed the venue as Dame spoke about her experience leading product and engineering efforts at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, sharing some of what she learned about gathering customer data, iterating quickly to

As you might’ve heard, it’s getting a little crowded in space, between thousand-satellite constellations à la SpaceX’s Starlink and the millions of pieces of space junk accumulated from decades of launches. But it’s also getting a little crowded in the space-monitoring space, with a number of companies competing to create observation systems to help satellite

Airbnb is going all in on the “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy that much of the business world has been forced to adopt, committing to full-time remote work for most employees and a handful of perks like 90 days of international work/travel. It’s a strong, simple policy that so few large companies have had the

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It’s Thursday, April 28, 2022, and Haje’s blood pressure is slowly returning to what passes for normal after raging about Social Security numbers for a few minutes. Look, it’s hard to get

Last month, I wrote about Minut and its $14 million Series B round, an investment that closed in December. Today, we are sharing the pitch deck the company used to raise the round, led by Almaz Capital. What does Minut do? The startup has built a privacy-forward hardware solution that helps Airbnb hosts “keep an

Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised an $83.5 million Series A with Khosla Venture’s