Startups

Calling all mobility founders! The clock is ticking and we’re down to seven days left to apply to pitch TC Sessions: Mobility taking place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, CA with online analyst commentary on May 20th.  We just announced the agenda and as you can see, you don’t want to miss out on

Like many ambitious Chinese who graduated college abroad during the 2010s and aspired to be the next Jack Ma or Pony Ma, Lucas returned to his motherland to build his own internet startup. Two years into running the business, however, his enthusiasm has waned. The regulatory risks and compliance costs affecting his company have become

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. Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Thursday, April 14, 2022! As we put this together, we are listening to TED’s Chris Anderson interview with Elon Musk about his attempt to buy Twitter.

Deel’s timeline is impressive: Founded in 2018, entered YC and raised its seed round in 2019. In 2020, the company raised a Series A and Series B. In 2021, Deel raised its Series C and Series D for a total amount raised of $629 million since its founding. And on April 20, co-founder and CEO

Shared micromobility company Luup has raised $8 million (1 billion yen) in debt and asset financing to meet the growing demands of Japan’s micromobility market, which according to a recent report, is projected to reach $11.6 billion in 2030, up from $39.4 million in 2020.   Luup will use the proceeds to expand its service

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. Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Wednesday, April 13, 2022! Tomorrow, we are giddy with excitement to be attending Early Stage (if you’re coming, don’t forget to submit your pitch deck!). If

There’s no shortage of digital banks in Nigeria and, in general, in Africa. As the region continues to experience rapid growth in mobile usage and the corresponding growing young population, these fintechs think this is the right time to provide financial services to every market category, from the banked to the unbanked. We’ve covered a

Nursing shortages were a problem well before our hospitals were rocked by a pandemic. Two years in and overloaded systems have further contributed to burnout, stress and other factors plaguing the people we rely on for our own well-being. We’ve seen robotics applied to just about every other field of late, so why not nursing

Grain, a four-year-old, fully remote startup that’s finding increasingly elaborate ways to capture video snippets of online meetings to make important moments easy to share, search, and save, has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global Management. Other backers in the round include Zoom itself, the Slack Fund, Unusual Ventures, and

PassiveLogic, a startup developing a platform to autonomously control building systems, today announced that it raised $15 million from Brookfield Growth, the investment arm of asset management firm Brookfield. CEO Troy Harvey says that the new capital will be put toward growing PassiveLogic’s team and “launching an ecosystem of products that enable autonomy.” Analysts at

Voyager Innovations, the owner of Philippines’ payment and financial services app PayMaya and neobank Maya Bank, announced today it has raised $210 million, bringing its valuation to $1.4 billion. The round was led by SIG Venture Capital, and included participation from EDBI and First Pacific Company, as well as returning shareholders PLDT, KKR, Tencent, International

Cocos Technologies, a China-based game engine provider that has been around since 2010, just announced it has picked up $50 million in a Series B funding round in a bid to work on development and move beyond games. Investors include CCB Trust, a subsidiary of China Construction Bank, GGV Capital, and real-time communication solution provider

It’s hard to think of a product category that is less sexy than window air conditioning units. Windmill begs to differ, bringing a breath of fresh air to an industry that’s been steadfastly clunking away in the corner. The company raised $10 million to make the ubiquitous AC easier to install, smarter and gentler on

Between his roles as co-leader of Mayfield Fund’s engineering biology practice and founder at IndieBio, Arvind Gupta reviewed approximately 470 startup pitches last year. He characterizes his process as “simple,” but that is a bit reductive: after reviewing a deck and scheduling a meeting with the founders, he’ll spend many hours acquainting himself with both

Before you can even think about building an algorithm to read an X-ray or interpret a blood smear, the machine has to know what’s what in an image. All of the promise of AI in healthcare — an area that has attracted $11.3 billion in private investment in 2021, can’t be realized without carefully labeled

Arrival, a UK-based electric vehicle company that went public last year, has set itself a lofty goal. The company aims to produce electric vehicles that cost less than other EVs and competes with pricing on fossil fuel-powered vehicles.  A lofty goal requires a bold plan. For Arrival, that means bypassing the traditional large-scale or even “giga-sized”

Evan J. Zimmerman Contributor Evan J. Zimmerman is the founder and CEO of Drift, a genomics software company, and chairman of Jovono, a venture capital firm. More posts by this contributor Twitter’s acquisition strategy: Eat the public conversation CFIUS Cometh: What this obscure agency does and why it matters to your fund or startup In

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. Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Friday, April 8, 2022! Today, Haje has mostly been reading the most recent IPCC report and gobbling anti-anxiety meds by the fistful, while Christine was talking

Running an airline is a tough industry, with many companies either folding shop or merging with rivals to survive. Being an airline passenger isn’t a walk in the park, for a litany of reasons that anyone who has ever been in an airport can easily enumerate. Landline, a four-year-old, Fort Collins, Colorado-based transportation startup, thinks

Dana Linnet Contributor Dana Linnet is president and CEO of The Summit Group DC, an independent strategic advisory consultancy in Washington, D.C. specializing in defense, space and emerging technologies. She formerly held positions as a career U.S government official and contracting officer, defense executive and VP/GM for a Silicon Valley tech startup. The views expressed

The long-awaited re-correction of private tech startup valuations and fundraising expectations has a web3-sized asterisk next to it. While many funds are returning to more conservative check-writing, with a focus on profitability and business fundamentals, crypto remains a sector in the spotlight that attracts dedicated billion-dollar funds and investment terms that remind us more of

Over the past four months, digital mortgage lender Better.com has conducted a mass layoff not once, but twice. The company also badly botched a mass layoff not once, but twice.  First, on December 1, Better.com laid off about 900 employees via a Zoom video call that ended up going viral. It was hardly the first

Perfect pitch, a singer’s ability to produce any given musical note without a reference tone, is a rare phenomenon — only 1-5 people out of every 10,000 have it. While your odds of creating a perfect pitch deck that captures coveted VC interest aren’t quite that dire, they’re not exactly in your favor, either. Venture

Late-stage SaaS startups may be in the most trouble when it comes to changing valuation marks among technology companies, new data indicates. A report from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) exploring first-quarter software startup trends details that late-stage SaaS valuations in the United States scaled the most rapidly in 2021, closing out the year with the

A survey of Y Combinator companies makes it clear that the fintech subsector is far from dead Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 7 hours Given the recent run of concerned headlines that insurtech companies have generated, you’d be forgiven for anticipating that the startup category would find itself in dire straits. Not a bit of it.

TechCrunch Live has an exciting slate of episodes scheduled for April. The speakers come from a variety of disciplines, backgrounds and locations. Like always, each episode features an entrepreneur presenting their early pitch deck along with the investor who funded the company. We want to know how the founder hooked the VC, what makes their

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. A fine day to you, and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, April 1, 2022! It was a slow news day at TC Towers because we double-checked every PR pitch for April

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. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, March 31, 2022! It’s a beautiful day in our neck of the woods, and we have a great lineup of news for you today,

Steve Bartel Contributor Steve Bartel is the CEO of Gem, a talent engagement platform backed by Greylock, Accel and ICONIQ. Over the last several years, an increasing number of companies have pledged to hire a more diverse workforce and begun releasing their diversity numbers annually. The results have been a mixed bag at best. With so

‘Every morning starts with a check-in on Slack with all the colleagues’ Rebecca Bellan 8 hours The COVID-19 pandemic taught the world how to work from home, but Russia’s war in Ukraine has taught the employees at Delfast, a Ukrainian e-bike startup, how to work from bomb shelters, while on the move and under threat