Startups

The cameras, lenses, and lighting equipment to shoot even a relatively modest production can cost in the millions of dollars. Rental is often the name of the game, but the latticework of mom-and-pop equipment rentals can be hard to navigate. BoxedUp takes a fresh look at the space, creating a rental marketplace — a Turo

Shared micromobility company Tier Mobility said on Wednesday it has acquired Fantasmo, a U.S.-based computer vision-powered e-scooter parking startup whose tech Tier had been trialing in multiple cities in Europe. Tier will bring on all of Fantasmo’s 15 staff members and continue to invest in and develop what will now be an in-house Camera Positioning

Hundreds of companies presented at Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day event, and I looked at pretty much all their logos. There’s a lot of solid ones, a few clunkers and a handful of really nice ones. Here’s a list of the latter for your pleasure and edification. I haven’t put these in any order

The credit card giant Visa has launched a NFT creator program in an effort to bring small businesses into the digital economy. “We’ve seen rapid growth in the NFT ecosystem over the past year,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, told TechCrunch. “We think NFTs represent a new form of ecommerce.” The idea of

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 Tuesday, March 29, 2022! Haje and I are now flying solo with the newsletter. It will be all hands on deck today and tomorrow as

Michael Redd Contributor Michael Redd spent 12 seasons playing in the NBA and on the U.S. Olympic team. He is now co-founder and chairman of 22 Ventures. More posts by this contributor 3 warning signs that your investor will leave you on the sidelines Startup accelerators are increasingly putting the brakes on demo days. The

The adoption of buy now, pay later (BNPL) in Nigeria as a payment option both online and at the point of sale is expected to record a CAGR of 20% from 2021 to 2028, per this report. BNPL’s growth is further highlighted as GMV is predicted to increase from $204 million to over $1 billion

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 Monday, March 28, 2022! Alas, I knew this day was coming, and here it is. Christine and Haje are taking over my bits of Daily

Evaluating and keeping an eye on the suppliers to your business is crucial, and fantastically complicated. Contingent leaps to the rescue, armed with a freshly printed $8.2 million check from investors. The SaaS platform helps companies procure more strategically and better manage supply chain risk and compliance. “The typical questionnaire process to onboard suppliers is

Football or soccer, the latter commonly used in the US, is the most popular and watched sport globally with over five billion football fans according to its apex governing body, FIFA. While the World Cup, its pinnacle event of football and arguably the world’s most popular sporting event, shows the popularity of the sport in

Bias alert: I am writing to you from my home office Alex Wilhelm 9 hours Firstbase announced a Series B round of funding today, led by Kleiner Perkins. TechCrunch covered the company’s Series A one year ago, when the world’s remote work shift was fully underway. Now in a more hybrid world, with corporations large

Alexandre Robicquet Contributor Alexandre Robicquet is co-founder and CEO of Crossing Minds, an AI-powered recommendation platform for e-commerce and content. An experienced Stanford AI scholar, he holds three Master’s degrees in mathematics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Four years ago, my team set an ambitious goal: build the smartest recommendation platform on the market. Since

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 Friday, March 25, 2022! This is one of the last Daily Crunch intros that I will write for you. I will miss our daily chats

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It was a live recording this week, which was good fun. Our co-host Natasha was off, so Mary Ann and Alex teamed up with Grace to hammer our way through the news of the week live, with

Lahore-based coworking space startup, Colabs, is set to roll-out a SaaS product to enable businesses meet back-office needs including company registration, talent sourcing and management, payroll processing and legal and tax compliance. It also plans to hire more staff, which will include increasing the product team for its SaaS workspace business service that is emerging

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 24, 2022! I am happy to report that Haje is taking on the day’s startups section, as he will be sharing the Daily

Few companies caught as much of a COVID tailwind as U.S. grocery-delivery giant Instacart. Reporting indicates Instacart’s 2020 revenues roughly tripled to around $1.5 billion. That epic pace of growth helped the company raise a series of large, high-priced financing rounds. In June 2020, Instacart raised $225 million at a $13.7 billion valuation. A month

French startup Weglot has closed a $50 million Series A funding round (€45 million) from Partech. The company has built a translation solution for websites. It helps you add more languages to your site without a lot of tweaking and without having to switch to a different CMS or e-commerce platform. And this is key

I would put window washing fairly high (so to speak) on the list of jobs it makes sense to automate. Certainly the gig qualifies as both dirty and dangerous — and surprisingly, doesn’t come with all that much in the way of hazard pay. That’s something you would think might come standard with a job

Tome co-founders Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, former Instagram and Facebook product leads, are applying their creative spins to the dreaded slide deck. It’s true that the slide deck hasn’t been improved upon so much in the past 30 years, though many startups have given it a-go over the years, including 9Slides, Swipe, and more

As the use of aircraft like drones, electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles and uncrewed aerial vehicles take off, Japanese startup Terra Drone wants to make sure trafficking the skies doesn’t get overlooked. “Our airspace is going to get more crowded than ever, but most companies today are concentrating only on hardware development,” said Terra

Going viral is the dream, but most projects need a little push. Mariusz Gąsiewski, Google’s CEE Mobile Gaming Lead, compares going viral to sightings of the mythical Yeti, the legendary snow creature that allegedly roams the Himalayas. “Many more people are talking about it than really saw it,” he told TechCrunch, noting that viral growth

Listen in to the first-ever episode of Found Live. We were joined by the mother-daughter duo Jordan Taylor and Edith Cooper who co-founded Medley — a group coaching platform focusing on personal and professional growth. They talked with the Found hosts about navigating a co-founder relationship with your mother or daughter. They discuss how important

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, February 22, 2022! We are back! Yes, after a lovely long weekend, your entire TechCrunch team is back in the saddle. Which is good because everything appears to be going on at once. So it was perfect that Slack decided that it actually wanted a four-day weekend

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, or Tuesday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week. We are a day late here thanks to the American holiday, which means

MarketForce, the retail B2B and end-to-end distribution platform founded in Kenya, has raised $40 million in Series A funding for its merchant inventory financing and expansion across Africa. MarketForce, which was launched in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda last year after growing beyond Kenya and Nigeria, plans to introduce buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options to help merchants access

Jambo, a Congo-based startup building Africa’s web3 user acquisition portal through “learn, play, earn” and democratizing access to crypto-based income-generation opportunities, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Experts say Africa is poised to be disrupted by web3 in a similar fashion that has seen Southeast Asia become one of the best markets for web3.

LG’s innovation center — LG Nova among friends — today announced that it has selected the first 50 companies for its Mission for the Future global challenge competition. From 1,300 applicants, the company picked its first cohort to start building opportunities with the startups. Nova itself is a counterpoint to profit-focused corporate venture capital outfits,

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. Since launching the venture firm Backstage Capital in 2015, Arlan Hamilton has invested millions in more than 195 companies led by underrepresented founders, from a duo taking on auto insurance to a

Since launching the venture firm Backstage Capital in 2015, Arlan Hamilton has invested millions in more than 195 companies led by underrepresented founders, from a duo taking on auto insurance to a team rethinking how we virtually learn. Despite the breadth in the business, Hamilton says she is consistently asked two questions by her portfolio