Startups

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, February 18, 2022! First, a note that much of TechCrunch is off Monday for a U.S. holiday, so some regular stuff might land a

Delivery has become one of the fastest growing verticals for robotics investments amid pandemic-related shutdowns. There’s been plenty of interest in the category over the years, but Covid-19 has accelerated interest on all sides of the equation. Among this category, however, Agility stands out – in more ways than one. Born out of research from

Amanda Milligan Contributor Amanda Milligan is head of marketing at Stacker Studio, a newsroom and newswire that partners with brands to create and distribute content to high-quality news publications, earning brand authority and links. More posts by this contributor 3 strategies for elevating brand authority in 2021 6 reasons why reporters aren’t interested in your

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, February 17, 2022! Heading into a long weekend here in the United States, you might think that the news is slowing down but, nope.

Along comes Metriport, which aggregates all of your quantified-self data in one place, and adds clever features like mood tracking, medicine tracking and journaling. All your data lives locally on your device to protect your privacy, and the app can find correlations in your data to help you become a better you. Counting calories, summing

Blair Silverberg Contributor Blair Silverberg is co-founder and CEO of Hum Capital, a financial services company using technology to accelerate the fundraising process. More posts by this contributor Know your startup’s value so you can communicate it to investors For companies raising capital in the coming year, news of rising interest rates, market volatility and

David Teten Contributor More posts by this contributor What are the ‘jobs to be done’ of an investment manager? The macro trends forcing change on the investment management industry Akshat Dixit Contributor The easiest way to work with and for VC funds is to become a scout, getting compensated for sourcing investments. But how do

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 can early-stage startups

Payments infrastructure company Stronghold has launched a venture capital arm to deploy $100 million of its balance sheet capital in startups and funds in three core strategies — underrepresented founders, fintech, and web3, CEO Tammy Camp told TechCrunch in an interview. Stronghold offers a suite of fintech and blockchain APIs and services, including embedded payments,

The ability to rent all sorts of things is a logical step in the evolution of a subscription economy, but renting hardware wasn’t necessarily top-of-mind for startups until COVID-19 hit. Pre-pandemic, a common step in the onboarding process at many VC-funded startups in the Bay Area called for new employees to visit the closest Apple

Tech healthcare unicorn Ro announced today that it has raised $150 million exclusively from existing investors, led by ShawSpring Partners, with participation from FirstMark Capital, General Catalyst, Seven Seven Six, BoxGroup, Altimeter Capital, Baupost Group, Initialized, TQ Ventures and TCG. Sources close to the company, as well as Bloomberg, confirm that the money was raised

Contact Financial Holding, Egypt’s non-bank consumer finance provider, has invested $9 million in the country’s ecommerce super-app Wasla, setting the stage for the rollout of new online shopping capabilities, products and regional expansion. Contact has been in the business of consumer finance since 2001, while Wasla was founded in 2018 by former Serag Meneassy and

Based in Singapore with offices throughout Asia and Australia, Reebelo wants to make buying pre-owned tech as desirable as a brand new device. “What we have seen is that many younger generations are very much open to the idea of sustainable consumption,” co-founder Philip Franta told TechCrunch. “We see a lot of growth and momentum

Yann Leretaille Contributor Yann Leretaille is the co-founder and CTO of Wingback, a SaaS growth infrastructure company. The very first hire at our SaaS startup was (surprise!) not an engineer. It might seem counterintuitive, but the first person on board at Wingback was a Fractional Head of Remote — and it was the best decision

Open finance continues to be a significant theme in the world of fintech as businesses tap APIs to access customers’ financial accounts and provide a gamut of integrated and embedded financial services. In the latest development, Stitch — one of the prominent players building and operating these APIs in Africa — confirmed to TechCrunch that

Welcome to my new weekly fintech focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it turns into a

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. In the beginning of the pandemic, we learned which companies were unprepared to handle a cataclysmic event. Now, as the world slowly starts to reopen in light of vaccinations, we’re learning which

Amit Anand Contributor Amit Anand is a founding partner of Jungle Ventures and an early pioneer and leader in the development of Southeast Asia’s venture capital industry. More posts by this contributor Predicting the next wave of Southeast Asia tech giants Investors are doubling down on Southeast Asia’s digital economy It was only a matter

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, February 11, 2022! Today we’re talking big rockets, self-driving cars, tech stocks getting rekt, and more. It’s a fun, and good mix of news. Enjoy! – Alex The TechCrunch Top 3 Rocketship, or big vapor phallus? At an event about SpaceX’s huge Starship launch system, more questions

In the world of cybersecurity, you can’t secure something if you don’t know it’s there. Enter cybersecurity asset management, an admittedly unsexy fragment of the booming industry that investors have shown an ever-increasing appetite for over the past 18 months. The cybersecurity industry experienced what is being hailed by some as a “golden year” —

Artificial intelligence has infiltrated a number of industries, and the restaurant industry was one of the latest to embrace this technology, driven in main part by the global pandemic and the need to shift to online orders. That need continues to grow. In 2021, some 60% of Americans ordered takeout or delivery at least once

Atommerce, a Korean startup that helps users connect with mental health professionals via a mobile app MiNDCAFE, plans to scale its service for growth with a $16.7 million Series B, which was three times oversubscribed within two months. With the recent funding, Atommerce plans to enhance artificial intelligence and machine learning technology for its platform

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, February 10, 2022! Trying new stuff is always risky, but I wanted to say thanks to everyone who came out today to watch Equity

Twine, a company that provides networking tools for virtual events and remote teams, will soon bring its services to Zoom thanks to its just-closed acquisition of the Y Combinator-backed startup, Glimpse, which had developed a “speech matching” platform designed for virtual events. Glimpse’s idea was to offer a way to facilitate the connections that typically

Meal deliveries in Vietnamese cities typically take less than half an hour, but grocery deliveries are lagging behind, sometimes taking up to two to three hours, says Rino founder Trung Thanh Nguyen. By creating a vertically-integrated logistics infrastructure centered around “dark stores,” or stores set up for order fulfillment only, Nguyen says Rino can cut

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: When is the H-1B

The COVID-19 pandemic has created all sorts of real estate issues for companies as it forced so many employees to work from home, leaving empty space all over the globe. And while there is no shortage of technology out there for landlords, there are fewer options for commercial real estate tenants and brokers. Enter Occupier.

The MENA region has about 400 million people with $500 billion in annual savings. But as a relatively young population, most of them have minimal equity market and investment exposure. Replicating the success of Robinhood in the U.S., some platforms are looking to create investors out of the region. One such is Egypt-based Thndr. The

Renowned Silicon Valley operator Adam Nash thinks you want to donate much more than you do, and he’s about to make it dead simple for you. Such is the message we received when talking late last week with Nash, whose most recent full-time roles include as a VP at Dropbox and president and CEO of

Chicken is the most consumed meat in the United States and the world. And yet, the system in place to breed and feed and raise all this chicken is incredibly detrimental to our overall wellbeing. It props up a conventional agricultural apparatus that focuses on corn and soy production, not to mention fosters a system