Startups

For many of us, our home is by far our biggest asset, and in the world of fintech, that’s led to a logical extension: when you need money, borrow against that biggest asset. Today, a London fintech called Selina, which provides flexible capital to consumers on five-year terms against up to 85% of the value

Vivek Narayanadas Contributor Vivek Narayanadas serves as General Counsel for MetaMap, which helps online services become borderless through user-centric, privacy-forward trust and safety workflows. From securing a loan to renting a car to getting a job, our lives increasingly depend on the digital world to enable trust-based interactions online. That world is now borderless: people

Swing, a South Korean electric scooter and micromobility startup, announced today it has raised $24 million in a Series B round to spur its growth and expansion to Japan.  The funding was led by White Star Capital, which also invested in Berlin-based Tier Mobility, and included existing backer Hashed, among others. With the fresh capital,

Michael Fey Contributor Michael Fey leads Island as co-founder and CEO, relying on his extensive experience in cyber security, enterprise software and cloud technology. A company’s most valuable asset is its people, especially for organizations still in their infancy. A startup’s founding team can be the difference between an industry-changing unicorn and just another failed

Q5D’s proposition is a simple one: use robotics to automate the process of producing wiring harnesses for electronics. It’s one that — surprisingly — is often still executed by hand, owing to its overall complexity. It’s a process, the company is quick to point out, that hasn’t really changed all that much over the previous

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. If there’s one sector that is incessantly in pursuit of Magic Metrics, it’s edtech. For the past two years, I’ve spoken with every top investor and founder in the industry and each

Growth marketing (TechCrunch+) 3 experiments for early-stage founders seeking product-market fit: Elise King, director of Human Ventures’ entrepreneur-in-residence program and member of the firm’s investment team, spoke with founders and tells us about finding product-market fit. Tackling touchpoints on your customer’s path to purchase: Returning contributor Jonathan Martinez shares his thoughts about using segmentation and

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 4, 2022! The TechCrunch team is getting pretty stoked for our 2022 slate of live and online events. Equity and Found are hosting

Coding bootcamp Nucamp will no longer publish job placement metrics in its advertising materials, a move that CEO Ludovic Fourrage is making to rebuild student trust in the industry. “Students have to be accountable for finding the right job in the industry, and too often placement is easily used as a justification of increasing the

Automakers keen to sell vehicles loaded with features and software services — in a bid to generate more revenue — have an information overload challenge. These so-called software-defined vehicles contain myriad systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) running anything from electric powertrains to driver assistance features to infotainment. The crux is that they all must work in concert.  Car

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 3, 2022! Today we have a few angles on the startup market. The gist is that there are some positive signals to digest,

Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor A lean startup’s growth marketing tech stack 5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make Someone clicks your ad on Facebook, and they choose to purchase

Video is the beating heart of the most popular content online these days, and it’s not just because it’s entertaining. It’s also because of how accessible it is: it’s become incredibly easy for anyone, whether you’re technical or not, to make, post or watch video. Today, a London-based startup called Veed that’s built an online-only,

Scale AI’s path to becoming a $7.3 billion company was paved in real data from images, text, voice and video. Now, it is using that foundation to get into the synthetic data game, one of the hotter and emerging categories in AI. They announced Wednesday an early access program to Scale Synthetic, a product that

Sergiu Matei Contributor Sergiu Matei is the founder of Index, a platform that helps teams find and hire world-class remote software developers and be globally compliant from the get-go. More posts by this contributor 3 ways to recruit engineers who fly under LinkedIn’s radar The internet is undergoing a drastic facelift thanks to surging interest

Whose Your Landlord,1 or WYL, announced a $2.1 million seed round today led by Black Operator Ventures, better known as BlackOps Ventures. TechCrunch readers will already be aware of BlackOps’ fund, which we covered at launch last December. The goal behind the $13 million capital pool was to invest in Black founders. The WYL round

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 Tuesday, February 1, 2022! I celebrated the first day of the month by having my internet cut out right as I started to prepare this

Last November, Apple announced the launch of Self Service Repair — a surprising addition for a company that has notoriously lacked such capabilities. Those changes didn’t happen in a vacuum, of course. The president and Congress have both been pushing to open the so-called right to repair. There are plenty of reasons for this, from

The demand for software engineers is expected to grow by 22% between 2020 and 2030, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This figure is larger than the 4% average for other careers. One would be out of touch with reality to say they haven’t noticed this phenomenon in Lagos, Africa’s startup

In the crypto ecosystem, wallets are perhaps the most critical user touchpoint serving as a gateway to exchanges and smart contracts. This positions the startups building popular wallet apps closest to the firehose of consumer crypto opportunities, while also leaving them to take charge in tackling many of web3’s unsolved problems including steep onboarding challenges

It’s been a 12-year journey for Purely Elizabeth founder Elizabeth Stein, and based on her plans for the company’s next phase, she is just getting started. Stein, who began her career as a holistic nutrition counselor, started the company in 2009 after going back to school and learning about superfood ingredients and food as medicine,

The Egyptian social e-commerce market will be worth over $14.8 billion by 2024. The opportunity in the market can be attributed to the growth in online social sellers in the country, over 1.25 million them, helping little-known brands sell and distribute their goods via different networks. Brimore–a market leader in the country and, to an

Joby Aviation is seeking permission for a series of high-profile air taxi flights over San Francisco Bay, according to documents filed with the FCC and obtained by TechCrunch. The tests of the startup’s second-generation pre-production prototype, called the S4, would be the first in full view of the public and the first in an urban

Elise King Contributor Elise King is program director of Human Ventures’ entrepreneur-in-residence program and is a member of the firm’s investment team. At Human Ventures, we have a fund for pre-seed and seed-stage investments, a venture studio and an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program. Through this work, we’ve discovered a lot about how different founders

Jason Wenk Contributor Fintech founders that set out to solve big problems for consumers almost always begin with the best intentions — they want to help people. But they often miss that mark by a country mile, which spurs questions about how effective other fintech founders can be at helping consumers. Trust me, when you

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 market is down. The party is over. And Peloton of X startups aren’t too happy right now. As tech stocks take a hit, the big question on my mind is how

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 January 28, 2022! It’s nearly blizzard o’clock where I am, so please enjoy the following newsletter as my final missive before hunkering down. In happier

As a company grows, the amount of important information employees need to keep track of inevitably grows right along with it. And, as your tech stack gets more complicated, that information ends up split up across more places — buried in Slack threads, tucked into Jira tickets, pushed as files on Dropbox, etc. Dashworks is

The idea of starting your own business can be overwhelming — often to the point of paralysis. Here’s the thing: You’re not alone. Here’s the other thing: It doesn’t have to be that way. If that drive to be your own boss won’t let you sleep at night, then TechCrunch Early Stage is an absolute must-attend

Zigbang, a South Korean proptech startup that provides real estate transactions service, announced on Thursday that it will acquire Samsung SDS’ home internet of things (IoT) unit to make a foray into the smart home industry.  Samsung SDS sold the smart home IoT division, which is the only B2C business Samsung SDS has, in order to focus