Startups

Nigeria’s informal trade sector, worth over $244 billion, has more than 40 million micro, small and medium businesses. Most of these businesses operated offline until a few years ago when startups brought about digitization by providing infrastructure and a gamut of e-commerce and financial services. One-year-old Sabi — a spinoff from Rensource, an African energy

As many of the top cryptocurrencies seem to temporarily stabilize near all-time highs, users looking to speculate on tokens that are a bit more volatile are searching across exchanges to find deals. Amsterdam-based startup TabTrader has been capitalizing on this search with a platform that aggregates prices and token availability across dozens of exchanges. While

Boyd Davis Contributor Boyd Davis is the CEO and co-founder of Compright, a cloud-based compensation planning tool. Previously, Boyd helped organizations deploy solutions that leveraged data and AI. The Great Resignation is among the most significant events in recent U.S. history. We are seeing a post-COVID-19 generation refusing to work under the same conditions as

Last year, fintech API infrastructure players came into the African tech scene, ushering in Plaid-like services to businesses and developers. And the attention on these companies, particularly from venture capitalists, spiralled into this year, with each significant player raising large seed to Series A rounds. OnePipe, a fintech API company with a different play from

Kyle Poyar Contributor More posts by this contributor Freemium isn’t a trend — it’s the future of SaaS How to overcome the challenges of switching to usage-based pricing It’s not just your imagination — usage-based pricing (UBP) is seemingly everywhere in 2021. SaaS companies have been ditching traditional subscription pricing in favor of usage-based models

The venture arm of Volvo Cars, an automaker long synonymous with safety, has invested in an optics and imaging startup developing technology that can be integrated into a car’s windshield or windows to deliver images to drivers and passengers. Volvo Cars Tech Fund invested $2 million into optics and imaging developer Spectralics, funds it will

If you’ve followed corporate card and spend management startups in the U.S., you might be familiar with Brex and Ramp. Payhawk is also offering an all-in-one financial management solution for businesses, but with a focus on European customers. And the company just raised a $112 million Series B round at a $570 million valuation. Greenoaks

Liz Kofman-Burns Contributor Liz Kofman-Burns, Ph.D., is a recovering academic and co-CEO of Peoplism, a DEIB consulting firm that has helped startups like Betterment, ClassPass and Grammarly achieve measurable results. As a startup founder, you’re likely laser-focused on growth. We get it: You can’t do anything at all if the lights aren’t on. But if

Renee Fry Contributor When you’re wearing multiple hats while managing your startup’s operations, there’s hardly any time to stop and think about what would happen if things were to go catastrophically wrong. You probably don’t consider the consequences if you were to die suddenly, leaving the venture you spent so much blood, sweat and tears

The skyline of the city is a mass of brightly lit office buildings, industrial factories and skyscrapers, the endless hash of lights and shadows making the night seem as if it is teeming with life. Within that urban jungle, we find Amit Gupta, our dastardly hero. He smelled of fresh laundry, hair gel and a

John Story Contributor John Story is general counsel and chief data ethics officer at Acoustic. Previously, he served as a senior member of the legal team at Pax Labs and GoPro. Did you know your company’s data privacy practices can be a competitive differentiator? Usually, we think of competitive differentiators around the level of service

This is a fantastic time to found a startup, but unless you plan to bootstrap it, you will still need to go through the laborious exercise of crafting a pitch deck. With so much riding on the outcome, this can be an extremely stressful process — a convincing deck requires you to come up with

During the garage-stage and Zoom-room days of a company’s life, fluidity can feel key to idea creation. The lack of contractual obligations is baked into how we understand the origin stories of the most famous startups. We celebrate rapid pivots, love scrappy MVPs over perfectly polished platforms and pay attention to repeat entrepreneurs who raise

Matt Cohen Contributor Founder and managing partner at Ripple Ventures, Matt Cohen is a business operator turned early-stage investor. More posts by this contributor Founders must learn how to build and maintain circles of trust with investors Matthew Mendelsohn’s accession to become Yale’s new chief investment officer marks a milestone for the rise of university

The TechCrunch Experts program had an active week! Joey Noble, community manager for Demand Curve, returned with a teardown of Customer.io’s homepage with insights you can apply to your own company’s website, and Jonathan Martinez shared his essentials for creating an optimal growth marketing tech stack. With the new year almost upon us, I interviewed

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it would stop accepting Visa credit cards issued in the U.K. due to high interchange fees on transactions. The company gave a deadline of January 19 and is offering consumers who primarily use Visa cards £20 off a purchase as an incentive to update their preferred payment method. The

Helaina, a company producing a first-of-its-kind infant milk, announced $20 million in Series A financing to usher in its next phase of growth that includes beginning the manufacturing and commercialization process for its first product. Food scientist Laura Katz, who also teaches food science at New York University, founded the company in 2019, and touts

Zoom is great and all, but talking to a lot of two-dimensional humans on computer screens is hardly the future we were all dreaming of. PORTL agrees, and under the catchy slogan “if you can’t be there, beam there,” has carved out a new slice of the market, where you can holographically teleport your image

Aron Solomon Contributor Aron Solomon, J.D., is the head of Strategy for Esquire Digital and the editor of Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was the founder of LegalX, a legal technology accelerator. More posts by this contributor Introducing the Open Cap Table Coalition If you

Kandji, the startup building an Apple device management business, has been doing pretty well for itself with rapdily growing revenue, a fat valuation and lots of investment capital rolling in. Today, the company announced a $100 million Series C on an $800 million valuation, up 10x in the last year when the company did its

A team of Google executives, many of whom worked with one another for years, left the company earlier this year to launch a startup. The fintech firm, Arbo Works, has raised a financing round led by Sequoia Capital India, the two said Thursday. Arbo Works, spearheaded by Caesar Sengupta, said on Thursday 120 angel investors,

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: Can our employee travel

This morning Plug Pagamentos (Plug) announced a $2.7 million seed round, led by Costanoa Ventures‘ latest partner, Amy Cheetham. Other investors in the round included Verve Capital and Norte Ventures, among others. Plug, based in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, wants to make its home-market more amenable to online commerce. In an interview,

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 5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make In growth marketing, signal determines success You’ve launched a few paid acquisition channels and are now starting to

Rahul Vohra Contributor Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of email app Superhuman. In the first half of 2021, global venture funding shattered the previous six-month record — set in the second half of 2020 — by more than $100 billion. The market was flooded with new startups, and one after another made headlines

Pistil Data, a cannabis market intelligence platform, has closed a $6.5 million seed round led by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde. The funding round included participation from JW Partners and other entrepreneurs. Pistil Data makes market intelligence accessible to cannabis brands and organizes billions of data points to provide customized sales opportunities for cannabis brands. The

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! I know I said this last week, but TC Sessions: Space is right around the corner and we’d love for you to join. You can find a sneak peek of the agenda at the bottom of this post. Send tips, comments and reactions to aria.techcrunch@gmail.com. Don’t forget to

Joey Noble Contributor A homepage that converts visitors into customers is one of the highest leverage assets a startup can have. Once your website can convert cold traffic, you can spend more time and resources on acquiring new audiences. This post is going to tear down the homepage of Customer.io, a marketing automation platform that

Doola, a startup that aims to help global entrepreneurs form a U.S. business, has raised $3 million in seed funding. Doola actually started its life in 2020 as StartPack as a pivot from another startup called Standups. During that pivot process, the team realized that it didn’t want to go through the “complex and time-consuming”

Kilo, a Vietnam-based B2B e-commerce platform that connects wholesalers with micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), wants to digitize the local retail value chain via technology. “In Vietnam, micro, small and medium enterprises are the backbone of the retail economy — serving 80% of all purchases,” CEO and founder of Kilo Kartick Narayan said. Kilo’s