Startups

The BaaS market is evolving rapidly and so are the options for companies who wish to quickly spin up new financial services by leveraging these bank-in-a-box APIs. We recently took a look at who the ideal customers and partners are for banking-as-a-service startups … And today we’re going to dig deeper into the different flavors

Shares of IsoPlexis, a company creating tools to zoom in on the flurry of protein activity surrounding a single cell, began trading on Friday. The company aims to raise about $125 million with the IPO, which will be used to build the commercial team and advance the company’s plans to play a bigger part in

No one’s going to tell you when your startup has reached product-market fit — there are no flashing lights, no siren, no balloons falling from the ceiling. “Especially for first-time founders, assessing product-market fit at a stage where it’s mostly anticipation can be as much art as science,” writes News Editor Darrell Etherington, who interviewed

Ryan Narod Contributor Ryan Narod leads marketing at Mutiny, a no-code AI platform that helps marketers convert their top-of-funnel demand into revenue, without engineers. Your target customers may discover your website through ads, search, word of mouth or offline channels like direct mail or events, but when they arrive, 99% of them usually skim your

Outsourcing engineering has become more common in recent years, so we’re starting a new initiative to profile the software consultants who startups love to work with the most. Founders and other startup leaders, just fill out this quick survey with a few more details to help us find the right ones. For our first profile,

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 In growth marketing, signal determines success Early-stage brands should also unlock the power of influencers Having spent time in the trenches with many startups, I’ve

A number of high-profile investors are chasing to invest in Slice, a fintech startup that is attempting to expand the market for credit cards in India. Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to lead a round of over $100 million in the Bangalore-based startup, sources familiar with the matter told me. A number

Riiid, a South Korea-headquartered AI-powered edtech company, acquired its Japanese distribution partner Langoo to expand its Japan footprint.  The acquisition comes after the company’s latest $175 million Series D round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 in May. Riiid has said it will continue to fuel its global expansion with the funding.  Langoo, Riiid’s partner in

“Most of the technical content published misses the mark with developers. I think we can all do a better job,” author and developer marketing expert Adam DuVander says. That was the very realization that led DuVander to share what he had learned about marketing to developers in two ways: He recently launched a book, “Developer

Analysts say the value of e-commerce in Africa is expected to reach $29 billion next year, yet Africans still find it difficult to make international payments for products online. Cards, M-Pesa, bank transfer and mobile money, are the most common methods Africans use to make payments. But while various payment gateways have provided better experiences

The adoption of telehealth services has boomed in the pandemic — with usage up 38-fold since January 2020, according to a report by McKinsey. While a lot of the attention has been on companies that are building the communications layer between consumers and clinicians, there are also a wave of companies building devices to expand

CostCertified, a Canadian startup which provides real-time, interactive residential construction estimates, raised $8.45 million in a seed round of funding. FUSE, a Pacific Northwest venture firm which counts former Microsoft CFO John Connors and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner as venture partners, led the round.  The company is also backed by Y Combinator (having participated

Mauritius and U.K.-based investment company Juven went live today with plans to fund growth-stage technology and consumer companies in Africa. The one-year-old firm is looking to invest large checks in companies “that have proven business models, strong revenue traction and large addressable markets,” it said in a statement. Juven is one of the few investment

SmartRyde, a Japanese online pre-booked airport transfers service platform, is a marketplace that connects travelers to local transportation operators/online travel agencies (OTAs). Sota Kimura, co-founder and CEO of SmartRyde, founded SmartRyde in 2017 after he experienced trouble getting a taxi from the airport to the hotel when he traveled abroad, Kimura told TechCrunch. SmartRyde, which

It’s that time again! Today is the 28th Demo Day for Alchemist, an accelerator that primarily focuses on enterprise companies — or those that sell to other companies, primarily, rather than directly to consumers. This latest cohort comes in at 23 companies. Like the last few Alchemist batches, this one was entirely virtual — a

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In a world where fintech is so hot right now, and investors are being swept up by their excitement for the space, Chime has managed to ride the wave to near perfection. The company has raised upwards of $2.6 billion, including a fresh $750 million just this year. The startup, playing in the fee-free banking

Image Credits: Wasp It seems that a lot of startups are trying to help developers reduce the complexity involved in coding an app. Last week we covered the seed round for RunX, a company that helps developers code back-end cloud resources more quickly. Today, Y Combinator Winter 2021 graduate Wasp announced a $1.5 million seed

If you’re diagnosed with lazy eye — otherwise known as amblyopia — as a child, there are only a few options at your disposal. You can wear an eye patch, you can take eye drops or you can wear corrective lenses. Or, in the future (pending FDA clearance), you could watch TV.  That’s the central

Venture capital is a popular source of capital for early-stage startups, but it’s definitely not the only one. Debt is an increasingly popular alternative, as is non-dilutive, revenue-based financing. So, we invited Accel Partner Arun Mathew, Clearco co-founder and president Michele Romanow, and Pipe co-founder and co-CEO Harry Hurst to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 last week

When LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman first coined the term “blitzscaling,” he kept it simple: It’s a concept that encourages entrepreneurs to prioritize speed over efficiency during a period of uncertainty. Years later, founders are navigating a pandemic, perhaps the most uncertain period of their lives, and Hoffman has a clarification to make.

Web3 is still taking shape, so it is hard to define. At TechCrunch Disrupt, Houseparty founder Ben Rubin emphasized decentralization as Web3’s central feature. In today’s Web 2.0, individuals give money and personal data to network operators in exchange for access to information. “In Web3 there is a possibility — not saying that it’s going

New companies face innumerable challenges around fine-tuning their product and constructing the appropriate revenue model. You may be looking ahead to raising some funds and trying to juggle the administrative aspects of running a business, but before all that, the purpose of your company is to sell your solution and generate revenue. But to do

Rivian, the electric automaker backed by Amazon, Ford and a cornucopia of heavy-hitting institutional investors like T. Rowe Price Associates and Coatue, finally made its once-confidential IPO filing public.  The company, which started in 2009 as Mainstream Motors before adopting the Rivian name two years later, has exploded in terms of people, backers and partners

Most big accelerators tend to dedicate some of their resources to dauntingly hard science problems and the companies taking them on… but for SOSV’s IndieBio, it’s the primary focus. Last time we checked in with IndieBio, their companies were working on everything from lozenges to treat gum disease, to vertical farms for the sustainable production

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, meaning that we were running full-strength for our roundup of this super busy week. Before we hop into the topics, you can follow the show on Twitter — all the cool kids do! — and keep in mind that on Mondays Equity provides a short kickoff

Brian Walsh Contributor Brian Walsh is the head of WIND Ventures, the venture capital arm of COPEC, a leading energy company in Central and South America and the U.S. WIND Ventures provides mobility, energy and retail startups and scaleups with access to Latin America. More posts by this contributor Latin American startup deals see major

If you are looking for a growth marketing playbook, stop reading now, because you won’t get one from Tuff. The agency’s founder Ellen Jantsch makes it clear: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to growth. The team at Tuff knows their stuff — and it’s precisely why they are not selling “magic” or any kind

The larger a coding project gets, and the more people become involved, the harder it becomes to get a big picture view of how the entire project fits together, and this is especially true for distributed teams. Today, CodeSee, an early stage startup that wants to help development teams understand the entire code base, released

Sudheesh Nair Contributor Sudheesh Nair is CEO of ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence company that has built an intuitive Google-like interface for data analytics. Before ThoughtSpot, Sudheesh was president at Nutanix. More posts by this contributor A blueprint for building a great startup founding team Speaking about the historical trajectory of significant movements, Gandhi once said,