Startups

As companies look for ways to respond to incidents in their complex micro services-driven software stacks, SREs or site reliability engineers are left to deal with the issues involved in making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Rootly, a new early stage startup wants to help by building an incident response solution

Z1, a Sao Paulo-based digital bank aimed at Latin American GenZers, has raised $2.5 million in a round led by U.S.-based Homebrew. A number of other investors also participated in the financing including Clocktower Ventures, Mantis – the VC firm owned by The Chainsmokers, Goodwater, Gaingels, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund. Notably, Mantis has also

AI teams invest a lot of rigor in defining new project guidelines. But the same is not true for killing existing projects. In the absence of clear guidelines, teams let infeasible projects drag on for months. They put up a dog and pony show during project review meetings for fear of becoming the messengers of

Jalal Nasir Contributor Jalal Nasir is the founder and CEO of Pixalate, a global ad fraud intelligence and marketing compliance platform. Previously, he was one of the early engineers on Amazon’s fraud prevention and risk management team and held various product leadership roles building ad tech and enterprise privacy technologies. Programmatic advertising is a $200

Lacuna Technologies, a startup that helps cities create and enforce transportation policies by building and managing open-source digital tools, has raised $16 million in a Series A round, bringing the company’s total investment to $33.5 million. Since the startup was founded in 2018, Lacuna has invested in helping cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and Miami

The numbers don’t lie. According to DocSend, the average pitch deck is reviewed for just three minutes. And if you think a senior VC is studying the presentation your team crafted for months as if it were a Fabergé egg — well, you might be disappointed. Even if you are lucky enough to land a

Drew Beechler Contributor Drew Beechler is the director of marketing at High Alpha, a venture studio that creates and funds B2B SaaS companies. There’s a lot wrapped up in a name: feelings, emotions, connotation, unconscious bias, personal history. It’s an identity — it gives something meaning and importance. In leading marketing and brand at High

Influential entrepreneurs like Paul Graham and Naval Ravikant always preach the need for startups to have founders-turned-investors on their cap table. As Ravikant puts it, “founders want to know that the people they are taking money from have first-hand experience.”  His platform AngelList has helped individual founders-cum-investors source and participate in deals via collectives. However,

Evan Fisher Contributor Founder of Unicorn Capital and Minimal Capital, Evan Fisher‘s pitching and investor strategy has helped startups raise more than $2.5 billion. Let’s play out this scenario. Your deck is ready and you’re just about to start reaching out. What does conventional wisdom say that you should send? A three-paragraph overview, four bullet

Lordstown Motors continues to stumble. The beleaguered electric vehicle startup is now being investigated by the Department of Justice, in addition to an ongoing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigation, first broke by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, is still in its early stages, according to unnamed sources. It is being

In this case study, we’ll show how we used research-driven CRO (conversion rate optimization) techniques to increase lead conversion rate by 79% for China Expat Health, a lead generation company. Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups. Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody. Image Credits:

Lisa W. Liu Contributor Lisa W. Liu is a senior partner at The Mitzel Group, where her practice focuses on business and immigration issues. A CEO’s fiduciary duties to their company and its shareholders do not end when they are off the clock — they must always act in good faith. However, navigating the boundaries

For kids of a certain age — think 9 to 15 — options for enrichment are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while the ability to make money is largely non-existent. A new startup called Mighty wants to provide them with a new alternative through a platform it’s building that, like a kind of

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny, Natasha, and Alex were on-deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. But, if you want to hear more about Robinhood, this is not the episode for you. If you want to learn more about the consumer fintech company’s

This afternoon Robinhood, the popular investing app for consumers filed to go public. The company intends to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol “HOOD.” That Robinhood released an S-1 filing today is not a surprise. The company privately filed to go public back in March, leaving the startup-watching world waiting for the eventual filing

Edtech startup Microverse has tapped new venture funding in its quest to help train students across the globe to code through its online school that requires zero upfront cost, instead relying on an income-share agreement that kicks in when students find a job. The startup tells TechCrunch it has closed a $12.5 million Series A

We first covered Traptic back in 2019, when it appeared as a Battlefield finalist on stage at Disrupt SF. Today, the South Bay robotics startup is announcing some major progress. For starters, it began commercial deployment of its strawberry-picking mobile robot early this month. Traptic tells TechCrunch that Blazer-Wilkinson, a top-five U.S. strawberry producer, began

Stewart Hillhouse Contributor Stewart Hillhouse writes actionable growth marketing insights as senior content lead at Demand Curve. By night, he interviews marketers and creatives on his podcast, Top Of Mind. Before getting into marketing, Stewart was a semi-professional lumberjack. He also writes at stewarthillhouse.com. We’ve spent millions of dollars running ads for brands like Outschool,

Peanut, the maker of a social networking app for women, is entering into the investing space with today’s launch of a microfund called StartHER. As the name implies, the new fund will focus on investing in women as well as other historically excluded founders “of all ages, life stages, ethnicities and sexual orientations,” the company says.

Australian rocket launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies is betting that bigger isn’t always better. The company has developed a small launch vehicle it calls Eris, a 25 meter (82 foot) rocket that can deliver payload of up to 215 kilograms (474 lbs) to sun synchronous orbit. Now, it’s raised a $61 million AUD ($46 million

Toca Football, a nine-year-old, Costa Mesa, Ca.-based company that operates 14 sports centers across the U.S. that are focused on soccer training, has raised $40 million in Series E funding to roughly double the number of facilities that are now up and running in the U.S., as well as to open a site in the

Duolingo filed to go public yesterday, giving the world a deep look inside its business results and how the pandemic impacted the edtech unicorn’s performance. TechCrunch’s initial read of the company’s filing was generally positive, noting that its growth was impressive and its losses modest; Duolingo recently began making money on an adjusted basis. While

New York-based construction startup Toggle this morning announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and featured Blackhorn Ventures, Point72 Ventures, New York State and Twenty Seven Ventures. It follows a $3 million seed round raised in late-2019. Robotics in general have been a massively

Family offices have existed since the 1800s, but they’ve never been so manifold as in recent years. According to a 2019 Global Family Office Report by UBS and Campden Wealth, 68% of the 360 family offices surveyed were founded in 2000 or later. Their rise owes to numerous factors, including the tech startups that mint

Stewart Hillhouse Contributor Stewart Hillhouse writes actionable growth marketing insights as senior content lead at Demand Curve. By night, he interviews marketers and creatives on his podcast, Top Of Mind. Before getting into marketing, Stewart was a semi-professional lumberjack. He also writes at stewarthillhouse.com. Email has the highest return on investment of any other marketing

Once heralded as disruptive marketplaces, classifieds are giving way to transactional marketplaces. Yet, some classifieds in the West like eBay have evolved with time, acquiring competition operating both models. In Africa, this occurrence is happening in part, at least for the classifieds businesses that haven’t fizzled out. Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we did something fun and different and good: a live show! A good number of people came, and asked questions, and altogether, it was a blast. Danny, Natasha, and Alex had a lovely time with the

Mark Spera Contributor What do all companies, regardless of industry, say they want? Growth. Lighting-fast, continuous growth. The good news is you can quickly learn which growth marketing strategies work by studying other companies’ success and adapting it to your own business. Most technophiles remember Dropbox’s referral program — the one that helped it grow

Meetings should have a clear purpose, but instead, they’ve become a way to measure status and reinforce what is colloquially referred to as CYA culture. There’s a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, “This meeting could have been an email!” you can bet that some small part of them meant it

As the pandemic unevenly roars on, Emily Melton, founder and managing partner of Threshold VC, is reflecting on a previous public health crisis: the Spanish Flu. She says the response just over a century ago prompted the rise of interventional medicine — treating illness through surgery or medicine only after symptoms manifest. Today, interventional medicine