Startups

The war for talent in the tech world can be brutal — and so, it turns out, can the war between platforms that help companies source it. In the latest developement, Toptal — a marketplace for filling engineering and other tech roles with freelance, remote workers — has filed a lawsuit against direct competitor Andela

We’re getting closer to putting our spotlight on Pittsburgh, and there’s quite a bit going on behind the scenes. We’ve been spending a ton of time chatting with folks who are on the ground in the city, and we’ve had a great time learning and listening, which we think will make this installment of our Spotlight

Jeff Bussgang Contributor Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital, a former entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, teaches entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. When I was at Open Market in the 1990s, our CEO gave out the recently published book “Crossing the Chasm” to the executive team and told us to read it to gain insight into why

Jumpcut founder Kartik Hosanagar is a professor at the Wharton School, but about ten years ago, he spent his summer in an unlikely way: he wrote a screenplay. Set in India, his script garnered some interest from producers, but no one took the plunge to fund a film by a first-time Indian director. Now, films

A bat-shaped organic photovoltaic module from Dracula Technologies Internet of Things devices are proliferating, making daily tasks more convenient for many people—but that comes at cost. The United Nations expects the amount of e-waste created globally to reach 52.2 million metric tons this year, and a sizable portion of that are dead batteries. Dracula Technologies,

Community has never felt louder in startupland. Bringing people together over a shared interest is innate to human nature. And, coming out of a lonely, draining pandemic, every startup wants to find a way to cultivate community, conversation and camaraderie as part of its value proposition. Last week, though, the outside world got a look

Swedish battery developer and manufacturer Northvolt AB has raised $2.75 billion in capital as it prepares to ramp up to an annual production capacity of 150 GWh in Europe by 2030. The funding round – Northvolt’s largest thus far – was co-led by existing investors Goldman Sachs and Volkswagen, and new investors including the Swedish

“It’s not a nail polish company,” says Fenton Jagdeo of Faculty, the startup he cofounded in 2019 with Umar ElBably. Though their Toronto-based company currently sells just three shades of nail polish along with some nail stickers — that’s it —  the products are a wedge to something much larger, says Jagdeo. There will be

Toast has raised more than $900 billion and is reportedly valued at over $5 billion. But back in 2011, no one knew this startup would see such meteoric success. It had a few things going for it, of course — founder Aman Narang hailed from Endeca, where he was a software engineer and product lead

You’d expect an expense management company to have a large sales department and advertise through all kinds of channels to maximize customer acquisition. But like we’ve seen over and over through the course of this EC-1, Expensify just doesn’t do what you think it should. Keeping in mind this company’s propensity to just stick to

David Teten Contributor More posts by this contributor How to win consulting, board and deal roles with PE and VC funds 5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs Hey, founders between gigs: What now? If you exited your last company for airplane money and are now independently wealthy, congratulations! If you want to

Abby Kearns Contributor Abby Kearns, chief technology officer at Puppet, has more than 20 years of experience scaling growth for numerous Fortune 500 and startup companies. The pandemic forced companies around the world to adjust to a “new normal,” which caused many leaders to pivot their business strategies and adopt new technologies to continue operations.

Astra, the space launch startup with plans to go public via a SPAC merger, will acquire electric propulsion maker Apollo Fusion, the company said Monday. Electric propulsion systems are effective at moving spacecraft from lower to higher orbits, even to the moon, Astra Chief Engineer Benjamin Lyon said in a blog post Monday, pointing to

SentinelOne, a late-stage security startup that helps organizations secure their data using AI and machine learning, has filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In an S-1 filing on Thursday, the security company revealed that for the three months ending April 30, its revenues increased by 108% year-on-year to $37.4 million

Guest articles are hugely popular with our startup audience — if the topics are right. Prospective authors regularly ask us about which topics Extra Crunch subscribers would like to hear more about. Here are some pointers: How-tos: Generally, early-stage founders want the latest useful information about how to create a company, including fundraising, growth and team-building.

For all that’s said about fundraising and working alongside investors, rarely do we get to see founders and their investors in candid conversation with one another. Extra Crunch Live is changing that. On the weekly live show, we sit down with founders and the VCs who funded them to talk about how they came together

There’s no crying in baseball, and there are certainly no shortcuts in building a successful startup. But, thanks to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9, you don’t have to reinvent the freakin’ wheel. This two-day bootcamp offers early-stage founders (pre-seed through Series A) access to the startup ecosystem’s leading experts and

Jason VandeBoom Contributor Jason VandeBoom is founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign, a customer experience automation (CXA) company. Software as a service has been thriving as a sector for years, but it has gone into overdrive in the past year as businesses responded to the pandemic by speeding up the migration of important functions to the

Toyota AI Ventures, Toyota’s standalone venture capital fund, has dropped the “AI” and is reborn as, simply, Toyota Ventures. The fund is commemorating its new identity by investing an additional $300 million in emerging technologies and carbon neutrality via two early-stage funds: the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund and the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund.  The introduction

Henry Shapiro Contributor Henry Shapiro is the co-founder of Reclaim.ai, an intelligent calendar assistant platform used daily by over 4,000 companies. Prior to founding Reclaim, Henry led product and marketing at New Relic. It was August 2019, and the fundraising process was not going well. My co-founder and I had left our product management jobs

Razor Group. Branded. Thrasio. These are big names in the new wave of e-commerce companies taking the world by storm. Their business of acquiring small e-commerce brands that look promising and consolidating them is quite popular in the U.S. and Europe. The concept has sifted through those shores to Latin America and Asia, where companies

David Teten Contributor More posts by this contributor 5 innovative fundraising methods for emerging VCs and PEs How to attract large investors to your direct investing platform Paulina Symala Contributor Would you like to work with private equity and venture capital funds? There are relatively few jobs directly inside private equity and venture capital funds,

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: Any unique immigration strategies

Work looks wildly different today than it did a year ago. In tech, every bit of the workplace has been tweaked to fit our new remote world. From scaling accountability and onboarding remotely to figuring out what old perks can be made socially distant — myriad decisions have been made at the hands of the

Even as remote software uptake has boomed during the pandemic, certain workflows have gotten prioritized for specialized toolsets while other team members have been left piecemealing their productivity. Employees designing the copy that directs users and encapsulates company messaging have been particularly forgotten at times, say the founders of Ditto, a young startup building software

Mario Ciabarra Contributor Mario Ciabarra, founder and CEO of Quantum Metric, is a computer scientist and tech entrepreneur helping organizations align the entire product lifecycle for many major global brands with a single version of customer-defined and quantified truth. Debt is a tool, and like any other — be it a hammer or handsaw —

Zenyum, a startup that wants to make cosmetic dentistry more affordable, announced today it has raised a $40 million Series B. This includes $25 million from L Catterton, a private equity firm focused on consumer brands. The round’s other participants were Sequoia Capital India (Zenyum is an alum of its Surge accelerator program), RTP Global,

Thousands of electric vehicle charging stations will be built around the country over the next decade. ChargerHelp!, founded in January 2020 by Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis, wants to make sure they stay up and running. The idea for the on-demand repair app for EV charging stations came to Terry when she was working

Cloud kitchens are already meant to reduce the burden of infrastructure on food and beverage brands by providing them with centralized facilities to prepare meals for delivery. This means the responsibility falls on cloud kitchen operators to make sure they have enough locations to meet demand from F&B clients, while ensuring fast deliveries to end

Oren Yunger Contributor Oren Yunger is an investor at GGV Capital, where he leads the cybersecurity vertical and drives investments in enterprise IT, data infrastructure, and developer tools. He was previously chief information security officer at a SaaS company and a public financial institution. More posts by this contributor 6 CISOs share their game plans