Startups

When a founder has a work history that includes the name of the parent company of one of their key investors, you probably assume that was one of the first deals to come together. Not so with May Mobility and Toyota AI Ventures, which connected for the company’s second seed round, after May went out

One thing is clear in the cloud native world. Developers use a lot of services to create applications, and while service meshes define how these services work together, just getting a grip on the services a team uses is usually tracked manually in spreadsheets. That’s where Cortex, a new startup, comes in. It can help

Per a recent report by Bain & Co., e-commerce is expected to grow to $28.5 billion in MENA by 2022 from a 2019 value of $8.3 billion. Egypt, one of the most active e-commerce countries in the region, is anticipated to grow 33% annually to reach $3 billion by 2022. But for any e-commerce business

Bright Machines is going public via a SPAC-led combination, it announced this morning. The transaction will see the 3-year-old company merge with SCVX, raising gross cash proceeds of $435 million in the process. After the transaction is consummated, the startup will sport an anticipated equity valuation of $1.6 billion. The Bright Machines news indicates that

As a longtime real estate developer based in Chile, Benjamin Labra was able to spot gaps in the buying and renting markets in Latin America. To meet demands, he started Houm, an all-in-one platform that helps homeowners rent and sell their properties in the region. Fresh out of Y Combinator’s W21 cohort, today Houm announced

Dominik Angerer Contributor Dominik Angerer is CEO and co-founder of headless CMS Storyblok, which provides best practice guidance for startups on how to build a sustainable approach to marketing their content. Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social — marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. It’s little wonder that

When you’re head-down and nose to the grindstone — I’m looking at all you hard-working early-stage startup founders — it’s easy to miss a deadline for an outstanding opportunity. Case in point: competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 in September. We want every game-changing, innovative startup — from anywhere around the world —

Mike Ghaffary Contributor Mike Ghaffary is a general partner at Canvas Ventures, where he invests in innovation for consumers and software. Previously, he was a partner at Social Capital, co-founder and VP of Business Development of Stitcher, VP of Business and Corporate Development at Yelp, and Director of Business Development at TrialPay. More posts by

No matter what slice of the mobility market you’ve claimed as your own — AVs, EVs, data mining, AI, dockless scooters, robotics or the batteries that will charge and change the world — you won’t find a better place to showcase your extraordinary tech and talent than TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. Buy a Startup Exhibitor

Before Twilio had a market cap approaching $56 billion and more than 200,000 customers, the cloud-communications platform developed a secret sauce to fuel its growth: a developer-focused model that dispensed with traditional marketing rules. Software companies that sell directly to end users share a simple framework for managing growth that leverages discoverability, desirability and do-ability

Adam LaGreca Contributor Adam LaGreca is the founder of 10KMedia and previously led communications for DigitalOcean, Datadog and Gremlin. More posts by this contributor Dear Google, the future is fewer people writing code There’s a lot of noise out there. The ability to effectively communicate can make or break your launch. It will play a

One. That’s the number of African tech companies that have gone public on the NYSE in the last 10 years. Two, if you’re counting local exchanges. The former is African-focused e-commerce company Jumia and the latter is Egyptian fintech company Fawry. As a tech company, Fawry’s listing on the Egyptian Stock Exchange is a rarity.

New media poster child Substack announced today that they’ve added a small community-building consultancy team to its ranks, acquiring the Brooklyn-based startup People & Company. The small firm has been working with clients to build up their community efforts, and its team will now be tasked with building up some of the newsletter company’s upstart

Legionfarm, the gaming platform that lets gamers play with pro players in their favorite games, has today announced the close of a $6 million Series A round. Investors in the round include SVB, Y Combinator, Scrum VC, Kevin Lin, Altair Capital, Ankur Nagpal and more. Legionfarm launched out of Y Combinator at the beginning of

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: How does the International

Do you and your early-stage startup have what it takes to be a modern-day gladiator and compete in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021? You won’t know unless you apply, and time is running out. You have only 48 hours left to throw your helmet into the ring. If you want to compete for glory,

Atomized, an early stage startup that wants to create a modern tool to help developers deploy infrastructure faster, announced the first step of its funding journey today, a $500,000 pre-seed round from Zing Capital, Y Combinator and several unnamed angels. Company co-founder and CEO Nik Kotov says developers are spending over 20% of their time

Charity Dean has been in the national spotlight lately because she was among a group of doctors, scientists and tech entrepreneurs who sounded the pandemic alarm early last year and who are featured in a new book by Michael Lewis about the U.S. response, called The Premonition. It’s no wonder the press — and, seemingly

Panaseer, which takes a data science approach to cybersecurity, has raised $26.5 million in a Series B funding led by AllegisCyber Capital. Existing investors, including Evolution Equity Partners, Notion Capital, AlbionVC, Cisco Investments and Paladin Capital Group, as well as new investor, National Grid Partners also participated. Panaseer has now raised $43m to date. Panaseer’s

Better.com, a venture-backed digital mortgage lender, announced this morning that it will combine with a SPAC, taking itself public in the second half of 2021. The unicorn’s news comes as the American IPO market is showing signs of fresh life after a modest April. The Better.com deal comes just over a month after it sold

Singapore-based Aspire, which wants to become the financial services “one-stop shop” for SMEs, announced that its business accounts have reached $1 billion in annualized transaction volume one year after launching. The company also unveiled Bill Pay, its latest feature that lets businesses manage and pay invoices by emailing them to Aspire’s AI-based digital assistant. Launched

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 I transfer my

It is clear that Black, women, Latinx and LGBTQ+ startup founders face an uphill battle when it comes to getting a share of the VC investment pie in Silicon Valley. Perhaps that’s why Sixty8 Capital, a firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana, smack dab in the middle of the country, has chosen to launch a new

SoftBank has picked its bet in China’s flourishing industrial robotics space. Youibot, a four-year-old startup that makes autonomous mobile robots for a range of scenarios, said it has notched close to 100 million yuan ($15.47 million) in its latest funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, the Seoul-based early-stage arm of the global investment behemoth.

GajiGesa, a fintech startup that provides earned wage access (EWA) and other services for workers in Indonesia, has added strategic investors to help it launch new services and expand its user base. Its new backers include OCBC NISP Ventura, the venture capital arm of one of Indonesia’s largest banks, and the founders of grab-and-go coffee

At the heart of Duolingo is its mission: to scale free education and increase income potential through language learning. However, the same mission that has helped it grow to a business valued at $2.4 billion with over 500 million registered learners, has led to tensions that continue to define the business. How do you survive

Income-share agreements, or ISAs, are a way to bring flexibility to the often steep financial costs of higher education. The financial model allows a student to learn at zero upfront cost, and then pay any costs through a percentage of future income over time. While the model has caught fire from a variety of trade

The pandemic has just pushed edtech mainstream, but language-learning startup Duolingo had already spent the past decade figuring out how to build a successful edtech app. In our latest installment of the EC-1 series, Natasha Mascarenhas goes deep with the company to understand how it found product-market fit, then figured out how to grow like

Jason Meller Contributor Jason Meller is the founder and CEO of Kolide, an endpoint security solution for teams that value productivity, transparency and employee happiness. In non-aerobatic fixed-wing aviation, spins are an emergency. If you don’t have spin recovery training, you can easily make things worse, dramatically increasing your chances of crashing. Despite the life-and-death

Diversity has been linked with equity and inclusion because diversity is just one part of the equation when it comes to hiring Black employees. How do the companies they work for make people feel welcome and included, rather than isolated? How do Black employees find their way into management, up the corporate ladder to the