Startups

As expected, Bill.com is buying Divvy, the Utah-based corporate spend management startup that competes with Brex, Ramp and Airbase. The total purchase price of around $2.5 billion is substantially above the company’s roughly $1.6 billion post-money valuation that Divvy set during its $165 million, January 2021 funding round. Divvy’s growth rate tells us that the company

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is one of the most popular parts of our annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference which is happening on September 21-23 this year. Now we’re very excited to reveal one of the fine people who will be judging Startup Battlefield at this year’s all-virtual event in September: Shauntel Garvey, a general partner at Reach Capital,

Tech investments in emerging markets have been in full swing over the past couple of years and their ecosystems have thrived as a result. Some of these markets like Africa, Latin America, and India, have comprehensive reports by publications and firms on trends and investments in their individual regions. But there’s hardly a report to

Chime can apparently call itself the “fastest-growing fintech in the U.S.,” but it has agreed to stop referring to itself as a “bank,” per a new report out of American Banker. Evidently, the eight-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit was the target of an investigation by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation after Chime used

Text Blaze, which was a part of the recent Winter 2021 Y Combinator accelerator batch, announced that it has closed a $3.3 million seed round. The company’s investment was led by Two Sigma Ventures’s Villi Iltchev and Susa Ventures’s Leo Polovets. The company’s product hybridizes two trends that TechCrunch has been tracking in recent years,

Flextock, one of the 10 African startups from the recent Y Combinator winter batch, has bagged an impressive pre-seed round just two months after graduation.  The five-month-old company, which helps consumers and businesses manage e-commerce and fulfillment operations —  from warehousing and logistics to delivery and cash collection — has closed a $3.25 million pre-seed

It’s only been three years since they hit the streets and Revel’s blue electric mopeds have already become a common sight in New York, San Francisco and a growing number of U.S. cities. However, Revel founder and CEO Frank Reig has set his sights far beyond building a shared moped service. In fact, since the

Nathan Beckord Contributor More posts by this contributor The lightning-fast Series A (that was 3 years in the making) Founders seeking their first check need a fundraising sales funnel Domm Holland, co-founder and CEO of e-commerce startup Fast, appears to be living a founder’s dream. His big idea came from a small moment in his

Education may well be the most important activity we conduct as a society — and it may also be the hardest space to build a startup in. Selling to school districts and universities is notoriously difficult, but enticing consumers is even harder. Learning takes focus, patience, tenacity and resources, and most consumers would prefer to

A Solid Power manufacturing engineer holds two 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid state battery cells for the BMW Group and Ford Motor Company. The 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid state battery cells were produced on Solid Power’s Colorado-based pilot production line. Source: Solid Power. Solid state battery systems have long been considered the

When the iconic American power tools company Stanley Black & Decker began looking for ways to improve the pipeline of diverse candidates that the company was reviewing for potential roles, it turned to an Israeli-based startup called Talenya for help. The company wasn’t alone in looking to startups for support in new hiring initiatives. Last

Last call, founders. Today is your last chance to save $100 on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising. Our last founder bootcamp event of the year takes place July 8-9, and it’s time to call on Saint Expeditus — the patron saint of procrastinators and programmers alike. He’ll help you kick

My mom cuts to the chase when she is describing my beat to others. In her words, I cover companies like Uber before they become companies like Uber. And honestly? I can’t exactly disagree with the description. The best feeling in tech journalism is telling a story about a startup before it becomes a household

Platforms like Shopify, Stripe and WordPress have done a lot to make essential business-building tools — like running storefronts, accepting payments and building websites — accessible to businesses with even the most modest budgets. But some very key aspects of setting up a company remain expensive, time-consuming affairs that can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses

TC Early Stage is back in July and we have a fantastic lineup in store that’s laser-focused on marketing and fundraising. That includes, but is not limited to, Sequoia’s Mike Vernal, whose portfolio companies include Citizen, PicsArt, Whisper, Threads, Houseparty and more. Vernal will be leading a discussion on tempo and product-market fit. The chat

Tech companies in Silicon Valley, the geography, have had an incredible year. But one indicator points to longer-term changes. The internal rate of return (IRR) for companies in other startup hub cities has been even better. A big new analysis by AngelList showed aggregate IRR of 19.4% per year on syndicated deals elsewhere versus 17.5%

Ariel Katz Contributor Ariel Katz is the founder and CEO of H1, a global healthcare platform that helps life sciences companies, hospitals, academic medical centers and health systems connect with providers, find clinical research, locate industry experts and benchmark their organization. In the early 2000s, Jeff Bezos gave a seminal TED Talk titled “The Electricity

Phil Edmondson-Jones Contributor Phil Edmondson-Jones is a principal at Oxx, the specialist SaaS VC backing Europe and Israel’s most promising B2B SaaS businesses at the scale-up stage. Once the uncool sibling of a flourishing fintech sector, insurtech is now one of the hottest areas of a buoyant venture market. Zego’s $150 million round at unicorn

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put Delft, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Utrecht on the Techcrunch

Every developer relies on environments like testing, staging and production as they build software, but building them can be a time-consuming operation. ReleaseHub, an early stage startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, wants to change that by providing a service to make environments available on demand. Today, the company announced

Before Precursor Ventures hired Sydney Thomas, the firm was running its operations out of founder Charles Hudson’s inbox, the investor recently recalled. Thomas was hired specifically to do the operational work of bringing a solo GP fund, with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place — and that’s exactly what

So far, I haven’t met a single one of my investors in person Max Greenwald 8 hours Max Greenwald Contributor Max Greenwald is the co-founder and CEO of Warmly, an app that pulls context on everyone you meet via Zoom or other video calling platforms. More posts by this contributor Protect Your Privacy & Security

Opsera, a startup that’s building an orchestration platform for DevOps teams, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Felicis Ventures. New investor HMG Ventures, as well as existing investors Clear Ventures, Trinity Partners and Firebolt Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding

TechCrunch’s Early Stage 2021 is back for part two of our bootcamp-for-entrepreneurs event, with a focus on marketing and fundraising. Building on the first half of the event in April, this two-day virtual sprint will take place July 8 & 9, and we’re thrilled to welcome Rebecca Reeve Henderson as one of our all-star slate

Maryam Haque Contributor Bobby Franklin Contributor More posts by this contributor The startup community must defend merit-based immigration Ensuring foreign-born founders can grow their startups in the U.S. Let’s be clear: The venture capital industry has lacked diversity. The good news is the industry is working to improve itself. To begin with, as an industry,

It’s been a very tough year for Placer.ai’s core customer segments of retail and commercial real estate, to put it mildly. But the foot traffic and location analytics startup saw growth in new categories, including consumer packaged goods (CPG) and hedge funds that use its tech to perform due diligence. The Los Altos, California-based company

Sign language is used by millions of people around the world, but unlike Spanish, Mandarin or even Latin, there’s no automatic translation available for those who can’t use it. SLAIT claims the first such tool available for general use, which can translate around 200 words and simple sentences to start — using nothing but an

Andrés Dancausa Contributor Andrés Dancausa is fund partner, EMEA for operator-led international investors TheVentureCity. Before entering the world of VC, he was the CEO of a Spanish fintech company and launched his own startup in the edtech space. There’s a disconnect between reality and the added value investors are promising entrepreneurs. Three in five founders

Don’t let procrastination slow your roll. Yeah, we’re looking at you, early-stage founders. At TechCrunch, we love to reward action with savings. Want to save a cool $100? Buy your Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising pass before April 30, at 11:59 p.m. (PT), and you’ll keep a cool $100 in your pocket. Take action,

MasterClass, which sells a subscription to celebrity-taught classes, sits on the cusp of entertainment and education. It offers virtual, yet aspirational learning: an online tennis class with Serena Williams, a cooking session with Gordon Ramsay. While there’s the off chance that an instructor might actually talk to you — it has happened before — the