Startups

So, an eight-year product veteran from Facebook and an internationally renowned barista walk into a coffee bar… It’s not a joke. It’s the origin story for Taika, a new startup that’s aiming to bring natural stimulants to the masses through its juiced-up coffee beverages. The two co-founders, Michael Sharon, an eight-year veteran of Facebook’s mobile

Jonathan Greechan Contributor Jonathan Greechan is co-founder of the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator, Founder Institute, has run over 100 webinars including 100,000+ live attendees, and is one of Meetup’s most active organizers. Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting calendars — along with travel budgets and marketing plans — by canceling events ranging to

London-based femtech hardware startup Astinno has picked up an Innovate UK grant worth £360k ($450k) to fund further testing of a wearable it’s developing for women experiencing a perimenopause symptom known as hot flushes. The sensor-packed device, which it’s calling Grace, is being designed to detect the onset of a hot flush and apply cooling

When you think of voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, the words “emotional” and “expressive” probably don’t come to mind. Instead, there’s that recognizably flat and polite voice, devoid of all affect — which is fine for an assistant, but isn’t going to work if you want to use synthetic voices in games,

As the world looks to reopen after weeks of lockdown, governments are turning to contact tracing to understand the spread of the deadly coronavirus. Most nations are leaning toward privacy-focused apps that use Bluetooth signals to create an anonymous profile of where a person has been and when. Some, like Israel, are bucking the trend

The current state of our COVID-19 world has underscored more than ever before the need for reliable delivery and e-commerce services: consumers sheltering in place are shopping more than ever online and getting items brought directly to their homes; and retailers urgently need platforms that can help them manage, sell and bring their goods to

When Zach Sims first started pitching his coding startup, Codecademy, he framed it to investors as a corporate tutoring company. That was intentional, despite the fact that edtech is a $5 trillion business. “It was much easier for investors to understand instead of an education company,” he said, noting that the industry has long been

We recently interviewed Jon McNeill to learn more about his newest project, a startup studio called DeltaV Ventures. But we also wanted to hear about what it’s like to work inside of Tesla and Lyft. McNeill spent two-and-a-half years as the carmaker’s president, heading up global sales, marketing, delivery and government relations before heading to

Hummingbird Bioscience, a startup focused on developing new treatments for cancer and other diseases, announced today it has added $6 million to its previously announced Series B, bringing the round’s total to $25 million. The extension was led by SK Holdings, and included participation from returning investors including Heritas Capital and SEEDS Capital, the investment

We’re not letting this pandemic disrupt Disrupt SF 2020. Like any determined early-stage startup founder, we’re adapting and moving forward. Can’t join us in person on September 14-16? No problem. Take advantage of Digital Startup Alley, a completely new way to disrupt. Place your startup in front of influential movers and shakers and keep your

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use every Saturday morning by email (7am PT). Subscribe here. A specific type of small startup has a window to raise crowdfunding in a somewhat less regulated way than normally required in the U.S., based on a temporary set of rule changes

Four years ago, Adnan Asar, the founder of the new addiction prevention service Lucid Lane, was enjoying a successful career working as the founding chief technology officer at Livongo Health. It was the serial senior tech executive’s most recent job after a long stint at Shutterfly and he was shepherding the company through the development

Chris Lynch, a founder and former general partner at Boston-based seed-stage fund Accomplice, remembers “VC Mountain in Waltham.” Back then, entrepreneurs on funding quests would visit a building overlooking the Waltham Reservoir near Boston where they pitched to a few investors: Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. “And if they didn’t invest in

As the infrastructure for developing games becomes more advanced, studios have turned to buying best-in-class technology from others instead of building everything from scratch (often with inferior quality). This shift underpinned Unity’s rise as the most popular game engine. The current focus on games as ever-evolving social hubs that can remain popular for a decade

Acast, a podcast monetization and distribution platform, announced a new partnership with JioSaavn, one of the largest streaming audio services in India. The agreement mean JioSaavn will distribute content from Acast and have access to its technology for podcasters. JioSaavn, which claims 104 million monthly active users, is the second-largest streaming audio service in India

Imagine a model of collaborative research and development among hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, universities and other research institutions where no one shared any actual data. That’s the dream of the new New York-based startup Owkin, which has raised $25 million in fresh financing from investors, including Bpifrance Large Venture, Cathay Innovation and MACSF (the French Pension

In the space of several weeks, COVID-19 has transformed countless industries and will continue to do so in ways we can only imagine. The pandemic has also spurred many to find new ways to work and keep society moving amid physical distancing, stay-at-home orders and mass hospitalizations. For years, robotics and automation have been a

Founder and CEO Lara Vandenberg told me that she created Publicist to support the ways in which the communications and marketing industry is changing— changes that are only accelerating due to COVID-19. Vandenberg was previously senior vice president of communications and marketing at Knotch, and she told me, “More companies now are being better served by

When I first met Bustle Digital Group’s Jason Wagenheim, it was right as New York City was beginning to go into lockdown. The BDG offices were empty thanks to the company’s newly instituted work-from-home policy, but it still seemed reasonable to meet in-person to learn more about BDG’s broader vision. At the time, Wagenheim —

IRL, the recently pivoted calendar app that aggregates live virtual events, has today launched a web version of the platform. The company, which has $11 million in funding from Goodwater Capital, Founders Fund and Floodgate, started as a social planning app that helped folks find each other in the real world, based on interest and

Wunderlist is going away, but fans of the productivity app may find some consolation in founder Christian Reber’s announcement that he is launching a new startup called Superlist. “Superlist will be more than just a todo app, but never as bloated as the project management software you loathe to use,” he tweeted. “Slick, fast, and

Romeen Sheth Contributor Romeen Sheth is president of Metasys, a workforce-management firm based in Atlanta. Steve Schlafman Contributor Steve Schlafman is founder, coach and angel investor at High Output, a boutique leadership-development company based in NYC. Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO by Ben Horowitz is one of the most commonly cited management think pieces of the last

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:‌ Will a PPP loan‌

French startup Back Market has raised a new $120 million funding round from Goldman Sachs, Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo Growth. The company operates a marketplace for refurbished smartphones and electronics devices. Back Market doesn’t refurbish devices in house. Instead, it partners with certified sellers and let them list their items on the site. The startup

The economic effects of COVID-19 could delay Africa’s next big IPO — that of Nigerian fintech unicorn Interswitch. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time the Lagos-based payments company’s plans for going public were postponed; the tech world has been anticipating Interswitch’s stock market debut since 2016. For the continent’s innovation ecosystem, there’s a

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. A few weeks back we dug into the boom that savings and investing apps and services were enjoying. Companies like Acorns, M1 Finance, Robinhood and others were seeing rapid growth in their assets under management

Back in January, Georgia Tech professor David Joyner got a cryptic email from a student based in Wuhan, China. “I’m under quarantine, but my internet access is okay so I have more time to spend on classwork, I wanted to let you know,” the message read. Unsure why Wuhan would be under quarantine, Joyner did

Gaming platforms have earned serious clout with investors in recent years. Add in the VC excitement surrounding collaboration tools and it’s no surprised there’s interest in backing another gaming chat app. Guilded is creating a chat platform designed for competitive gaming and esports that focuses heavily on keeping gamers organized and connected with their teams.

Customs is the sieve of international supply chains. And yet despite its critical role, clearing customs for freight brokers can be a slow and opaque process reliant on manual data entry and prone to errors. Silicon Valley-based KlearNow has developed a platform that aims to bring customs clearance into the digital age. Now, with $16

The COVID-19 crisis is creating an untold amount of uncertainty through every business sector, but for cannabis startups, it’s exacerbating a critical market that was already in decline. TechCrunch spoke to Schwazze CEO Justin Dye following his company’s recent rebrand. He joined the company when it was Colorado’s Medicine Man Technologies (MMT) in late 2019