Startups

Hello TechCrunch friends and family, tomorrow morning at 9 am Pacific Time we’re gathering on Zoom for an in-depth chat about our favorite startups from the latest Y Combinator Demo Day. This year’s installment of the twice-yearly startup event happened yesterday, a week early and online only. Like many other things, Demo Day was adapted

Is there an audience for a center-right news publication focused on original reporting and analysis? That’s the proposition that The Dispatch set out to test when it launched last October, and the early results are promising. The startup says it’s now approaching 10,000 paying subscribers, adding up to more than $1 million in annualized revenue.

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, is officially launching business bank accounts today, after an extensive trial period over the last 12 months that saw early access given to 2,500 business customers. Perhaps surprisingly, right out of the gate Monzo is offering two versions of its business bank account — which is aimed at sold traders

Noah Lichtenstein Contributor Noah Lichtenstein is the founder and managing partner of Crossover, a diversified private technology fund backed by institutional investors, technology execs and professional athletes and entertainers. More posts by this contributor What Studying Students Teaches Us About Great Apps I’ll admit it: When it comes to food, I’m lazy. There are dozens

TechCrunch did a synopsis recently on Africa’s 2019 VC stats. Analyses from investment fund Partech and media outlets Disrupt Africa and WeeTracker came up with varied numbers, but there was a common trend: the top two countries for venture capital to startups across all three studies were Nigeria and Kenya. TechCrunch covered a number of

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today was something a bit special. We’d originally hoped to have this episode in person, as a group, but the world isn’t flying as much right now so we had to make do. Regardless, please say hello and

From long payment cycles to antiquated processes on how to bill workers, the hefty inefficiencies of the construction industry are long overdue for innovation.  Enter startups such as the large venture-backed Katerra and recently public companies such as Procore. Still, independent contractors or workers from small family businesses often can’t afford hefty fees from SaaS

Y Combinator’s Demo Day is a key soirée on the startup calendar. This year, however, instead of a packed room replete with short pitches and lackluster catering, Demo Day has gone virtual. Even more, it was moved up by a week, pushing the public debut of a host of companies to this coming Monday. TechCrunch

It’s amazing that in this day and age, the best way to search for new clothes is to click a few check boxes and then scroll through endless pictures. Why can’t you search for “green patterned scoop neck dress” and see one? Glisten is a new startup enabling just that by using computer vision to

Lisa Enckell Contributor Lisa Enckell is a partner at Antler, an early-stage venture capital firm and startup generator. In Asia, where I work as a partner at an early-stage VC, startups are regularly rolling out a minimum viable product (MVP) and then transacting on messaging apps. Companies like shoe brand Portblue, AI e-commerce company Sorabel

Caryn Marooney Contributor Caryn Marooney is general partner at Coatue Management and sits on the boards of Zendesk and Elastic. An advisor to Airtable, in prior roles she oversaw communications for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus and co-founded The OutCast Agency, which served clients like Salesforce.com and Amazon. Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth.

Fintech startup Revolut has introduced a new trading feature for premium users. Starting today, Premium and Metal users can access gold exposure from the app. Revolut works with a gold services partner (London Bullion Market Association) so that money that you spend on gold exposure is backed by real gold held by this partner. In

YC-backed Giveaway lets folks give away their unused or unnecessary items in a marketplace. Unlike other buy/sell or donation platforms, Giveaway uses a virtual currency on the platform to reward people for listing their products for free on the app. Users earn Karma coins each time they list an item on the website. Folks can

PandaDoc, a sales-focused document automation startup, announced a new web-based document production editor today that allows sales teams to quickly generate proposals and contracts from design templates. The templates give a consistent and professional look to these documents, which might otherwise be produced in a word processor like Word or Google Docs. While customers are

What do you do when you’re rich in cryptocurrencies but you don’t want to sell your positions? The company named Blockchain thinks it has found a solution. It lets you borrow money against cryptocurrencies held in your Blockchain wallet. As soon as you lock cryptocurrencies in your wallet, you receive USD PAX, a stablecoin that

The apartment rental market in the US will be worth $174.1 billion this year, and today a startup that’s built a platform to help it along by connecting renters with rentals is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth. Zumper, which provides listings of available rental properties and services (such as rent payments)

The insurance industry depends on data to support a number of functions the average person in the street is usually completely unaware of such as “informed risk selection”, underwriting and claims management. Like many industries, it would like to automate much of this but it’s just not that simple. Synthesized is a UK startup that

Two video startups are making dueling legal claims against the other. The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that interactive video company Eko is accusing Quibi of infringing on its patented technology. At around the same time, The Hollywood Reporter noted  that Quibi (which is launching its short-form mobile video service next month) has

Everlaw is bringing modern data management, visualization and machine learning to eDiscovery, the process in which legal entities review large amounts of evidence to build a case. Today, the company announced a $62 million Series C investment. CapitalG (Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund) and Menlo Ventures led the round. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and K9

As Stanford, Princeton, Columbia and others shutter classrooms to limit the coronavirus outbreak, college educators around the country are clambering to move their classes online.  At the same time, tech companies that enable remote learning are finding a surge in usage and signups. Zoom Video Communications, a videoconferencing company, has been crushing it in the

‘We started as a side project… and side projects can’t afford offices’ Greg Kumparak @grg / 7 hours When Zapier was founded in 2011, it was a side project for three friends from Missouri who wanted to make it easier to connect any one web app to another. Nine years, millions of users and around

Extra Crunch is now past its first birthday. Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot, made some changes and generally found our groove. Toward the end of 2019, former TechCrunch writer Alex Wilhelm returned to the publication to help grow Extra Crunch, though he still writes for the main site as well. His daily

Postmates announced today it would be adding a “non-contact delivery option,” for those concerned about COVID-19 exposure from workers bringing them food. Instacart set up something similar earlier this week, announcing sales were 10x higher this week over last due to coronavirus concerns and rolling out the “leave it at my door” option for customers

As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay

If you’re an early-stage startup founder with a big vision and even bigger dreams, join us and more than 10,000 other like-minded startuppers at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020 on September 14-16. Silicon Valley’s premier early-stage startup extravaganza focuses on founders, investors and startup experts determined to disrupt and reshape technology. Attending is awesome, but

Oribi, an Israeli startup promising to democratize web analytics, is now launching in the United States. While we’ve written about a wide range of new or new-ish analytics companies, founder and CEO Iris Shoor said that most of them aren’t built for Oribi’s customers. “A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,”

Startup accelerator Y Combinator announced today that it has moved its demo day online, citing a “growing concern over COVID-19,” or coronavirus. The demo day has historically drawn crowds of Silicon Valley elite, journalists and both national and international venture capitalists to watch more than 100 startups come out to the world.  “While we won’t

Spindrift, maker of fizzy soda and sparkling water, has raised $29.8 million in a funding round, per an SEC filing. The Charlestown, Mass. company was founded by Bill Creelman and has raised $70 million in known venture capital funding to date, per Crunchbase data. The company did not immediately respond to request for comment.  Previous

Kinnos, a New York-based startup, was founded six years ago, but what the five-person company produces is suddenly top of mind — and a new round of funding reflects as much. To wit, Kinnos, which makes additives that cause disinfectants to turn blue long enough to ensure a surface has actually been covered, just closed

An Indonesian startup called Newman’s is using telemedicine to help Indonesian patients get care for stigmatized health issues. Part of Y Combinator’s winter 2020 batch, the startup launched last month with prescription hair loss treatments and plans to expand into other verticals, including erectile dysfunction and smoking cessation. Newman’s was founded by Elsen Wiraatmadja, Alfred