Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. A multibillion dollar acquisition, IPO projections and some good ol’ VC and billionaire drama? It would be unfair to say that this week in tech and startups felt like 2021’s boom cycle; especially
So-called “stakeholder capitalism” has not had the most illustrious of histories. Yes, there have been “Walmart Associates” who were able to own stock in the company, or “John Lewis Associates” (in the U.K.), but it’s hardly made the average person well off. At least they got something? In tech startups, however, tech founders are helped
There’s been a standing question surrounding how seriously we should ultimately take Astro. The product was launched exactly one year ago, in limited quantities as a Day One offering for $999 a pop. My interaction with the robot was (at the time) limited to a few pre-launch demos. I came away from the experience thinking
Hi all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up some of the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. The goal? Even when you’re swamped, a quick skim of WiR on Saturday morning should give you a pretty good understanding of what happened in tech this week.
Jason Schoettler Contributor Raising a Series B for any startup is challenging right now, with many VCs pulling back on investments — funding for Series B rounds across all sectors fell 55% in August compared to a year earlier, for example. But raising a Series B for a hardware startup can be even tougher. It
Juno, a startup that provides checking accounts to crypto enthusiasts and allows them to take their paychecks in digital tokens, has raised a new funding round as it expands its offerings to include a tokenized loyalty program. The one-and-a-half-year old startup has amassed over 75,000 customers in the U.S. who take their salaries (some in
Aiven, which provides fully managed and hosted services for major open source projects including Kafka, Cassandra and Grafana, has announced its first-ever acquisition — the Finnish company has snapped up Kafkawize, a self-service open source data governance tool for Apache Kafka. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition comes amid a renewed focus
Amazon released Wednesday the second-generation version of Echo Auto, a smaller and slicker device aimed to broaden the e-commerce giant’s reach by bringing its Alexa voice assistant into more vehicles. Echo Auto, which first came to market in 2018, connects to a vehicle’s infotainment system to bring the Alexa assistant into the vehicle. A driver
Movie and TV reviews site Rotten Tomatoes is releasing a card game in early 2023 called “Rotten Tomatoes: The Card Game,” a fast-paced party game that challenges cinephiles by making them guess what rating a movie has — a.k.a the Tomatometer score, which reflects the percentage of positive professional critic reviews for a movie. This
India’s market regulator has tightened disclosure norms for firms looking to file for an initial public offering after lackluster performance of more than half a dozen tech startups in the past year and a half. Firms looking to raise funds from public offers will now be required by law to disclose their key performance indicators
Everyone knows membership has its privileges. And that adage holds true at TechCrunch Disrupt, which takes place on October 18–20 in San Francisco. How so? Disrupt attendees who hold one- or two-year subscriptions to TC+ receive exclusive access to the TC+ Lounge at the show. Let’s back up a moment. If you’re not familiar with
Meet Reflect, a new analytics tool that has been specifically designed for HR teams. While many teams now rely on sophisticated data visualization and business planning tools, HR teams can’t easily measure different metrics and see how they evolve over time. And yet, human resources have become a key component for tech startups and innovative
Amazon is launching two new designs for its Echo Dot Kids devices, the company announced at its virtual event today. The Echo Dot Kids devices now come in new Owl and Dragon designs. The two new designs join Amazon’s current Echo Dot Kids devices: the Tiger and the Panda. The new designs will be available
When ByteDance bought the Chinese VR headset maker Pico a year ago, the message it sent was clear: it was betting that the immersive device would be where future generations spend most of their time consuming digital content. It’s a marriage reminiscent of Meta’s acquisition of Oculus back in 2014, except the world is now
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Embedded insurance — selling coverage at the same time as another product or service — is on the rise. According to data platform Dealroom, it accounts for a growing share of all policies sold, and startups in this space raised nearly $800 million in 2021 alone. Having recently polled investors on all things insurtech, we
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Friday! We don’t know about you, but we are both ready for some R&R after ploughing through a wall of deep-cringe texts from the Musk/Twitter trial. We hope you get some,
HSBC Asset Management, the investment arm of Britain’s HSBC Group, has led a seed round of $4 million in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup Bizbaz, the two said Friday. Founded in June 2019, Bizbaz offers its proprietary customer intelligence and risk management solutions to banks, insurance companies and fintech startups. The startup has
You already know whether you’re an Amazon Echo type person. If so, you’re probably looking at one right now, thinking “should I upgrade that thing or is it pointless?” Probably the latter — unless you also have Amazon’s Eero mesh Wi-Fi product, in which case: it’s probably still pointless, unless it’s pretty old. In which
The digital ads market is robust, with Statista predicting that worldwide spend will reach nearly $900 billion by 2026. But fake and fraudulent ad traffic remains a major problem in the space. Global losses from ad fraud totaled $35 billion in 2020 alone. And beyond the wasted spend, invalid traffic can inflate metrics, leading brands
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Before we get into this week’s show notes, some programming notes: OK, now to the show. This week, Natasha, Mary Ann and Rebecca took the mic, with Theresa on production duty, to talk
Are you ready to rumble, TechCrunch style? Twenty of the most promising and creative early-stage startups — chosen from the elite Startup Battlefield 200 — will bring the heat for $100,000 in the world-renown Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 18–20 in San Francisco. We have an outstanding cohort of VCs ready to
Virtual reality (VR) has struggled to transition too far beyond gaming circles and specific industry use cases such as medical training, but with the burgeoning metaverse movement championed by tech heavyweights such as Meta, there has been a renewed hope (and hype) around the promise that virtual worlds bring. Just yesterday, Los Angeles-based AmazeVR announced
The inquest into the death of British schoolgirl, Molly Russell, has concluded that social media was a factor in her demise, the BBC reports. The 14-year-old had viewed thousands of pieces of content about self-harm and suicide on online platforms, including Instagram and Pinterest, prior to her death in November 2017. Reaching a conclusion on
Amazon showed its Eero Wi-Fi lineup some love this morning during a hardware event, announcing the Eero PoE 6, a Wi-Fi 6 Power over Ethernet (PoE) access point that can provide up to 2,000 square feet of coverage and support up to 100 devices. A complementary new product, the Eero PoE Gateway, delivers up to
YouTube TV launched a new option that allows subscribers to purchase add-ons without subscribing to the full channel offering in the service’s Base plan. With this new à la carte plan, subscribers can access more than 20 add-on channels, from Showtime and HBO Max to NBA League Pass, MLB.TV and Starz, among others. This confirms
It’s demo day season. This morning marked the kickoff of VC firm 500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day, which saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches to prospective investors — and customers. Participants ran the gamut from fintech and sustainability to edtech and developer tools, and several stood out from the rest of
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Today we are mostly listening to acoustic covers of songs we love (a surprise Iron and Wine cover, perhaps?), and mentally preparing ourselves for TechCrunch Disrupt. Which reminds us — did you
Paul Huelskamp and Alex Meek were hiking near Mount Tamalpais in Marin County a few years ago when the peaceful quiet of the woods began to give way to the clatter of a diesel generator. When they came upon it, they saw it “spewing black smoke” into the otherwise cool, crisp air, Huelskamp recalled. The
The Vision Fund, a venture capital arm of SoftBank, has launched a sweeping layoff process, cutting at least 30% of its workforce globally, or approximately 150 of the 500 employees, according to a report by Bloomberg. The news comes nearly two months after SoftBank chief executive officer and founder Masayoshi Son said the company would