In spite of the so-called Great Resignation, wages haven’t risen as dramatically as some economists anticipated. About 41% of workers recently surveyed by Willis Towers Watson say that they’re living paycheck to paycheck, while the Bureau of Economic Advisers reports that personal savings rates reached a seven-year low in April — reflecting the dire financial
Braxia Scientific is a Toronto-based company that focuses on depression, suicidality and related mental health conditions. Today, the company announced it is buying KetaMD to extend its telehealth prowess and in particular to expand its tech-facilitated ketamine-based treatments from its current local market of Florida into the wider U.S. The deal is worth around $6
Way back in March, Samsung joined a growing number of hardware makers announcing self-repair initiatives. The list, which includes similar offers from both Apple and Google, finds companies proactively reacting to potential right to repair legislation. Both Samsung and Google teamed up with popular repair site iFixit for their offerings, providing low-cost tools to fix
Y Combinator says it has intentionally shrunk the number of startups within its accelerator for the Summer 2022 batch. As first reported by The Information and independently verified by TechCrunch, Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 cohort — currently in action — boasts nearly 250 companies, down 40% from the previous cohort, which landed at 414 companies.
Perhaps the most interesting story to emerge from the venture capital slowdown and stock market correction that began in late 2021 is the rejiggering of unicorn valuations. Instacart and Stripe picked up new, lower 409a valuations. Klarna got repriced via an equity round, and other richly funded startups that raised last year are staring down the
Spur Capital Partners, an investor in venture capital funds, is out to raise $200 million for its seventh core fund. So far, it has secured nearly $74 million to bet on early-stage VCs, per a securities filing. Who or what is Spur betting on, exactly? Over the years, the investor claims it has indirectly backed
Ro’s co-founder and chief growth officer Rob Schutz is stepping back from his current role and will stay involved with the digital health company in an advisory role, TechCrunch has learned. The shift comes just weeks after Ro cut 18% of its staff to “manage expenses, increase the efficiency of our organization and better map our
A ruling put out yesterday by the European Union’s top court could have major implications for online platforms that use background tracking and profiling to target users with behavioral ads or to feed recommender engines that are designed to surface so-called ‘personalized’ content. The impacts could be even broader — with privacy law experts suggesting
Dating giant Match Group announced a series of changes to Tinder’s management team alongside the announcement of disappointing second-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Notably, Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg will be departing the company after less than a year in the top job. Match Group is also killing Tinder’s plans to adopt new technology, like virtual currencies
Bitwise Asset Management CIO Matt Hougan joins Emily Chang and Bloomberg’s Sonali Basak to discuss the highly-anticipated Ethereum Merge and its potential impact on the whole crypto ecosystem, after Ethereum developer Tim Beiko revealed the update is expected to happen on the second week of September.
Sprig, a startup offering tools for user and software product research, today announced that it raised $30 million in a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, First Round Capital, Elad Gil and Figma Ventures. It brings the company’s total raised to $90 million, which CEO Ryan Glasgow says is being put toward expanding Sprig’s service
Mudafy, a tech-enabled real estate broker operating in Latin America, has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding led by San Francisco-based Founders Fund. Founded in mid-2019, Mudafy operates with a typical digital brokerage model — aiming to make it easier for people to buy and sell their homes and serve as
Happy August! Or, as many of my neighbors are fond of saying: Happy Fogust. San Francisco sits on a peninsula surrounded by chilly water, so when warm summer air rushes in, thick fog obscures the landscape. Some days, the blanket is so thick, visibility is just a few hundred feet. It’s an apt metaphor for
A number of startups have cropped up to tackle the challenge of making hydrogen cheap and accessible for industrial users, including the latest, Aurora Hydrogen. The startup announced a $10 million Series A yesterday led by Energy Innovation Capital and joined by Williams Companies, Shell Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.
Yair Snir Contributor Yair Snir is vice president and managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, leading venture investment activity in Europe and Israel. Good companies get bought not sold. This saying has been passed down as conventional wisdom through generations of entrepreneurs, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. While the IPO is characterized as
Instagram may be worried about TikTok’s threat to its business, but in the near-term, it’s still far ahead when it comes to the influencer marketing dollars spent on its platform in the U.S. According to a new analyst report, Instagram is on track to capture nearly 3x the amount of influencer marketing spend compared to
Large-scale and mid-sized enterprises and businesses are increasingly adopting — and offering — software-as-a-service platforms as they seek to increase their revenue and parlay their growth into greater efficiency. Now a young startup, Emitrr, is aiming to bring the benefits of this model to small and local businesses in the U.S. Emitrr claims to help
We knew it was happening, but Meta has confirmed that its long-standing chief operating officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg has departed from her role as of yesterday (August 1). News emerged on June 1 that Sandberg would be stepping down after more than 14 years in position and would be replaced by chief growth officer Javier
This past month has seen several African fintechs such as Flutterwave and Union54 make headlines for compliance checks and fraud issues. Both unlinked events re-emphasize the importance of know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks and why regulators enforce strict policies that financial institutions need to be held accountable to while operating across
Pinterest may be best known for shopping inspiration and design ideas, but the company’s newest product wants to inspire its users to tap into their own creativity. The company has quietly launched a new iOS app called Shuffles for putting together collages using photos, image cutouts and other animated effects. The app is currently in
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. Monday is here, and we are excited to throw ourselves into another week of summertime tech news. Apropos summer — as the VCs stop answering their phones in favor of drinking elderflower
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Last week we said that you needed to pay attention to the public markets, and we weren’t kidding. It was a huge week for earnings — with notes from all over, including the
Discord announced new measures to bring its Android app into parity with its iOS counterpart today. The changes will improve the app’s experience for Android, which has historically lagged behind the iPhone version of Discord. Discord says the app is now “rebuilt from the ground up” using React Native, a developer framework for making apps
If Pinterest is a bellwether of consumer spending, things are not looking up just yet. Still, investors in the social network rallied as Q2 revenue came in roughly in line with expectations and user declines were not as horrible as they thought. That’s not to say Pinterest’s earnings were good. Pinterest missed on earnings and
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Listen up
With July now behind us, we have a full month of trading data from the NFT market to digest. The numbers are mixed. While there are some positive signals from the non-fungible token market that matter, others are decidedly negative. Trading continues, but at what appears to be a far slower pace. For companies in
Today, Disney+ released a new trailer for the Star Wars series “Andor,” while also revealing that the premiere will be postponed to September 21 to accommodate a three-episode premiere. So not only will the series be the longest live-action Disney+ season with 12 episodes, it will also be the first time Disney+ has had a
Priyanka Srinivas Contributor Priyanka Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Live Green Co, a Chilean food tech startup that uses artificial intelligence to suggest plant-based alternatives for meat and artificial additives in food. More posts by this contributor Aiming to create a gender-equitable startup landscape? When it rains, it pours. The dampened outlook for
We asked TechCrunch readers to vote for the roundtable sessions they would most like to see at TC Disrupt on October 18–20 in San Francisco, and startup fans from around the world have spoken. Roundtables — some of the most popular sessions at TechCrunch Disrupt — are 30-minute expert-led discussions designed for up to 20
If the world wants to feed 10 billion people in 2050, it’ll need to find a better way to grow food. Today, about half the world’s habitable land is devoted to agriculture, yet even that amount can’t provide everyone with the sort of diet enjoyed by people in developed countries. If everyone wanted to eat