Social commerce — the process of buying and selling products or services directly through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — is becoming the most natural way for consumers to make purchases since people use social media and messaging apps almost every day. SleekFlow, an omnichannel social commerce platform that helps businesses build
It’s almost Shakespearean. Juul, the e-cigarette company that took the U.S. by storm five years ago — and which was valued at its peak at $38 billion — is about to get kicked out of the country, according to the WSJ. Per the outlet’s report earlier today, the Food & Drug Administration could announce as
Sequoia India and Southeast Asia is broadening the range of its check size for the Surge program as the storied venture firm attempts to make its seed investments more “relevant for a larger set of founders,” it said Thursday. The venture firm’s check size for the three-year-old Surge program, which previously made $1 million to
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. Is it Wednesday already? The calendar tells me that it is. (Fun fact: My apartment’s so full of date-displaying smart displays that it’s a struggle not to trip over them.) Time sure
Fusion startup Zap Energy has reached two milestones that could nudge it ahead in the race to offer low-cost, carbon-free energy — a $160 million Series C round and a successful test of a prototype fusion reactor that could pave the way to a commercial version. Fusion power has become an unlikely investor favorite as
The buy now, pay later (BNPL) market, estimated to be worth $120 billion in 2021, has grown significantly over the last few years. But for most of its rise to virtual checkout prominence, BNPL largely targeted everyday consumer goods like clothes from Urban Outfitters or a Peloton. Now, the credit method is moving beyond its
Cashify, a marketplace for gadgets trade-ins and buybacks in India, has raised $90 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its business in the world’s second-largest smartphone market. Prosus Ventures and NewQuest Capital Partners led the seven-year-old Indian startup’s Series E funding, Cashify said on Thursday. Paramark Ventures and existing backers
Spotify is developing a new feature called Community that would allow mobile users to see what sort of music their friends are streaming in real-time as well as what playlists they’ve recently updated in a dedicated place in the app. The company today offers a similar “Friend Activity” feature on the desktop, but had limited
Detroit-based Airspace Link has positioned itself as a provider of increasingly important infrastructure in the burgeoning drone services space, letting operators get local and federal approval quickly. With $23 million in new backing, the company now plans to take its platform to other countries looking to get their drone industries off the ground. The company’s
At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company’s smart assistant. The most head turning of the bunch was a potential new feature that can synthesize short audio clips into longer speech. In
CloudQuery CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Pats helped launch the startup because he needed a tool to give him visibility into his cloud infrastructure resources, and he couldn’t find one on the open market. He built his own SQL-based tool to help understand exactly what resources he was using, based on data engineering best practices. After
Vignesh Chandramouli Contributor Vignesh Chandramouli, a partner at Oak HC/FT, focuses on growth equity and early-stage venture opportunities in healthcare. For years, automation has been a key driver of transformation across industries, changing the way companies and entire sectors operate. However, healthcare, a $4.1 trillion industry, has fallen behind. For an industry that constantly innovates,
Lev Kerzhner Contributor Lev Kerzhner leads Saragus Agency, which provides corporate storytelling services to startups, companies, entrepreneurs and investor groups. Over the past two years, I’ve designed dozens of presentations for a variety of companies at various stages of fundraising — from startup SAFE rounds, to VC rounds and IPOs. In this article, I will
Strapi, an open source content management system (CMS), today announced that it raised $31 million in Series B funding led by CRV with participation from Flex Capital, Index Ventures, and angel investors including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. With the capital, CEO Pierre Burgy tells TechCrunch that the plan is to launch a new product,
For the last several years, Appsmith has been quietly building an open source platform for internal development teams to build the custom apps they need. These are business applications that companies tend to build themselves to give them access to data in a more streamlined and visual way. While the company frames it as low-code,
Climate tech has been one of the biggest successes of the last few years. By 2025, investors are expected to sink $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion annually into a wide range of startups that promise to upend everything from travel and commuting to agriculture, construction, and more. Oh, and they’ll either trim carbon emissions or
Few sectors have boomed in the past few years like climate tech has. But despite the burgeoning urgency driving interest and investments, the ongoing market downturn is threatening to dim the prospects of many bright startups. But are climate tech VCs as gloomy as the rest? Three investors active in the space joined me on
Onstage at TC Sessions: Climate 2022 this week, climate modeling expert Dr. William Collins shared why he’s deeply skeptical of carbon offsets, and tree-based offsets in particular. According to Collins, they are, “as far as we can tell, a feel-good measure.” Likewise, tree-planting programs pedestalized by companies like United Airlines are “fool’s gold,” he said.
You’ve probably heard of unicorns, and you may have heard of soonicorns. But have you heard of gigacorns? Unlike its other more common cousins, the term “gigacorn” doesn’t refer to valuation. Instead, it tells us how well a startup can help fight carbon dioxide emissions, climate change and its implications. According to venture capitalist Christian
Most of us have a variety of fermented food products in our kitchen: you can’t make tofu, chocolate, vinegar or bread without agreeable microorganisms that can be produced at scale. Today, precision fermentation is innovating the alternative protein industry as food tech startups find the best methods for brewing eggs, dairy, meat and seafood in
Despite being one of the countries in Europe with the most hours of sunshine, Spain has extremely low levels of household solar installations. Madrid-based Samara, a startup founded in May this year — which is launching a service in its home market today — wants to change that, spotting what it believes is a major
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is still “hopeful, positive and in fact bullish” that Congress can agree on “a significant push into clean energy,” despite the regulatory body’s virtual gridlock on issues like climate. Before Congress breaks for August recess, Democrats have said they hope to reach a deal on a budget reconciliation bill. Effectively
Join, a decision-making platform for architecture, engineering and construction, today closed a $16 million Series A round led by SignalFire with participation from Ironspring Ventures, Metaprop, Building Ventures and Standard Investments. The fresh capital, which brings the company’s total raised to $30 million, will be put toward “doubling down” on market expansion and expanding Join’s
Deno, the development company behind the eponymous Deno runtime, today announced that it closed a $21 million Series A round led by Sequoia that brings its total raised to $26 million. According to CEO Ryan Dahl, the new cash will be put toward building out Deno’s commercial offering, Deno Deploy, while growing marketing operations and
Successful founder stories are a trove of information and inspiration. They’re also a map of sorts, one that provides insight into the challenges of navigating the complex startup landscape. Hearing about the triumphs and challenges — and the inevitable missteps — can help new and aspiring early-stage founders stay the course and even avoid common
Based in Vietnam, Anfin wants to turn more people into stock investors with features like fractional trading and in-app communities. The Y Combinator alum announced today it has raised a $4.8 million Series A led by angel investor Clement Benoit, the founder of Stuart and Not So Dark, and Y Combinator. Participants in the round
In recent years, there’s been an explosion of tools that allow businesses to connect, transform, analyze and serve data from all kinds of sources. Combined with the increasing pressure on businesses to digital transform their operations, this can lead to a patchwork of solutions that aren’t easy to maintain or scale. Research from Forrester estimates
Despite the demand for platforms that let developers experiment with different versions of apps, the infrastructure required remains relatively complex to build. Beyond data pipelines and statistical methods, and experimentation infrastructure relies on analytical workflows often sourced from difficult-to-configure cloud environments. Plenty of startups have emerged in recent years to abstract away the app experimentation
Gearset, a tooling provider for Salesforce software, today announced that it raised $55 million in a funding tranche led by Silversmith Capital Partners. Co-founder and CEO Kevin Boyle said that the new money will be put toward expanding Gearset’s product offering, growing its sales and marketing functions, and scaling the team across the U.S. and
Caring for a family member is not only hard work, but expensive, too. Many family caregivers miss work (or stop working) and pay for medical expenses out of pocket. Aidaly was created to help them find sources for compensation and financial aid. The company, which is coming out of stealth mode, announced that it has