Notarize, a startup that offers remote online notarization services, has let go of 110 people – or 25% of its workforce. Doing the math, the seven-year-old, Boston-based company had about 440 employees before the staff reduction. When the COVID-19 pandemic first began, demand for Notarize’s services, dubbed RON for short, skyrocketed as people were confined
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. It’s Fridaa… wait, Thursday? Come on, will this week ever end? Don’t worry, we are all right, just looking forward to our impending vacation mode. — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top
Despite developers being deeply involved with tech company product launches and software upgrades, most company executives have very little insight into how these teams actually do their work or how their productivity could be improved. DX thinks it has cracked the code. Back in early 2020, DX co-founder Abi Noda was working as a product
Last year, a small group of Emory University graduate students at Goizueta Business School in Georgia began to examine the challenge of getting Black and other historically underrepresented founders access to capital. One way to do that, they reckoned, was to raise a generation of investors who would pay more attention to these groups. The
Brad Feld, a venture capitalist of 25 years an author of several books, has just republished a book that first came out in 2013 and to which Feld, with the help of coauthors Matt Blumberg and Mahendra Ramsinghani, has added quite a bit for this new, second edition. Called Startup Boards:A Field Guide to Building
Kenya-based Crossboundary Energy Access (CBEA), a mini-grid infrastructure fund, has raised $25 million from ARCH Emerging Markets Partners Limited, Bank of America, and Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund to back renewable energy projects across the continent. The CBEA, a subsidiary of the investment group Crossboundary, said in a statement that the new funding will unlock an
Arian Simone sat poised center stage at the Embrace Action Summit to share words that many entrepreneurs in the audience understood far too well. “Women of color are the most founded, entrepreneurial demographic,” she said at the biannual business conference hosted by the Tory Burch Foundation. “They are just the least funded.” Simone is the co-founder
If you’re a coach who’s ever thought, “Man, I wish there was a footwear-mounted performance tracker for my soccer team,” boy, do I have some excellent news for you. Playermaker, founded in 2016, is already in use by more than 250 teams, and the company today announced a $40 million fundraise, which will help it
The banking industry isn’t always welcoming to startups, depending on the market’s outlook. As inflation rises and companies brace for the worst, once-promising neobanks are being forced to face the music. For example, Varo Bank, the first neobank to be granted a U.S. bank charter, recently revealed that it could run out of cash by
The European Union is considering how to respond to a major blow to its antitrust enforcement after a court in Luxembourg sided with chipmaker Qualcomm — which had been appealing a €997 million ($1BN+) fine the EU levied against it back in 2018. At the time, the bloc’s competition regulator concluded Qualcomm had abused its
Platform9, which bills itself as an “open distributed cloud company,” today announced that it closed a $26 million funding round led by Celesta Capital with participation from Cota Capital, NGP Capital and other investors. CEO Bhaskar Gorti said that the new cash will be used to drive Platform9’s go-to-market strategy and product research and development,
Coinbase has hired Arnab Kumar, former executive at Prosus Ventures, in the latest push to relaunch its eponymous cryptocurrency exchange in India. Kumar, who has previously also worked at influential think tank Niti Aayog and Deutsche Bank, is joining the exchange as director of India market expansion, a spokesperson said in an email. At Niti
The crypto sell-off of the last several days was preceded by staffing cuts at several companies in the business of facilitating the trading of decentralized assets and tokens. Reductions at Gemini and Crypto.com were superseded today by news that Coinbase is cutting more than 1,000 staff. Given that Coinbase and other crypto exchanges were high-flying
It’s difficult to build high-growth clean tech companies using venture capital: Despoiling the planet has a much higher return on investment than saving it. Twenty years ago, there were high hopes for companies aiming to mitigate environmental impacts, but an extended recession, China’s dominance over solar power manufacturing and low natural gas prices were just
Shared micromobility giant Lime is piloting electric motorbikes in Long Beach, California. Lime has been teasing a new form factor to cater to use cases outside of scooters and bikes for a while, so it’s no surprise to see the company test out a vehicle that’s sturdy and comfortable like a bike but easy to
NordVPN, one of the most popular VPN providers, is the latest to confirm that it will be removing its servers in India ahead of the nation enforcing new strict guidelines later this month. The Lithuania-based firm, which counts General Catalyst and Novator among its backers and is valued at $1.6 billion, said on Tuesday that
Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern joins Emily Chang from the Bloomberg Technology Summit to discuss the macro environment’s impact on travel, consumer behavior trends, and take a look at travel in the year ahead.
Biotech startup Meta Pharmaceuticals sets itself an ambitious goal as it secures its initial investment. The Shenzhen-based company, which sets out to develop treatments for autoimmune diseases with the help of artificial intelligence, has raised $15 million from its seed and pre-A rounds. There is no lack of investor interest in companies applying machine learning
Many people have plenty of online subscriptions that they barely use, and can save a fair amount of money with a service like Truebill to see all their recurring payments in one place. Spendflo wants to do the same for enterprise subscribers of SaaS services, and is targeted toward chief financial officers and finance leadership
Crypto falls below $1T as lending giant freezes withdrawals Jacquelyn Melinek 7 hours Crypto markets were shaken as the not-so-stablecoin UST and sister cryptocurrency LUNA collapsed last month, bringing the digital asset economy down with them and exposing smaller, more vulnerable players. Now, we’re seeing crypto whales like Celsius floating up to the surface for
Though the iPad was a huge hit from the beginning based on its user-friendly interface and single-application focus, it had begun feeling a bit stale for those who hunger for more depth. Long one of the world’s lightest and most powerful medium format computers, the lag between what kind of work it was capable of
Apple introduced some amazing updates across iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS at the worldwide developer conference (WWDC) last week. The company announced a few new features never seen before on iOS like Stage Manager for better multitasking and Safety Check to get away from abusers. But there are others that Apple simply Sherlocked — the
Magic Spoon, the maker of better-for-you cereals, secured $85 million in Series B funding as three of its brands make the jump from direct-to-consumer-only offerings to Target store shelves for the first time. HighPost Capital led the new round, which brings Magic Spoon’s total funding to date to $100 million. HighPost is joined by Siddhi
On a very special episode of The TechCrunch Podcast this week, I’m joined by Apple Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing Kurt Knight, who talks us through some of the big updates Apple announced at its WWDC conference on Monday. Kurt specifically talks us through the big new changes to Apple’s Continuity suite of features
Celsius Network, one of the biggest crypto lenders, told customers Sunday evening that it is pausing withdrawals, swap, and transfers between accounts in a move that has sparked discussions and has prompted the price of the firm’s token to take a 60% tumble in the past one hour to 19 cents. “We are taking this
The Zendesk ownership saga took several new turns this week, with an external investor, Jana Partners, agitating against the company, a review of its strategic options coming to a close, and the business software company deciding to stay independent. Now worth less than $10 billion, Zendesk has made more noise in recent months than you
Welcome to The Interchange, a take on this week’s fintech news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Greetings from Austin, Texas, where the temps have been over 100 degrees for days now and we’re trying hard just not to melt. The global funding boom in 2021 was unlike anything most of us
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. Per Layoffs.fyi, a layoff tracker, over 16,000 tech workers lost their jobs in May, and June is off to a similarly brutal start. TechCrunch’s senior reporter Amanda Silberling and I have accidentally,
Hi, friends! Welcome back to Week In Review, the newsletter where we recap some of the top stories to cross TechCrunch dot com this week. The most read story this week was . . . well, everything that came out of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference. Apple tends to dominate the news cycle during WWDC,
During its WWDC keynote, Apple announced a bevy of changes and updates to its hardware and software. In the mix were anticipated improvements to its various operating systems and computers — and plans to expand its fintech footprint. Apple has been growing as a consumer finance company for some time, most famously thanks to its