To date, Blueland, fresh off its $20 million fundraise back in February, has mostly been focusing on home cleaning products. Today, the innovative cleaning company launches a new product that helps you be as clean as your house, embracing the same “hey, let’s not ship water if we can avoid it” model as its domestic
Data science teams are stymied by disorganization at their companies, impacting efforts to deploy timely AI and analytics projects. In a recent survey of “data executives” at U.S.-based companies, 44% said that they’ve not hired enough, were too siloed-off to be effective, and haven’t been given clear roles. Respondents said that they were most concerned
French startup Sencrop just raised an $18 million Series B funding round led by JVP. The company helps farmers mitigate all sorts of risks, from extreme weather events to diseases that affect various crops. It is both a hardware and software play with a forecasting service that you can access through a subscription product. Weather
Last October marked 20 years of the iPod. It’s a remarkable run in the cutthroat, always-iterating world of consumer electronics. And while it’s undoubtedly true that life hasn’t been particularly for the music player in a product lineup that includes various iPhones and iPads, the beloved music player has somehow managed to hang on. That
Arianee has raised a $21 million Series A round (€20 million) in a round led by Tiger Global. The company issues digital ownership and authenticity certificates on behalf of partner brands. For instance, a luxury and fashion brand can replace the authenticity card that you get with your new watch or handbag with a digital
Hannah Life Technologies, a startup for couples trying to conceive, announced today it has raised $5.15 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. Other investors include Golden Gate Ventures, Anthro Ventures, and medical technology entrepreneur Dr. Jack Wang. The funding comes about 18 months after the company raised seed funding from Y
Uber has opted for arbitration to solve a dispute it has with drivers in Kenya over the reduction of commuter fares. The ride-hailing firm asked Kenya’s Supreme Court, in an application, to allow it to solve its issues with the drivers through channels agreed upon in contracts, while stating that it was “improper” for its
South Korean startup Seadronix wants to reduce the issue of marine accidents, 75% of which are caused by human error, according to a 2019 Allianz safety and shipping report. The company just secured a $5.8 million Series A extension to scale its AI-based ship berthing monitoring and navigation systems to help cargo ships navigate safely
Software as a service has become the default for how organizations adopt and use apps these days, thanks to advances in cloud computing and networking, and the flexibility of pay-as-you-use models that adapt to the evolving needs of a business. Today, a company called Paddle, which has built a large business out of providing the
Shopify put a spotlight on the role and significance of logistics and fulfillment in e-commerce when it snapped up Deliverr for $2.1 billion last week to gain its own, direct foothold into providing those services for its e-commerce customers a la Amazon. Now, an up and coming startup in fulfillment in Europe has closed a
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Monday, May 9, is upon us, and today is a day of browser-cache-powered drama in the form of a Wordle word The New York Times decided was too controversial, but still existed
By now you may be tired of stories detailing the bad news in the market. Too bad! More are coming. If the deluge of negative headlines feels like a pile-on, recall that in 2020 and 2021, TechCrunch obsessively covered the technology, startup and venture capital markets’ various excesses; to not cover the party’s comedown would
TikTok is rolling out a new “Friends” tab that replaces the “Discover” tab in the bottom menu of the app. The company says the new tab is going to roll out to more people over the coming weeks and that it will allow users on the platform to find content from people they’ve connected with.
Who knows what secrets await in the hearts of plants? Brightseed has found a couple of them, anyway, using an AI-based analysis method and will be bringing its first products to market soon with the help of a $68 million B round. Brightseed’s thesis is simply that there are almost certainly some very helpful and
Business intelligence is an increasingly well-funded category in the software-as-a-service market. By handling large amounts of data to analyze and benchmark lines of business, BI promises to help identify, develop, and otherwise create new revenue opportunities. Pervasive BI remains elusive, but statistics on the category reveal that about a third of employees use BI tools
Fintech startup Yapily is announcing that it plans to acquire finAPI — the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals before it closes. Both companies offer open banking solutions in Europe. With this move, Yapily is consolidating its position in Europe and growing its business in Germany, more specifically. The terms of the deal are undisclosed,
Vladyslav Strykun Contributor Vladyslav Strykun is head of marketing at Headway, an edtech startup that provides bite-sized learning for fun and personal growth. Wondering how to improve the marketing performance of your mobile app in the spring without experimenting and extra costs? Take advantage of results from the high winter season, also known as Q5.
Jess Lee, a partner at Sequoia Capital, has sat on both sides of the table. The Hong Kong native, Stanford graduate, and former Googler ran and sold the venture-backed outfit Polyvore before being recruited into the world of venture capital, where she’s spent the last six years. Because she herself pitched many investors (and, she
Startup and unicorn clarity cometh, just at the price of everything Alex Wilhelm 7 hours It’s a nasty day for asset prices. Around the world, the stock market is selling off. Here in the United States, shares are following suit in early-morning trading. Tech stocks are taking fresh blows, and sentiment among the investing classes
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that the platform is going to start testing NFTs with select creators in the United States this week. Mosseri noted that there will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram. At launch, the supported blockchains for showcasing NFTs on Instagram are Ethereum and
Cloudflare today announced that it’s collaborating with Deno, the development company behind the eponymous Deno runtime, and individual contributors of the Node.js open source project to create standards that enable developers to write code between Deno, Node.js, and Cloudflare’s serverless app platform, Cloudflare Workers. Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince says that the effort will
Hugging Face 🤗 has closed a new round of funding. It’s a $100 million Series C round with a big valuation. Following today’s funding round, Hugging Face is now worth $2 billion. Lux Capital is leading the round, with Sequoia and Coatue investing in the company for the first time. Some of the startup’s existing
Investment in stocks or retirement accounts can seem like a complicated process if you are not sure where to begin. Mentum is out to change that in Latin America, and is working on customizable investment APIs and widgets so businesses in Latin America can build and offer fully digital investment products, like local mutual funds,
Egyptian fintech Paymob, which enables merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store, announced today it has raised $50 million in Series B funding. PayPal Ventures, the global corporate venture arm of PayPal, New-York-based venture capital Kora Capital, and London-based Clay Point led the round. New participating investors include Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment
Atma, an Indonesian startup that wants to make job hunting less painful, announced today it has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Ventures, with participation from Global Founders Capital. Strategic investors in the round included founders and executives from GoTo Group, Advance Intelligence Group, Ula, Lummo, Kopi Kenangan, Sampoerna Strategic, MMS Group
Ford CEO Jim Farley says electric pickup trucks are not right for every driver. The company’s first all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck began rolling off the assembly line today. He’s on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Jill Gunter is no stranger to crypto — she’s seen the market through its ups and downs, conducting research on blockchain protocols, working at multiple crypto startups and co-founding her own, and investing as a crypto VC at Slow Ventures. Gunter first started following the crypto space in 2011, when she was working in the
What’s to become of the tech company office, and how do companies function without the structure that working together in the same building has traditionally provided us? That’s a monumental question facing tech companies today as they struggle to define their approach to work in a post-pandemic world. Sure, there have been fully remote companies
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. The Great Resignation, the economic trend of people quitting their jobs in pursuit of other opportunities, has been greeted by a harsh reality: the Great Reset. This week, a spate of tech
Hi all, it was a roller coaster of a week in the world of fintech as I published two separate articles on startup layoffs and a nine-figure funding round in the span of a few hours. It was also a week filled with lots of activity on FinTwit, or “Financial Twitter,” as it’s more formally