Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the
Much has been written about Elon Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter, an effort which, despite substantial backing from Morgan Stanley and the approval of Twitter’s board, stands on unsure footing at present. Reporting and punditry have focused on the security implications of the proposed acquisition, as well as Musk’s potential approaches to content moderation and,
Just over a year ago, UiPath was among the most favored startups in the world. Last February the company raised a massive $750 million round at a staggering $35 billion valuation. The robotic process automation, or RPA company, was firing on all cylinders. By the time that UiPath went public in April of last year,
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. There’s a clash happening in the early-stage market. In one world, late-stage investors are reacting to tech stonk corrections by clamoring toward the early-stage investment world, forcing seed investors to go even
Are you slouching at your desk again? There’s an app for that… Zen uses posture mirroring software to help information workers stop hunching over their desks — sending alerts when it detects you’re not sitting up straight so you can correct your posture and, hopefully, avoid a lifetime of back problems. The catch? It uses
Symmetrical.ai, a payroll tech provider, today announced that it raised $18.5 million in financing led by Target Global with participation from Global Founders Capital, Finch Capital, Partech, Market One Capital, and Inovo. The proceeds will support Symmetrical’s expansion into new European markets and enterprise clients, CEO Piotr Smoleń told TechCrunch via email, as well as
For investors, one factor will almost always stand head and shoulders above the rest: Your TAM (total addressable market) needs to break at least $1 billion. But alongside a massive addressable market, investors are also looking to see that you have existing customers, even they’re few in number, who truly love your product. However, communicating
Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Good news! We’re not talking about crypto, Elon Musk or SaaS multiples today. We’re also not talking IPOs, global venture capital trends or the like. Instead, we’re going to
Synthesis AI, a startup developing a platform that generates synthetic data to train AI systems, today announced that it raised $17 million in a Series A funding round led by 468 Capital with participation from Sorenson Ventures and Strawberry Creek Ventures, Bee Partners, PJC, iRobot Ventures, Boom Capital and Kubera Venture Capital. CEO and founder
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the
BNPL is not a new concept; it’s just taken off in recent years and become far more mainstream. Buy now, pay later lets people do exactly what its name suggests — buy something and pay for it later. The difference between BNPL and credit cards is that rather than charge the full amount of a
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This was a live week! Which meant that Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic with Alex Wilhelm, and Grace Mendenhall, our ever-trusty producer, helped us power through. A big shoutout to Dennis,
Thanks to the explosion of low- and no-code development tools, building web apps from scratch has become easier — and cheaper — than it once was. But sophisticated search and navigation functions can complicate the process. A recent survey from IT research firm GoodFirms estimates the cost of a complex app to be between $91,550
One thing I love about fintech is the promise of unlocking more tools for more people. In a broad sense, the current era of fintech has done just that — people around the world now have access to financial services that were earlier either completely out of reach before, or, at a minimum, prohibitively expensive.
Less than a year ago, Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, intending to perform research in the public interest on making AI more reliable and explainable. Its $124 million in funding was surprising then, but nothing could have prepared us for the company raising $580 million less than a year
Snapchat is adding new assistive devices for Bitmoji avatars to expand its representation options for users. Now, users can add a hearing aid in a variety of colors and choose to have them in one ear or both. Snapchat has also added a selection of its most popular Bitmoji stickers featuring the avatar with a
AI systems that understand and generate text, known as language models, are the hot new thing in the enterprise. A recent survey found that 60% of tech leaders said that their budgets for AI language technologies increased by at least 10% in 2020 while 33% reported a 30% increase. But not all language models are
Used-car digital platforms have been proliferating across the world for a handful of significant reasons, but most of those are related to our recent pandemic. Among those reasons is the rapid digitization of the used car industry, as startups have flooded the market with easier-to-use platforms that the older e-commerce-style ones lacked. The other is
Twitter didn’t have as many users as it thought — a predicament that may have encouraged the company to more seriously consider its acceptance of Elon Musk’s proposal to take the company private in a $44 billion deal. According to Twitter’s Q1 2022 earnings out this morning, the company admits it had been overcounting the
Earlier this month at TechCrunch Early Stage, I talked to Frederique Dame, an investing partner at GV, about product-market fit. A standing-room-only crowd packed the venue as Dame spoke about her experience leading product and engineering efforts at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, sharing some of what she learned about gathering customer data, iterating quickly to
Lotti Siniscalco is a partner at Emergence Capital, where she invests in early-stage enterprise software companies. During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, she headlined a session dedicated to giving feedback on pitch decks. What follows is a small slice of Lotti’s input from the session. Constructing pitch decks is part art and part science. And they’re
On Friday afternoon, former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey turned to the platform that he co-created to speak about its future, days after the company was bought for $44 billion by Elon Musk. In the vague thread, Dorsey said he doesn’t believe in permanent bans, with the exception of illegal activity. “As I’ve said before,
Movable Ink today announced that it secured $55 million in a Series D funding round led by Silver Lake with participation from Contour Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and others, bringing the marketing software startup’s total raised to $97 million. The investment comes as Movable Ink — which was valued at $1.3 billion prior to the
In further fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Yandex, the company that’s sometimes referred to as the ‘Google of Russia’, has signed a term sheet to sell its media division to VKontakte (VK), aka the local Facebook equivalent. Yandex confirmed it has signed a term sheet to divest its news aggregator (News) and blogging/infotainment platform
Airbnb today announced that it will soon no longer offer refunds for COVID-19-related circumstances, including cases where a guest or host becomes sick with COVID-19 — reflecting an update to the company’s extenuating circumstances policy. Beginning May 31, Airbnb hosts’ cancellation terms will apply “as usual,” Airbnb said, although certain reservations made before May 31
As you might’ve heard, it’s getting a little crowded in space, between thousand-satellite constellations à la SpaceX’s Starlink and the millions of pieces of space junk accumulated from decades of launches. But it’s also getting a little crowded in the space-monitoring space, with a number of companies competing to create observation systems to help satellite
Ford started production yesterday on its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, a do-or-die vehicle that takes the automaker’s — and the United States’ — best-selling vehicle and swaps its gas-guzzling engines for powerful electric motors juiced by more than 1,800 pounds of batteries. The mattress-sized pack can deliver over 300 miles of range, but if Ford
Elon Musk has lined up a new CEO for Twitter and told banks that agreed to help fund his $44 billion acquisition offer about his plans to monetize tweets, according to a new report from Reuters. A source told Reuters that Musk has decided on who he plans to appoint as the new chief executive
Much of the grocery focus over the past three years has been around online adoption, but as long as 90% of U.S. grocery sales still happen in stores, companies like Clerk want to bring some digitization to the brick-and-mortar grocery experience. CEO Marlow Nickell founded Austin-based Clerk in 2016, and while he saw Amazon and
Mass transit group Swvl has confirmed to TechCrunch its deal to buy UK start-up Zeelo, estimated to be a $100 million acquisition, according to sources. The Egyptian-born startup that provides shared transportation services for intercity and intracity trips, recently expanded into Turkey with its acquisition of Volt Lines. Earlier this year it went public (NASDAQ: