William Wilson Contributor William Wilson is a partner in Goodwin’s technology group and intellectual property practice. His practice focuses on technology transactions, including counseling, structuring and negotiating deals across industries with a particular focus on the fintech, healthcare and technology sectors. Last year saw investors throwing record amounts of dollars into startups, but recent geopolitical
Asia had more IPOs than other regions in Q1 2022, but its tally dropped from Q4 2021 Anna Heim 7 hours Sometime in 2021, the world passed the 1,000-unicorn milestone. This was captured by Crunchbase’s private unicorn board, which is dedicated to tracking startups with valuations above $1 billion; the list kept on increasing and
An app called BeReal, founded by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, launched in December 2019 with its idea of asking users to post an unedited photo once per day after receiving a push notification. Upon receiving the alert, the user has up to 2 minutes to share what they’re up to
Databases are an essential part of doing business in the digital world, but not every organization is achieving success with them. In a 2019 Vanson Bourne survey, enterprises said that they’ve been held back by legacy database technologies — specifically relational databases systems. Relational databases weren’t designed with newer apps or the cloud in mind,
Google has shared a screenshot of its new cookie consent popup. At first, the new popup will be available on YouTube in France. But the company says it plans to roll out the new design across Google services in Europe. This updated design comes a few months after the CNIL, France’s data watchdog, fined Google
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. On this fine day of April 21, 2022, we celebrate a shiny new podcast from our crypto team: Chain Reaction. Q: Why is the podcast so loud? A: Because it’s immutable. This
MadEats, Y Combinator alum, claims to be the first “‘full-stack’ delivery-only startup in the Philippines,” with their own virtual storefront, ghost kitchens and fleet of drivers. More than that, they also conceptualize and launch their own brands, making them a delivery-only restaurant group. The company announced today it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding
In an SEC filing today, Elon Musk indicated that Twitter has yet to respond to his offer to buy the company, and that he is “exploring whether to commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares.” Recall that Twitter has itself adopted a poison-pill defense of its equity in light of Musk’s
Change is afoot in the non-stop world of data collection and application, and if you’re a data-driven startup — or on your way to becoming one — TechCrunch and Cloudera have joined forces for an event you won’t want to miss. Data and the Culture Transformation, an online event presented by Cloudera, takes place on
French startup Greenly has raised a $23 million Series A round. The company has built a software-as-a-service platform that lets you calculate your company’s carbon emissions, store and track them in one place, generate a certified report of your carbon footprint and get some insights about ways to reduce your emissions. Energy Impact Partners (EIP)
Zenly has always felt like the small social app that could become the next big thing. But it turns it Zenly is quietly becoming a social giant without anyone paying much attention — at least until now. Originally designed in Paris, the app was acquired by Snap back in 2017. But that acquisition was just the
Luke Hutchison didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do as a graduate of West Point — only that he wanted to serve his country, graduating as he did two years after the 9/11 attack in New York. Certainly, he never imagined launching a private event management platform for restaurants and venues, but that’s what
Amazon may be attempting to take on Shopify in the west, but in India, it is gearing up to explore social commerce. Amazon India has acquired the social commerce startup GlowRoad as the e-commerce giant makes a bigger push into one of its key overseas markets, a source directly familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
After an era of open affection for Silicon Valley followed by an era of relative quiet, former President Barack Obama is tearing into tech. The former president spoke Thursday at an event co-hosted by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation, and this time he didn’t mince words about the toll that social media
As the global startup market digests a changing valuation environment and climate for venture investment, not every sector is taking the same amount of damage. One is indeed faring better than the rest. It’s not the flashiest sector in startupland. Instead, it’s the tried-and-true software-as-a-service (SaaS) category that appears to be in the best shape
From the department of Tit for Tat, on the heels of a cascade of sanctions against Russia, Russian organizations and Russian individuals over Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry now has issued a list of U.S. figures that are now prohibited from entering Russia — and will be indefinitely. The list includes
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield is expanding. The tech ecosystem has grown exponentially in size and possibility since the early days of Startup Battlefield and it’s time that we grow along with it. That’s why we’re proud to announce TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200, a new era of our exciting startup community competition. Showcasing global founders This October,
Construct Capital co-founders and general partners Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt continue to dive into innovation that some investors may not think is so sexy, but actually runs behind the scenes so that our food gets to grocery stores every week and our packages arrive when they say they will. And this time, they have
Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is now facing “internal scrutiny” at the company after pressuring U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail to kill a story about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. The revelations come in an explosive new report from the Wall Street Journal detailing a coordinated campaign to discourage the tabloid
At its AWS Summit San Francisco, Amazon’s cloud computing arm today announced a number of product launches, including two focused on its serverless portfolio. The first of these is the GA launch of Amazon Aurora Serverless V2, its serverless database service, which can now scale up and down significantly faster than the previous version and
For years grocery retailers have been using data driven forecasting to help them predict demand to figure out which products to reorder to keep shelves stocked. That’s nothing new. But Berlin-based startup Freshflow is targeting a particular slice of this market: It’s built an AI-powered forecasting platform to help retailers optimize stock replenishment of fresh,
Cultivated meat, grown in a bioreactor rather than out on the range, might be one of the big food trends of the decade. But it’s relying on tech built around multiplying yeast and bacteria cells, not animal tissue — and Unicorn Biotechnologies wants to change that with new equipment created with mass food production in
Eye-tracking has long been one of the those computing holy grails. Whether it’s accessibility concerns, opening up new form factors or just trying to put a novel spin on the ways we interact with our devices, decades of consumer electronics are littered with attempts to use the gauze to unlock a new form of input.
Front’s cap table reads like an honor role of investors. CEO and co-founder Mathilde Collin raised funds from numerous Silicon Valley firms and individual investors. On April 27 she’s speaking on TechCrunch Live to share her strategy that allowed her company to raise funds from less traditional VCs. One of those VCs is also speaking
In mid-2020, short-term rental startup Lyric Hospitality shuttered most of its locations in what was widely viewed as another pandemic casualty. But the San Francisco company — which was out to help folks who struggled to decide between staying in a hotel or an Airbnb — wasn’t ready to go down without a fight. It
Swiss-Hungarian end-to-end encrypted cloud services provider Tresorit has added a new string to its security bow: It’s started offering E2E encrypted email as a subscription add-on for business users of third party email service providers. Tresorit’s E2EE module enables subscribers to send and receive strongly encrypted email messages via their usual email provider — with
Immigrants to a new country can often be cash-rich. The problem is, is that they have no credit history in their new country. Plus, a consumer cannot take their credit file from one country to another. Furthermore, credit bureaus are rarely coordinated or joined up across countries. The upshot of this is that those that
As humanity prepares to return to the Moon (“to stay,” as they remind us constantly), there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to make sure astronauts are safe and productive on the lunar surface. Without GPS, navigation and mapping is a lot harder — and NASA is working with lidar company Aeva
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. Happy 20th of April, 2022, which has no particular significance and we are not making any jokes. It’s been a strange news day, but never fear, we have some great stories for
Ordinary Folk, a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-Series A funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring and expand into Hong Kong while scaling in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Sean Low, the startup has two main platforms: Noah is