Unicorn births are down, exits are down, and nine-figure rounds are taking on water Alex Wilhelm 20 hours The first quarter of 2022 brought a historically huge sum of investment for global startups, with the three-month period outclassing any quarter in 2018, 2019, and 2020, according to CB Insights data. But despite the fact that
Truora, a Colombian user authentication startup, has raised $15 million in Series A funding co-led by two Silicon Valley-based venture firms. Propel Venture Partners and Accel led the investment for Truora, which valued the company at $75 million post-money. Founded in August 2018, Truora was originally focused on background checks for gigster platforms. In 2018
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. Technology news was entertaining this week, if nothing else. The fact that we started the week learning that Elon Musk had bought a material percentage of Twitter’s stock,
Apparently it wasn’t just an April Fools’ joke or an errant Elon Musk tweet. As any true blue Twitter user knows, the divide over the social network adding an edit button is the deepest ideological ravine of our time — and Twitter is poised to switch sides. The company confirmed Tuesday that it is indeed
Indian social media app Koo introduced a voluntary self-verification service to its users on Wednesday in an unusual step that it believes will bring credibility and trust on its platform. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup said users on its platform will have the option to self-verify their profiles “in seconds” using their government-approved identity cards. The feature
Qureos, a UAE-based edtech and remote work marketplace that is changing how people upskill and get jobs across the globe, plans to grow the uptake of its platform by 10 times this year in its race to create 100 million jobs over the next few years. The startup has today announced closing a $3 million
Pinterest announced today it’s becoming the first major digital platform to introduce a comprehensive misinformation policy designed to combat false and misleading claims around climate change on its platform. According to the company’s newly updated misinformation guidelines, Pinterest will now be able to remove content that denies the existence of impacts of climate change, denies
Tandem, a startup building corporate communications tools, has released a new product called Spaces, hoping to blend remote and in-office work so that all staff feels properly connected to their coworkers. The release of Spaces comes as many companies are digesting a return to offices and the question of how to manage a team that
TikTok is launching a new Creative Agency Partnerships (CAP) University program that is designed to help creative agencies become “TikTok experts,” the company announced on Wednesday. The company says the five-week program will teach enrollees what they need to know about getting started on TikTok and how to use the platform to up their marketing
The edit tweet button isn’t Twitter’s only new feature that can rewrite history. The company has apparently changed the way it handles embedded tweets that were deleted after the fact, littering webpages across the internet with holes. Previously, a deleted tweet embedded in a webpage would still display the text content of a tweet. Now
Snapchat announced this week that it’s introducing a new ASL Alphabet lens to encourage users to start learning American Sign Language. The new AR lens will teach users to fingerspell their name and practice the ASL alphabet. The lens also includes games that users can play to test their ASL knowledge. The social media company
Twitter will finally let you be excluded from this narrative. The company announced Thursday that it was testing a new way for users to remove themselves from conversations they don’t want to be a part of. The company calls this “unmentioning” and while it’s only a test for now, it’s one many Twitter users weary
Lisa Kaplan Contributor Lisa Kaplan is the founder and CEO of Alethea Group, a technology company that detects and mitigates instances of disinformation, misinformation and social media manipulation on behalf of private and public sector entities. Kaplan was recently recognized as Forbes 30 Under 30 and as one of Washington, D.C.’s most powerful women Lee
There’s coming hard out of the gates with a new company, and then there’s Sweep. The company was founded in 2020, then raised a $22 million Series A round a few months ago, following by a $73 million Series B round announced today. The company swept in with a platform for carbon emissions management. It
Rick Schostek, EVP of American Honda, said it best in a released statement: “Announcing a new battery electric vehicle isn’t exactly headline making news these days.” He’s right. There’s seemingly a new EV everyday (including an electric DeLorean, announced yesterday). But this announcement is different. General Motors and Honda today announced a partnership to co-develop
Gogoro, the company behind Taiwan’s thriving two-wheeler battery swapping ecosystem, is poised to succeed where others have tried and could not — and now it has the cash to do so. On Monday, the company closed its merger with special purpose acquisition company Poema Global and is now listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker
The U.S. government owns about 1,100 charging stations. It may need more than 100,000 charging stations to support widespread EV use in the next decade, according to testimony from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday. The testimony, which was first reported by Reuters, mainly delved into the U.S. Postal Service’s efforts to transition its
Well, the early-bird has left the building and taken substantial savings right along with it. Did you miss out? Don’t despair — we’re still committed to making TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 available and accessible to as many mobility fanatics as possible. How? Listen up. We’ve added two new pass types: Expo Only and Online Only.
We often think of NASA as an agency that looks outward into space, but it’s the agency’s position in space that makes it such a powerful tool for observing the Earth itself. Today NASA announced the results of two space-based studies observing climate change across the planet. The first is a data set from the
Take a shipping container, add a helping of AI and a boat-load of black soldier flies, fold in a small mountain of food waste, sprinkle in $16 million of investment led by Balderton Capital, and call in the Michelin reviewers, because om nom, you’ve got yourself a delicious dish called Better Origin. The company is
Dave Mullen Contributor Dave Mullen is an investor at SVB Capital, where he focuses largely on fintech, proptech and insurtech. Dave was previously an investor with Wells Fargo’s principal investment arm and is currently the proptech vertical lead for the EVCA. More posts by this contributor Fintech founders can learn a lesson about frugality from
It’s 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, and you’re running late for a flight to a corporate conference. While stuck in rush-hour traffic, it occurs to you that you’ve forgotten to book a babysitter for the kids — and find a restaurant for the team outing scheduled toward the end of your trip. Instead of completing
Fashion e-commerce startup, The Folklore Group, has today announced a shift from direct-to-consumer to B2B wholesale against the backdrop of a $1.7 million pre-seed funding, which the startup plans to use to fuel the growth of its new business. The startup’s new wholesale business dubbed The Folklore Connect, will link luxury fashion brands in emerging
If “The Great Resignation” taught us anything, it is that people want to be appreciated, respected and well paid for their work. Staff turnover in restaurants and hospitality has always been an issue, with people leaving at an average rate of 30%. That’s where Landed comes in. The company touts itself as the “first end-to-end
Pam answering the phone at Dunder Mifflin become one of the most iconic refrains of life at The Office, and it’s really no wonder that it did: businesses big and small have long run on communications as played out over PBXs, voice mail, cold and warm calls, customer help lines, and more recently the never-escapable,
Amadeus’ migration to the public cloud will take 3 years Ron Miller 7 hours Public travel systems provider Amadeus opened for business way back in 1987 when four airlines wanted to offer a centralized booking system. Today, the company facilitates booking and inventory management for 216 airlines, as well as hotels, trains, airports, online travel
As we start to see AI advance in business, the ways in which we interact with machines are beginning to change. Companies like Salesforce are looking for new opportunities for AI to have a more direct impact on customers. While using AI to surface the customer most likely to churn or most likely to buy
Lilt, a provider of AI-powered business translation software, today announced that it raised $55 million in a Series C round led by Four Rivers, joined by new investors Sorenson Capital, CLEAR Ventures and Wipro Ventures. The company says that it plans to use the capital to expand its R&D efforts as well as its customer
Airbyte, the well-funded open source data integration platform, today announced that it has acquired Grouparoo, an open source startup that focuses on helping businesses sync data between their data warehouses and cloud-based tools. In many ways, this complements Airbyte’s offering, which focuses on loading data into data warehouses, while Grouparoo then specializes in operationalizing that
Shifting consumer buying behaviors means brands can’t only rely on selling via one channel anymore. For e-commerce and traditional retailers looking at new ways to connect and engage with consumers, Lucky believes its approach enables them to work together to not only achieve that goal, but give consumers a better shopping experience. The 1-year-old company