You may not have heard of Amadeus, but if you’ve taken a trip, you’ve probably interacted with its tech stack. Launched in 1987, the company provides hundreds of transportation and hospitality providers with inventory management and booking services. “In short, it covers just about every aspect of travel IT imaginable,” writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.
The credit-oriented fintech platform Liquidity Group, which funds later-stage technology companies, has announced a new raise of $775 million from private equity house in Apollo and MUFG Bank. In a statement Ron Daniel, Co-Founder and CEO of Liquidity Group said: “The new capital partnership with Apollo and the continued and successful partnership with MUFG is
Two-dimensional virtual event platforms such as Hopin, Cvent and Zoom have become staples of virtual events but these are about consuming content rather than “user activation” for brands. So in the metaverse, brands have turned to platforms like Meta, Sandbox or Decentraland for this kind of interaction. But, again, these are platforms built for consumers,
To many people, e-commerce is synonymous with shopping on Amazon, but the reality is that a retailer has the option to use a bundle of different channels to sell and market products, and many do. Today, a startup called Productsup, which has built a platform that helps retailers navigate that landscape, is announcing $70 million
Financial infrastructure startup Fidel API has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The London-based company provides identity, data and payments products that it says gives developers a way to capture consent permissions and “securely” connect payment cards to a service or application. “With this infrastructure, developers are
VPN usage has surged in the last several years, with growing concerns over data privacy and security — and sometimes completely different motivations like people wanting to access content otherwise blocked in their regions — driving an estimated 30% of all internet consumers globally to use a VPN at some point this year. Now Nord
In the latest spark from its fast evolving tech ecosystem, Spain’s scale-ups are banding together to lobby lawmakers and press the economic case for their high-tech, high-growth business model more broadly. The new lobby group, called EsTech (aka ‘Es’ for España), had its official launch last week — when it unveiled nine founding company members
TikTok has once again delayed the timeline for opening its first data center in the European Union, in Dublin, Ireland — saying the facility is now not expected to be fully operational until next year. The video-sharing social network has been trailing plans to store the data of EU, EEA and U.K. users in the
The political agreement reached late last month between the European Union and the US administration on a new transatlantic data transfers pact which aims to end years of legal uncertainty for businesses exporting data from the bloc is not yet a done deal. The deal in principle faces scrutiny in the coming months once the
Proton, the Geneva, Switzerland-based startup behind the eponymous E2E encrypted webmail service ProtonMail, has acquired French startup SimpleLogin, which offers a freemium, open source service for creating email aliases to let people shield their actual email address when they sign up for digital services. Paris-based SimpleLogin was founded back in 2019 and works as a
A growing number of people are looking for ways to live more sustainably amid increasing concerns over the environment and what we humans keep doing to pollute it. Today, a startup called Grover that has built a business around one aspect of that — enticing people to buy and eventually discard less consumer electronics such
Hulu’s streaming app is the latest to add support for Apple’s SharePlay — Apple’s newer system that allows users to co-watch content, like streaming movies or shows, over FaceTime calls. The update was quietly noted in Hulu’s iOS app update description this week alongside news of a new Live TV feature that will allow users
Global digital payments giant Visa has opened up an innovation studio in Kenya, its first in Africa and sixth globally, after posts in Dubai, London, Miami, San Francisco and Singapore. The studio will bring together developers, Visa’s internal and external clients, and other partners to co-create payment and commerce solutions. “Sub-Saharan Africa is a fast-growing
Noissue, a New Zealand-based packaging platform that offers custom, sustainable packaging to businesses of all sizes, has acquired the team and tools necessary to build microsites and dynamic QR codes. On Wednesday, noissue announced the acquisition of London-based Tapkit, a startup that has worked with brands such as L’Oréal, NYX, Haus, TRIBE and Little Cooks
Spotify’s $90 in-car entertainment system “Car Thing,” which went on sale to the general public in February, is gaining a number of new features. The company announced today it would add one of users’ most-requested features — the ability to add songs and podcasts to a queue — alongside other updates involving voice commands, playlists,
Over the past four months, digital mortgage lender Better.com has conducted a mass layoff not once, but twice. The company also badly botched a mass layoff not once, but twice. First, on December 1, Better.com laid off about 900 employees via a Zoom video call that ended up going viral. It was hardly the first
Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter
Perfect pitch, a singer’s ability to produce any given musical note without a reference tone, is a rare phenomenon — only 1-5 people out of every 10,000 have it. While your odds of creating a perfect pitch deck that captures coveted VC interest aren’t quite that dire, they’re not exactly in your favor, either. Venture
Late-stage SaaS startups may be in the most trouble when it comes to changing valuation marks among technology companies, new data indicates. A report from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) exploring first-quarter software startup trends details that late-stage SaaS valuations in the United States scaled the most rapidly in 2021, closing out the year with the
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. Saying goodbye to Q1 What a week. If you were plugged in to the startup news cycle recently, you’ve been busy. Y Combinator dropped hundreds of new startups
A survey of Y Combinator companies makes it clear that the fintech subsector is far from dead Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 7 hours Given the recent run of concerned headlines that insurtech companies have generated, you’d be forgiven for anticipating that the startup category would find itself in dire straits. Not a bit of it.
Arena founder Paulo Martins grew up in Brazil playing video games, an industry that thrives on building communities among the players. Later, he came to the U.S., where he was an early employee at Hulu, helping the streaming TV service grow to over 7 million subscribers and $1 billion in revenue. When it came time
TechCrunch Live has an exciting slate of episodes scheduled for April. The speakers come from a variety of disciplines, backgrounds and locations. Like always, each episode features an entrepreneur presenting their early pitch deck along with the investor who funded the company. We want to know how the founder hooked the VC, what makes their
Clubhouse is launching a protected profile setting to allow users to only make their full profile available to people they approve as followers, the company announced on Wednesday. The change is being implemented in response to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine in an effort to keep users protected on the platform. “We’re grateful we’ve become
The European Union’s planned risk-based framework for regulating artificial intelligence includes powers for oversight bodies to order the withdrawal of a commercial AI system or require that an AI model be retrained if it’s deemed high risk, according to an analysis of the proposal by a legal expert. That suggests there’s significant enforcement firepower lurking
Grayscale Investments CEO Michael Sonnenshein discusses the outlook for crypto and its oversight with Kailey Leinz and Guy Johnson on “Bloomberg Markets.”
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. A fine day to you, and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, April 1, 2022! It was a slow news day at TC Towers because we double-checked every PR pitch for April
Startups are once again considering layoffs as a way to control cash consumption and attract new capital. News that Fast, a one-click checkout software provider targeting the e-commerce market, is offering sharp staff cuts to investors in hopes of securing new capital is notable, but a single data point. A public database tracking startup layoffs,
Like most smartphone users in India, I use WhatsApp a lot. But I have never sent anyone a voice message — ever. Turns out, others do. WhatsApp said on Wednesday that users on its gigantic messaging app send an average of 7 billion voice messages every day. Communication by the means of voice notes —
The sidewalks along University Avenue in Palo Alto used to be a great place to do business. For decades, there were several blocks where angels and VC partners camped out at café tables, taking pitches between lattes. The pandemic put a stop to that, however. These days, when you have an opportunity to sell an