Singapore-headquartered esports startup Ampverse has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Falcon Capital. The company says this is the largest Series A raised by an esports organization in Southeast Asia, based on data from PitchBook and other third-party platforms. The round will be used to expand in Indonesia and the Philippines, acquire
Instagram is testing a new feature that will make it easier for users to discover and support social causes directly through hashtags, the company announced on Monday. Now, when you search for specific hashtags associated with certain social movements, you’ll have the option to support them through new options. Once you get get to a
The lowly breaker panel has been around for a century without getting much love, and along comes Span. The company is making a compelling bid for better, smarter electrical panels, and just got a $90 million top-up to continue its evolution. The company is solving the challenges of electrification and micro-grid balancing, ensuring that the
Hello and welcome back to Found, the podcasts where we tell the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Jordan talked with Laura Crabtree, the co-founder and CEO of Space SaaS company, Epsilon3 which helps companies run their complex engineering, testing, and operational procedures. Here’s a sneek peak into what they get into in
Sourceful, an Index Ventures backed supply chain transparency startup, has fast-fuelled with a $20 million Series A around half a year after it announced a $12.2M seed round. The latest raise is once again led by Index, with Coatue and Eka Ventures also participating. The 2020-founded startup works with brands to shrink the environmental damage
Apple’s latest earnings report found the hardware giant exceeding expectations amid the ongoing chip shortage. All told, the company marked a 9% growth in iPhone sales, as most of the rest of the market contracted. When it comes to navigating the supply chain, there’s a lot to be said for the leverage that comes with
Evaluating and keeping an eye on the suppliers to your business is crucial, and fantastically complicated. Contingent leaps to the rescue, armed with a freshly printed $8.2 million check from investors. The SaaS platform helps companies procure more strategically and better manage supply chain risk and compliance. “The typical questionnaire process to onboard suppliers is
We know that running a company is hectic, so we are giving Austin founders a couple extra days to apply to pitch at TechCrunch Live on April 6 at 11:30 am PT / 2:30 pm ET. The Austin tech scene is thriving and we are here for it. In addition to great panels, we also
Elon Musk tweeted this weekend that he is “giving serious thought” to building his own social media platform. “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” the billionaire serial entrepreneur who is CEO of Tesla and Space X tweeted. “What should be
Mobility mavens, do you have your sights set on attending TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 but buying your pass keeps slipping down your to-do list? Well, listen up. This is the last week that you can save a very tidy $300 on the price of admission. Early-bird pricing disappears promptly at 11:59 p.m. (PT) on Friday,
Erol Toker Contributor Erol Toker is the CEO/founder of Truly.co, a Salesforce native bot platform bringing together AI, no-code rulesets and automation workers in highly customizable ways. The media is abuzz with articles telling us how to improve B2B sales, but at the same time, we also see headlines like “The end of B2B sales.”
The drip-feed of penalty fines for Apple in the Netherlands after an antitrust order about payment tech for dating apps has hit the maximum possible (for now) — reaching €50 million (~$55M) after the regulator issued a tenth consecutive weekly penalty of €5M for ongoing non-compliance. But the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) is
Figuring out what’s going on in the brain is generally considered to be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible. One major challenge is that the best ways to do so are room-sized machines relegated to hospitals — but brain.space is hoping that its portable, powerful, and most importantly user-friendly EEG helmet (plus $8.5M in funding)
Spotify acquired podcast discovery platform Podz last summer for roughly $49.4 million, per a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, to help accelerate the streamer’s extensive investments in podcasts. Now, Spotify is testing a feature that leverages the startup’s technology to help users find new podcasts they may like, the company confirmed. Podz had originally attempted
Football or soccer, the latter commonly used in the US, is the most popular and watched sport globally with over five billion football fans according to its apex governing body, FIFA. While the World Cup, its pinnacle event of football and arguably the world’s most popular sporting event, shows the popularity of the sport in
Zepto, an Australian real-time account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments platform, said Monday it has raised a $25 million AUD Series A (about 18.8 million USD) co-led by AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners. The instant payment platform lets merchants make, manage and receive secure payments by connecting directly from the payer’s bank to a merchant’s bank. The
The Family co-founder and CEO Alice Zagury has announced in a blog post that the French startup accelerator is suing Oussama Ammar for multiple claims — breach of trust, forgery and use of forgery. More specifically, Capital first reported that The Family suspects Ammar of diverting €3 million that were supposed to be invested in several
It’s consolidation time in the freelancer marketplace industry. French startup Malt is acquiring Comatch, a competing marketplace focused on consultants and industry experts. Comatch originally started in Germany, which means that Malt is also doubling down on the German market with this acquisition. Terms of the deal are undisclosed but it involves a mix of
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 on May 1,
Pomp Investments Owner and Investor Anthony Pompliano joins Emily Chang and Bloomberg’s Sonali Basak to talk about Bitcoin’s latest market moves, his thoughts on Bored Ape Yacht Club’s latest funding round and Miami’s tech and crypto scene.
Bias alert: I am writing to you from my home office Alex Wilhelm 9 hours Firstbase announced a Series B round of funding today, led by Kleiner Perkins. TechCrunch covered the company’s Series A one year ago, when the world’s remote work shift was fully underway. Now in a more hybrid world, with corporations large
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. Welcome to the weekend! We have a lot of ground to cover today, so pour some coffee, settle in, and roll with me. The great selloff? Remember when Amplitude
It’s getting harder these days to get your buyer’s attention. It used to be that you paid for some ads and threw up some blog posts and you were pretty much good to go, but as these channels become less effective, SaaS companies are looking to more sophisticated kinds of media production to reach their
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
Alexandre Robicquet Contributor Alexandre Robicquet is co-founder and CEO of Crossing Minds, an AI-powered recommendation platform for e-commerce and content. An experienced Stanford AI scholar, he holds three Master’s degrees in mathematics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Four years ago, my team set an ambitious goal: build the smartest recommendation platform on the market. Since
Infrastructure startups continue to attract venture dollars across the globe, especially in the case of payments infrastructure providers. No-code too also remains a draw. A startup that is a blend of the two can be found in Bogota, Colombia-based Simetrik, which just raised $20 million in a Series A funding round at a valuation “north
In a previous era, startups that gained influence with CIOs could skate through the procurement process and start planning seminars for new customers as soon as contracts were finalized. Today, a decade or more into the End User Era, consumers have become the tail that wags the dog. Product-led growth models have been widely embraced:
The European Union has just announced reaching an agreement in principle with the US on a revived transatlantic data flows deal — potentially signalling an end to the many months of legal uncertainty that has dogged cloud services after a landmark court ruling in July 2020 which struck down the EU-US Privacy Shield. “We have
Lost-item tracker and AirTag competitor Tile is today introducing its first anti-stalking safety feature, called “Scan and Secure.” The technology was first announced in October with a promised arrival date of sometime in early 2022. Using Tile’s mobile app, users will now be able to scan for unknown Tiles or Tile-enabled devices that may be
Tesla officially opened its plant outside Berlin on Tuesday and rolled out 30 Model Ys to customers. CEO Elon Musk followed through on his promise to dance as he did when Tesla opened its Shanghai factory two years ago. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was on hand for the festivities.