Last year I covered the launch of Berlin-HQ’d Revent — a new European early-stage with an “impact” focus — it was aimed to launch a €50 million ($60 million) fund to focus on climate tech, health, and well-being, and economic empowerment, backing startups with both “purpose and profit”. It’s now announcing the final close of
Ten game development studios in Africa have come together under one umbrella, the Pan Africa Gaming Group (PAGG), in an effort to unify the continent’s gaming sector, which is currently fragmented. The association is further envisioned to drive the uptake of gaming in the continent, and grow developer talent. The announcement was made today against
Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, February 22, 2022! We are back! Yes, after a lovely long weekend, your entire TechCrunch team is back in the saddle. Which is good because everything appears to be going on at once. So it was perfect that Slack decided that it actually wanted a four-day weekend
Alloy Automation, a Y Combinator graduate focused on connecting different e-commerce tools, announced this morning that it has closed a $20 million Series A led by a16z. The startup characterized the funding event as brisk, a contrast to its 2021 capital event when it was harder for the company to secure funding. TechCrunch covered Alloy’s
After publicly launching in the U.S. this past September, Facebook Reels today is becoming globally available in over 150 countries. The feature, which is a key part of Meta’s response to the TikTok threat, allows creators to share short-form video content on Facebook or cross-post Reels from Instagram in order to reach a broader audience.
The global chat commerce’s total addressable market is worth an estimated $80 billion and is seen as the third big wave of digital commerce after e-commerce and app commerce markets. As the largest digital platform in the world with more users than the internet’s 4.7 billion users, it only makes sense for businesses to communicate
More money for casual job-matching in Europe: Zenjob, a marketplace platform that targets students looking for side jobs in sectors like retail, logistics and hospitality and promises to connect them with employers in need of temporary labor, has closed a $50 million Series D round of funding. It’s just under two years since the Berlin-based
A team at Google is today launching a new product for mobile app developers called Checks which leverages A.I. technology to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, amid a rapidly changing regulatory and policy landscape. The freemium solution will be offered to both Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, who will
Jun.02 — Electronics Art Inc. CEO Andrew Wilson discusses the company’s banner year of 2020 and how the gaming industry has exploded throughout the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. The video game maker is set to debut the latest release of their popular title “Battlefield” and reveal the new cover of “Madden NFL 22” this
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, or Tuesday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week. We are a day late here thanks to the American holiday, which means
New data collected by Crunchbase News indicates that the value of global unicorns has crested the $4 trillion mark. The valuation milestone is notable not merely for its scale, but its relative size. Compared to what? The value of the major tech companies of the West, namely the U.S. Big Five. Once they were known
Luxembourg-based Leko Labs, a construction startup that’s developing sustainable wood-based building materials as an alternative to steel and concrete and applying automation to construction methods, has closed a $21 million Series A round of funding. The raise is led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150 with participation from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Tencent, AMAVI, Rise PropTech
Companies sit on a lot of unstructured data and often don’t have the capabilities to get much out of it. Now imagine having a way to store data and actually be able to ask it questions, for example, “When did ABC Company sign its first contract with us?” or “Show me videos that contain blue
Online language learning continues to be a huge opportunity for startups, with the most engaging experiences meeting a surge of interest from consumers looking for more productivity out of the hours that they spend on their smartphones. In one of the more recent developments, a language learning app called EWA — which has built a
The world’s labs are under pressure to do more tests and process more materials, not just due to COVID but from the growing biotech and drug development sectors — and automation is the sure path forwards. Automata, which got its start making a robotic arm for handling individual tasks, has now raised $50M to automate
Spotify’s oddly-named in-car entertainment system, “Car Thing,” is now available to the general public after initial tests that began in 2019. The now $89.99 device — a $10 increase from its limited public release in October — is largely targeted towards vehicle owners who don’t have a built-in infotainment system offering easy access to Spotify,
MarketForce, the retail B2B and end-to-end distribution platform founded in Kenya, has raised $40 million in Series A funding for its merchant inventory financing and expansion across Africa. MarketForce, which was launched in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda last year after growing beyond Kenya and Nigeria, plans to introduce buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options to help merchants access
Donald Trump’s media group released its TRUTH Social iOS app today in the U.S., but a scan of the app’s API using publicly available tools revealed that it already closed itself to registrations (also, the scan showed that its “proprietary account registration microservice” is named “Pepe,” which is also the name of a meme with
Relocating employees can involve up to 20-30 different complex processes, while many of the support packages on the market can be inflexible and expensive. Plus, relocating services are usually only available to company leaders, not staff. But an even bigger issue looms over companies today: the ‘great resignation’ brought on by the pandemic, as employees
RIP Mark Zuckerberg’s “time well spent“? In a move that appears to coincide with Facebook/Meta reporting slowing growth, photo-sharing app Instagram appears to have quietly removed the ability for mobile users to set a lower daily time limit reminder than 30 minutes. Indeed, the app’s UX design nudges people to choose a three hour ‘limit’
The Netherlands’ competition authority has once again increased a fine levied against Apple for failing to comply with an antitrust order related to payment tech and dating apps. The fifth penalty payment of €5 million issued today means the tech giant is now on the hook for €25M (out of a possible total of €50M)
Jambo, a Congo-based startup building Africa’s web3 user acquisition portal through “learn, play, earn” and democratizing access to crypto-based income-generation opportunities, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Experts say Africa is poised to be disrupted by web3 in a similar fashion that has seen Southeast Asia become one of the best markets for web3.
Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way for companies to raise capital, and investors are taking notice. Groundfloor, the first real estate crowdfunding platform to gain regulatory approval, announced today that it raised its first round of institutional capital since 2015. Brian Dally, a former mobile network exec, and Nick Bhargava, a co-author of the
Volta Trucks — the Swedish electric vehicle startup that believes it can build better urban delivery vehicles and other trucks that are safer and take up a smaller carbon footprint than their gas-guzzling, more clumsy, existing counterparts — has closed a big round of funding to help it through that last mile of work before
Welcome to my new 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 turns into a
Shopify CEO Harley Finkelstein joins Emily Chang on the heels of their earnings. The Amazon rival came in with a successful fourth quarter, beating analyst estimates for revenue and profit and turning the tide after a previous rocky period. Shopify expects revenue growth to be lower as online spending resets post-Covid this year. He speaks
LG’s innovation center — LG Nova among friends — today announced that it has selected the first 50 companies for its Mission for the Future global challenge competition. From 1,300 applicants, the company picked its first cohort to start building opportunities with the startups. Nova itself is a counterpoint to profit-focused corporate venture capital outfits,
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is Saturday, which means it’s not a usual day for us to drop an episode. But what are we if not try-hards at heart? So, we’re back today. What do we have
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. Since launching the venture firm Backstage Capital in 2015, Arlan Hamilton has invested millions in more than 195 companies led by underrepresented founders, from a duo taking on auto insurance to a
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. Oh yeah, y’all, it’s the weekend and it’s a long one here in the United States as we have Monday off. As you read this I am