Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman joins Emily Chang to talk about mortgage rates in the U.S. inching closer to 4% and its impact on the housing market. He also shares his insight on where real estate investors are buying homes in the U.S. and how out-of-towners with big budgets are fueling rapid price growth in popular
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 team rethinking how we virtually learn. Despite the breadth in the business, Hamilton says she is consistently asked two questions by her portfolio
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week, Natasha and Alex and Mary Ann got together with Chris and Grace to rock our regular Friday news roundup. This time, however, with extra zip, as we’re staring down a long weekend that,
Instrumental was launched by two former Apple mechanical engineers in 2015. Having worked on products like the iPod and Apple Watch for the previous six years, they were intimately familiar with the process for checking on manufacturing quality: You got on a plane to Asia and took a look for yourself. CEO and co-founder Anna-Katrina
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, February 18, 2022! First, a note that much of TechCrunch is off Monday for a U.S. holiday, so some regular stuff might land a
ICON, which creates homes using 3D printing, has raised an additional $185 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The financing is said to be an extension of ICON’s $207 million Series B that was announced last August. While the Austin-based company confirmed the latest raise, it declined to
Retailers have traditionally onboarded their drop-ship, marketplace and wholesale suppliers using electronic data interchange (EDI), which is a fancy way of saying information that is sent from one company to another electronically. However, setting up this process can take months, time most retailers don’t have if they want to get ahead in Amazon’s world. In
Delivery has become one of the fastest growing verticals for robotics investments amid pandemic-related shutdowns. There’s been plenty of interest in the category over the years, but Covid-19 has accelerated interest on all sides of the equation. Among this category, however, Agility stands out – in more ways than one. Born out of research from
News that Databricks crossed the $800 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold last year was impressive, but more notable was its growth rate of greater than 80% during the same period. That’s a wild expansion pace for a company of Databricks’ size, and it backed up its CEO’s general vibe that his team could weather
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has confirmed to TechCrunch that Jeren A. Miles, who had been a manager of global community development, is no longer employed by the company after a video went viral on YouTube, which was then reposted on Reddit and other sites, featuring him in a sting operation conducted by amateurs
Quick pop quiz: Is it better to recycle your cardboard boxes, or use a sturdier packaging bag that can be used again and again until it meets its maker again? Returnity‘s bet is the latter, and the company just raised $3.1 million from Brand Foundry Ventures to continue the work the company has been doing
The public markets may have cooled on fintechs in recent months, but for entrepreneurs who are still considering starting up, “outlook good,” says the Magic 8 Ball. In 2021, one-third of all unicorns created were fintech companies: investor FOMO, increased use of digital payments, BNPL, and other financial services created a gravitational field that attracted
I fully confess I was a skeptic when Samsung unveiled the first Note. And I certainly wasn’t alone among the crowd at the Messe Berlin that IFA. The 5.3-inch display was unimaginably large in a year when the average screen measured a hair over 3.5 inches. The stylus graced the phone like a vestigial organ
Amanda Milligan Contributor Amanda Milligan is head of marketing at Stacker Studio, a newsroom and newswire that partners with brands to create and distribute content to high-quality news publications, earning brand authority and links. More posts by this contributor 3 strategies for elevating brand authority in 2021 6 reasons why reporters aren’t interested in your
The UK’s cost of living crisis has been making grim headlines for months — with no respite in sight. Just this week, newspapers reported that inflation had hit 5.5%, a 30-year high, further pushing up prices for everyday essentials like food. Worse is yet to come as an energy price cap will end in April,
Snapchat is rolling out a new buddy system-like feature that will allow users to share their real-time location for 15 minutes or a few hours with a friend, the company announced on Friday. The new global feature is meant to help users look out for their friends as they continue to resume their social life,
In the past year, Kubernetes adoption exploded, with over 5.6 million developers using the cloud-native tools — an increase of 67% from the year prior. For those who need a refresher on Kubernetes, it is an open source container project created by Google in 2014 to automate, monitor and run applications. Kubernetes is one of
Further evidence of the booming Portuguese tech ecosystem is emerging today with the news that venture capital firm Shilling is topping-up its ‘Founders Fund’ to €52 million ($59M), with €22M ($23M) more than the primary announcement last April. Significantly for Europe where often VC funds are backed by the sometimes constraining European Investment Fund, this
Powered by 25,000 motorcycle taxis at the start of 2020, Safeboda was at its peak, ferrying thousands of pillion passengers in cities across Uganda and Nigeria. And then the covid pandemic hit, throwing everything into a spin. Containment measures like work from home directives meant a slump in business, which was worsened by the lockdowns,
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, February 17, 2022! Heading into a long weekend here in the United States, you might think that the news is slowing down but, nope.
One way to survive a valuations trough is to grow like hell Alex Wilhelm 11 hours Big-data analytics unicorn Databricks is back in the news, disclosing a new revenue figure and its 2021 growth rate. TechCrunch has been tracking the company for years, curious about its growth and what its rising worth said about its
Take a look at most subscription-based SaaS pricing strategies and they will often have a free version for a certain number of seats, a pro version for a larger set of seats and an enterprise version for large companies. But what about everything in between — the company that is just above the 10-seat threshold
What’s the next step beyond Zoom calls and FaceTime? How about beaming yourself from one device to another in real-time using augmented reality? That’s the premise behind a startup called Beem, which is today announcing its first consumer app, $4 million in seed funding, and its longer-term plan to become a communications technology for the
Along comes Metriport, which aggregates all of your quantified-self data in one place, and adds clever features like mood tracking, medicine tracking and journaling. All your data lives locally on your device to protect your privacy, and the app can find correlations in your data to help you become a better you. Counting calories, summing
Imagine staying at an AirBnb and becoming so attached to a particular chair or tea set that you want to buy it. Instead of asking the property owner where it’s from and tracking it down, Minoan Experience let you order the product by scanning a QR code. Then it’s delivered to your home in a
Snapchat users will be able to change their usernames later this month, the company announced on Thursday. The username change won’t impact aspects of users’ accounts, such as their friend lists, Snap codes, Snap scores, memories, etc. Snap says all iOS and Android users globally will be able to change their usernames starting February 23rd.
Trying to deal with the huge amount of data associated with how companies are going to transition to a ‘net zero’ economy is an uphill task. The interface of numbers would tax even the geekiest of CEOs. What if it could all be rendered visually, but also accurately? That’s the germ of the idea behind
Voltron Data was launched last year by former employees from NVidia, Ursa Computing, BlazingSQL and the co-founder of Apache Arrow. The group came together to build a company on top of Arrow to help companies that don’t want to deal with the headaches of managing an open source project on their own. Voltron Data co-founder
‘Embedded commerce’ started with things like PayPal and has evolved with products like Stripe, many years later. But ‘embedded finance’ is appearing as a new wave in FinTech, with the likes of Contis, Solaris, Swan, and Stripe Treasury (not yet live in the EU). Indeed, you may recall that Angela Strange (of a16z) made the
Those Super Bowl ad spots paid off for a number of tech companies not just in terms of exposure, but also app installs, a new report indicates. But Coinbase’s viral ad — which just bounced a QR code around on a black screen like the old DVD screensaver — outperformed the group, with installs jumping