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
Sixth Street Chief Science Adviser and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, co-founder of the CRISPR genome editing technology 10 years ago, and Sixth Street Vice Chairman and Partner R. Martin Chavez join Emily Chang to discuss the future of CRISPR and its potential for commercialization.
Blair Silverberg Contributor Blair Silverberg is co-founder and CEO of Hum Capital, a financial services company using technology to accelerate the fundraising process. More posts by this contributor Know your startup’s value so you can communicate it to investors For companies raising capital in the coming year, news of rising interest rates, market volatility and
Investor attention is focused on event companies lately, especially as pandemic restrictions ease around the world and events become in-person again. Just this year, we’ve seen companies like EventX, Twine, Vendelux and Zuddl announce either funding or strategic moves that enable them to vie for attendee attention. It’s not just a matter of going to
Voila, a startup building infrastructure for social commerce, is bringing concepts from China’s e-commerce market to the U.S. The company offers an alternative to the “link in bio” solutions used today by creators, like Linktree and Beacons, which direct followers to creators’ social profiles, personal websites, and other recommendations. Instead of a link list or
Vanilla is indeed “the world’s most popular flavor.” However, despite its popularity, its production is so complex that many people aren’t often getting the real thing, but a synthetic version of the flavoring. About 70% of the vanilla we consume is grown in Madagascar, and if you saw the weather news lately, the area was
Running a streaming media service requires a complex combination of technologies that can be difficult for even large companies to manage on their own. The Salesforce and AWS media industry groups have come together in an attempt to simplify that process by offering a solution that combines an infrastructure solution from AWS and marketing and
French startup Multis has raised a $7 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Originally designed as a neobank for companies working with cryptocurrencies, the company has slightly altered its product vision. It now intends to offer the software layer that helps web3 organizations manage their crypto finances. Other investors in the round include Long
David Teten Contributor More posts by this contributor What are the ‘jobs to be done’ of an investment manager? The macro trends forcing change on the investment management industry Akshat Dixit Contributor The easiest way to work with and for VC funds is to become a scout, getting compensated for sourcing investments. But how do
Nomad, a marketplace that aims to provide small-time rental property owners with “guaranteed rent,” has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley Bank Capital. The raise comes just six months after the Denver-based startup raised about $5 million in a seed round of funding. Nomad’s co-founders PJ O’Neil and
Microsoft is making a handful of changes to AltspaceVR to combat harassment within the virtual reality app. As of today, the company has removed the Campfire, News and Entertainment Commons social spaces. Those were hubs where AltspaceVR users could freely gather and talk to one another. But that same freedom also meant harassment was an