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 3, 2022! Today we have a few angles on the startup market. The gist is that there are some positive signals to digest,
Dolby Laboratories today announced that it has acquired Millicast, a WebRTC-based developer platform for building ultra-low-latency video streaming experiences, as it works to build out its developer platform. The promise of Millicast, which was founded in 2018, is that it can deliver content across the globe in broadcast quality and with sub-second latency. The company
Sound the horns, unveil the banners, cue the parade. Snap is profitable. And we don’t mean adjusted-EBITDA profitable, adjusted-operating-income profitable, or even the infamous non-GAAP-net-income profitable. It’s real-profit profitable. In the fourth quarter of 2021, Snap reported $1.3 billion in revenue (up 42% year over year), an operating loss of $25.1 million, and GAAP net
With toilet paper and kitchen rolls in its product portfolio for now, and a lot more coming down the pipe, Cloud Paper is a sustainable, bamboo-based alternative to toilet paper made from whatever toilet paper is usually made from. The company raised a $5m round from an impressive cadre of investors to expand its product
Alon Alroy Contributor Alon Alroy is the co-founder, CMO and CCO of Bizzabo, an event technology platform for hybrid, virtual and in-person events. We’ve been living in a world required to pivot from business-as-usual in person to Zoom meetings, and now to a mix of both. Many companies are continuing to consider various strategies to
With the so-called “Great resignation” many frontline workers (nurses, truck drivers etc) are re-assessing their lives in the wake of the pandemic, while older companies are struggling with this new world order. Employees also also now demanding better communication, so appy-fying those comms makes sense. France-based Snapshift started out as a staff management web solution
A huge amount of energy use on our planet goes toward creating heat, and not only that, but a large amount of that energy is wasted and byproducts like CO2 blasted into the atmosphere. Modern Electron could change that with a new system that captures the emissions and produces clean hydrogen, right inside a home
Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor A lean startup’s growth marketing tech stack 5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make Someone clicks your ad on Facebook, and they choose to purchase
Zero Grocery is on a mission to deliver your groceries in two hours and in a way that doesn’t hurt the planet. The plastic-free grocery, home and personal care delivery startup is one of the companies we featured two years ago when discussing venture capital interest in businesses focused on reducing waste. At the time,
It’s that old chestnut: You are a fancy-pants brand wanting to make a product that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside because you only use fair-trade, sustainably grown ingredients and materials, but you don’t know where to turn. Next thing you know, Novi comes bursting through the wall holding a freshly squeezed pitcher
Google today announced a new version of Workspace, the company’s productivity service that you probably still refer to as G Suite. With the new — and free — Google Workspace Essentials plan, Google wants to bring more business users onto the platform by offering them the basic Workspace productivity tools — with the exception of
Studytube, a Dutch online learning platform, has acquired Springest, a European training-booking marketplace. Simultaneously it’s closed a $30 million Series B investment round led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and existing investor Verdane Capital. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Studytube offers mid-sized and large enterprises an online learning and development platform through a
A true “metaverse” may not yet exist, but that hasn’t stopped marketers from adopting the buzzword to promote their apps and games on mobile app stores. According to new data shared today by Sensor Tower, there are now 552 mobile apps that include the term “metaverse” in their apps’ titles or descriptions, in hopes of
Video is the beating heart of the most popular content online these days, and it’s not just because it’s entertaining. It’s also because of how accessible it is: it’s become incredibly easy for anyone, whether you’re technical or not, to make, post or watch video. Today, a London-based startup called Veed that’s built an online-only,
In early morning trading today, shares of PayPal are off around 25% following the company’s earnings report yesterday evening. Investors did not like what the company had on offer. TechCrunch focuses on private companies and private markets. But at times, public companies can help us better understand what is going on in larger markets where
Founded by alums of Hinge and Bumble, Sunroom is a creator platform that throws out the stuff that makes mainstream social media apps such a hostile place for women. And, ideally, it wants to help them get paid in the process. The app was co-founded by Lucy Mort, former design director at Hinge, and Michelle
More than 80% of the world’s workforce, some 2.7 billion people, do not spend their days in front of computers, and that has led to a strong disparity when it comes to technology, with some 1% of IT investment targeting them as users. That’s been changing very rapidly with the rise of smartphones and apps,
With startups getting into nuclear technology, it’s no surprise to see more fund-raising happening. Now, Kyoto Fusioneering, a fusion energy startup based out of Japan but increasingly expanding abroad, has raised 1.33 billion yen (US$ 11.7 million) in its latest round of funding. The company has now raised 1.67 billion yen (US$ 14.7 million) to
Scale AI’s path to becoming a $7.3 billion company was paved in real data from images, text, voice and video. Now, it is using that foundation to get into the synthetic data game, one of the hotter and emerging categories in AI. They announced Wednesday an early access program to Scale Synthetic, a product that
Waldo has raised $15 million for its ‘no code’ automated testing tool. Mobile development teams using Waldo can set up tests without writing a line of scripting code. It then seamlessly integrates in your continuous integration (CI) pipeline. Joshua Zelman from Insight Partners is leading today’s Series A round with participation from Matrix Partners and
The biggest social network in the world isn’t getting any bigger. Meta posted its fourth quarter earnings Wednesday, sharing financials that disappointed Wall Street enough to send its stock into a nose dive. Shares of the company, still trading under the ticker symbol FB for now, plunged 20% as the numbers hit. While Meta’s last
Google’s public cloud has been chasing competing services from Amazon and Microsoft for so long, you might think it would be getting winded. But the critical Alphabet division keeps on keeping on, yesterday reporting revenues of more than $5.5 billion for the fourth quarter. That was the good news. The bad news was that Google
E-commerce has continued to boom in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but running an e-commerce business has also become significantly more chaotic, with unpredictable supply chains, logistics hiccups, and overall higher costs upending even the best-laid plans. To underscore the demand for solutions to address this, today a startup called Wayflyer — which has
Though the Covid-19 pandemic almost immediately devasted the business of travel booking startup Headout, the company has been able to return to growth as domestic travel rebounded in recent months. The service, which helps consumers book tours, events, and other experiences and activities in cities around the world, delivered 800% growth since January 2021 by
Sergiu Matei Contributor Sergiu Matei is the founder of Index, a platform that helps teams find and hire world-class remote software developers and be globally compliant from the get-go. More posts by this contributor 3 ways to recruit engineers who fly under LinkedIn’s radar The internet is undergoing a drastic facelift thanks to surging interest
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 our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex brought on the Most Online™ reporter at TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling
Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has come a long from being run out of a garage in Phoenix to now a 120-person company, valued at $1.5 billion, that’s expected to grow to over 300 people by year-end as its business explodes. To aid on that front, Whatnot is making two key hires, one of which involves
Vegetable oils like canola and palm oil have become a major part of our diet, whether we like it or not, and while they’re useful substances, they’re not exactly good for you and are a major cause of deforestation. Zero Acre Farms is a new company aiming to provide a improved alternative, produced by microorganisms
Traditionally, a data lake was a place to store amorphous unstructured data, while a data warehouse was where you put very structured data like credit card information. That began changing in recent years as companies saw a need to merge the two concepts and the lakehouse idea — combining the power of the data lake
A piece of compliance theatre that the behavioral ad industry has for years passed off as “a cross-industry best practice standard” — claiming the consent management platform allowed advertisers to keep tracking and surveilling European Internet users without having to worry about pesky EU privacy laws — has today been confirmed to breach the bloc’s