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 January 20, 2022! Today’s theme is more. Sure, the creator economy grew last year, but this year more major platforms are working to help power
While buy now, pay later startups have largely focused on the consumer, a growing group of them are now focusing on the B2B space. The premise behind that is that after all, businesses need more flexible payment options, too. For example, in December, Affirm spinout Resolve, which specializes in “buy now, pay later” capabilities for
A major Senate bill that would prevent tech companies from giving preference to their own products and services just passed a significant hurdle in Congress, bringing it one step closer to becoming law. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted today on the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, moving the prominent antitrust bill toward a vote
Jamil Wyne Contributor Jamil Wyne is an advisor, investor and author focusing on entrepreneurship, technology and economic development in emerging markets. He has worked with the World Bank, IFC, UN, Clean Energy Venture Group, Schmidt Futures, Ashoka, and other organizations. Abrar Chaudhury Contributor Dr. Abrar Chaudhury is a climate finance research fellow at Oxford Said
Mustafa Suleyman has been working in artificial intelligence for 12 years, trying to figure out how to use machine learning systems and AI to do important things in the work and have impact at scale. “And over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to be at the forefront of a lot of cutting-edge applications of
The European Parliament has definitively backed major limits on behavioral advertising during a plenary vote on amendments to the pan-EU Digital Services Act (DSA). The move looks set to crank up pressure on Big Tech business models that rely on pervasive tracking and profiling of users to target ads — with adtech duopoly Facebook and
Last summer, Samsung announced that – for the first time in a decade – it wouldn’t be releasing a new Note. The future of the well-loved phablet was a big, open question, as the hardware giant acknowledged a shift in focus to foldables, a form factor it felt was finally ready for a truly mainstream
Sexual health isn’t the taboo it once was, but that doesn’t mean everything is all roses and unicorns in the land of STI testing. TBD Health is taking a fresh new approach with at-home testing made available for vagina-havers. The company has been offering a five-panel “check yourself out” kit for at-home testing, and recently
Frederik Mijnhardt Contributor Frederik Mijnhardt is the CEO of Secfi, an equity planning platform for startup executives and employees. Last year set a new record for public exits, with more than 844 U.S. companies going public via an initial public offering (IPO), a direct listing, or through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). That’s 105%
TikTok is testing support for paid subscriptions, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. As first reported by The Information, the popular short-form video app is exploring the option for creators to charge subscriptions for their content. The feature is part of a limited test for the time being and is not broadly available. TikTok
Prophecy, a low-code platform for data engineering, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors SignalFire and Berkeley Skydeck as well as new investor Dig Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $31 million. At the core of the
Berlin-based Cherry Ventures has launched its fourth fund, a €300 million ($340 million) early-stage tech fund. The Cherry IV fund will also feature a dedicated crypto and web3 strategy, building off Cherry’s existing portfolio in the space. Cherry’s portfolio includes unicorns Flink and SellerX, Infarm, as well as AUTO1 Group, FlixBus, flaschenpost, Forto, Xometry and
Tech sees differently, and can fuse multiple types of data we can’t even perceive: lidar, IR, ultrasonic, and so on. Metalenz, maker of highly compact “2D” cameras for advanced sensing, hopes to bring polarized light into the mix for security and safety with its PolarEyes tech. Polarization isn’t a quality of light that’s often paid
Greenlabs, a South Korean agtech startup, announced this week it has closed a $140 million Series C led by BlueRun Ventures, with participation from Skylake Incuvest and SK Square. The startup plans to use the Series C, which brings its total raised to $170 million to date, to expedite its global expansion, make acquisitions and
Plaid, a fintech unicorn known for its APIs that connect consumer bank accounts to financial applications, announced today that it is buying Cognito. The price is around $250 million, paid in a blend of cash and stock TechCrunch understands, though we couldn’t suss out the exact mix of each. The deal highlights where Plaid is
User onboarding has been a longstanding and persistent challenge in the world of apps. Developers grapple with design and technical constraints; publishers and users might have different priorities when it comes to engaging with a service; the content of those services is changing all the time; and perhaps most of all, people are all different
By adding some electrodes and some electronics to your earbuds, Wisear can make your music experience a lot more hands-free than before. Bite down on your own teeth twice to pause a track, or three times to skip to the next tune — without making a noise, hand gesture or much visible movement at all,
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 January 19, 2022! What a news roundup we have for you today: China’s changing venture landscape, the power of passwords, no-code startups, and why women
A SaladStop worker uses StaffAny to clock in StaffAny, a management platform for SMEs with shift workers, has raised a $3.4 million Series A led by GGV Capital. The round included participation from East Ventures, FreakOut Shinsei Fund, Far East Ventures, Farquhar Venture Capital and angel investors including Allen Shim, former CFO of Slack. The
What a roller coaster day for China’s tech industry. TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has dissolved its strategic investment team, sending worrying messages to other internet giants that have expanded aggressively by investing in other companies. At the beginning of this year, ByteDance reviewed its “businesses’ needs” and decided to “reduce investments in areas that are
Nowsta attracted venture capital for its approach to help employers better engage with their hourly workforces in this increasingly hybrid work environment. The company announced today $41 million in Series B funding in a round led by GreatPoint Ventures that brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $59 million. Joining GreatPoint in the
As the legal uncertainty in Europe clouding use of US cloud services cranks up, Google has responded by firing up its lobbying engines to call for US and European lawmakers to get a move on and come up a new rubberstamp to grease transatlantic data flows as usual as the bloc’s regulators finally start to
Australian user research software company Dovetail announced today that it has closed a $63 million Series A led by Accel. The company has now raised just over $70 million in total, and it added its new capital at a valuation that it describes as “north” of $700 million. As you can tell by the numbers,
The global startup fundraising boom has lifted nearly every sector you can name: Edtech took off during the pandemic, software in general got a lift, and even more risky and long-term wagers like space tech and biotech are seemingly doing well in today’s risk-on startup fundraising market. But no single category or niche in startup
Instagram is giving creators more ways to make money with today’s launch of Instagram Subscriptions. The feature, which was spotted hitting the App Store back in November, is now officially in early testing with a small group of U.S. creators who will be able to offer their followers paid access to exclusive Instagram Live videos
Even though consumer gaming constitutes a small fraction of its overall business, Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of its all-cash $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard proves that the technology corporation takes the sector plenty seriously. It is easy to think that Microsoft should have invested the money into other, perhaps more lucrative businesses in its
There are many ways of spinning up a startup, but it takes a particularly brave set of founders to take on a deeply entrenched industry with a small number of incumbents who have the market all sown up. You’d have to be a special flavor of bold to take on internet search for example —
Carry1st, a South African publisher of social games and interactive content across Africa, has raised a $20 million Series A extension led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This is a16z’s first investment in an Africa-headquartered company (the firm has previously invested in Branch and Zipline, companies with some operations in Africa but headquartered in the U.S).
Wrangle raised $2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding to advance its technology that automates workflows, approvals and tickets so that a company can track work and provide call-to-action tasks within chat platforms like Slack. Bloomberg Beta and Eniac Ventures co-led the investment, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Hustle Fund, TDF Ventures and more
Pyxis One, now Pixis, closed on $100 million in Series C funding to continue developing what it touts as “the world’s only contextual codeless AI infrastructure for complete marketing optimization.” SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the round and was joined by new investor General Atlantic, and existing investors Celesta Capital, Premji Invest and Chiratae Ventures.