Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. We’re getting back up to full speed this week, so Mary Ann and Alex along with Grace behind the scenes took on our Friday show. Next week Natasha and Chris are back, and
Twitter has been working on Spaces Recordings, a feature that will let hosts share tweets with audio recordings of past Spaces. Now, when hosts share the recordings, they’re able to see how many listeners joined live, as well as how many people replayed the recording after the fact. we’ve been working on Spaces Recordings and
Line is a regular staple at CES, showing off its high-end milled-aluminium docking stations. This year, the company is back in Las Vegas with an accessory aimed squarely at the gamers among us. Line Frzr is a thermoelectric active cooling device that pre-cools the air before it goes into your gaming laptop. Traditional laptop cooling
Sowmyanarayan Raghunathan Contributor Sowmyanarayan Raghunathan is the VP of Engineering at Talentica Software and an NIT Surat alumnus. He has helped over 50 early and growth-stage startups fulfill their engineering needs and stay ahead of the curve in the last 17 years. In 1992, Ward Cunningham coined the metaphor “technical debt” to highlight how businesses
Update: Tech stocks have given up all gains since this post went up, with both the Nasdaq and the basket of software stocks we track in the red. From a slightly later perspective, concern about near full-employment and resulting rising interest rates appears to have won the in-market sentiment battle. The relationship between economic news
The conservative social media platform Parler has raised $20 million in funding, according to an SEC filing that was signed and submitted on January 6, the anniversary of last year’s domestic attack on the Capitol. The app, which claims to have 16 million-plus registered users, describes its mission as one focusing on protecting “against the authoritarian
IBM could be looking to sell the Watson Health division for a mere $1 billion, according to an Axios report. The question is why is IBM running away from the healthcare vertical just as it seems to be heating up, and for such a low price? Just last month, Oracle spent $28 billion to buy
Mosquitos kill more people than any other creature in the world, and there’s no shortage of potential tech solutions. One such solution comes from Bzigo, which markets a device that finds mosquitos in your home, points at them with a laser and can notify you on your phone when a mozzy is buzzing about. Walking
Miguel Fernandez Contributor Miguel Fernandez is CEO and co-founder of Capchase. He is passionate about changing working capital dynamics to make it the main source of cash for tech companies. Launching a business is hard enough, but scaling it to a successful and lucrative exit is even more difficult. Securing early-stage venture financing is usually
Data privacy is top of mind for online sellers, and for good reason: Regulators in China, Europe and North America are taking an interest, and iOS 14.5 allowed many consumers to disable data tracking, with negative consequences for companies that relied on Facebook’s granular ad targeting. Bearing those factors and others in mind, Ben Parr,
Meta, formerly Facebook, is tinkering around with how it tells users about their privacy options. The company has switched up where this information lives and how it’s explained a number of times over the years and now appears to be centralizing some privacy FAQs and controls in one place across its family of apps. The
In December 2014 I wrote a post titled Finding the elusive big wisdom in big data. We have made big advances since then in storing, processing and generally handling large volumes of data in a digital context, but humans still have trouble when it comes to reliably finding relevant nuggets that can improve business outcomes.
Long gone are the days when CES actually stood for “Consumer Electronics Show” — the CTA has seen to that in its various small print. I recommend you check out our recent best of CES 2012 story for a look back on the days when things like smartphones took center stage at the event. Mobile
As 2021 wound down, The Exchange wanted to dig into what might happen if the startup music stopped playing. So we got veteran venture capitalist Matt Murphy on the phone to talk it over. Murphy started his career at Sun Microsystems back in the mid-90s, joining venture shop Kleiner Perkins in 1999, where he stayed
This morning private-market powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz announced that it has closed $9 billion in new capital for its venture capital, growth-stage, and biotech-focused vehicles. The firm, better known by the moniker a16z, also raised a $2.2 billion crypto-focused fund last year. The collection of fundraises by the firm highlight the rising size of private-market investing
Founder Alán Jaime Misrahi grew up devoted to soccer, eventually playing in Mexico’s third division. While he didn’t necessarily make it to the “big leagues” playing the sport, his new company Draftea aims to win over the 350 million sports fans in Latin America, Jaime Misrahi told TechCrunch in an interview. Draftea, which calls itself
US medical device maker, Abbott, is moving into making general purpose consumer biosensing wearables. The company has been making continuous glucose monitor (CGM) hardware for diabetes management for years (since 2014) — but in a healthtech keynote at CES yesterday, Abbott’s chairman and CEO, Robert B Ford, announced it’s developing a new line of consumer
Age-tech startups at this year’s CES demonstrated the potential breadth of the sector. If tech can help an older person live more comfortably, it can also help out a lot of other people. After all, the usefulness of things like mobility aids, health monitoring platforms and long-term financial planning aren’t limited to the elderly. Yesterday,
Curtis Townshend Contributor Software businesses are setting new heights for fundraising nearly every day. Transmit Security broke records last summer with their $543 million Series A, and in Q3 2021, $26.4 billion was invested in North American early stage startups, compared with $12.1 billion a year earlier. There have been warnings that these landmark fundraises
Prerna Gupta Contributor Prerna Gupta has launched mobile entertainment apps, like Hooked and Smule, reaching over a billion people. She is currently working on a stealth project in the NFT space. As the debates on Twitter rage on, most tech founders and VCs have by now chosen a side: Web 2.0 or web3. Proponents of
Miro is indeed still in the right place at the right time. With remote work continuing to rise, or a hybrid of that and in-person, the online workspace company finds itself with 30 million users and counts nearly all of the Fortune 100 companies as clients. And now today, the company announced its largest round
As a journalist and investor, I’m always a little suspicious of single-product, super-niche companies; there are just so many things that can go wrong, and one of the ways that direct-to-consumer brands do well is having the ability to cross-sell to its customers. Morphée was one of those brands, starting with its frankly ludicrously over-designed
Spotify is today introducing a new ad format aimed at podcasters which it’s calling “Call-to-Action Cards” — or CTA cards, for short. The feature, which is powered by Spotify’s streaming ad insertion technology, will display a visual ad in the Spotify app when the audio ad begins to play. The cards can be customized by
Rebecca Lynn Contributor More posts by this contributor Startups And The Un-Banking Of America Marketing makes or breaks a company. When I am asked what is the No. 1 thing that I would do to help a company scale massively, it is focusing on marketing. Period. I learned long ago that the best product doesn’t
Today, Khosla Ventures said it raised over $550 million for its first Opportunity Fund. Samir Kaul, managing partner, Khosla Ventures The new oversubscribed fund brings Khosla’s total set of funds to just under $2 billion. Managing partner Samir Kaul told TechCrunch that the fund gives the firm an opportunity to retain its pro rata and
Everybody wants a little of that TikTok magic. To that end, Twitter is rolling out a new test feature that invites people to post video reactions to tweets instead of quote-tweeting the old-fashioned way. It’s a very un-Twitterlike choice, but the company has been actively experimenting with new products for a while now, including the
Nine months after its public launch, Verb Data, a customer-facing analytics company, took in $3 million in funding to continue developing technology so that SaaS companies can build better in-product dashboards for their customers. Founders Dave Hurt and Oleg Fridman started the Boston-based company in January 2020 and started its private beta program with five
In a decision as significant as it is unexpected, German’s antitrust regulator has concluded that Google’s business meets the threshold for special abuse control which was established under an update to competition law targeted at digital giants and passed at the start of last year. The finding that Google has “paramount significance across markets” is
For four weeks during 2021, this TechCrunch reporter took the plunge and tested a “metabolic fitness” service from Bangalore-based startup Ultrahuman. The tracker program, branded Cyborg, uses arm-mounted medical grade hardware to get a real-time read-out of your blood glucose — using that dynamic data-point to power a quantified health service that scores what you
Tinder confirmed it’s exploring the development of a new feature called Swipe Party which offers a way to make sorting through possible matches a more social experience. According to details spotted in the Tinder mobile app’s code, Swipe Party requires access to the phone’s camera and microphone so your friends can “see and hear you