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
Alvaro Gutierrez Contributor Alvaro Gutierrez is co-founder and CEO of Barkibu, which uses data to make pet care better, more affordable, and personalized. Alvaro began his career providing acquisition financing for M&A at JP Morgan before co-founding Spanish pet retail giant Kiwoko, which in turn acquired 12 other companies and was eventually sold 5x. When
The special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) boom did not play out as some folks in the technology and business worlds hoped. Despite a wave of optimism through early 2021, private companies that pursued public debuts with the help of blank-check companies have frequently failed to cover themselves in glory in the intervening quarters. Even more,
LinkedIn, now with more than 800 million people listing their professional profiles to build out their careers, is taking its next steps to get them to spend more time on the platform. The company is rolling out a new events platform, where it will be listing, hosting and marketing interactive, virtual live events. It is
Back in 2019, Amazon first announced its Sidewalk network, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol and network for connecting smart devices — and keeping them online when your own WiFi network, for example, goes down, by piggybacking on your neighbor’s network. Since last year, Amazon has been turning its Echo devices into Sidewalk bridges and
Biometrics, and specifically facial recognition, have seen a surge of usage in the last several years, first as a tool to help organizations verify identities digitally against rising waves of fraud and cybercrime; and second as a way to help enable that process even further in our socially-distanced, pandemic-punctuated times. Today, a startup called iProov,
Working from home has been my normal for more than a decade, but it’s getting a bit stale. Time to spice it up — with some of CES 2022’s hottest items, all of which definitely kind of exist. First off let’s upgrade these dinky twin 27-inch Dells I’ve been attempting to work on for the
Consumers worldwide have downloaded Meta’s Oculus app, the mobile companion for Oculus VR devices including the Quest 2, roughly 2 million times globally since Christmas Day, according to new data from third-party app intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. Already, had been some indication that the Quest 2 was a popular holiday gift after the
Namibian business-to-business e-commerce startup JABU confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised a $3.2 million financing round. The seed round, which was closed last year, welcomed investors such as Afore Capital, Y Combinator, FJ Labs, Quiet Capital, Kli Capital, Pareto Capital and unnamed angels. As a last-mile distribution e-commerce company, JABU joins a list of
French startup PayFit just announced that it closed a new $289 million Series E round (€254 million) before the holidays. Following this round, the startup has reached a post-money valuation of $2.1 billion (€1.82 billion). The company has been building a payroll and HR software-as-a-service platform for small and medium companies. It is operating in
Instagram has started testing private likes on Stories as part of a limited test. The Meta-owned company confirmed that the feature is not broadly available and is currently only visible to a small group of people globally. The company also explained that only the person who has posted the Story can see the total number
Meez, a company creating professional recipe software and a culinary operating system, brought in its first-ever funding round of $6.5 million to continue developing its tools to help chefs manage their recipes. Josh Sharkey, CEO of Meez. Image Credits: Evan Sung CEO Josh Sharkey, a chef himself for most of his career, incorporated the New
Chalk another one up for decentralized enforcement: France’s data protection watchdog has slapped headline-grabbing fines on Facebook and Google for failing to respect local (and pan-EU) cookie consent rules. Today, the CNIL said it’s fined Google €150M (~$170M) and Facebook €60M (~$68M) for breaching French law, following investigations of how they present tracking choices to
As a longtime photographer/videographer/audio nerd, charging all the devices at home is often a chaotic nightmare, and if you’re taking your equipment on the road, it gets worse. It doesn’t speak highly of me as a professional, but I’ve found myself without the right charger, a missing battery or a light that turns out to
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Will the H-1B lottery
Some of the most high-flying stocks of the pandemic are struggling in the new year and it’s bad news for tech companies of all sizes. TechCrunch noted yesterday that software stocks were having a pretty poor start to the year. That was, it turned out, only the beginning of the damage. Today’s trading took yet
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 5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make In growth marketing, signal determines success It’s been a crazy year in growth marketing, what with the meteoric
Xage (pronounced Zage) is a startup working to keep critical infrastructure like oil and gas pipelines, water supplies and electrical grids up and running securely. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B. Piva led the round with participation from Momenta, Valor Equity Partners and OurCrowd, along with existing investors March Capital, City Light
As more and more people are wanting to leave a smaller footprint on the earth, many of us are living in smaller spaces. Daan Tech is a startup we found at CES 2022 that is taking a fresh new look at tech aimed specifically at small households of one or two people. I rarely cover
Some of my favorite childhood memories include being read to, and learning to read myself to get lost in a book. If you’ll forgive me the oldmanyellsatcloud.gif moment: It’s a grievous loss that many children are so comprehensively surrounded by screens that it’s hard to experience this. I was delighted, then, to see Oranoff launch