Apple is breaking with holiday tradition: The company announced early last month that its App Store will continue to review developer submissions over the holidays, welcome news for app developers facing their busiest season. Previously, an app that needed to release a bug fix or a critical update on Black Friday or during the final
Jamie Viggiano Contributor Jamie Viggiano is the chief marketing officer at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in consumer, SaaS and infrastructure businesses. More posts by this contributor Create target customer personas to develop successful growth strategies Start building your brand book with a visioning workshop It’s human nature to reflexively categorize and
Serial fintech entrepreneur Walter Cruttenden founded Acorns with his son, Jeff, in 2012 with the goal of helping low- and middle-income households to invest and save responsibly. The pair wanted to simplify investing for the millions that have trouble getting started or continuing to invest. Then in 2018, Walter went live with a new company
Short video app Triller is set to go public via a reverse merger with video-tech company SeaChange International, the two companies announced on Wednesday. The combined entity will be valued at approximately $5 billion. The boards of both companies have approved the proposed merger and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter
Taking notes during a meeting is an art form, requiring multitasking skills for listening, typing and coming up with intelligent things to say while you do the other two. Not to mention the three or four different applications we use to prepare, run and follow-through with meetings. Avoma thinks we are doing too much and
Enterprise software giant Sage has acquired the remaining stake in Brightpearl, originally a UK-based startup in cloud retail management, for $340m. Brightpearl provides a SaaS-based retail operating system, enabling real-time business insights. Sage previously owned 17% of the Bristol, UK-based startup, which MMC Ventures, a UK Series A investor, backed in 2014. The startup had
Ampla Technologies, a startup which provides financing to small-to-medium sized consumer-facing businesses, announced today it has raised $40 million in a Series A round of funding co-led by VMG Partners and Forerunner Ventures. Existing backer Core Innovation Capital also put money in the round. In conjunction with the equity investment, Ampla has also secured $250
European startup and venture capital data company Dealroom has raised a €6 million Series A, it told TechCrunch. The company’s new capital comes nearly two years after it raised €2.75 million in early 2020. Its database competes with a number of rivals in North America, including PitchBook, CB Insights, and my former employer Crunchbase. Beringea
When it comes to engineering talent in the world of tech, demand continues to outpace supply, a predicament so acute that by 2030, that disparity will balloon to 85 million positions being unfilled, according to research from Korn Ferry. Today, a startup that believes it can stem that tide with a more inclusive, global approach
Fintech startup LiveFlow has raised a $3.5M Seed round which was led by Moonfire Ventures with backing from Y Combinator, Seedcamp and WndrCo. Also participating was Victor Jacobsson, co-founder of Klarna; Bradley Horowitz, former VP Product at Google; Oliver Jung, former VP International Expansion at AirBnB, Phillip Chambers, Peakon founder & CEO, and others. LiveFlow
With traction metrics that would make any startup CFO foam at the mouth, TikTok influencer marketing platform Ubiquitous is making a big splash in the chaotic market of influencer marketing. It’s one of the fastest-growing segments of advertising and marketing, but one that brings some unique challenges; working with influencers directly is labor-intensive, but results
With everything that has gone down at Better.com over the past 18 months, many of us are scratching our heads in wonder that CEO Vishal Garg remains employed. On December 10, employees of the digital mortgage lender were notified via email by the Better board of directors that Garg would be taking time off, effective
Creator monetization startups are cropping up left and right as the tech world embraces the fast-growing creator economy. But Patreon, founded in 2013, has been around since before words like “influencer” were in our vocabulary — back when “Tik Tok” was a Kesha song, rather than the social platform that everyone is trying to emulate.
Veho, a startup applying technology to next-day package delivery, aims to solve the last mile of delivery — how packages get from fulfillment centers to the customer’s door. It also wants to do it with a unique flair: providing transparency into deliveries that starts with the option of when, where and how customers want their
The European Union’s competition regulator has given the all-clear to Microsoft’s $19.7 billion purchase of transcription tech firm Nuance, which was announced earlier this year. The EU said today it has concluded there are no competition concerns for the region if the acquisition goes ahead, clearing it without conditions. The deal was notified to the
Last year’s Essential implosion marked one of the most high-profile consumer electronics startup failures in recent memory. Launched in 2017 with $330 million, a killer pedigree and some truly grand ambitions, the company sputtered through a combination of industry issues, disappointment and troubling allegations against founder Andy Rubin. The firm’s IP was eventually purchased by
Jamie Viggiano Contributor Jamie Viggiano is the chief marketing officer at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in consumer, SaaS and infrastructure businesses. More posts by this contributor 5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire To create successful growth strategies, relevant marketing campaigns and products that deliver real value
It’s my last day of work for the year, so we’re going to have some fun. Obviously, we’re talking crypto this morning. Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO and present CEO of Block, the company formerly known as Square, stirred the crypto pot recently, making explicit his preferences in the larger blockchain landscape by taking swipes
Supernova is a new app that has now gone live on the Apple and Android app stores billing itself as a new “ethical alternative” to Instagram and Facebook, where most of the ad revenues go to charities. Does it have a chance? It would be fair to say that after many years of either watching
In the U.S., around 13% of greenhouse gases are spewed out of commercial and residential buildings. You’d be forgiven for scratching your head and asking why. If you tour a typical New York building, you’ll often find that the tech that runs deep in the underbellies of the brick-clad behemoths looks like the 1960s and
Tackle.io, an Idaho-based startup that helps software companies sell through cloud marketplaces such as AWS’s, announced today it has raised a $100 million Series C funding round. Co-led by Coatue and Andreessen Horowitz, the round also saw participation from Bessemer Venture Partners. Bringing Tackle’s total funding to $148 million, the Series C turned Tackle into
As crazy as the NFT market has become, there’s been an increasing range of other things to do with NFTs other than pimp images of apes and punks – even if they have become enormously valuable. We’ve seen the auction of apartments as NFTs, for instance. And now we’re seeing charities starting to benefit from
Planet42, a South Africa-based car subscription company that buys used cars from dealerships and rents to customers via a subscription model, has raised $30 million in equity and debt. The investment — which co-founder and CEO Eerik Oja called a bridge round — is a prequel to a larger Series A round next year. It
The early 2022 IPO cohort is beginning to take shape. Recall that Reddit recently filed to go public, albeit privately. That’s going to be a huge debut. With Samsara closing out 2021 and Reddit set to ensure fireworks, we might be content. But there are more offerings coming, including Justworks: The HR software company filed
In 2019, when LinkedIn began asking for Chinese users’ phone numbers, it was clear that the professional social network would have to follow a different set of rules in the country. But it realized simply setting up the real-name verification regime required by Chinese authorities wasn’t enough; it faced a mounting task of balancing Beijing’s
Just four months after announcing $27 million in Series A funding, Overjet, a company developing dental artificial intelligence software, came forward again with another $42.5 million in Series B financing backed by existing investors. Prior to the company’s Series A, we profiled them in 2020 when the company raised $7.85 million in funding. The latest
Stenon, an AgTech company that has a real-time soil-sensing solution, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round from Founders Fund, David Friedberg’s The Production Board, and existing investors including Cherry Ventures and Atlantic Labs. Founded in 2018 in Potsdam, Germany, Stenon’s digital soil data is produced without the need for a laboratory, making it faster
Zepto, a Mumbai-based startup that operates a 10-minute instant grocery delivery service, has more than doubled its valuation to $570 million from $225 million less than two months ago as it expands into newer cities. Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund led the $100 million Series C round in Zepto, the two said Monday. Glade Brook, Nexus,
Rocket Companies announced this morning that it will purchase Truebill for $1.275 billion in cash. Rocket Companies is best known for its Rocket Mortgage product, while Truebill is a consumer-facing app that helps consumers manage subscriptions, automate savings and budget. The deal’s price tag will prove lucrative for Truebill shareholders. PitchBook data indicates that Truebill’s
A new forecast has dubbed TikTok as the world’s third-largest social network, just behind Facebook and Instagram. In its inaugural forecast on TikTok’s global install base, Insider Intelligence — the firm previously known as eMarketer — predicts that TikTok will reach 755.0 million monthly users in 2022, after seeing 59.8% growth in 2020, followed by