HashiCorp filed go public this week, becoming the latest addition to our growing roster of expected fourth-quarter IPOs. The cloud infrastructure unicorn presents an interesting mix of open source and proprietary code, with recurring revenues and a nascent hosted product. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get
A former upstart Instagram rival is suing Meta, formerly known as Facebook, over allegations that the company violated antitrust laws by cloning a competing product and ultimately killing its business. The app, Phhhoto, launched in 2014, inviting users to create and share short GIF-like videos. If that sounds familiar, that’s because the same functionality was
It’s data season, with groups like Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), CB Insights, PitchBook and Crunchbase News putting out data sets that we’re having fun exploring. This morning, we’re adding one more to our arsenal. The Exchange spent some time this week diving into the SVB “State of the Market” report for the fourth quarter. As
Is this the beginning of the end for the hated tracking cookie consent pop-up? A flagship framework used by Google and scores of other advertisers for gathering claimed consent from web users for creepy ad targeting looks set to be found in breach of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A year ago the IAB
Shared electric micromobility giant Lime has closed a $523 million raise in convertible debt and term loan financing, money that Lime CEO Wayne Ting says is the next step on the company’s path to going public next year. Lime will use the capital to invest in its decarbonization efforts, refresh a significant portion of its
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. And have fun! This week our very own Mary Ann was off — we send her our best, as she is a living saint — so Natasha and Alex and Grace and
Helion Energy, a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, today announced the close of its $0.5 billion Series E, with an additional $1.7 billion of commitments tied to specific milestones. The round was led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator.
Kintaba, a startup from a couple of Facebook site reliability veterans, is building a product to monitor incident response across the entire lifecycle. Today the company released a new concept called heat maps, a way to look at a response from a human perspective and build an understanding of how people in your organization respond
More fuel for social audio: Berlin-based social audio startup Beams, which is building a platform for sharing and consuming short-form audio recordings — as a sort of bite-sized/deconstructed and/or collaborative podcast format which it bills as “audio-based social media” — has doubled its seed funding, adding another $3 million to close out the round at
Following the passage of the so-called “anti-Google law” in South Korea, Google has announced it will comply with the new mandate by giving Android app developers on Google Play the ability to offer alternative payment systems alongside Google’s own. The legislation represents the first time a government has been able to force app stores to
Dan Perry Contributor Dan Perry is managing partner of the Thunder11 communications agency. He previously headed the Associated Press in the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Jonathan “Yoni” Frenkel Contributor On the surface, it’s impressive that Israel has nearly as many unicorns as the European Union with a population almost 50 times smaller. It may
Products developed to manage artificial intelligence data are still largely fragmented, solving one problem at a time for developers, but not the entire life cycle. Enter Sama, a company providing high-quality training data that powers AI technology applications. CEO Wendy Gonzalez said the company is developing the first end-to-end AI tool for training data through
At its Facebook Communities Summit today, the social networking giant announced a series of updates and new tools for managing Facebook Groups, including tools designed to help admins better develop the group’s culture, as well as several other new additions like subgroups and subscription-based paid subgroups, real-time chat for moderators, support for community fundraisers, and
The number of DevOps tools has increased exponentially over the last few years and, with that, the amount of data these tools can produce to help businesses improve their software development processes. But most of the time, this data simply ends up in a dashboard for some scattershot analysis. Propelo (previously known as LevelOps) wants
Today after the bell American ride-hailing giant Uber reported its third-quarter financial results. Critically, the long-unprofitable company managed to squeak $8 million worth of adjusted EBITDA — a very modified profit metric — while still posting net losses of more than $2 billion. The adjusted-profit result comes days after Lyft, Uber’s domestic rival, also recently
Rivian, the electric automaker that recently filed for an IPO, has been sued by a former sales and marketing vice president for alleged gender discrimination. The lawsuit alleges that Laura Schwab, a former sales and marketing executive who had a long employment history with Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin before joining Rivian in November
Of all the startup markets in the world, fintech in Latin America is one of the hottest. Capital is flowing into the region’s financial technology companies at a slicing pace, leading to a wave of startups that are building private-market value at a simply astounding rate. The sheer volume of capital flowing into LatAm fintech
Twitter is rolling out the ability for users to share direct links to their Spaces to let others tune into a live audio session via the web without being logged into the platform. The social media giant says the new functionality is aimed at Spaces users who have friends that aren’t on Twitter but would
Last week, TechCrunch ran my TC-1 about Bowery Farming. What began as a piece about a heartily financed New York startup ballooned into an exploration about an emerging field with a rich and fascinating history. I sought to answer some big questions about the efficacy, profitability and sustainability of vertical farming. I would be lying
Google Cloud announced a major deal today with The CME Group to move CME’s futures and options markets to the cloud over a 10-year period. The deal has several components, including a $1 billion investment from Google into CME. Google would not say how much the total deal is worth, however. Philip Moyer, VP of
The UK’s recently appointed secretary of state for digital, Nadine Dorries, has signalled she wants to take a tougher line on social media platforms than her predecessor — telling a parliamentary committee she’s looking at speeding up the application of criminal sanctions for breaches of incoming UK online safety legislation. A provision to hold named
A new app called Push It is sitting at the top of the App Store promising little more than the ability to send “push notifications to your friends.” The app features only two screenshots — one of a big red button and another basic, black-and-red screen with text that says “sending.” So what is going
Since it was founded in 2012, Blend has signed up some of the biggest banks in the country — including the likes of Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank — as well as a bevy of smaller, more traditional financial institutions across the U.S.. Now, it’s setting its sights on the startup and fintech market, hoping
You may have visited some quick-service restaurants or other retailers in the past few months and noticed signs posted with shortened hours or not being open on a certain day. Dubbed “The Great Resignation,” the mass exodus of hourly workers over the past 18 months has now resulted in a competition for talent. So much
The company formerly known as Facebook just announced its plans to sneak around Apple’s infamous platform fees, the latest beat in an ongoing war between major software companies and the creator of iOS. In a Facebook post Wednesday, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network would give eligible creators on its platform new custom
Data streams with continual, real-time updates of information are a critical building block of how apps and sites function today, and now a startup that has built a platform to power those data streams is announcing a growth round of funding on the back of strong growth in its business into a wider set of
Aimed at construction sites, vacation homes or for other hard-to-reach locations, Arlo‘s new Arlo Go 2 LTE/Wi-Fi Security Camera is at your beck and call to keep an eye out for thieves, sneaks and other scoundrels. The company is also peddling its Arlo Secure subscription service, which gives users access to a rolling 30-day library
Alternative mobile browser Firefox today shipped its latest release for iOS and Android with an update aimed at helping users address common issues — like the visual clutter of having too many open tabs or needing to pick up where your left off the last time the app was closed, among other things. The changes
Self-driving trucks startup TuSimple signaled it is close to testing its system without a human safety operator on public roads before the end of the year. During the startup’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, TuSimple announced plans to proceed with its driver-out pilot program, which would remove the driver for runs over the 80-mile route
Paytm has raised $1.104 billion in India’s largest-ever anchor round as part of its initial public offering, which is also shaping up to be the nation’s largest, as the poster child of the Indian startup ecosystem moves closer to listing in the public markets. Blackrock, GIC, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Birla MF are among