How to iterate on product has always been one of the top concerns at startups. But while they previously had to rely solely on customer feedback and instincts, they now also have a trove of data to balance. This dynamic creates new opportunities but also requires a new kind of arbitrage. We discussed this new
It’s been an active four quarters for technology IPOs. If you rewind the clock to Q4 2020, we’ve seen megawatt public debuts from tech shops of all sorts. Airbnb recovered from COVID-19-induced lows to list, while Roblox delayed its IPO and went out with a direct listing. DoorDash went public. C3.ai had an explosive offering
Google has today launched TaskMate in Kenya, a crowdsourcing app that lets people use smartphones to do tasks and get paid, tapping the growing gig economy. The tech giant said it has rolled out the beta version after a year-long experiment in the East African country, and is preparing to introduce it to other countries
Organizations that have made the leap into using big data to drive their business are increasingly looking for better, more efficient ways to share data with others without compromising privacy and data protection laws, and that is ushering in a rush of technologists building a number of new approaches to fill that need. In the
TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey founders and investors in cities across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in MENA cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put your city on the TechCrunch Map! This
The ocean economy is growing in importance, and with it grows the need to map, understand, and track the ocean itself. Saildrone has been doing just that with its fleet of autonomous science vessels, and the company has now raised a massive $100M round C to pursue its ro-boat aspirations further. Saildrone’s boats have been
In 2019, Amazon introduced a more affordable way to stream Amazon Music in their home with the launch of a free, ad-supported music service that streamed over its Echo speakers. Today, Apple is catching up with its debut of a new, lower-cost version of its Apple Music subscription it calls the “Voice plan.” Unlike Amazon’s
The necessity of animal testing is a sad one for the process of drug discovery, but there’s seemingly no good alternative to mice, even though they’re not particularly accurate human analogues. Quris claims to have the first real option in its combination of AI with data from a “patient on a chip” that provides remarkably
The decentralized reality of office work after the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drive plenty of startup activity. To wit: OfficeRnD, which makes workplace management software that’s increasingly geared toward helping businesses provide a ‘hybrid office’ model — meaning they’re offering flexible work spaces to staff who want to spend some of their time working out
Apple is set to announce new hardware today. The company is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live. [embedded content] Rumor has it that
Uber is testing Pool Chance, a feature that lets riders heading in the same direction share the cost of the journey, in Kenya, with plans to roll out the low-cost service to Ghana and Nigeria. TechCrunch discovered the option when booking a car in Nairobi, Kenya. An Uber spokesperson later confirmed it was part of
One of the gating factors for getting more homeowners to make the switch to solar energy has been that solar, as a business, is hard one to get right, with many a company failing when they’ve been unable to strike the right balance between the technology working as it should, provisioning services in a cost-effective
Tim Parilla Contributor More posts by this contributor How to make sure your legal team is M&A ready A recent Corporate Counsel article highlighted a growing trend: More senior legal leaders are migrating to startups to take on general counsel roles. For some, it’s an attempt to find a better work-life balance (whoops!), while others
January 2020 seems like a long time ago: Billie Eilish swept the Grammy Awards, Tesla’s market cap made it America’s most valuable car company, and Visa announced plans to purchase Plaid for $5.3 billion. A year later, the credit card giant balked at the deal after it attracted regulatory scrutiny, but Ryan Lawler reports that
We can’t check out every investing outfit’s demo day. But one event that we try to catch every year is that of Pear, which is held annually each fall and features (blessedly) just a dozen or so very nascent startups. Pear, a seed-stage venture firm founded in 2013, has an impressive track record when it
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Or, as in today’s episode, talk our way through some big breaking news from the technology world so that we can better understand just what is going on. Danny and Alex got together late Friday on a
Twitter has announced that paid Ticketed Spaces are coming to Android users in the U.S. over the next few days. Hosts on Spaces, Twitter’s live audio room feature, will now be able to sell access to Ticketed Spaces. The Android launch comes after the initial Ticketed Spaces roll out for iOS users in late August.
Advice is not a new concept, but Intro is putting its spin on access to in-demand experts through personalized one-on-one video calls. The Los Angeles company was founded in 2020 by entrepreneur Raad Mobrem, who previously founded Lettuce, an operating system for small businesses that was acquired by Intuit in 2014. Raad Mobrem, founder of
Analogue’s much-anticipated Pocket retro gaming machine will come with more than just sleek design and the ability to play tons of classic games. The device will be the first with AnalogueOS on it, an effort to make what founder Chris Taber calls the “Library of Alexandria of video games.” Actually, he called it the “great
Ximena Aleman Contributor Ximena Aleman is co-founder and chief business development officer at Prometeo, an open banking platform that serves Latin America. More posts by this contributor Startup fundraising is the most tangible gender gap. How can we overcome it? Fintech regulations in Latin America could fuel growth or freeze out startups We are only
Continuing our series of interviews with leading technology luminaries, The Exchange recently caught up with Visionary Founder/CEO at Large Unicorn as its IPO priced and began to trade this week. After a rapid-fire series of S-1 filings, Large Unicorn priced above its own expectations, raising more capital than it had likely anticipated during the lead-up
American technology giant Microsoft announced today that it will pull its professional social network LinkedIn from the Chinese market later this year. Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for more than $26 billion back in 2016. The news comes amidst a flurry of regulatory changes in the Asian nation, as well as rising tensions between the company and
It’s difficult for startups on a small budget to attract executives with the knowledge base to propel them forward, but Continuum, a talent marketplace for fractional employees, doesn’t think it should be. The remote-first company, which launched today, has been quietly developing a tool that matches venture-backed companies with executives who have been-there-done-that, but don’t
Emerging out of Singapore as primarily a “company builder” in 2017, Antler made its name as a runner of a global startup generator program and investing from a very early, pre-seed stage. It tended to throw teams together, mix in a tech stack and spit out startups at a prodigious rate. But things have progressed
Jul.30 — Yakir Gola, CEO of startup delivery service Gopuff, explains how his company has raised $1 billion in funding and what sets them apart from competitors like Uber Eats and Doordash. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Ivan Baidin Contributor Ivan Baidin is head of Travelpayouts, a global integrated affiliate program focused exclusively on travel offers. During the pandemic, we realized that we were swamped with work and overloaded with information. So we came up with an idea to fix that. At Travelpayouts, we plan a strategy for a year, then each
There may be plenty of funding for some startups these days. But plenty of companies will tell you otherwise. VC Lab, an accelerator for venture capital firms, wants to create investors who will back the rest of the world. A basic hurdle to this goal is the standard paperwork you need to set up a
WhatsApp is beginning to roll out a new feature that will provide its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat history backup in iCloud or Google Drive, patching a major loophole that has been exploited by governments to obtain and review private communication between individuals. WhatsApp has long encrypted chats between users on
Clarifai wants to bring artificial intelligence into the lives of developers, business operators and data scientists so they can automate and accelerate their model development. Matt Zeiler founded the New York-based company in 2013 focused on computer vision. Since its $30 million Series B in 2016, Clarifai has been rolling out new capabilities and products
A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it’s possible to use Facebook’s targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook’s platform assigns them. The paper — entitled “Unique on Facebook: Formulation