After rebranding from White Hat and raising $44 million earlier this year, tech apprenticeship startup Multiverse has raised another round of funding. The company today announced that it has closed $130 million in a Series C round. The funding had been rumored in recent weeks while the round was being closed. D1 Capital Partners and
Mobile spyware is one of the most invasive and targeted kinds of unregulated surveillance, since it can be used to track where you go, who you see and what you talk about. And because of its stealthy nature, mobile spyware can be nearly impossible to detect. But now one Y Combinator-backed startup is building an
For many financial institutions in Southeast Asia, verifying new customers takes a week or two, said the founders of Verihubs. The startup cuts that time down to as little as five seconds, using AI-based identity authentication technology and APIs that let companies continue verifying returning customers through SMS, WhatsApp or flash calls. Verihubs announced it
Madison Schill Contributor Madison Schill is the director of marketing and communications at Livescale and is a former fashion editor and producer. Live shopping — the seamless and simultaneous combination of online shopping, livestreaming and social media — has been taking North America by storm since October 2019. Though booming to take up over 13%
The decarbonization of the planet will be the next major disruption of the 21st century, according to SOSV managing general partner Sean O’Sullivan and Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures. A disruption of such magnitude will bring about changes that will touch every industry and corner of daily life, and as a result, a complex
Brett Lovelady Contributor Brett Lovelady is the founder of Astro Studios, now a part of PA Consulting, a design-driven company that empowers designers and strives to capture the value of design in the product, brand, experience and company creation process. Around 90% of startups ultimately fail, and the reasons leading to failure are well known:
Investor and entrepreneur Anshu Sharma — formerly Storm Ventures, now CEO of privacy-focused SkyFlow — asked on Twitter today about the connection between interest rates and technology valuations: Ignore the compliments; Sharma was merely trying to bait Jeff and me into engaging with his question. Which worked, as you can tell. Sharma is someone with
The head of Instagram has just announced that it’s “pausing” a planned version of the social media software aimed at under 13 year olds. The development comes hard of the heels of critical reporting in the Wall Street Journal which unearthed internal documents that suggest the Facebook-owned company was aware the social media service caused
As more enterprises migrate to cloud-based architectures, they are also taking on more applications (because they can) and, as a result of that, more complex workloads and storage needs. Machine learning and other artificial intelligence applications add even more complexity. Now a startup that has built technology to make that process move faster and more
The UK’s competition watchdog has cleared Facebook’s acquisition of Kustomer, a maker of CRM tools. The purchase was announced last November — with a price-tag we reported as $1BN — but is pending closing after facing regulatory scrutiny. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an inquiry on the proposed merger this summer, at
Cryptocurrency company Coinbase is announcing a handful of new features. While the company is better known for its exchange that lets you convert USD into various cryptocurrencies, Coinbase wants to expand its consumer services so that you use the platform for different use cases with more financial services. First, the company will soon launch direct
Customer service is one of the most important relationships between a business and its customer, and that was made even more clear during the global pandemic. Though Thankful AI CEO Ted Mico and his co-founder Evan Tann didn’t start out with experience from the business side, they started the Venice, California-based company in 2018 out
Regional seed and early-stage venture capital firm, Flat6Labs, has finished raising $10 million for its seed fund targeted at Tunisian startups, according to a statement released by the company. The seed fund, called Anava Seed Fund (ASF), at first sought a close of $3 million but instead closed 3.3x of the initial figure. The fund
When businesses can connect more personally with their customers, those customers in turn are more loyal. However, as consumer behavior changes, especially as it did over the past 18 months, it is more difficult to establish that connection amid all of the messages put in front of them. Optimove, specializing in customer relationship management marketing,
The meteoric rise of collaborative design startup Canva — now valued at $40 billion — and conversely, the viral interest we’ve been seeing in the market for NFTs where you can “buy” a share of a limited-edition digital asset, are two examples of how the tech world today revolves around — and values — catchy
Ninja Van, a Singapore-based logistics startup, has closed a $578 million Series E round to support its operations infrastructure and technology systems growth. Investors include China’s Alibaba Group as well as existing investors DPDgroup’s GeoPost, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Savering’s B Capital Group, Monk’s Hill Ventures, and Zamrud, a sovereign wealth fund controlled by Brunei, based on its
After working as an investment banker in Canada for a decade, Halima Iqbal moved back to Pakistan in 2017 and quickly realized how difficult it is for women to access financial services. “I had a really hard time opening up a basic bank account. It took me about three and a half months,” Iqbal told
Covid-19 really put the kibosh on live events in the last 18 months, but in the world of tech, it also meant that live event startups that found a way to survive and grow throughout the period got a lot of attention. In the latest development, Dice — a London company that has built a
Sep.23 — Gavin Wood, Polkadot Founder & Ethereum Co-Creator, joins Emily Chang to talk about the future of crypto and Polkadot’s ongoing adoption, and why looming regulation could be useful for the industry.
The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly been devastating on many levels. But if there’s any silver lining in the global crisis, it could be that it’s less taboo to talk about feeling anxious, depressed or burnt out. Because chances are, the person you’re talking to is feeling one of those things too. So it’s no surprise
Intuit, the business and financial tools company best known for its TurboTax software, made news last week for its acquisition of Mailchimp, and is now announcing a corporate venture capital arm, Intuit Ventures, to identify growth opportunities and trends beneficial for its key customers — small businesses and consumers. The company is the latest to
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.
Priyanka Srinivas Contributor Priyanka Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Live Green Co, a Chilean food tech startup that uses artificial intelligence to suggest plant-based alternatives for meat and artificial additives in food. When it comes to gender equality in the business world, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg hit the nail on the head: “Knowing
SoftBank is gaga for startups in Latin America. Since first announcing it was planting a stake in the ground in the region in early 2019, the Japanese conglomerate has plugged more than $5 billion into the region, and it expects that number to top $8 billion by year’s end. Its capital contributions are meaningful to
The tools you use most often are the ones you think about the least. Calendly, an app that helps people plan, schedule and follow up on meetings, may be a perfect example of that. Today, some 10 million people send Calendly links to millions of others to sort out meeting slots. But perhaps because its
Sunday, a startup that didn’t exist just a few months ago, has raised a $100 million Series A funding round. Today’s funding round is led by Coatue with participation from partners of DST Global. Investors in the restaurant, hospitality and tech industries are also participating. I already wrote a lengthy profile of Sunday when it
If that headline sounded judgmental, I apologize. We just wrapped up a three-day virtual event that included discussions and interviews with some of the most notable people in technology, media, government and venture capital. Even in person, there’s no way to absorb Disrupt in its entirety. Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to membersUse
Just two months after securing $2 million in pre-seed funding, plant-based pudding startup Noops is announcing an additional $2 million round led by Lerer Hippeau. The Long Island-based company was founded in 2019 by Hungryroot co-founder Gregory Harry Struck after he adopted a plant-based diet while battling cancer. “It was born out of a need
When it comes to online calendars and calendar apps, services like Google Calendar and Outlook from Microsoft rule the roost with hundreds of millions of users globally. Now another company is hoping to ruffle some feathers with its own move into the space. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Yahoo is working on called Day,
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce COO Bret Taylor discussed their $28 billion merger, announced last December, a deal the Department of Justice signed off on this summer but that shareholders still seem to be second-guessing. At least, they aren’t convinced of the value that Slack brings to Salesforce