For many of us, going to work these days no longer means going into a specific office like it used to; and today one of the startups that’s built a platform to help cater for that new, bigger world of employment — wherever talent might be — is announcing a major round of funding on
Mark Spera Contributor In nearly every Google algorithm update in recent memory, Google has rewarded old, megatraffic sites, sending their search rankings soaring at the expense of smaller, newer sites. Big sites have increased their search traffic by 28% year over year, according to GrowthBar’s organic search data on the 100 most visited sites. Why?
Southeast Asia’s car marketplace wars are going into high drive. Today Carsome Group, one of the region’s largest online used car marketplaces, said it plans to acquire listings platform iCar Asia in a transaction worth more than $200 million. Carsome has agreed to acquire 19.9% of iCar Asia from Malaysia internet conglomerate Catcha Group. In
As financial crime has become significantly more sophisticated, so too have the tools that are used to combat it. Now, Quantexa — one of the more interesting startups that has been building AI-based solutions to help detect and stop money laundering, fraud, and other illicit activity — has raised a growth round of $153 million,
France has hit Google with a fine of half a billion euros after finding major breaches in how it negotiated with publishers to remunerate them for reuse of their content — as is required under a pan-EU reform of digital copyright law which extended neighbouring rights to news snippets. The size of the fine is
The pandemic’s effect on the global app market has not been hard to miss. In the first quarter and first half of this year, consumer spending in mobile apps hit new records at $32 billion and $64.9 billion, respectively. In Africa, it can be tough to call out exact numbers on consumer spending because the
The skies are on the cusp of getting busier — and louder — as drone delivery and electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft startups move from moonshot to commercialization. One former NASA engineer and ex-director of Uber’s air taxi division is developing tech to ensure that more air traffic doesn’t equal more noise. Mark
Staff management platform Vara’s team If you follow startup news from Indonesia, you know that the country’s estimated 60 million small businesses are a hot target for tech companies. BukuKas and BukuWarung, for example, both recently raised large rounds to fuel their race to digitize SMEs’ operations. Founded in November 2020, Vara is focused specifically
Bioengineering may soon provide compelling, low-carbon alternatives in industries where even the best methods produce significant emissions. Utilizing natural and engineered biological process has led to low-carbon textiles from Algiknit, cell-cultured premium meats from Orbillion, and fuels captured from waste emissions via LanzaTech — and leaders from those companies will be joining us on stage
Carbon tracking is very much the new hot thing in tech, and we’ve previously covered more generalist startups doing this at scale for companies, such as Plan A Earth out of Berlin. But there’s clearly an opportunity to get deep into a vertical sector and tailor solutions to it. That’s the plan of Vaayu, a
Jake Rothstein spent nearly six years scaling Papa, a Miami-based company that offers care and companionship to seniors. The business, which pairs elderly Americans with uncertified-yet-vetted pals, helps offer casual services, such as technology support, grocery delivery or even a fun conversation. It has raised upwards of $91 million in venture capital to date. The
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic went to space (or the vicinity of space) in a PR-suffused event over the weekend. It was all rather twee, packed with maudlin riffs about childhood dreams and riddled with hero worship. And the stream kept stuttering while some of the planned vehicle-to-Earth communications failed. The Exchange is continuing its look
Facebook has been accused of multiple breaches of European Union consumer protection law as a result of its attempts to force WhatsApp users to accept controversial changes to the messaging platforms’ terms of use — such as threatening users that the app would stop working if they did not accept the updated policies by May
Dovetail co-founders Ash Fogelberg and Nick Frandsen Based in Sydney and Auckland, Dovetail is a full-service venture studio that works closely with founders who have a great idea, but may lack technical backgrounds. Dovetail helps them build companies from the ground up, preparing them for growth and more funding. Founded in 2014, Dovetail’s success stories
Twitter has appointed a resident grievance officer in India days after the American social media firm said to have lost the liability protection on user-generated content in the South Asian nation over non-compliance with local IT rules. On Sunday, Twitter identified Vinay Prakash as its new resident grievance officer and shared a way to contact
Doing more with less: This is what marketers get asked for when they join an early-stage startup. British consultant Lucy Heskins knows firsthand how overwhelming that can be, which is why her services can both replace and complement early in-house marketing staff. Either way, it often involves educating the founders about the job to be
One might think that a short week due to a U.S. holiday calls for a short weekly recap, but we have plenty to share about growth marketing from our coverage over the week. With the help of your recommendations, this week we were able to interview Peep Laja and Lucy Heskins, and publish multiple guest
Albert Wenger Contributor Digital technologies have disrupted the structure of markets with unprecedented breadth and scale. Today, there is yet another wave of innovation emerging, and that is the decarbonization of the global economy. While governments still lack the conviction necessary to truly fight the climate crisis, the overall direction is clear. The carbon price
Last year, during the pandemic, a free browser extension called Netflix Party gained traction because it enabled people trapped in their homes to connect with far-flung friends and family by watching the same Netflix TV shows and movies simultaneously. It also enabled them to dish about the action in a side bar chat. Yet that
It’s not easy following a larger-than-life founder and CEO of an iconic company, but that’s what former AWS CEO Andy Jassy faces this week as he takes over for Jeff Bezos, who moves into the executive chairman role. Jassy must deal with myriad challenges as he becomes the head honcho at the No. 2 company
DN Capital, one of Europe’s most active VCs has launched its latest $350 million (£220m, €300m) fund off the back of a pretty stand-out year when the firm saw four of its portfolio companies hit billion-dollar-plus valuations. DN’s ‘Fund V’ will invest across Europe, the UK and the US, but with strongly European LPs, DN
Did you see the viral videos of yesterday’s flooding in New York City subways? In one, riders waded through brown, waist-deep water; another video showed a cascade rushing down a flight of stairs to a subway platform where passengers waited for a train. Infrastructure doesn’t attract much attention until it fails. Domain name services (DNS),
French startup Didomi has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Elephant and Breega. The company manages consent flows for web publishers and app developers. Didomi is already doing well in Europe with billions of consent interactions per month — it plans to expand to the U.S. with today’s funding round. “Jawad,
Kris Holt Contributor Kris Holt is a contributing writer at Engadget. WhatsApp is working on a setting that will let users more easily bypass its iffy image compression and send photos and videos in the highest available fidelity. The “best quality” option will likely join “auto” and “data saver” choices in a future version of the
Netskope, focused on Secure Access Service Edge architecture, announced Friday a $300 million investment round on a post-money valuation of $7.5 billion. The oversubscribed insider investment was led by ICONIQ Growth, which was joined by other existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Base Partners, Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital. Netskope
We’re entering a phase in the COVID-19 pandemic where transmission is going to go through the roof because of the Delta variant. But as vaccinations ramp up around the world, the main cost to society now will not be the health services being overwhelmed, but mass disruption to businesses as staff are forced to self
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. Natasha will be back with us starting next week. So, it was old times on the show with just two of our team to vamp on
The venture capital market is racing ahead, foot on the gas, middle finger out the window, hair on fire. That’s our read of the Q2 2021 data released thus far concerning how much money venture capitalists deployed around the world during the second three months of the year. Startups have never had it this good
Frontier, which bills itself as a “new kind of vertically-integrated jobs marketplace” launches today with a $2.8M investment round led by NFX in the US, and backed by London’s firstminute Capital, FJ Labs, Cyan Banister, Ilkka Pannanen, Alex Bouaziz, Liquid 2 and several other funds and angels. Frontier’s schtick is that it pre-tests applicants, weeds
Circle has announced that it plans to become a public company. The cryptocurrency company will merge with Concord Acquisition Corp, a SPAC. Circle is better known as one of the founding members of the Centre consortium with Coinbase. Along with other crypto partners, they have issued USD Coin (USDC), a popular stablecoin. A SPAC is