Five months after announcing a $3 million seed round from Spero Ventures, shopping-focused live video host Talkshoplive is back, this time with a $6 million seed extension led by Raine Ventures. The new round of funding gives Los Angeles-based Talkshoplive $10.5 million raised to date and enables it to scale its product management and technical
A new startup called SwoonMe aims to fix the problem with superficial dating apps, where users primarily make decisions based on how someone looks in their photos. Instead of swiping through profiles, SwoonMe’s idea is to use a combination of avatars and audio to encourage users to connect based on someone’s personality, not their appearance.
Seed investment firm Hummingbird VC, which previously invested in Deliveroo, Peak Games, MarkaVIP, and Kraken has a new Managing Partner. Firat Ileri, previously a Partner – who at 28 became one of Europe’s youngest VCs when he joined in 2012 – takes over from Founding Partner Barend Van den Brande, who will now take on
As companies look for ways to respond to incidents in their complex micro services-driven software stacks, SREs or site reliability engineers are left to deal with the issues involved in making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Rootly, a new early stage startup wants to help by building an incident response solution
In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing earlier this year, other crypto companies may be looking to go public sooner than later. That appears to be the case with Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra
In his first press event since ignominiously leaving office earlier this year, former President Donald Trump announced that he is launching a volley of class action lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook, Google and their CEOs, claiming that the three companies violated his First Amendment rights. “We’re demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the
Alp Uguray Contributor Alp Uguray is an award-winning technologist, adviser and investor with 2x UiPath (MVP) Most Valuable Professional Award and is a globally recognized expert on intelligent automation, AI (artificial intelligence), RPA, process mining and enterprise digital transformation. Understanding what you will change is most important to achieve a long-lasting and successful robotic process
French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The company is both an edtech startup and a video game studio with an ambitious goal — it wants to build a game that is as
Z1, a Sao Paulo-based digital bank aimed at Latin American GenZers, has raised $2.5 million in a round led by U.S.-based Homebrew. A number of other investors also participated in the financing including Clocktower Ventures, Mantis – the VC firm owned by The Chainsmokers, Goodwater, Gaingels, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund. Notably, Mantis has also
Lula, a Miami-based insurance infrastructure startup, announced today it has raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding. Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures co-led the round, which also included participation from SoftBank, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, Shrug Capital, Steve Pagliuca (Bain Capital co-chairman and Boston Celtics owner), Tiny Capital’s Andrew Wilkinson. Existing
A new pilot program from TikTok would inject a little LinkedIn into the youthful video-based social network. TikTok announced that starting today it will invite users to submit video resumes to participating companies, including Target, Chipotle, Shopify, Meredith, NASCAR and the WWE. The company encourages applicants to show off their skills in a creative way
The pandemic has been a time for a lot of reflection on both a personal and business level. Tech companies in particular are assessing whether they will ever again return to a full time, in-office approach. Some are considering a hybrid approach and some may not go back to a building at all. Amidst all
Swiss Post, the former state-owned mail delivery firm which became a private limited company in 2013, diversifying into logistics, finance, transport and more (including dabbling in drone delivery) while retaining its role as Switzerland’s national postal service, has acquired a majority stake in Swiss-Hungarian startup Tresorit, an early European pioneer in end-to-end-encrypted cloud services. Terms
AI teams invest a lot of rigor in defining new project guidelines. But the same is not true for killing existing projects. In the absence of clear guidelines, teams let infeasible projects drag on for months. They put up a dog and pony show during project review meetings for fear of becoming the messengers of
Many teachers and parents in Indonesia rely on WhatsApp to keep in touch, creating “multiple groups that often become messy and highly ineffective, and result in confusion or lost threads,” says Rizky Aniez, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Gredu. The Jakarta-based startup was created to give everyone involved in the educational process—school administrators,
A group of 37 attorneys general filed a second major multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google Wednesday, accusing the company of abusing its market power to stifle competitors and forcing consumers into in-app payments that grant the company a hefty cut. New York Attorney General Letitia James is co-leading the suit alongside the Tennessee, North Carolina
Opaque, a new startup born out of Berkely’s RISELabs, announced a $9.5 million seed round today to build a solution to access and work with sensitive data in the cloud in a secure way, even with multiple organizations involved. Intel Capital led today’s investment with participation by Race Capital, The House Fund and FactoryHQ. The
French startup Younited Credit has raised a $170 million funding round. Goldman Sachs is leading the round with existing investors Eurazeo, Bpifrance and AG2R La Mondiale also participating. The company offers several credit products to European consumers. It also has a diversified distribution strategy. Consumer credit in Europe is completely different from consumer credit in
Jalal Nasir Contributor Jalal Nasir is the founder and CEO of Pixalate, a global ad fraud intelligence and marketing compliance platform. Previously, he was one of the early engineers on Amazon’s fraud prevention and risk management team and held various product leadership roles building ad tech and enterprise privacy technologies. Programmatic advertising is a $200
WellSaid Labs, whose tools create synthetic speech that could be mistaken for the real thing, has raised a $10M Series A to grow the business. The company’s home-baked text-to-speech engine works faster than real time and produces natural-sounding clips of pretty much any length, from quick snippets to hours-long readings. WellSaid came out of the
Trump’s spicy trio of lawsuits against the social media platforms that he believes wrongfully banned him have succeeded in showering the former president with a flurry of media attention, but that’s likely where the story ends. Like Trump’s quixotic and ultimately empty quest to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act during his presidency,
When the Pentagon killed the JEDI cloud program yesterday, it was the end of a long and bitter road for a project that never seemed to have a chance. The question is why it didn’t work out in the end, and ultimately I think you can blame the DoD’s stubborn adherence to a single vendor
Do you want your city to get its own TechCrunch Survey? They join in! So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here Check the list of European cities we’ve surveyed so far in our regular <a href=”https://forms.gle/jCcVCV9TgRjqJcRZ7“>survey</a> of European founders and
Kobo’s Elipsa is the latest in the Amazon rival’s e-reading line, and it’s a big one. The 10.3-inch e-paper display brings it up to iPad dimensions and puts it in direct competition with the reMarkable and Boox’s e-reader tablets. It excels on reading experience, gets by on note-taking and drawing, but falls a bit short
Amsterdam-based challenger bank Bunq has been self-funded by its founder and CEO Ali Niknam for several years. But the company has decided to raise some external capital, leading to the largest Series A round for a European fintech company. The startup is raising $228 million (€193 million) in a round led by Pollen Street Capital.
Lacuna Technologies, a startup that helps cities create and enforce transportation policies by building and managing open-source digital tools, has raised $16 million in a Series A round, bringing the company’s total investment to $33.5 million. Since the startup was founded in 2018, Lacuna has invested in helping cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and Miami
When Daniel Simon sold Bread, a consumer purchase finance and payments startup he’d co-founded, to Alliance Data Systems for over $500 million late last year, he quickly set his sights on building another startup. During the pandemic, Simon says he observed how much strain was placed on what he described as ‘real-world’ businesses and their
For years YouTube’s video-recommending algorithm has stood accused of fuelling a grab-bag of societal ills by feeding users an AI-amplified diet of hate speech, political extremism and/or conspiracy junk/disinformation for the profiteering motive of trying to keep billions of eyeballs stuck to its ad inventory. And while YouTube’s tech giant parent Google has, sporadically, responded
Cloverly, an Atlanta-based early stage startup, has developed an API that helps companies measure and then offset their carbon emissions. Today the company announced a $2.1 million seed round. TechSquare Ventures led the round with participation from SoftBank Opportunity Fund and Panoramic Ventures along with Circadian Ventures, Knoll Ventures, and SaaS Ventures
. While it was
The war between Box’s current leadership and activist shareholder Starboard took a new turn today with a detailed timeline outlining the two groups’ relationship, thanks to an SEC filing and companion press release. Box is pushing back against a slate of board candidates put forth by Starboard, which wants to shake up the company’s leadership and sell