Stewart Hillhouse Contributor Stewart Hillhouse writes actionable growth marketing insights as senior content lead at Demand Curve. By night, he interviews marketers and creatives on his podcast, Top Of Mind. Before getting into marketing, Stewart was a semi-professional lumberjack. He also writes at stewarthillhouse.com. We’ve spent millions of dollars running ads for brands like Outschool,
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha brought on Alexis Gay, a former operator at Patreon who now makes her living as comedian and podcast host, to talk about the creator economy — including our disdain for that horrid phrasing. You
Brian Turner Contributor Brian Turner, LEED-AP BD&C, leads strategic planning for product development and project work at Buildings IOT. Throughout his career, Brian has provided hands-on expertise to architects, engineers and building owners to design and implement integrated building systems. Everyone from investors to casual LinkedIn observers has more reasons than ever to look at
Getir, the startup based out of Turkey that has built a $7.5 billion business out a mobile app that lets consumers buy groceries and get them delivered in minutes, has grown its business up to now organically: targeting urban markets across Europe (and soon the U.S.) where it is disrupting the well-stocked cornershop with a
Common Sense Media has made a name for itself among parents as a useful resource for vetting entertainment and technology in terms of its age-appropriateness. Now, the organization’s for-profit affiliate, Common Sense Networks, is taking inspiration from those kid-friendly recommendations with the launch of new streaming service called Sensical. The service offers age-appropriate, entertaining, and
Peanut, the maker of a social networking app for women, is entering into the investing space with today’s launch of a microfund called StartHER. As the name implies, the new fund will focus on investing in women as well as other historically excluded founders “of all ages, life stages, ethnicities and sexual orientations,” the company says.
The American IPO market is hot for many companies, but surprisingly cool for others. The gap between the two cohorts of private companies looking to list is becoming notable. When Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi first set an IPO price range, The Exchange was curious about why the company felt so inexpensive. Compared to its American
Geoffrey Moore Contributor Known for his seminal book “Crossing the Chasm,” Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker and adviser who splits his consulting time between startup companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolio and established high-tech enterprises — including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5Networks, Gainsight, Google and Splunk. Jeff Bussgang, a co-founder and general partner at
Nodes & Links is a scheduling platform for large-scale infrastructure projects which works out when the nuts and bolts for the bridge (for example) should be delivered, and in what order. Unsurprisingly, complex infrastructure projects often get this wrong. The company has now raised an $11 million Series A funding round led by urban sustainability-focused
This is your opportunity to get a glimpse of the future of iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. Apple just released the first public beta of iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and watchOS 8. Those releases are the next major versions of the operating systems for the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Unlike developer betas, everyone can download
Australian rocket launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies is betting that bigger isn’t always better. The company has developed a small launch vehicle it calls Eris, a 25 meter (82 foot) rocket that can deliver payload of up to 215 kilograms (474 lbs) to sun synchronous orbit. Now, it’s raised a $61 million AUD ($46 million
Over the past year, there has been a surge of newly formed digital banks aimed at specific demographics. The banks in nearly all cases are trying to meet the needs of certain populations that they believe are feeling left out or underserved by traditional financial institutions. The latest such neobank to emerge is New York-based
Slack started talking about a new set of communications tools to enhance the text-based channels at the end of last year. Today the company released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles and gave more details on a couple of other new tools including the ability to leave a video message and an enhanced employee
For a glimpse of the security and privacy dystopia the UK government has in store for its highly regulated ‘British Internet’, look no further than guidance put out by the Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) yesterday — aimed at social media platforms and private messaging services — which includes the suggestion that
To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of
Instagram is building its own version of Twitter’s Super Follow with a feature that would allow online creators to publish “exclusive” content to their Instagram Stories that’s only available to their fans — access that would likely come with a subscription payment of some kind. Instagram confirmed the screenshots of the feature recently circulated across
Toca Football, a nine-year-old, Costa Mesa, Ca.-based company that operates 14 sports centers across the U.S. that are focused on soccer training, has raised $40 million in Series E funding to roughly double the number of facilities that are now up and running in the U.S., as well as to open a site in the
The number of startups acquiring e-commerce businesses, especially those operating on Amazon, to grow and scale is increasing as more people than ever are shopping online. The latest such startup to raise capital is Forum Brands, which today announced it has raised $27 million in equity funding for its technology-driven e-commerce acquisition platform. Norwest Venture
GitHub has unveiled a new product that leverages artificial intelligence to help you write code more efficiently. Named GitHub Copilot, today’s new product can suggest lines of code and even sometimes entire functions. GitHub has partnered with OpenAI to develop this tool. It doesn’t replace developers, it’s just a tool that should improve productivity and
Ably is a Pub/Sub messaging platform that companies can use to develop realtime features in their products. The company just raised a $70 million Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital. Every day, you use various apps that push and fetch data in realtime. When you send a message in your
Shopify changed the e-commerce landscape by making it easier for merchants to set up their websites both quickly and affordably. A startup called Tapcart is now doing the same for mobile commerce. The company, which has referred to itself as the “Shopify for mobile apps,” today powers the shopping apps for top brands, including Fashion
Jun.25 — MicroStrategy Chairman and CEO Michael Saylor discusses why he believes Bitcoin continues to be a good investment despite market volatility and China’s cryptocurrency crackdown. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Duolingo filed to go public yesterday, giving the world a deep look inside its business results and how the pandemic impacted the edtech unicorn’s performance. TechCrunch’s initial read of the company’s filing was generally positive, noting that its growth was impressive and its losses modest; Duolingo recently began making money on an adjusted basis. While
William Kilmer Contributor William Kilmer is managing partner with C5 Capital, a venture capital fund investing in the secure data ecosystem. He was formerly an operating partner at Mercato Growth Partners and served as CEO and chairman of PublicEngines (acquired by Motorola), and Avinti (merged with M86 Security) and served as chief marketing officer/chief strategy
After launching its IPO last week with an expected listing price range of $26 to $29 per share, cybersecurity company SentinelOne is going public tomorrow with some momentum behind it. Sources close to the deal tell us that the company, which will be trading under the ticker “S” on the New York Stock Exchange, is
Mate Rimac’s founder story has the makings of automotive folklore. He started Rimac Automobili in his garage in 2009 as a literal one-person operation that has grown to a company with more than 1,000 employees, supply contracts with automakers like Porsche and a new electric hypercar moving into production. What might not be known is
Listen, it’s probably not the best sign when a show feels like it’s running out of steam on its first day. Mobile World Congress’ opening salvo was headlined by Samsung in an event that touched on some partnerships and spent equal time teasing an upcoming event where it will actually launch some hardware. It’s hard
New York-based construction startup Toggle this morning announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and featured Blackhorn Ventures, Point72 Ventures, New York State and Twenty Seven Ventures. It follows a $3 million seed round raised in late-2019. Robotics in general have been a massively
Bees are absolutely critical to the health of our agricultural system, ecosystem, and overall wellbeing as a species here on Earth. And yet bee populations are decreasing and extinction concerns are growing. Beeflow, a startup that today announced the close of a $8.3 million Series A round, is looking to both save the bees and
JFrog, the company best known for a platform that helps developers continuously manage software delivery and updates, is making a deal to help it expand its presence and expertise in an area that has become increasingly connected to DevOps: security. The company is acquiring Vdoo, which has built an AI-based platform that can be used