One of the best parts of TechCrunch Disrupt is the Startup Battlefield competition, and one of the most important pieces of the Startup Battlefield is our lineup of expert judges — they’re the ones the founders are trying to impress. Once the demos and presentations are done, the judges need to think quickly and ask
A few months back, robotic process automation (RPA) unicorn UiPath raised a huge $750 million round at a valuation of around $35 billion. The capital came ahead of the company’s expected IPO, so its then-new valuation helped provide a measuring stick for where its eventual flotation could price. UiPath then filed to go public. But
EcoCart, a company pitching consumers on ways to offset their carbon emissions for free at select merchants (with a browser extension!) has raised $3 million in financing from Base10 Partners. Brands pay the company a commission to drive traffic to their websites under a standard affiliate marketing model and EcoCart uses a portion of the
When Microsoft announced it was acquiring Nuance Communications this morning for $19.7 billion, you could be excused for doing a Monday morning double take at the hefty price tag. That’s surely a lot of money for a company on a $1.4 billion run rate, but Microsoft, which has already partnered with the speech-to-text market leader
Cybersecurity training startup Hack The Box, which emerged originally from Greece, has raised a Series A investment round of $10.6 million, led by Paladin Capital Group and joined by Osage University Partners, Brighteye Ventures, and existing investors Marathon Venture Capital. It will use the funding to expand. Most recently it launched Hack The Box Academy.
Feb.01 — Clubhouse co-founder and CEO Paul Davison discusses the invitation-only social app, launched in 2020, and its explosive growth with over two million users including Oprah Winfrey, Drake, and Elon musk. He also addresses concerns over content moderation on the live audio platform. Davison speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology”.
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 1,000 times. Startup Alley is ground zero for entrepreneurial opportunity. It’s where hundreds of savvy, exhibiting startups increase their brand recognition, connect with investors, grow their network, expand their customer base and garner invaluable media coverage. TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 21-23, and we’ve added new
Jorge Torres Contributor Jorge Torres is CEO and co-founder of MindsDB, an open source AI layer for existing databases. Adam Carrigan Contributor Adam Carrigan is a co-founder and COO of MindsDB, an open source AI layer for existing databases. Open-source software gave birth to a slew of useful software in recent years. Many of the
Shilling, an early-stage VC in Portugal, has now launched a new €30M ($35.6M) early-stage fund called Shilling Founders Fund, which is backed just over 35 successful tech founders, as well as large European VC Atomico. The fund will run on a profit-sharing model, sharing fund returns with all of its portfolio founders. While the fund
“Most of the startups I give advice to about how to raise venture capital shouldn’t be raising venture capital,” an investor recently told me. While the idea that every startup isn’t venture-backable might run counter to the narrative to the barrage of funding news each week, I think it’s important to double click on the
Butter, a startup registered in Denmark but operating fully remote, is building an “all-in-one” platform for planning and running virtual workshops. Offering video software and other features dedicated to workshopping, the idea is to pull people away from using more generic tools, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which, arguably, aren’t well suited to workshops.
Mar.31 — Kimbal Musk, Big Green executive chairman and co-founder, says he’s excited about the future of Tesla. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller and Amanda Lang on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. The startup world could be in for a busy summer. Today the economy is improving. Unemployment
Corporate catering company Elior has acquired French startup Nestor for an undisclosed amount. Nestor originally started with a simple idea to differentiate itself from food delivery giants, such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and others. Every day, the startup offered a single menu for lunch. If you liked what was on the menu, you could order
Melissa Bradley wears many hats. She’s the co-founder of a startup called Ureeka, an investor at 1863 Ventures, and a professor at Georgetown’s business school. So it’s not an understatement to say that she understands the fundraising process from every angle. And moreover, she has both invested and fundraised for her own startup during this
Iyuno-SDI Group, a provider of translated subtitles and other media localization services, announced today it has raised $160 million in funding from SoftBank Vision 2. The company said this makes the fund one of its largest shareholders. Iyuno-SDI Group was formed after Iyuno Media Group completed its acquisition of SDI Media last month. In a
Canvas Medical, an electronic health records (EHR) startup, today announced their $17 million Series A and a new partnership with Anthem, one of the biggest health insurance companies in the country. The round was co-led by Inspired Capital and IA Ventures, with participation from Upfront Ventures. This round brings the company’s total funding to date
French startup Vybe has raised a $2.9 million funding round (€2.4 million) to build a challenger bank for teens. The company is currently testing its product with a soft launch. Users get a Mastercard payment card paired with an e-wallet. Each Vybe account comes with its own IBAN so that users can send and receive
Over the last few days, we’ve published several articles recapping panels from last week’s TechCrunch Early Stage virtual conference. Each story is based on an interview with a founder or investor who addressed some of the most common startup dilemmas. Predictably, they’re mostly focused on the how and why: How do I get into an
Practically every film production these days needs some kind of visual effects work, but independent creators often lack the cash or expertise to get that top-shelf CG. Wonder Dynamics, founded by VFX engineer Nikola Todorovic and actor Tye Sheridan, aims to use AI to make some of these processes more accessible for filmmakers with budgets
Swag has a long and patchy history in the world of business. For every hip pair of plaid socks, there are five t-shirts you may never wear, an itchy scarf, a notepad your kids might use, and an ugly mug; and most of all, likely thousands of dollars and lots of time invested to make
While visual ‘no code‘ tools are helping businesses get more out of computing without the need for armies of in-house techies to configure software on behalf of other staff, access to the most powerful tech tools — at the ‘deep tech’ AI coal face — still requires some expert help (and/or costly in-house expertise). This
Mar.31 — Kimbal Musk, Big Green executive chairman and co-founder, discusses educating students through gardening at home. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller and Amanda Lang on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Few companies have done better than Scale at spotting a need in the AI gold rush early on and filling that gap. The startup rightly identified that one of the tasks most important to building effective AI at scale — the laborious exercise of tagging data sets to make them usable in properly training new
Shorthand, the Australian startup behind a no-code platform that allows publishers and brands to create multimedia stories, has raised $10 million Australian (just under $8 million U.S.) from Fortitude Investment Partners. CEO Ricky Robinson told me via email that this is Shorthand’s first institutional round of funding, and that the company has been profitable for
The planet-loving folks at the Sustainable Ocean Alliance started an accelerator a couple years back focusing on very early stage companies, but this year they’re expanding the program to accept those who have already closed their first round. The mix of experimental and (comparatively) proven approaches may help diversify the accelerator’s growing network. “Last year,
When Box announced it was getting a $500 million investment from private equity firm KKR this morning, it was hard not to see it as a positive move for the company. It has been operating under the shadow of Starboard Value, and this influx of cash could give it a way forward independent of the
Given the pandemic, huge changes are being wrought in tech events, something which used to be the lifeblood of the industry. Many a startup has pitched to win funding, and many a hackathon has formed teams that went on to greater things. It’s a sad fact that this era is over, at least until the
Sometimes you’ve just got to confirm an unannounced product to put the rumors to bed, I guess. That was Google’s strategy this afternoon, following earlier rumors from Android Central that a chip shortage had put the kibosh on the mid-budget phone. In a comment to TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson noted, “Pixel 5a 5G is not
During a seed funding round, a founder needs to convince a venture capital investor on a vision. But during a Series A fundraise, napkin-stage ideas don’t make the cut — a founder needs product progress, numbers, and revenue (or at least a plan to eventually generate some). In many ways, the stakes are higher for