Early-stage founders have about a zillion questions and face a battalion of challenges to get their businesses up and running. That’s why we created TechCrunch Early Stage, a two-day, virtual and highly interactive conference that takes place on July 21 – 22. At TC Early Stage, early founders — from pre-seed through Series A — can
If you were hoping for Q3 SaaS IPOs, here’s some good news Alex Wilhelm 8 hours The domestic stock market is advancing today on the back of some better-than-anticipated economic recovery data in the United States. While retail spending is still lower compared to the year-ago period, gains in May from April were better than
Mobile social networking app for women, Peanut, is expanding into video chat to help better support its users amid the coronavirus outbreak. The company, which began its life with a focus on motherhood, has evolved over the years to reach women looking to discuss a range of topics — including pregnancy, marriage, parenthood, and even
Google Cloud today announced the launch of Filestore High Scale, a new storage option — and tier of Google’s existing Filestore service — for workloads that can benefit from access to a distributed high-performance storage option. With Filestore High Scale, which is based on technology Google acquired when it bought Elastifile in 2019, users can
Pale Blue Dot, a newly outed European venture capital firm focused on climate tech, announced this week the first closing of its debut fund at €53 million. Targeting pre-seed and seed stage startups, the firm says it will consider software and technology investments with a strong positive climate impact. Current areas of focus include food/agriculture,
Apple’s App Store faces antitrust scrutiny, a private space company plans to install a satellite for lunar communication and Boston Dynamics expands availability of its iconic Spot robot. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 16, 2020. 1. Apple Pay and iOS App Store under formal antitrust probe in Europe The European Commission confirmed that it’s
French startup Molotov is better known for its TV streaming service in France. The company has attracted millions of users that use it to watch live TV, record movies and TV shows in the cloud, play past TV content and access on-demand channels. The company is launching Molotov Solutions, a B2B division that will build
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our short-form week-starter in which we go over the weekend, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds, and dig into what is stuck on our minds. So, by section then:
TransferGo, the London-based international money transfer service, has raised another $10 million in funding, as it discloses that its customers numbers has surpassed two million. The round was co-led by Seventure, and Vostok Emerging finance, with follow-on funding from Hard Yaka, Revo Capital, and Bootstrap Europe. The startup is also announcing it has launched in
Finland-based Swappie has closed a €35.8 million ($40.6M) Series B to expand into new markets in Europe. The ecommerce business refurbishes and resells used iPhones, taking care of the entire process from testing and repairing used handsets, to selling the refurbished devices via its own marketplace, with a 12-month warranty. Local VC and private equity
Stockwell AI entered the world with a bang but it is leaving with a whimper. Founded in 2017 by ex-Googlers, the AI vending machine startup formerly known as Bodega first raised blood pressures — people hated how it referenced and poorly ‘disrupted’ mom-and-pop shops in one fell swoop — and then raised a lot of money. But ultimately, it
When 2020 began, the year seemed set to include another year of record-setting venture capital investment and, perhaps, some long-awaited IPOs. All that quickly faded when COVID-19 spread globally, shutting economies, undercutting swaths of the business world and rearranging the working life in countries around the globe. Here at TechCrunch we’re navigating the changing landscape,
Sherman Ye founded VESoft in 2018 when he saw a growing demand for graph databases in China. Its predecessors like Neo4j and TigerGraph had already been growing aggressively in the West for a few years, while China was just getting to know the technology that leverages graph structures to store data sets and depict their
‘Europe’s most wired’ politician outlines her top cyber issues Scott Bade 7 hours Scott Bade Contributor Scott Bade is a former speechwriter for Mike Bloomberg and co-author of “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First.” More posts by this contributor Huawei’s terrible week Startups are transforming global trade in the COVID-19 era In
Nov.21 — The sixth season of Formula E kicks off this weekend in Saudi Arabia where the slickest and fastest all-electric vehicles do battle outside Riyadh. And it will all be powered by a company based more than 8000 miles away. Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow explains.
How do you give your brand a voice that feels authentic and unique? How can you communicate with users in a way that helps and engages without feeling weird or forced? We’re thrilled to announce that Anna Pickard, Head of Brand Communications at Slack, will be joining us at TC Early Stage to teach us
Startups need money. State and local governments need startups and the employment growth they offer. It should be obvious that the two groups can work together and make each other happy. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Each year, governments spend tens of billions of dollars on economic development incentives designed to attract
After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments in its app. Today the Facebook-owned messaging service announced that users in Brazil would be the first to be able to send and receive money by way of its messaging app, using Facebook Pay, the payments service WhatsApp owner Facebook launched
In a typical month, an IT department might deal with a small percentage of employees working remotely, but tracking a few thousand employees is one thing — moving an entire company offsite requires next-level planning. To learn more about how large organizations are adapting to the rapid shift to working from home, we spoke to Liberty
One of the first national coronavirus contacts tracing apps to be launched in Europe is being suspended in Norway after the country’s data protection authority raised concerns that the software, called ‘Smittestopp’, poses a disproportionate threat to user privacy — including by continuously uploading people’s location. Following a warning from the watchdog Friday, the Norwegian
WhatsApp is adding support for in-app payments, Apple is upgrading the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro desktop and we argue about the future of startup hubs. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 15, 2020. 1. WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on
Veteran journalist Maria Ressa, the founder of Filipino independent news site Rappler, was found guilty on Monday of cyber libel charges by a Manila court. She faces up to six years in prison. Critics of the charges, which include prominent human rights and press freedom advocates, say charges filed against Ressa and Reynaldo Santos Jr,
Sinch said on Monday it has agreed to buy Indian firm ACL Mobile for £56 million (roughly $70 million) in what is the third acquisition deal the Swedish mobile voice and messaging firm has entered into at the height of a global pandemic. The Swedish firm said acquiring ACL Mobile will enable it to leverage
Chinese internet giant ByteDance has announced plans to discontinue two of its apps in India, its biggest overseas market, and urged its users to move to TikTok. Vigo Video and Vigo Lite, two apps that allow users to create and share short-form sketches and lip-syncing to Bollywood songs, posted a message early Monday (local time)
Jun.11 — Tesla Inc. is getting closer to displacing Toyota as the world’s most valuable carmaker. Colin Rusch, senior analyst at Oppenheimer, discusses his firm’s outperform rating on Tesla’s stock on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Are you an early stage founder? Then listen up, because we created TC Early Stage just for you. This two-day virtual conference takes place on July 21-22. We’ll provide the details below, but first things first. Early bird tickets cost just $199 for early-stage founders, but this sweet deal flies south on June 26 at
Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. Many in the tech industry saw the threat of the novel coronavirus early and reacted correctly. Fewer have seemed prepared for its aftereffects, like the outflow of talented employees from very pricey office
Jul.30 — Connecting cars to each other and the infrastructure around them could play an important role in the future of autonomous vehicles and improving safety. However, a debate over technology and standards is delaying global deployment. While China is focused on utilizing 5G for cars, other markets are debating the choice between a 5G-based
“A lot of people denigrate the value of talking about race and racism in technological spaces,” said Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, which has surged to the top of the New York Times best sellers list in paperback nonfiction, two and a half years after its initial January 2018
BLCK VC is on a mission to double the number of Black venture capitalists out there by 2024. The reason behind it shouldn’t need explaining — only 2% of all partner-level VCs are Black, and 81% of VC firms don’t have a single Black partner. It’s no surprise then, that the startup ecosystem that is