Penta, the Berlin-based business banking challenger that also now operates in Italy, has raised €18.5 million, described as the first closing of a new funding round. Leading the round is new investor RTP Global and existing investor HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Also participating is ABN AMRO Ventures and Berliner Volksbank Ventures, and Finleap (the fintech company builder that
Smart rings are still a relatively young category in the wearable hardware world, but the Oura Ring seems to be a standout in terms of early success. The Oura Ring hardware is sleek and packed with sensors, allowing it to measure a user’s sleep patterns, take your body temperature and track activity, and now Oura
Kenya’s largest teleco, Safaricom, will implement a fee-waiver on East Africa’s leading mobile-money product, M-Pesa, to reduce the physical exchange of currency in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The company announced that all person-to-person (P2P) transactions under 1,000 Kenyan Schillings (≈ $10) would be free starting Tuesday for the next 90 days. The move came
Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, is officially launching business bank accounts today, after an extensive trial period over the last 12 months that saw early access given to 2,500 business customers. Perhaps surprisingly, right out of the gate Monzo is offering two versions of its business bank account — which is aimed at sold traders
While companies might pay for a CEO coach, lower level employees often get stuck with lame skill-building worksheets or no mentorship at all. Not only does that limit their potential productivity, but it also makes them feel stagnated and undervalued, leading them to jump ship. Therapy…err…executive coaching is finally becoming destigmatized as entrepreneurs and their
GiveVision, the U.K. startup creating wearable technology to help “restore” sight to people with visual impairments, is partnering with Sony (via the Sony UK Technology Centre) to develop and manufacture its next generation device. Specifically, GiveVision says it will be working with Sony UK Tec to help bring to market a new, lightweight version of
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the U.S., grocery delivery apps have begun seeing record numbers of daily downloads, according to new data from app store intelligence firm Apptopia. On Sunday, online grocery apps including Instacart, Walmart Grocery, and Shipt hit yet another new record for daily downloads for their respective apps, the firm says.
Noah Lichtenstein Contributor Noah Lichtenstein is the founder and managing partner of Crossover, a diversified private technology fund backed by institutional investors, technology execs and professional athletes and entertainers. More posts by this contributor What Studying Students Teaches Us About Great Apps I’ll admit it: When it comes to food, I’m lazy. There are dozens
GitHub, the developer repository owned by Microsoft, made a little deal of its own this morning when it bought JavaScript packaging vendor npm for an undisclosed amount. As GitHub CEO Nat Friedman wrote in a blog post announcing the deal, npm is a big deal in the JavaScript community. The company is the commercial entity
Unfortunately, the world doesn’t have a constant quantity of problems, and while governments and most private businesses are focused on tackling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, companies like Genecis Bioindustries are working on technologies to solve another major problem: climate change. For over a decade, sustainability advocates and entrepreneurs have been searching for a way to
We need to go hands-off in the age of coronavirus. That means touching fewer doors, elevators, and sign-in iPads. But once a building is using phone-based identity for security, there’s opportunities to speed up access to WIFI networks and printers, or personalize conference rooms and video call set-ups. Keyless office entry startup Proxy wants to
One of the defining characteristics of the European Union has been its strong policy of taking an open approach when it comes to borders in the region: the EU may be a collection of individual countries, but it works as one, and so when you travel from one to the other as an EU citizen,
TransferWise, the London-headquartered international money transfer service most recently valued by investors at $3.5 billion, has partnered with China’s Aliplay for international transfers. The launch enables TransferWise’s now 7 million-plus users to be able to send Chinese yuan from 17 currencies to users of Alipay, which serves more than 1.2 billion people worldwide including via
TechCrunch did a synopsis recently on Africa’s 2019 VC stats. Analyses from investment fund Partech and media outlets Disrupt Africa and WeeTracker came up with varied numbers, but there was a common trend: the top two countries for venture capital to startups across all three studies were Nigeria and Kenya. TechCrunch covered a number of
Huboo, the U.K. startup that operates a multi-channel fulfilment service for e-commerce businesses of varying sizes, has picked up an undisclosed amount of investment from Maersk Growth, the venture arm of Danish container logistics giant A.P. Moller – Maersk. The funding is described as a bridge round designed to see Huboo through to a future
Meet Riot, a company participating in Y Combinator’s current batch that wants to help you fight phishing attempts. Riot runs fake phishing campaigns on your employees. For instance, your team members could receive an email saying that their Google account has been deactivated to see if they can spot real email notifications from fake ones.
Remote collaboration tools like Zoom are gathering massive amounts of attention as people begin working from home en masse. But, as with most trends, virtual reality seems to be sitting out this boom. This should be surprising to absolutely no one, but the lack of widespread adoption is not for lack of trying. Virtual reality
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today was something a bit special. We’d originally hoped to have this episode in person, as a group, but the world isn’t flying as much right now so we had to make do. Regardless, please say hello and
Startups have done some wild things to get the attention of VCs. In fact, Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta sent YC partner (at the time) Garry Tan a six-pack of beer through the service after missing the deadline for Y Combinator by two months. Yesterday, the ingenuity of startups struck again. Tadabase.io, an enterprise startup that
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently
From long payment cycles to antiquated processes on how to bill workers, the hefty inefficiencies of the construction industry are long overdue for innovation. Enter startups such as the large venture-backed Katerra and recently public companies such as Procore. Still, independent contractors or workers from small family businesses often can’t afford hefty fees from SaaS
Ecosia, a not-for-profit search engine which uses ad generated revenue to fund planting trees, is set to get a visibility boost in Chrome. A change Google is making to its chromium engine will see it added as a default search engine choice in up to 47 markets for the version 81 release of Google’s web
Y Combinator’s Demo Day is a key soirée on the startup calendar. This year, however, instead of a packed room replete with short pitches and lackluster catering, Demo Day has gone virtual. Even more, it was moved up by a week, pushing the public debut of a host of companies to this coming Monday. TechCrunch
Unitary, a startup that’s developing AI to automate content moderation for “harmful content” so that humans don’t have to, has picked up £1.35 million in funding. The company is still in development mode but launched a trial of its technology in September. Led by Rocket Internet’s GFC, the seed round also includes backing from Jane
When concerns about the novel coronavirus — and subsequent changes in activity — are not bringing productivity to a halt (and perhaps especially in times of needing to be as efficient as possible), one of the bigger IT trends has been a push to streamline how people work by creating better integrations between the different
It’s amazing that in this day and age, the best way to search for new clothes is to click a few check boxes and then scroll through endless pictures. Why can’t you search for “green patterned scoop neck dress” and see one? Glisten is a new startup enabling just that by using computer vision to
American-listed shares are off sharply this morning, falling after a steep selloff yesterday was not staunched by a presidential address. The declines echo what happened to Asian-listed stocks earlier today. All major American indices are now in bear-market territory, having shed the requisite 20% from recent highs. Today’s carnage is simply bleak. As we write
Instagram is embracing its potential as a news source, employing its ubiquity to distribute Coronavirus prevention techniques through a new call-out at the top of its homescreen feed. In some countries, Instagram will show a link to information from the World Health Organization and local health ministries along with a message like this: “Help Prevent
With the globalized world going into partial or complete lock down over the Covid-19 pandemic, startups in the travel sector are facing a huge stress test and immediate disruption to business as usual as public health concern spirals and entire populations are encouraged or even forced not to travel. The traditional travel hub of Europe
ZTE’s struggles with the U.S. government generally haven’t been as high-profile as fellow Chinese mobile giant Huawei, but the company has still had its share of issues in recent years. The latest wrinkle, first reported by NBC and later confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, finds it under investigation over bribery charges. The issues stem