Vantage, a service that helps businesses analyze and reduce their AWS costs, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. A number of angel investors, including Brianne Kimmel, Julia Lipton, Stephanie Friedman, Calvin French Owen, Ben and Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer and Justin Gage, also participated in this […]
Pro-privacy browser Brave, which has been testing its own brand search engine for several months — operating a waitlist where brave (ha!) early adopters could kick the tyres of an upstart alternative in Internet search — has now launched the tool, Brave Search, in global beta. Users interested in checking out Brave’s non-tracking search engine, […]
With as much seed capital as there is in the market today, we talked to investors about startups raising later Series As than before, while Series B rounds can happen incredibly rapidly.
We’ve chronicled, in great detail, the many layers of technology, services and solutions that have been wrapped around the world of education in recent years — and especially in the last year, which became a high watermark for digital learning tools because of COVID-19. Today, a startup called Merlyn Mind is coming out of stealth […]
The conversation on founder pay is changing for the better. We've gathered insights from founders and VCs and narrowed down the most important factors and benchmarks to guide your decision.
In 2017, Paul Hawken published a book compiling a set of concrete actions people could take to combat climate change called The Climate Drawdown. Inspired by this, Seth Bannon, founding partner at Fifty Years, a firm that provides seed funding for companies aiming to make the world a better place, decided to do something similar […]
Zeller, a Melbourne-based fintech founded by former Square executives to serve small- to mid-sized businesses, has raised $50 million AUD (about $37.5 million USD) led by Spark Capital, the investment firm whose portfolio also includes Twitter, Slack and Coinbase. Zeller’s valuation is now $400 million AUD (about $301 million USD). The funding included participation from […]
More than a million people migrate to the U.S. each year. Upon their arrival, they face challenges in opening a local bank account and accessing financial services at regular rates. These challenges for migrants, a significant portion of whom also need to send money home, have persisted globally for decades, despite large government support programs. […]
As venues reopen across the U.S., Mixhalo has announced a pair of additions to its in-person audio live event audio streaming platform: Mixhalo Over Cellular and Mixhalo Rodeo. The first is, more or less, what it sounds like. Rather than relying on Wi-Fi, the leverages 5G. The company says it will be able to offer […]
Kairos, the startup studio led by Ankur Jain, is launching a new brand today called Bilt Rewards. Bilt is a rewards program that lets renters earn each time they make a rent payment. The company is funded by Kairos, which is the studio that is also responsible for brands like Rhino, Alloy, and Little Spoon. […]
Squad used to be an app that connected people with similar interests for in-person meetups. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. While most social apps thrived under these conditions — people craved digital connection more than ever — Squad couldn’t operate. Founder Isa Watson didn’t know how long the world would be in shutdown. Instead of […]
You might well have a sleep app that tracks your sleep. I use Sleep Cycle, and have found it has started to even tell me when I cough during the night. It turns out you can run machine learning over how you might cough in the night, to detect changes in the way you cough. […]
This morning G2, a company that provides an online software review and information database, announced that it has raised a $157 million Series D. Per a release the company shared with TechCrunch in advance of its news, G2 is now worth more than $1 billion, making it a unicorn in modern parlance. Permira led the […]
Time is your most valuable asset — as the saying goes — and today a startup called Memory.ai, which is building AI-based productivity tools to help you with your own time management, is announcing some funding to double down on its ambitions: it wants not only to help manage your time, but to, essentially, provide […]
Entrepreneur Kuljeev Singh has had a three-course meal in the restaurant business. He was an angel investor in ChefHero, a part-time owner in an Australian-style meat pie shop, and now, is the founder of ResQ, a startup that helps restaurants repair and service their equipment through contractor work. Sitting at multiple seats at the table […]
We’re about a week away from TechCrunch Spotlight: Pittsburgh, and one of the uniquely-TechCrunch things we do at events is a pitch-off. Be it the big Disrupt Battlefield, or the flash pitch-offs that happen weekly on Extra Crunch Live, the energy around folks pitching their company — sometimes for the first time — is downright […]
EU antitrust authorities are finally taking a broad and deep look into Google’s adtech stack and role in the online ad market — confirming today that they’ve opened a formal investigation. Google has already been subject to three major EU antitrust enforcements over the past five years — against Google Shopping (2017), Android (2018) and […]
Insilico Medicine, an AI-based platform for drug development and discovery announced $255 million in Series C financing on Tuesday. The massive round is reflective of a recent breakthrough for the company: proof that it’s AI based platform can create a new target for a disease, develop a bespoke molecule to address it, and begin the […]
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published its final recommendations yesterday setting on guidance for making transfers of personal data to third countries to comply with EU data protection rules in light of last summer’s landmark CJEU ruling (aka Schrems II). The long and short of these recommendations — which are fairly long; running to […]
Transmit Security, a Boston-based startup that’s on a mission to rid the world of passwords, has raised a massive $543 million in Series A funding. The funding round, said to be the largest Series A investment in cybersecurity history and one of the highest valuations for a bootstrapped company, was led by Insight Partners and […]
