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For many early startups, debt financing is not an option. If companies want to preserve equity, however, debt can be an advantageous choice.

Ads are coming to Twitter’s version of Stories, known as Fleets. The company announced today it will began pilot testing Fleet ads in the U.S., which will bring full-screen, vertical format ads to Twitter for the first time, allowing it to better compete with the vertical ads offered across social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, […]

Convenience stores are ubiquitous — and they sell the vast majority of gas purchased by consumers in the United States. But as more Americans transition to electric vehicles, a major reason people visit convenience stores will disappear. Industry giant 7-Eleven is looking to capture this growing market of EV drivers. The company said Tuesday it […]

With American stocks back near record highs, it could be a propitious moment to list for software companies that lack impressive top-line expansion results.

The grassroots Democratic organization Indivisible is launching its own team of stealth fact-checkers to push back against misinformation — an experiment in what it might look like to train up a political messaging infantry and send them out into the information trenches. Called the “Truth Brigade,” the corps of volunteers will learn best practices for […]

If you’ve experienced parenthood, you’re well versed in the surprisingly small world of disposable diapers. Help may be on the way. Kudos, a startup that is looking to reinvent the disposable diaper with sustainability in mind, announced the close of a $2.4 million seed round of financing today. Investors include Foundation Capital, XFund, PJC, Precursor […]

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a lot in the world, and supply chains are no exception.  A number of applications that aim to solve workflow challenges across the supply chain exist. But getting real-time access to information from transportation providers has remained somewhat elusive for shippers and logistics companies alike.  Enter project44. The seven-year-old Chicago-based company […]

Max Q is a weekly newsletter from TechCrunch all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Mondays in your inbox. This week actually includes two, since I was out last week for a Canadian national holiday (and back today for the U.S. one, ironically). There’s plenty to cover, including Blue Origin’s bidding […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday Tuesday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. […]

With COVID-19 restrictions lifting and employees starting to make their way back into offices, hackers are being forced to change tack. While remote workers have been scammers’ main target for the past 18 months due to the mass shift to home working necessitated by the pandemic, a new phishing campaign is attempting to exploit those […]

The cybersecurity industry has no shortage of technology to fight against network intruders, app corrupters, email hackers and other cyber criminals. Today a startup called Redacted is coming out of stealth with a different approach to tackling that malicious activity: It applies threat intelligence, and then proactively goes after the hackers to recover data loss […]

Cloudera was once one of the hottest Hadoop startups, but over time the shine has come off that market, and today it went private as KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a pair of private equity firms, announced they intended to purchase Cloudera for $5.3 billion. The company has a market cap of around $3.7 […]

Just about every week there’s a blockbuster round coming out of South America, but in certain countries such as Ecuador, things have been more hush-hush. However, Kushki, a Quito-based fintech, is bringing attention to the region with today’s announcement of an $86 million Series B and a $600 million valuation. “We never thought that we […]

A technical system underpinning the European Union’s plan for a pan-EU “digital pass” for verifying COVID-19 vaccination or test status across the region has gone live today, with a handful of EU Member States connected to the gateway and more expected to follow ahead of a July 1 full launch. The idea for the EU’s […]

Personal finance startup Truebill has raised a $45 million Series D funding round led by Accel. This comes just a few months after the company raised a $17 million Series C. Overall, the startup has raised $85 million since its creation. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Cota Capital and Eldridge Industries are also participating in […]

Belvo, a Latin American startup which has built an open finance API platform, announced today it has raised $43 million in a Series A round of funding. A mix of Silicon Valley and Latin American-based VC firms and angels participated in the financing, including Future Positive, Kibo Ventures, FJ Labs, Kaszek, MAYA Capital, Venture Friends, […]

Online fraud and identity theft is a global problem that has only been exacerbated with increased online transactions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it is estimated that Brazilian companies lose over $41 billion due to fraud every year. In an attempt to tackle this problem head on, Lincoln Ando and Raphael Melo started idwall […]

When two of Indonesia’s biggest companies — ride-hailing company Gojek and e-commerce marketplace Tokopedia — joined forces as GoTo Group last month, a key highlight from the merger was that the last-mile delivery space is still a huge global trend. In Nigeria, the e-commerce and last-mile delivery market is projected to be worth over $20 […]

Line Corporation, best known for its messaging app, launched a digital banking platform in Indonesia today. This means Japan-based Line Corp. now offers banking services in three of its biggest overseas markets: Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan. Line Corp.’s Indonesian banking platform is the result of a partnership the company struck in 2018 with PT Bank […]

Freight forwarding — the process of organising how and where items will be shipped around the world, and specifically the technology that underpins that work — continues to be a huge area of the logistics market, not least because of the huge boom in e-commerce in the last year, and because of the Covid-19-mandated need […]