TechCrunch

Marqeta has long been a fintech darling, but it's less well-known than other companies in its sector due to its infrastructure nature.

Alek Koenig spent four years at Affirm, where he was head of Credit. There he saw firsthand just how powerful the alternative lending model could be. Koenig realized that it wasn’t just consumers who could benefit from the model, but businesses too. So in November 2019, he founded Settle as a way to give e-commerce […]

The influence of a founder on their company's culture cannot be overstated. Everything from their views on the product and business to how they think about people affects how their company's employees will behave.

Discovery has ordered a new reality show, to air in 2022, which will be an eight-episode competition series where competitors will vie for a chance to take a trip to the International Space Station on a commercial Axiom Space mission. The winner will be a crew member for AX-2, the second mission from Axiom to […]

It’s 2021. Contact importers are old history, and everyone’s a creator, building for their own audience. How can early-stage startups find meaningful traction at the velocity they need when the distribution channels are more competitive and complex than ever? Which ads are worth spending money on? Growth and marketing expert Susan Su is joining us […]

Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban innovation organization, has announced the launch of Pebble, a vehicle sensor that’s designed to help manage parking in cities by providing real-time parking and curb availability data. Here’s how it works: Small spherical sensors are stuck to the ground on parking spaces to note the absence or presence of a vehicle. […]

Lamborghini will pay homage to combustion engines with the introduction of two new V12 luxury sports cars this year before it makes a push into electrification as the company tries to balance its storied gas-powered past with a hybrid, and eventually electric, future. The company laid out Tuesday its electrification roadmap, a plan that will […]

Email marketing is decades old, but it’s a category that has surprising life in it. Multiple generations of email marketing companies have come through and sustained success, from Constant Contact to Mailchimp. These brands often become household names — after all, you probably have hundreds of emails with their logos attached to the email footer. […]

As cloud-native apps continue to become increasingly central to how organizations operate, a startup founded by the creators of a popular open-source tool to manage authorization for cloud-native application environments is announcing some funding to expand its efforts at commercializing the opportunity. Styra, the startup behind Open Policy Agent, has picked up $40 million in […]

Email marketing has been with us for decades, but today it has been refined to a science and an art form. If you’re an early-stage founder, it is one of the best ways to build and grow your direct relationship with your customer. You know how fickle the platforms can be. You can’t afford to […]

In the absence of a real baseball league, it is perhaps not surprising that a simulated one should grow popular during the troubled year 2020. But even so, the absurdist horror and minimalist aesthetic of Blaseball seem an unlikely success. The text-based fantasy fantasy league has attracted hundreds of thousands of players and now $3.4 […]

Nearly every social media experience today is built on the same premise: Humans identify with individuality. Users create a profile, upload an avatar picture, write a short biography and can then scream into the ether to other users on behalf of their digitally sculpted selves. Naj Austin, the founder behind Ethel’s Club, built Somewhere Good […]

The events of the past year and a half could well mark the beginning of a sea change for the world of restaurant robotics. The essential industrial was slammed amid the pandemic, leaving many companies searching for a decent automated option that could both keep things running and potentially avoid transmission vectors. Seattle-based Picnic is […]

Last September we concluded our 27-inch iMac review thusly, “The big open question mark here is what the future looks like for the iMac — and how long we’ll have to wait to see it. That is, of course, the perennial question for hardware upgrades, but it’s exacerbated by the knowledge of imminent ARM-based systems […]

As publishers face up to whatever might be their next existential crisis — there are so many options from which to choose, including Substack stealing all their writers; or Clubhouse pulling in people through audio-based conversations where news and analysis intermingle seamlessly with networking — a startup that’s helping them build more tools to keep […]

One thing is clear in the cloud native world. Developers use a lot of services to create applications, and while service meshes define how these services work together, just getting a grip on the services a team uses is usually tracked manually in spreadsheets. That’s where Cortex, a new startup, comes in. It can help […]

When antitrust accusations close in on Google the tech giant loves to fire back a riposte that competition is just “one click away“. It’s a disingenuous retort from an online advertising behemoth whose power and profits stem from its expertise in capturing markets by manipulating and monopolizing Internet users’ attention. Indeed, the entire brand is […]

Automation is extending into every aspect of how organizations get work done, and today comes news of a startup that is building tools for one industry in particular: life sciences. Artificial, which has built a software platform for laboratories to assist with, or in some cases fully automate, research and development work, has raised $21.5 […]

The world of digital payments is very fragmented, with different types of online bank accounts, digital wallets and money transfer services used in different countries. Singapore-based Thunes, a fintech focused on making cross-border money transfers easier, announced today it has raised a $60 million growth round led by Insight Partners. One of the world’s largest […]

Facebook wants to whet consumers’ appetite for live streamed shopping with this week’s launch of “Live Shopping Fridays” event series, which will see larger brands live streaming beauty, skincare, and fashion content on a weekly basis. The event begins Friday, May 22nd and runs through mid-July, with streams from brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, Bobbi […]