TechCrunch

Here are seven ad types that have proven to increase click-through rates (CTR), with examples of each. Clone them to test in your own social ad campaigns.

In the white-hot creator economy space, startups are increasingly looking to build paint-by-numbers platforms to help budding creators more easily execute on what were once seemingly insurmountable business challenges. The ex-Uber team at Pietra is cashing in on this vision with a plan to build a backend for launching and scaling creator product lines. The […]

Amazon has petitioned that the newly minted Chair of the FTC and implacable critic of the company, Lina Khan, be recused from decisions relating to the company. The company argues that she has been too outspoken about the failure to regulate Amazon to handle matters impartially. It will be for the FTC to decide, and […]

SWORD Health, a virtual musculoskeletal care platform founded in 2015, announced today that it has raised an $85 million Series C funding round led by General Catalyst. Other participating investors included BOND, Highmark Ventures, BPEA, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Transformation Capital and Green Innovations. The funding comes months after the company raised a $25 million […]

Virgin Orbit had a successful first commercial launch, meaning there’s now officially another small satellite launch provider in operation with a track record of delivering payloads to space. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket took off from its carrier aircraft at around 11:45 AM EDT today, and the spacecraft had a successful series of engine fires and […]

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed seven new charges against Paige Thompson, the former Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineer accused of hacking Capital One and stealing the personal data of more than 100 million Americans. The new charges, which include six counts of computer fraud and abuse and one count of access device […]

Australian rocket launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies is betting that bigger isn’t always better. The company has developed a small launch vehicle it calls Eris, a 25-meter (82 foot) rocket that can deliver a payload of up to 215 kilograms (474 pounds) to sun synchronous orbit. Now, it’s raised a $61 million AUD ($46 million […]

It’s almost go-time for all you early-stage startup founders. That’s right, on July 8-9 thousands of determined entrepreneurs around the world will gather virtually for the best little two-day bootcamp we like to call TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising. Two days focused on the bottom-line essentials to build your start up the right […]

Over the past year, there has been a surge of newly formed digital banks aimed at specific demographics. The banks in nearly all cases are trying to meet the needs of certain populations that they believe are feeling left out or underserved by traditional financial institutions. The latest such neobank to emerge is New York-based […]

Mandolin just marked its first birthday earlier this month, and yet the Indianapolis-based startup is already announcing a $12 million Series A. That’s a quick follow up to the $5 million seed it raised in early October of last year. Turns out the global pandemic is a pretty fortuitious time to launch and grow a […]

While many Chinese companies are seemingly struggling to find the demand that they expect for their shares on American exchanges, domestic companies are seeing some opposite results.

Instagram is building its own version of Twitter’s Super Follow with a feature that would allow online creators to publish “exclusive” content to their Instagram Stories that’s only available to their fans — access that would likely come with a subscription payment of some kind. Instagram confirmed that the screenshots of the feature recently circulated […]

If the pandemic achieved anything good, it was putting health front and center in the minds of the general public, elected officials, investors and innovators. Cityblock has been working on solutions for bringing together the healthcare industry and communities since long before now, but it raised a total of $372 million spanning December through March, […]

Increased diversity on boards isn’t just a great development by itself; board experience positions members well for future leadership roles, getting more women and people of color into corner offices.

Board tensions at Hinge Health, a San Francisco-based digital health unicorn, have caused Bessemer Venture Partners to switch up its board director seat, replacing the original investor at the chair with a different one. Hinge Health co-founder and CEO Daniel Perez says BVP’s original board seat went to the partner who led the his company’s […]

Microsoft’s customer security chief says as many as one-third of all government demands that the company receives for customer data are issued with secrecy clauses that prevents it from disclosing the search to the subject of the warrant. The figure was disclosed in testimony by Microsoft’s Tom Burt ahead of a House Judiciary Committee on […]

No, it’s not April Fool’s Day. But Twitter’s entire account has been taken over by NFTs. As its new header reads: “I’ve stopped moisturizing because tweeting about NFTs is keeping me young now.” If that’s true, the Twitter bird is going to look like a little baby duckling by the end of the day. This […]

To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of […]

Ro, a direct-to-consumer virtual care company, has scooped up Kit, an at-home diagnostics company with an array of customizable products, from finger prick blood tests to weight measurement tools. The price was undisclosed. Ro co-founder Zachariah Reitano said that he first approached Kit as a potential customer, hoping to integrate its quality testing into its […]

Fresh off the heels of a $650 million Series E funding round, 3D printed rocket startup Relativity Space is now preparing to increase production capacity by a factor of ten, with the opening of a 1 million square-foot factory headquarters in Long Beach, California. Relativity’s current factory, a 150,000 square-foot facility also in Long Beach, […]