Kodiak Robotics, the U.S.-based self-driving truck startup, is partnering with South Korean conglomerate SK to explore the possibility of deploying its autonomous vehicle technology in Asia. The ultimate aim of the partnership is to sell and distribute Kodiak’s self-driving technology in the region. Kodiak will examine how it can use SK’s products, components and technology […]
Instagram today announced it’s adding a new feature to help connect online shoppers to product drops through its app. Drops, which are a newer e-commerce trend, help sellers create buzz for forthcoming products in the days and weeks leading up to their availability. The products themselves are often only available in limited supplies or for […]
The Flywire IPO is neat from a financial perspective and notable in that it's a Boston exit as opposed to yet another New York or San Francisco-based flotation.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha dug into Danny’s latest mega-project: A long, fascinating, and deeply-reported series into the world of disaster tech. It’s all about the market, startups, and their backers, so it was perfect fare for […]
Treet, a company rethinking the resale retail market, announced the close of a $2.8 million seed round today. The financing comes from Bling Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Techstars, BABM Ventures, BBG Ventures, Green Meadow, Interlace Ventures, V1.VC, and Alante Capital. Despite the fact that selling old clothes is the most sustainable, and most financially beneficial way […]
Insurtech is picking up steam in a big way, but startup Parametrix thinks there is still plenty of room left to innovate. The company, which today announced the close of a $17.5 million funding round, offers insurance policies for companies who rely on third-party cloud providers, ecommerce services, payment gateways and CRM systems. In essence, […]
We don’t hear as much these days about “Zoom fatigue” as we did in the first months after the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off last year, but what’s less clear is whether people became more tolerant to the medium, or if they’d found ways of coping with it better, or if they were hopeful that tools […]
The big media consolidation continues — day after rumors swirled around Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, the online massive retailer confirmed today that it will be acquiring the nearly 100-year-old studio for a cool $8.45 billion. The deal is another big step toward bolster Amazon’s fight in the streaming wars, with some 4,000 films. The list […]
Facebook this week will begin to publicly roll out the option to hide Likes on posts across both Facebook and Instagram, following earlier tests beginning in 2019. The project, which puts the decision about Likes in the hands of the company’s global user base, had been in development for years, but was deprioritized due to […]
Another sizable raise for a pet (cats and dogs) tracking company this morning. Austria-based Tractive has announced a $35 million Series A, led by Guidepost Growth Equity. The round is the company’s first since 2013, when its GPS-based tracker first hit the market. Along with the funding round, the company is also announcing its official […]
Lightrun, a startup that helps developers debug their live production code, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series A round led by Insight Partners. Glilot Capital Partners, which led the company’s $4 million seed round, also participated in this round. What makes Lightrun stand out in a sea of monitoring startups is […]
Imagine if Google Docs was end-to-end encrypted so that not even Google could access your documents. That’s Skiff, in a nutshell. Skiff is a document editor with a similar look and feel to Google Docs, allowing you to write, edit and collaborate in real-time with colleagues with privacy baked in. Because the document editor is […]
Uptycs, a Boston-area startup that uses data to help understand and prevent security attacks, announced a $50 million Series C today, 11 months after announcing a $30 million Series B. Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from Sapphire Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures. Company co-founder and CEO Ganesh Pai says that he was still […]
Obie, which has developed an insurtech platform for landlords, has raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures. Thomvest Ventures, Funders Club, MetaProp and Second Century Ventures also participated in the financing. If this sounds like a niche offering, that’s because it is. Obie’s software specifically targets small-to-medium size apartment […]
India said on Wednesday that WhatsApp’s lawsuit challenging the new local IT rules is an “unfortunate last moment” attempt to prevent new regulations from going into effect in “a clear act of defiance,” and said the Facebook-owned service didn’t raise any specific objection about the traceability requirement in writing after October 2018. Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s Electronics […]
Axle recently announced it raised $10m in Series A financing after a stellar year of growth. The round was led by Crosslink Capital with participation from FJ Labs, Flexport, Tribeca Early Stage Partners, and others including existing investors Anthemis Group, Techstars, and Plug and Play Ventures. In a press release, the company points to the […]
APIs make the world go round in tech, but that also makes them a very key target for bad actors: as doorways into huge data troves and services, malicious hackers spent a lot of time looking for ways to pick their locks or just force them open when they’re closed, in order to access that […]
This morning Clara announced that it closed a new, $30 million funding round and secured a $50 million revolving debt facility. The startup, which provides corporate cards to Mexican companies, raised funds earlier this year when it was busy launching its product. Since then, growth has proven rapid for the Mexico City-based company. TechCrunch learned […]
A decade before investing outside of San Francisco and New York became trendy, entrepreneurs Jewel Burks, Justin Dawkins and Barry Givens were betting on Atlanta. Each experienced first-hand the biases that disproportionately hurts Black founders – while also being living proof of the wave of Black innovation and opportunity in their city. Last year, the […]
The high stakes game of chess (or, well, consolidation chicken) that is on-demand food delivery rolls on today with a little more territorial swapping in Europe: Barcelona-based Glovo has agreed to buy three of Berlin-based Delivery Hero’s food delivery brands in Central and Eastern Europe — with deals that it said are worth a total […]
