One of the biggest pain points for startups and small businesses is keeping up with back office tasks such as bookkeeping and managing taxes. QuickBooks, it seems, just doesn’t always cut it. Three-time co-founders Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold, and Jessica McKellar formed Pilot with the mission of affordably providing back office services to startups and […]
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android […]
John Ruffolo isn’t as famous as some investors, but he’s very well-known in Canadian business circles. The longtime head of Arthur Andersen’s tech, media, and telecommunications practice, he joined OMERS roughly a decade ago when a former colleague became CEO and brought him aboard the pension giant to create a venture fund. The idea was […]
Amazon pushes back against unionization, WeWork eyes the SPAC route and there’s new spyware on Android. This is your Daily Crunch for March 26, 2021. The big story: Amazon makes PR push ahead of union vote Workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama (a suburb of Birmingham) will vote next week on whether to […]
Net revenue retention is the most underrated metric out there. The greater the NRR, the quicker companies can scale. Simply put: the power of compound math.
Last October as Slack was preparing for its virtual Frontiers conference, the company began thinking about different ways people could communicate on the platform. While it had built its name on being able to integrate a lot of services in a single place to alleviate the dreaded task-switching phenomenon, it has been largely text-based up […]
“Headless commerce” is a phrase that gets thrown around lot (I’ve typed it several times today already), but Vue Storefront CEO Patrick Friday has an especially vivid way of using the concept to illustrate his startup’s place in the broader ecosystem. “Vue Storefront is the bodiless front end,” Friday said. “We are the walking head.” In other […]
The same frustrations have plagued urban roadways for decades. But technology is finally providing new ways to address the challenges of crowding, pollution and parking enforcement on city streets.
This week’s Amazon public relations push will no doubt go down as one of the odder public-facing strategies in tech. As some of the company’s biggest rivals were getting ready to virtually testify on Capitol Hill, the retail giant’s CEO of worldwide consumer business appeared to suggest that Amazon is not only as progressive as […]
Gamefam learned to develop on Roblox the hard way -- by trial and error and by getting better at listening to the community’s unique gamer culture. Here are some common mistakes.
Woven Capital, the investment arm of Toyota’s innovation-focused subsidiary Woven Planet, has announced an investment into Silicon Valley-based autonomous delivery vehicle company Nuro. This kicks off the new $800 million strategic fund, which will invest in growth-stage technology companies that could one day develop into partners or acquisitions to further a mission of building the […]
Hub, a productivity platform for technical pre-sales, has formally launched with $1 million in seed funding. CEO Freddy Mangum and CTO Karl Gainey founded Hub in 2020. The pair both had experience in technical sales and recognized the challenges of using spreadsheets to manage their business. They researched and surveyed sales engineers at big and […]
When TechCrunch covered UIPath’s Series A in 2017, it was a small startup out of Romania working in a little known area of enterprise software called robotic process automation (RPA). Then the company took off with increasingly large multibillion dollar valuations. It progressed through its investment rounds, culminating with a $750 million round on an […]
While new headless commerce platforms are emerging all the time, Swell CEO Eric Ingram told me that it remains “really hard to do something new in e-commerce.” Specifically, he told me that most headless platforms (which offer back-end infrastructure separate from the front-end shopping experience) allow businesses to build a faster shopping experience, but they’re […]
UiPath added its name to the list of companies pursuing public-market offerings with the release of its S-1, which details a quickly growing software company with sharply improving profitability.
Procrastinators, last-minute decision makers and overwhelmed entrepreneurs heed this call! Your last chance to save $100 or more and attend both TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 bootcamps expires tonight! You’re dedicated to learning the essentials of building a solid early-stage startup, yes? That’s exactly what you’ll get at TC Early Stage 2021 (Operations & Fundraising: April […]
