The pandemic has clearly had an impact on the way we work, and this is especially true for salespeople. Salesforce introduced a number of updates to Sales Cloud this morning, including Salesforce Meetings, a smart overlay for Zoom meetings that gives information and advice to the sales team as they interact with potential customers in […]
Covering YC Demo Day yesterday was good fun, but I missed a few items while watching several hundred startup pitches. A few years ago, these stories might have been the biggest news of the week. But with the venture capital market redlining its engines while public markets remain sympathetic to growing, unprofitable companies, there’s lots […]
Plaid, the fintech giant, has announced the inaugural cohort of startups in its new accelerator program, FinRise. The equity-free and capital-free program has chosen five early-stage fintech startups out of 100 applications to join its cohort, working on issues central to the financial services industry such as simplifying payments and access to credit. The accelerator, […]
Leveraging networks of “experts” online started out as a very manual online business. But it’s rapidly becoming more efficient as machine learning is applied to the whole business model. Indeed, in the U.K. alone $60 billion is spent a year on using outside expertise. Large players in this space include GLG, Third Bridge, Guidepoint and […]
Breega, a VC firm based in Paris, has announced the final closing of its third fund. The firm has managed to raise $130 million (€110 million). This is Breega’s third fund and is officially called Breega Capital Venture 3. The firm’s previous fund launched in 2015 with €45 million ($53 million at today’s exchange rate). […]
Poshmark has come a long way over the last decade. Launched in 2011, the social fashion marketplace has raised upwards of $150 million, and has now listed on the public markets. It’s valued at $3.5 billion. But well before all the success, Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha saw the potential, leading the Series A for the company. […]
Ketch, a startup aiming to help businesses navigate the increasingly complex world of online privacy regulation and data compliance, is announcing that it has raised $23 million in Series A funding. The company is also officially coming out of stealth. I actually wrote about Ketch’s free PrivacyGrader tool last year, but now it’s revealing the […]
As Coinbase is about to go public in the U.S., another cryptocurrency company is having a blockbuster first quarter of 2021. Blockchain.com, the company behind a popular cryptocurrency wallet, an exchange, a block explorer and more, has raised a $300 million Series C round. If you’ve been paying attention, you may remember that I wrote […]
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, the Equity team brought on Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia and Hustle Fund General Partner Elizabeth Yin to talk about equity crowdfunding. It’s been about a week since the SEC increased the equity […]
Last year, former Glossier executives Henry Davis and Bryan Mahoney unveiled a new e-commerce startup called Arfa. Today, they’re announcing a new vision for the company, along with a new name, new funding and an acquisition. The name first: Moving forward, the New York startup will be known as Chord, which Davis (Chord’s chairman and […]
You might expect that a startup that makes community building software would be thriving during a pandemic when it’s so difficult for us to be together. And Bevy, a company whose product powers community sites like Salesforce Trailblazers and Google Developers announced it has raised a $40 million Series C this morning, at least partly […]
Early this month Google quietly began trials of ‘Privacy Sandbox’: Its planned replacement adtech for tracking cookies, as it works toward phasing out support for third party cookies in the Chrome browser — testing a system to reconfigure the dominant web architecture by replacing individual ad targeting with ads that target groups of users (aka […]
Aspiration, the financial services business for socially conscious consumers, is back with another environmentally friendly offering for its customers — this time, it’s a credit card. The Los Angeles-based company, which has raised roughly $250 million from investors including the celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition, and Orlando Bloom and more traditional institutional […]
Lidar companies across the planet are going SPAC, but Baraja isn’t in a hurry to go public. The Australian lidar maker has raised a $31M B round to continue the deployment and development of its “unique and ingenious” imaging system, with participation beyond the usual VC suspects. Baraja’s lidar uses what the company calls SpectrumScan, […]
Pacaso, a less-than-one-year-old startup that is out to give more people a chance at second home ownership, announced Wednesday that it has received $75 million in growth funding at a $1 billion valuation. Greycroft and Global Founders Capital co-led the $75 million in equity financing, which is notable for a few reasons. For one, the […]
WhatsApp’s planned policy changes aren’t sailing smoothly in India, the instant messaging service’s biggest market by users. Indian antitrust body, Competition Commission of India, on Wednesday ordered (PDF) an investigation into WhatsApp’s privacy policy changes, saying that Facebook-owned service breached local antitrust laws in the guise of a policy update. WhatsApp didn’t immediately respond to a […]
SpaceX has added yet more Starlink satellites to its existing constellation on orbit, with a successful delivery of 60 spacecraft this morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The mission used a Falcon 9 with a flight-prove booster that served on five previous launches, and a cargo fairing cover made up of two re-used halves from […]
Denmark-based Motosumo has scored a $6M Series A raise led by London’s Magenta Partners, alongside existing investors. The new funding will go on doubling its network of spin class instructors across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, expanding its tech team and upping its marketing. The 2015-founded fit-tech startup has developed a system for measuring […]
Tesla made headlines earlier this year when it took out significant holdings in bitcoin, acquiring a roughly $1.5 billion stake at then-prices in early February. At the time, it also noted in an SEC filing disclosing the transaction that it could also eventually accept the cryptocurrency as payment from customers for its vehicles. Now, Elon […]
As the Ubers of the world continue to scale, a smaller on-demand transportation startup has raised some funding in Germany, underscoring the opportunities that remain for startups in the space targeting specific service niches. Blacklane — the Berlin startup that provides on-demand black-car chauffeur services in Berlin, London, Dubai, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Singapore […]
