If three jam-packed days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, the mother of all tech conferences that takes place on September 21-23, wasn’t enough to get your startup motor running, listen up. You can attend the all-virtual TC Disrupt 2021 for less than a $100. Your eyes do not deceive. Read on! Right now, super early-bird pricing […]
Fetcher, a startup that promises to make the recruiting process easier while also diversifying the candidate pool, is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding. Originally known as Scout, the New York startup was founded by CEO Andres Blank, CPO Chris Calmeyn and engineering directors Javier Castiarena and Santi Aimetta. Blank […]
Brian Brackeen, the founder and former CEO of facial recognition startup Kairos, has made his way back to the company following his ouster in 2018. Brackeen is now chairing the company’s scientific advisory board, where he’ll help to address and eliminate issues of racial bias from the technology. While that’s not the company’s explicit mission […]
Once the path less traveled, bootstrapping today has become a much more viable and common approach to building a startup. By not taking venture capital dollars early, bootstrapping can force founders to remain disciplined in serving their paying customers well. It’s also a pretty compelling way to minimize dilution for founders and early employees. No […]
Earlier this month, Los Angeles became the latest city to task its various departments with prepping a feasibility study for deploying new software and monitoring technologies to better account for its carbon footprint. LA’s city council initiative, led by council member Paul Koretz, follows a push from the state legislature to mandate that all businesses […]
SpaceX has completed what’s known as the “stacking” of its first Super Heavy prototype, the extremely large next-generation first-stage rocket booster that it will eventually use to propel its Starship spacecraft to orbit and beyond. The Super Heavy Booster is about 220 feet tall — which is roughly the wingspan of a Boeing 747, or […]
As WhatsApp spends months to address users’ concerns and confusion about its planned policy update, there is evidently one entity it hasn’t had much luck making inroads with: The government of India. The Indian government alleged on Friday that WhatsApp’s planned privacy update, which goes into effect in two months, violates local laws on several […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This time around we had whatever passes for a quiet week as far as news volume. But that still meant we had to cut stuff and […]
Over the last few months, we’ve added a number of new Extra Crunch features at the request of the community. This includes Group Membership, expanding support to new countries like Israel and Norway, adding “sign in with Google” to improve checkout speed, and increasing login timeout so users aren’t regularly logged out of the product. […]
Igor Marinelli and Gabriel Lameirinhas were raised around manufacturing plants. Marinelli’s father worked for International Paper in a plant outside of São Paulo, while Lameirinhas’ father worked in a cement plant. Throughout their lives, the two friends had heard their parents complain about the sorry state of maintenance and monitoring of the heavy equipment that […]
As indoor farming expands, a number of new companies are cropping up to provide better data and monitoring tools for the businesses aimed at improving efficiencies and quality of indoor crops. One of these companies, the Copenhagen-based Nordetect, is entering the U.S. market with around $1.5 million in funding from government investment firms and traditional […]
The private equity giant Blackstone is today announcing the final close of its first growth equity fund — Blackstone Growth — with $4.5 billion in capital commitments from a wide range of family offices, entrepreneurs, endowments, strategic institutional investors, pension funds and other big wheels. The outfit says it’s the “largest first-time growth equity private […]
Ideally, it is expected of every business to reach its customers effectively. However, that’s not the case, as limiting factors that hinder proper digital communication come into play at different growth stages. Termii, a Nigerian communications platform-as-a-service startup that solves this problem for African businesses, announced today that it has closed a $1.4 million seed round. […]
For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business can easily run out of money or have considerable savings. Most restaurants don’t have access to deal directly with farms to get better deals because they lack the […]
Across the street from Suzhou North, a high-speed railway station in a historic city near Shanghai, a futuristic M-shaped building easily catches the eye of anyone passing by. It houses the headquarters of the five-year-old Chinese autonomous driving startup, Momenta. Like other major Chinese cities, Suzhou, which is famous for its serene canals and classical […]
Let’s stipulate the storm of user media (social audio, newsletters, live streaming) is evidence of something real and lasting. When this citizen media migrates to small business and the enterprise, we see that as confirmation, validation. Most of these efforts are in the investment phase, where startups and platforms consolidate ecosystems around the various disruptions. […]
There’s been quite a bit of movement in the additive manufacturing space in recent months. If I had to pinpoint a reason, I would say that — much like robotics (another space I follow fairly closely) — the category has gotten a boost in interest from the pandemic. Medical applications are understandably of interest lately, […]
Ford said Thursday that some Ford F-150 pickup trucks and Edge crossovers will be built without certain electronic modules due to a twofold punch of a global semiconductor shortage and a lack of parts caused by a winter storm. Ford said it will build and hold the vehicles for a number of weeks, then ship […]
Fort Robotics today announced a $13 million raise. Led by Prime Movers Lab, the round also features Prologis Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lemnos Labs, Creative Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Compound, FundersClub and Mark Cuban. The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, who previous headed up Humanistic Robotics. That fellow Pennsylvania startup is focused on […]
