Hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults get on flights each year from India to a foreign land to pursue higher education. Upon landing, they face a myriad of challenges: They don’t have a local credit history, so they can’t avail a range of financial services including a loan or a credit card — […]
Cloud Paper, the startup whose bamboo toilet paper (and celebrity and billionaire backers including Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Marc Benioff, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Mark Cuban) made a splash last year, is getting into the paper towel racket. Starting today, the company is taking pre-orders for its 12 pack boxes of sustainably sourced bamboo paper […]
Malicious hacking has become a pernicious and dogged fact of life for more organizations, and it’s a threat that has seemingly grown more complicated and sophisticated over time. One one effective approach to tackling that has been collaboration: not just applying an array of services to address the issue, but creating environments to help those […]
Meet Resilience, a new startup that wants to help cancer treatment institutes as well as cancer patients at every step of the treatment journey. It’s an ambitious project founded by two well-known French entrepreneurs. They want to leverage their tech skills for this new healthcare startup. Behind the scenes, there are two co-CEOs — Céline Lazorthes […]
Montreal-headquartered Inovia Capital has raised $450 million for Growth Fund II, the firm’s second growth-stage investment fund. The close of this funding comes just a little over two years after the announcement of its first in February 2019, a $400 million pool of investment capital that marked Inovia’s first foray beyond the early stage deals […]
Ikigai, a London fintech founded by former McKinsey partners, thinks there’s room in the crowded challenger market for a new premium offering that combines digital banking with wealth management. Targeting future and present high-net-worth individuals, Ikigai is iOS-only for now and consists of a current account and savings account, with adjacent wealth management features, all […]
SumUp, a London-based startup that helps businesses power revenues through card payments — by way of physical readers, online payments, invoices and other services — is itself powering up in a big way. Today it announced financing totalling €750 million (around $895 million at today’s rates), money that it will be using to continue expanding […]
It is nearly impossible for businesses in some African countries to receive money from PayPal. While the payments giant has not given reasons why this is so, speculation hints at factors like insufficient regulation and poor banking security in said countries. That might be a thing of the past for some businesses as African payments […]
One of the bigger startups in Europe operating a trading platform for cryptocurrency has closed a big round of funding on the heels of very rapid growth and plans to open its platform to a wider stream of assets. Bitpanda, a “neobroker” that wants to make it easier for ordinary people to invest not just […]
Chinese users of the instant messenger Signal knew that the good times wouldn’t last long. The app, which is used for encrypted conversations, is unavailable in mainland China as of the morning of March 16, a test by TechCrunch shows. The website of the app has been banned in mainland China since March 15, according […]
Over the years, Jack Ma has accumulated a media portfolio in China that rivals that of Jeff Bezos in the United States. But now the future of Ma’s media empire is in the crosshairs of the Chinese government, which is wary of the billionaire’s increasing media clout. The Chinese authorities have ordered Alibaba to divest […]
Shared micromobility startup Bird said it is investing $150 million into a European expansion plan that will including launching in more than 50 cities this year, a move that it says will double its footprint in the region. This growth plan is already underway with Bird recently bringing its scooters to Bergen, Norway, Tarragona, Spain […]
Sherpa, a startup from Bilbao, Spain that was an early mover in building a voice-based digital assistant and predictive search for Spanish-speaking audiences, has raised some more funding to double down on a newer focus for the startup: building out privacy-first AI services for enterprise customers. The company has closed $8.5 million, funding that Xabi […]
Stripe gets a mind-boggling valuation, Facebook promotes COVID vaccines and Elon Musk has an interesting new title. This is your Daily Crunch for March 15, 2021. The big story: Stripe valued at $95B That’s right: The popular payments company has raised $600 million in new funding at a $95 billion valuation. It says it will […]
GitHub has reached an “amicable resolution” with the person the company fired in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January, the former employee told TechCrunch. On the day a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, a worried GitHub employee warned his co-workers in the D.C. area to be […]
Gumroad, a startup that helps creators sell their work, is raising $6 million at a $100 million valuation. While $1 million of that total is reserved for AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant and Basecamp founder Jason Fried, the remaining $5 million is being raised with a twist: anyone willing to fork over at least $100 bucks […]
Amid growing competition from Twitter Spaces and other newcomers, popular social audio startup Clubhouse is making a move aimed at seeding its network with more high-quality content: It’s launching an accelerator program. During its weekly town hall event on Sunday, the company detailed its plans for its inaugural accelerator called “Clubhouse Creator First,” which will […]
Kelauni Jasmyn, general partner at the new Black Tech Nation Ventures, can explain her aims for the new firm quite succinctly: “The goal is to get more Black people funded.” That’s something Jasmyn has been working on already with Black Tech Nation, a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black entrepreneurs with education, content, community and more. […]
Fondeadora, a fintech startup based in Mexico City and building a challenger bank, has extended its Series A funding round. I covered the company’s original round back in August 2020. And now, Fondeadora is adding $14 million on top of the original $14 million it had already raised — it now represents a $28 million […]
