Coursera’s S-1 dropped last Friday, giving us a glimpse of the financial impact that COVID-19 had on a large edtech company. We worked through the numbers on the day the filing happened, but here are the core data points: Coursera’s 2020 revenue came to $293.5 million, up 59% from the year prior. During the same […]
We know that a lot of elements go into the formation of a startup ecosystem. When your city is outside of the major coastal tech centers, it takes a deliberate effort to get such a system off the ground. For Indianapolis, Indiana, it started with the creation of ExactTarget in 2000. When that company was […]
The popularity of video and other streamed content like podcasts is continuing to grow at a breakneck speed, and today a startup called Epidemic Sound, a marketplace to source the background music for that media, is announcing a huge round of funding to scale along with it. The Stockholm-based startup has raised $450 million from […]
TechCrunch Sessions: Justice covered a wide variety of topics. From DEI to labor to accessibility, the sessions went deep on the issues that matter most in the tech world. For example, we had an illuminating conversation with Arlan Hamilton around how to find the next unicorn. Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who has represented Oakland and the […]
Seth Rogen and four friends-turned-co-founders have been building a weed company for close to ten years, and its products are now available in the United States. The company’s house goods will be available through its website and select dispensaries in Los Angeles will carry Houseplant’s three strains of cannabis. Nearly every smoker has been there: […]
If you’ve ever had to file a claim with your insurance company, you know that it’s not exactly fun. Often, you’re on hold indefinitely waiting to speak to a live person. And if you’ve ever had to file an auto or home insurance claim, you know that all the back and forth with your carrier […]
People returning from a period of incarceration face innumerable challenges, among them entering a high-tech workforce that requires a new set of skills. Jason Jones leads remote instruction at The Last Mile, a code training program for inmates; Deepti Rohatgi is head of Slack for Good, a social-good office within the company running Next Chapter, […]
Valuations are up because software company growth will persist longer than most analysts and investors expected, making the present value of software companies' future cash flows larger, even if they had yet to grow into those later projections.
Los-Angeles based startup Canoo revealed its newest — and now third — electric vehicle, a pickup truck that does away with the sharp corners and huge engine housing of both comparable EV trucks and legacy diesel pickups and is aimed at both commercial customers and weekend warrior-minded consumers. The truck, which Canoo says is the […]
Twitter Spaces, the social network’s Clubhouse rival, is working towards a public launch in April, the company announced in comments made in a public Twitter Space audio room on Wednesday. According to the Space’s host, Alex aka @akkhosh on Twitter, the company intends to make it possible for anyone to host a Twitter Spaces room […]
Given the deluge of climate focused companies flooding public markets, it’s getting hard to keep track of who’s doing what, where they’re traded and how they’re performing. That’s why the folks at Energy Impact Partners have set up an index tracking tech companies that are focused on sustainability, energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. […]
As we’ve made our way through this pandemic, it has forced businesses to rethink and accelerate trends. One such trend is the movement to no-code tools to allow line-of-business users to create apps and workflows without engineering help. To help answer that demand, ServiceNow released a couple of new tools today as part of their […]
Roblox went public yesterday after seeing tremendous growth in 2020, which isn’t just good news for the company’s employees and investors — there are also startups like Gamefam hoping to take advantage of the platform’s success. Roblox has a whole ecosystem of millions of developers and creators building on its game platform, and some are […]
Hugging Face has raised a $40 million Series B funding round — Addition is leading the round. The company has been building an open source library for natural language processing (NLP) technologies. You can find the Transformers library on GitHub — it has 42,000 stars and 10,000 forks. Existing investors Lux Capital, A.Capital and Betaworks […]
A weekend statement from the Taiwanese government over its ability to provide water to the nation’s chip manufacturers in the face of an unprecedented drought make it clear that climate change is a direct threat to the foundations of the tech industry. As reported by Bloomberg, Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen took to Facebook on Sunday […]
Spain’s government has reached an agreement with trade unions and business associations over labor reforms that will see delivery platform couriers recognized as employees, it said today. Once such a law is passed, the development could have major ramifications for platforms operating in the market — which include the likes of Deliveroo, Glovo and UberEats, […]
In just a few hours, we’re going to (virtually) meet up in the Magic City, Miami. Since we first let you know about our new Spotlight series, we’ve gotten a ton of registrations and some amazing submissions for our pitch-off. The small event features three segments: networking, a pitch-off, and a fireside chat with Rebecca […]
Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new support option for its Premium Support customers that run mission-critical services on its platform. The new service, imaginatively dubbed Mission Critical Services (MCS), brings Google’s own experience with Site Reliability Engineering to its customers. This is not Google completely taking over the management of these services, […]
Facebook is expanding its monetization options for video creators. For anyone watching videos posted by those creators, that probably means you’ll see more ads. Facebook App Monetization Director Yoav Arnstein wrote in a blog post that creators will now be able to include in-stream ads in videos that are as short as one minute — […]
With prices ranging from $15 to $50, the strawberries grown by the vertical farming startup Oishii aren’t going to be found in just any grocery store. Instead, the nearly five year-old startup is taking what its co-founder Hiroki Koga called the Tesla approach and targeting the highest end of the market in a New York […]
