Payments for consumers have made a huge shift to the online world in the last year, a time when they have moved more of their purchasing to the internet to minimize in-person transactions in the midst of a virus-based health pandemic. Today, a startup that has built a similar kind of payments infrastructure — but […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]
In a year marred by the coronavirus pandemic, it seems that early-stage startups on the African continent are continuing to see some notable growth, both in terms of their business and from investors looking to back them. Microtraction, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Lagos, Nigeria, saw funding nearly quadruple for its portfolio. In […]
Here’s a bit of a curve ball from Apple. A month-and-a-half or so after launching the Fitness+ app premium workout service, the company’s offering up an add-on intended to offer an exercise dimension beyond the confines of iOS (and your living room). Arriving today for Fitness+ subscribers, Time to Walk is a new, guided walking […]
Moderna has detailed some of the steps it’s taking to ensure that its vaccine remains effective in the face of emerging strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that leads to COVID-19. These include testing how adding a second booster, for a total of three shots, works with its existing COVID-19 vaccine, and also developing a strain-specific […]
A third class action lawsuit has been filed in Europe against Apple seeking compensation — for what Italy’s Altroconsumo consumer protection agency dubs “planned obsolescence” of a number of iPhone 6 models. The action relates to performance throttling Apple applied several years ago to affected iPhones when the health of the device’s battery had deteriorated […]
Yac, the Orlando, Florida-based startup that’s digitizing voice messages for remote offices, has raised $7.5 million in a new round of funding. The company’s service has garnered enough attention to pick up a pretty sizable new round from investors led by GGV Capital and a return investment from the Slack Fund. Apparently, reinventing voicemail is a […]
TikTok has until Friday to respond to an order by Italy’s data protection agency to block users whose age it cannot verify, TechCrunch has learned. The GPDP made an “immediate” order Friday in response to the death of a 10-year-old girl from Palermo who died of asphyxiation after participating in a “blackout challenge” on the […]
Wolt, the Helsinki-based online ordering and delivery company that initially focused on restaurants but has since expanded to other verticals, has raised $530 million in new funding. The round was led by Iconiq Growth, with participation from Tiger Global, DST, KKR, Prosus, EQT Growth and Coatue. Previous backers 83North, Highland Europe, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, […]
Taboola is the latest company seeking to go public via special purpose acquisition corporation — more commonly known as a SPAC. To achieve this, it will merge with ION Acquisition Corp, which went public in 2020 with the aim of funding an Israeli tech acquisition (Haaretz reported last month that Taboola was in talks with […]
Google said today it is taking several steps to help with COVID-19 vaccine distribution in the United States, including grants and opening its facilities to vaccination programs. The tech giant is among several other large corporations, including Amazon, Walmart, Starbucks and Microsoft, that have pledged support to local government agencies and medical providers to help […]
Sano Genetics, a startup with a broad mission to support personalised medicine research by increasing participation in clinical trials, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding. The round is led by Episode1 Ventures, alongside Seedcamp, Cambridge Enterprise, January Ventures, and several Europe and U S.-based angel investors. It adds to £500,000 in pre-seed funding in […]
The line between social networking and gaming is increasingly blurring, and internet incumbents are taking notice. NetEase, the second-largest gaming company in China behind Tencent, is among a group of investors who just backed IMVU, an avatar-focused social network operating out of California. Menlo Park-based Structural Capital among other institutions also joined in the strategic […]
Pula, a Kenyan insurtech startup that specialises in digital and agricultural insurance to derisk millions of smallholder farmers across Africa, has closed a Series A investment of $6 million. The round was led by Pan-African early-stage venture capital firm, TLcom Capital, with participation from nonprofit Women’s World Banking. The raise comes after Pula closed $1 […]
French startup Alma is raising a $59.4 million Series B funding round (€49 million). The company has been building a new payment option for expensive good. You can choose to pay over three or four installments. This product sounds familiar if you’ve used Klarna in the past. But Klarna isn’t available in France. Cathay Innovation, […]
Dubai-based cybersecurity startup SpiderSilk has raised $2.25 million in a pre-Series A round, led by venture firms Global Ventures and STV. In the past two years, SpiderSilk has discovered some of the biggest data breaches: Blind, the allegedly anonymous social network that exposed private complaints by Silicon Valley employees; a lab leaked highly sensitive Samsung […]
There is no lack of state funding for China’s smart driving startups nowadays as the country advances its goal to become a global leader in artificial intelligence in a decade’s time. The latest to get a financial boost is Uisee, a Beijing-based company founded by a group of tech veterans including the former head of […]
German drone technology startup Wingcopter has raised a $22 million Series A – its first significant venture capital raise after mostly bootstrapping. The company, which focuses on drone delivery, has come a long way since its founding in 2017, having developed, built and flown its Wingcopter 178 heavy-lift cargo delivery drone using its proprietary and […]
Buzzy live voice chat app Clubhouse has confirmed that it has raised new funding – without revealing how much – in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz through the firm’s partner Andrew Chen. The app was reported to be raising at a $1 billion valuation in a report from The Information that landed […]
SpaceX has set a new all-time record for the most satellites launched and deployed on a single mission, with its Transporter-1 flight on Sunday. The launch was the first of SpaceX’s dedicated rideshare missions, in which it splits up the payload capacity of its rocket among multiple customers, resulting in a reduced cost for each […]
