Months after bagging $116 million in an extension of its Series F round, database vendor SingleStore this week announced that it raised an additional $30 million from investors including Prosperity7, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco. The Series F — or “Series F-2,” technically — now stands at $146 million, bringing SingleStore’s total raised to … Read more
Naver buying Poshmark for $17.90 per share is a fascinating deal, featuring elements of cross-border M&A, a sector on its back foot, and stock-market dynamics making some formerly expensive companies perhaps cheaper to pick off than they may ever be again. TechCrunch+ asked yesterday why we weren’t seeing more software M&A in light of depressed … Read more
Embedded banking — used by companies that do not build financial products like credit, payments or deposits from the ground up but want to offer those services to their customers to grow revenues — has been on a big growth tear in the last several years, and today one of the bigger players building finance … Read more
Xiaomi just launched the 12T Pro, a flagship with a 200-megapixel main camera. The company is using Samsung’s HP1 sensor with a base pixel size of 0.64μm and f/1.69 aperture. The sensor, which was launched last year, uses pixel binning in different ways: it can combine 16 pixels to produce a 12.5-megapixel image (2.56μm pixel … Read more
Figuring out what to pay employees is a universal problem. Startups, in particular, struggle with compensation as they are often competing with other startups for talent. For Roger Lee, the issue came up repeatedly when he co-founded 401(k) provider Human Interest, which achieved unicorn status in August of 2021 and today has nearly 700 employees. … Read more
Confluent, the company that built a streaming service on top of the open source Apache Kafka project, has always been about helping companies capture streams of data. First it was on prem, then later in the cloud. By moving the streaming service to the cloud, it was able to abstract away a lot of the … Read more
Businesses can use dozens of separate software tools to manage their day-to-day operations. Carbon6 Technologies estimates that for smaller businesses, like e-commerce marketplace companies, that can be between eight and 15 custom SaaS tools, which can cost anywhere from several thousand dollars to tens of thousands per year. Instead of continuing to buy each business, … Read more
It might be a little early to say ‘look out Cloudflare!’ especially given it’s $20B valuation, but a Slovenian startup thinks the web security giant has missed a trick in the market, as developers become more ignored in favor of large corporate clients. Bunny.net has now raised a $6 million funding round led by Runa … Read more
Ross Haleliuk Contributor Share on Twitter Ross Haleliuk is a venture capitalist and head of product at LimaCharlie.io. More posts by this contributor To bring PLG to cybersecurity, let’s change our hiring habits H1 2022 cybersecurity product-led growth market map The amount of time it takes for a user to realize and experience the value … Read more
As the enterprise device supply chain grows increasingly global and fragmented, it’s becoming more challenging for organizations to secure their hardware and software from suppliers. According to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, the EU agency that contributes to the bloc’s cyber policy, 66% of cyberattacks focused on a supplier’s code as of 2021. Combating … Read more
Tines, a no-code automation platform aimed at security teams, today announced that it raised $55 million in an extended Series B round led by Felicis, bringing the startup’s total raised to $96.2 million. CEO Eoin Hinchy says that the new capital, which values Tines at “north of” $300 million, will support the company’s go-to-market and … Read more
Meet Easop, a new software-as-a-service startup that helps companies manage equity incentives for employees across multiple countries. Easop works particularly well with startups that want hire remote workers and offer them equity. If you’re working for a tech startup and you’re in charge of hiring, you know that finding the right candidate can be quite … Read more
Ridgeline is a new VC firm that invests in B2B companies with a specific goal in mind: helping its portfolio companies sell to complex organizations that are hard to crack, but can be great customers if you break into them. The Memphis, Tennessee-based firm was started in 2020 by Ben Walker, Ryan Clinton and Andrew … Read more
Investing app Stash, which last raised $125 million from investors in a Series G round last year, is adding crypto to the set of products it offers its 2 million users. The startup sees itself as different from competitors because of its focus on cultivating customers who are long-term investors rather than encouraging more frequent, … Read more
The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to back EU legislation that will standardize mobile chargers on USB Type-C — paving the way for the law to start being applied by the end of 2024. MEPs have been pushing for the e-waste measure for over a decade so today’s massively affirmative plenary vote — of 602 … Read more
When Partake Foods founder and CEO Denise Woodard’s daughter was a year old, she began having food allergies, and while seeking out options, she was not excited by what she saw. “I was really frustrated with what I couldn’t find for her,” Woodard told TechCrunch. “From a brand perspective, I thought about how she would … Read more
The role of HR professionals grew in scope during the pandemic as companies were forced to navigate major workplace changes, like working from home. Unsurprisingly, those professionals have had some of the highest burnout rates over the past two years, particularly as HR departments remain under-resourced. According to an August survey from Workvivo, an employee … Read more
It feels like an eon has passed since the launch in 2019 of Ada Ventures, as a European VC that decided to invest in normally unrepresentative groups and sectors, like women or POC founders, as well as tech which improves society. Its $34 million (£27 million) fund, was designed as a “first-cheque” seed fund. Ada … Read more
The combination of rapid data growth and expanding data regulations like GDPR and CCPA is putting a lot of pressure on companies to figure out just what they have and provide the necessary controls that the evolving body of law requires. Enter Securiti, a startup launched in 2019, originally with the idea of focusing on … Read more
European Union lawmakers have given final approval to an online safety-focused overhaul of the bloc’s ecommerce rules — the first major update to the legal framework for digital services since the year 2000. The Council sign-off means the Digital Services Act (DSA) has cleared the last hoop — and been formally adopted. The European Parliament … Read more
For the average individual living in Lagos — Nigeria’s most populous city, with over 20 million people — apartment hunting is an extreme sport. Not only is rent expensive — low- to middle-income housing can cost between $1,000 and $5,000 yearly — but renters must also pay a year in advance, sometimes even two before … Read more
Apple’s App Store suffered a 5% year-on-year dip in net revenue in September according to a note from Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring. This is the biggest drop in App Store revenue since the financial services company started tracking its data. Woodring said gaming was the biggest reason for the decline as the sector plunged … Read more
Last April, Egyptian and MENA-focused venture capital firm Algebra Ventures announced the launch of its $90 million second fund. It was the sequel to its first: a $54 million fund invested in 21 startups across Egypt and the Middle East. While Algebra Ventures predicted it would reach its first close in Q3 2021, the firm … Read more
Euler Motors, an Indian startup that designs and builds commercial electric vehicles, has raised $60 million in a new funding round as it works to ramp up its production capacity and broaden its offerings. Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC led the New Delhi-headquartered startup’s Series C funding. Blume Ventures, Athera Venture Partners, QRG, ADB Ventures and … Read more
Gaming giant Activision Blizzard unlawfully retaliated against workers at Raven Software who formed a union, the National Labor Relations Board found. The quality assurance (QA) department at subsidiary Raven Software, who mostly work on “Call of Duty,” announced that they would form a union in January. Activision Blizzard sought to block the union, reasoning that … Read more
Google is spinning up a new, online-only startup accelerator centered around the elusive circular economy. The effort is Google’s latest to help environmentally focused startups grow, while potentially hooking them on its cloud products in the process. In the broadest of strokes, the circular economy represents a colossal shift in how humanity makes and uses stuff. … Read more
Zenskar, a startup that is aiming to help SaaS companies automate their billing workflows, has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round. Headquartered in New York and Bengaluru, Zenskar is building a platform for SaaS companies to generate bills for their complex pricing plans — whether they are based on usage-based pricing, subscriptions, nuanced … Read more
Elon Musk today waded into the Ukraine-Russia war with a peace plan that was . . . not very well-received. It may have been a tactic to distract industry watchers from Tesla’s third-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers for 2022, which fell short of analysts’ expectations. But it was a knuckle-headed tactic if so, and … Read more
The UK government has confirmed another pause to draft digital legislation under new prime minister Liz Truss’ reshuffled cabinet — saying the data reform bill it had introduced in recent months is on hold while ministers take another look. The paused bill contained a package of amendments to the UK’s data protection regime, which remains based … Read more
Naver, the South Korean search giant, today announced it plans to acquire secondhand apparel marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion in cash. The deal values publicly-traded Poshmark’s shares at $17.90 — a 15% premium over today’s closing price — and the companies expect it to close by Q1 2023, subject to approval by Poshmark stockholders and … Read more