Peanut, the maker of a social networking app for women, is entering into the investing space with today’s launch of a microfund called StartHER. As the name implies, the new fund will focus on investing in women as well as other historically excluded founders “of all ages, life stages, ethnicities and sexual orientations,” the company says.
Month: June 2021
Over the past year, there has been a surge of newly formed digital banks aimed at specific demographics. The banks in nearly all cases are trying to meet the needs of certain populations that they believe are feeling left out or underserved by traditional financial institutions. The latest such neobank to emerge is New York-based
Hour One, a startup that allows businesses to create ‘photoreal’ presenters which can speak pre-set any text or any language in a highly realistic manner, has signed a deal with Berlitz. The language learning giant will use the platform to augment its instructor-led services and grow its online language training programs in a way that
Slack started talking about a new set of communications tools to enhance the text-based channels at the end of last year. Today the company released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles and gave more details on a couple of other new tools including the ability to leave a video message and an enhanced employee
To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of
Instagram is building its own version of Twitter’s Super Follow with a feature that would allow online creators to publish “exclusive” content to their Instagram Stories that’s only available to their fans — access that would likely come with a subscription payment of some kind. Instagram confirmed the screenshots of the feature recently circulated across
Ably is a Pub/Sub messaging platform that companies can use to develop realtime features in their products. The company just raised a $70 million Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital. Every day, you use various apps that push and fetch data in realtime. When you send a message in your
Kikoff, a personal finance platform aimed at helping consumers build credit, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B round. The capital is in addition to the $12.5 million the startup raised across previously unannounced seed and Series A rounds, which were both led by Lightspeed Venture partners. Portage Ventures led
Istanbul in Turkey continues to prove itself as very fertile ground for casual gaming startups, which appear to be growing from small seedlings into sizable trees. In the latest development, Dream Games — a developer of mobile puzzle games — has raised $155 million in funding, a Series B that values the startup at $1
GitHub has unveiled a new product that leverages artificial intelligence to help you write code more efficiently. Named GitHub Copilot, today’s new product can suggest lines of code and even sometimes entire functions. GitHub has partnered with OpenAI to develop this tool. It doesn’t replace developers, it’s just a tool that should improve productivity and
Shopify changed the e-commerce landscape by making it easier for merchants to set up their websites both quickly and affordably. A startup called Tapcart is now doing the same for mobile commerce. The company, which has referred to itself as the “Shopify for mobile apps,” today powers the shopping apps for top brands, including Fashion
Toca Football, a nine-year-old, Costa Mesa, Ca.-based company that operates 14 sports centers across the U.S. that are focused on soccer training, has raised $40 million in Series E funding to roughly double the number of facilities that are now up and running in the U.S., as well as to open a site in the
The number of startups acquiring e-commerce businesses, especially those operating on Amazon, to grow and scale is increasing as more people than ever are shopping online. The latest such startup to raise capital is Forum Brands, which today announced it has raised $27 million in equity funding for its technology-driven e-commerce acquisition platform. Norwest Venture
As I’ve taken to online grocery shopping over the pandemic, I’ve always wondered why supermarkets didn’t offer simple ‘recipe’ features that would have automatically collected items for a homemade meal. It seemed an opportunity missed. But it is missed no more. Lollipop AI, the new British online grocery marketplace, is launching its public beta today
After launching its IPO last week with an expected listing price range of $26 to $29 per share, cybersecurity company SentinelOne is going tomorrow with some momentum behind it. Sources close to the tell us that the company, which will be trading under the ticker “S” on the New York Stock Exchange, is expecting to
Listen, it’s probably not the best sign when a show feels like it’s running out of steam on its first day. Mobile World Congress’ opening salvo was headlined by Samsung in an event that touched on some partnerships and spent equal time teasing an upcoming event where it will actually launch some hardware. It’s hard
Duolingo filed to go public yesterday, giving the world a deep look inside its business results and how the pandemic impacted the edtech unicorn’s performance. TechCrunch’s initial read of the company’s filing was generally positive, noting that its growth was impressive and its losses modest; Duolingo recently began making money on an adjusted basis. While
William Kilmer Contributor William Kilmer is managing partner with C5 Capital, a venture capital fund investing in the secure data ecosystem. He was formerly an operating partner at Mercato Growth Partners and served as CEO and chairman of PublicEngines (acquired by Motorola), and Avinti (merged with M86 Security) and served as chief marketing officer/chief strategy
As the pandemic took hold, training staff had to ‘go virtual’. Typically, that would have meant falling back on existing corporate training solutions, which we all know and “love”. Could there be another way? In 2018, trauma surgeon Dr. Alex Young took the training required for high-stress scenarios like surgery and applied it to a virtual
JFrog, the company best known for a platform that helps developers continuously manage software delivery and updates, is making a deal to help it expand its presence and expertise in an area that has become increasingly connected to DevOps: security. The company is acquiring Vdoo, which has built an AI-based platform that can be used
Samsung’s Mobile World Congress presser was, once again, all about wearables. The big news at this evening’s (or afternoon’s, timezone dependent) event was our best look yet at a redesigned interface for the company’s line of Galaxy Watches. One UI Watch – which takes its name from the Galaxy mobile interface — will share a
Stewart Hillhouse Contributor Stewart Hillhouse writes actionable growth marketing insights as senior content lead at Demand Curve. By night, he interviews marketers and creatives on his podcast, Top Of Mind. Before getting into marketing, Stewart was a semi-professional lumberjack. He also writes at stewarthillhouse.com. Email has the highest return on investment of any other marketing
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
Accel announced Tuesday the close of three new funds totaling $3.05 billion, money that it will be using to back early-stage startups, as well as growth rounds for more mature companies. Notably, the 38-year-old Silicon Valley-based venture firm is doubling down on global investing. The announcement underscores both the robust confidence investors continue to have
Last fall, Facebook announced it was opening an office in Lagos, Nigeria, which would provide the company with a hub in the region and the first office on the continent staffed with a team of engineers. We’ve now spotted one of the first products to emerge from this office: an education-focused mobile app called Sabee,
Family offices have existed since the 1800s, but they’ve never been so manifold as in recent years. According to a 2019 Global Family Office Report by UBS and Campden Wealth, 68% of the 360 family offices surveyed were founded in 2000 or later. Their rise owes to numerous factors, including the tech startups that mint
As the second quarter races to a close, we’re down to the wire for IPOs looking to get out before June ends. One such company is SentinelOne, a cybersecurity startup backed by Insight Venture Partners, Redpoint, Tiger Global Management, Data Collective and Anchorage Capital, among others. SentinelOne raised an ocean of capital while private, including
An antitrust suit against Facebook by the FTC and several states had the wind taken out of its sails today by a federal judge, who ruled that the plaintiffs don’t provide enough evidence that the company exerts monopoly control over social media. The court was more receptive, however, to revisiting the acquisitions of Instagram and
“It is great that MWC is back,” Samsung UK’s James Kitto said, opening up this year’s presser. “And behalf of everyone at Samsung, it’s great to be back at MWC.” What, precisely, it means to be “back” in 2021 is another question entirely. Samsung was, of course, one of a number of major industry players
Ahead of our TechCrunch City Spotlight: Pittsburgh event tomorrow, I spoke to current Mayor Bill Peduto and Dave Mawhinney, the executive director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Like many in the Steel City startup community, both share a focus on the historically difficult task of keeping startups in town. For more on
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