Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. As is tradition on the show, we used the last episode of the year to make predictions about the next year. To continue an annual tradition, Grace and Chris joined Natasha and Mary
Month: December 2021
In late March last year, as the virus started to spread across India, investors began to worry about the impact a potential pandemic could have on their portfolio firms. They exchanged notes, and on April 1, penned a joint open letter to the local startup ecosystem, advising firms to “prepare for the worst.” In the
The future of lidar is uncertain unless, as Voyant hopes to do, its price and size are reduced to fractions of their current values. As long as lidars are sandwich-sized devices that cost thousands, they won’t be ubiquitous — so Voyant has raised some cash to bring its smaller, cheaper, more easily manufactured, yet still
Ten years ago, if you were a scrappy kid somehow making a living off of YouTube ad revenue and brand deals, you were probably told you didn’t have a real job. Now, if monetizing your creative output is how you pay your rent, you’re part of the creator economy, a buzzy new industry. An often-cited
There is often a mistaken impression that covering the enterprise is kind of dull when compared to the consumer side of the house, but having followed the space for a couple of decades now, I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, there’s big money in the enterprise,
Two years ago, the African tech ecosystem saw newfound attention from global players that translated to the continent’s best year of receiving venture capital. From varying sources, it is estimated up to $2 billion went into African tech startups in 2019. With high-profile visits from the most famous Jacks (Ma and Dorsey), a long-awaited first
Koko Networks, a Kenya-based bio-fuel technology enterprise has extended its business to cover other fast-moving consumer goods, through a new tech platform that will capitalize on its established distribution networks in low-income neighborhoods. Koko Club, its new business-line, will sell the products directly to consumers through the dukas (small shops) that currently serve as the
GlobalBees, which raised one of the largest Series A financing rounds in India earlier this year, has entered the unicorn club as the New Delhi-headquartered firm scales its Thrasio-like house of brands. Premji Invest, the investment firm controlled by Indian tycoon Azim Premji, led the nine-month-old startup’s Series B financing round, the young firm disclosed
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: What’s allowed between a
A few years ago, VCs were expected to perform extensive due diligence on startups. Investors dove into financials, called customers and vetted founders. But power has now shifted toward the founders after a long run of investors holding more than half the power thanks to the commoditization of capital. The pace at which deals were
Hide your “Tony the Tiger”/”Eugene Levy” fan fiction — those phrases, along with hundreds of others, are now banned from Tumblr’s iOS app. Now, any personal blog that flags itself as “mature” is not accessible on the iOS app — users will see a pop-up explaining that the content has been hidden because of “potentially
Autonomous trucking startup TuSimple has completed its first autonomous truck run on open public roads without a human in the vehicle, according to the company. TuSimple’s Autonomous Driving System (ADS) navigated 100% of the 80-mile run along surface streets and highways between a railyard in Tuscon, Arizona and a distribution center in Phoenix, which took
On a congested sidewalk next to a busy mall in Shenzhen, a 20-something woman uses a smartphone app to order a milk tea on Meituan, a major food delivery company. In under ten minutes, the pearl-white drink arrives, not on the back of one of the city’s ubiquitous delivery bikes, but descending from the cloudy
As someone who covers Southeast Asia startups and funding stories, the best word I can think of to describe 2021 is “whoa!” This was the year that global investors not only started to pay close attention to the region’s tech ecosystems, but also began putting real money into them. Backed by international LPs, Southeast Asia-focused
As a remote island nation in the middle of the South Pacific, New Zealand is experiencing the stirrings of a burgeoning startup scene. The country has historically been capital-starved, but recent investments from the government and foreign investors have significantly increased access to early-stage venture capital funding. Now, certain industries are emerging as potential areas
Carisa Nietsche Contributor Carisa Nietsche is an associate fellow for the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics. Europe has a well-earned reputation for regulating Big Tech, taking the lead on privacy, data protection and especially
Sean Fanning Contributor Sean Fanning is a vice president on OpenView’s Investment team. Before that, he led the firm’s Proactive Portfolio Management function and acted as director of corporate development, supporting the portfolio on inorganic and balance sheet related initiatives. The flow of capital in SaaS is becoming increasingly bifurcated. There are the “haves” (public
Industry veteran Jitendra Gupta’s consumer-focused neobank Jupiter has raised about $86 million in a new financing round as the Bangalore-based startup gears up to offer its customers lending and wealth management services. Tiger Global, QED and Sequoia Capital India co-led the two-year-old startup’s Series C round, Gupta told TechCrunch in an interview. The new round values
There was a lot of action in 2021 in enterprise M&A — once totaled, my top 10 deals came in at just under $121 billion. And the biggest enterprise deal of the year by far — Oracle’s bid to buy Cerner — happened as I was writing this post. The final tally doesn’t include what
Earlier this month, Craig McLuckie, the co-founder of the Kubernetes project during his time at Google and now the VP of R&D at VMware (after selling his startup Heptio to the company), was named the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. He succeeds VMware’s Paul Fazzone, who was named chairman
When we penned the intro for this piece last year, little did we know that — in many ways — we’d still be deep in it by the time 2021’s feature rolled around. Amid another holiday season marred by a new variant, seemingly the more things change — well, you get the picture. Surprisingly, however,
Over the last two years, New Zealand’s startup scene has seen record venture and early-stage investment. Despite the pandemic, 2020 saw $158 million invested into 108 deals, representing the third year in a row of over $100 million in investment in startups. According to a PwC report, 2020 was also the third year of more
Skio, a startup that aims to take the pain out of selling subscriptions for brands on Shopify, has raised $3.7 million in a seed funding round. Kennan Davison, an engineer who previously worked at Hulu and Pinterest, founded the startup in April. He describes Skio as a fintech and an infrastructure company as a pivot
Dwana Franklin-Davis Contributor Dwana Franklin-Davis is a lifelong technologist currently serving as the CEO of Reboot Representation, a coalition of tech companies pooling their philanthropic resources to double the number of Black, Latina and Native American women receiving computing degrees by 2025. Ruthe Farmer Contributor Ruthe Farmer is the founder and CEO of the Last
As we get closer to the end of the year, we’re running more stories that look back at topics we examined in depth over the last several months, and several that offer well-informed predictions for the year ahead. This week, Bill Taranto, president of Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund, wrote a TechCrunch+ article that explored
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s just about Christmas, which means you may be stuck with family at the moment. Regardless of what, if any, holidays you may celebrate, there’s good chance that there are more people around
A TikTok moderator has sued the social media platform and its parent ByteDance over trauma caused by graphic videos, Bloomberg has reported. In a proposed class-action lawsuit, moderator Candie Frazier said that she has screened videos showing violence, school shootings, fatal falls and even cannibalism. “Plaintiff has trouble sleeping and when she does sleep, she
New Zealand, a country of just under 5 million people, has historically flown under the radar of venture capitalism. A geographically isolated country with a “no worries!” culture and an economy based on raw materials, Aotearoa hasn’t stood out to investors in the Asia-Pacific region, especially not when they could set their sights on larger
After seven years in the production of electronic gadgets, under his company Imose Technologies, Osayi Izedonmwen took leave to explore an idea that he had toyed with for some time — an edtech startup, Teesas, which now offers video classes and other digital educational material for learners in Nigeria. Teesas, which was launched less than
Because of the unpredictable nature of the fashion industry, fashion brands often have to ‘guestimate’ demand for their products, and if they get that demand wrong, they have to deal with the wasted inventory. All too often clothes end up being incinerated unnecessarily, adding to their environmental impact. UK startup Purple Dot has an ecommerce
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