TechCrunch Startup News

Meet Powder, a French startup that helps you share video clips of your favorite games, follow people with the same interests and interact with them. The company has raised a $14 million Series A round led by Serena. Powder wants to build the video infrastructure for social gaming. While many communities of gamers already share […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

Fintech startup Klarna is turning its mobile app into a banking app in Germany. Customers living there can now open a consumer bank account and get a Visa debit card. For now, Klarna is launching bank accounts for a limited number of users. The company expects to roll it out more broadly in the coming […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LiveRamp has acquired DataFleets, a fresh young startup that made it possible to take advantage of large volumes of encrypted data without the risk or fuss of decrypting or transferring it. LiveRamp, an enterprise data connectivity platform itself, paid more than $68M for the company, a huge multiple on DataFleet’s $4.5M seed announced just last […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

This morning Monte Carlo, a startup focused on helping other companies better monitor their data inflows, announced that it has closed a $25 million Series B. The round, which was co-led by GGV and Redpoint, comes mere months after its September Series A that was worth $15 million. Accel led the company’s Series A and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

InEvent, a startup powering virtual and hybrid events, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures. That’s just tiny fraction of the $125 million that online events platform Hopin raised last fall — in fact, a recent Equity episode suggested that Hopin might be the fastest growth story of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Harry Stebbings, the podcaster-turned-VC, is stepping down as a partner of Stride, the London-based venture capital firm he co-founded with Fred Destin, formerly of Accel. In a series of tweets, Destin said that Stebbings won’t be involved in Stride’s second fund (though he’ll remain a partner in fund one), and will instead be focusing on […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

Consumer payments is by no means a solved problem (I’ll trigger one hundred blockchain people if I say otherwise), but it sure as heck a pretty improved one. Checkout is a breeze with modern tools ranging from Stripe and PayPal to Fast and Rapyd to Apple and Google Pay. If you happen to need financing, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Virtual health and wellness platforms have grown increasingly popular throughout the pandemic, but a new startup wants to focus that effort exclusively on senior citizens. Bold, a digital health and wellness service, plans to prevent chronic health problems in older adults through free and personalized exercise programs. Co-founded by Amanda Rees and her partner Hari […] Learn more about your ad c...

Marketing software company HubSpot is acquiring The Hustle, the business and tech media startup behind the popular newsletter of the same name Axios broke the news of the deal and reported that it values the startup at around $27 million. HubSpot declined to comment on the deal price, and while tweeting about the acquisition, The […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...

Meet Cajoo, a new French startup that has raised a $7.3 million (€6 million) funding round. The company wants to make it easier to order groceries from your phone and receive them 15 minutes later. It is launching in Paris today. “I left Bolt around mid-August and I’m launching a company with two co-founders focused […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Beam has raised a $9.5 million Series A round. The company is working on a new web browser that completely rethinks the way you start a web session and browse the web. The startup is founded by Dom Leca and Sébastien Métrot. Dom Leca previously worked on Sparrow, an email app with an opinionated design. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nearly a year ago, the spread of COVID-19 ended the daily commute for millions of Americans, an abrupt change that sent the ridesharing industry into a free fall. Hip, which connected commuters with third-party bus and shuttle operators via an app, was just one of the many mobility-as-a-service startups that watched its clientele and revenue […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

Alloy Automation, a startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced today that it has closed $5 million across two rounds, the most recent of which brought $4 million to the company in October of 2020. The new funds were raised at a $16 million pre-money, $20 million post-money valuation, Alloy […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Popular, highly-scrutinized trading app Robinhood has raised $2.4 billion to its balance sheet from shareholders, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed by the company. The private startup raised $1 billion on Friday, meaning that it has raised $3.4 billion in a handful of days as it seeks to support a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

Another hour, another billion-dollar round. That’s how February is kicking off. This time it’s Databricks, which just raised $1 billion Series G at a whopping $28 billion post-money valuation. Databricks is a data-and-AI focused company that interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud. News of the new round began leaking last week. Franklin […] Learn more about your ad choices....

French startup Chefclub announced earlier this week that it has raised a $17 million funding round led by First Bridge Ventures. SEB Alliance, the venture arm of kitchen appliance maker Groupe SEB, Korelya Capital and Algaé Ventures are also participating. Chefclub has been building a major media brand on social media platforms. It has attracted […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

German startup Trade Republic is rolling out its app and service in France this week. This is a significant expansion move as Trade Republic has only been available in Germany and Austria so far. Trade Republic lets you buy and sell shares or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) from your phone with low, transparent fees. The company […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Storetasker is an online marketplace focused on connecting Shopify merchants with developers and other experts who can help grow their business. The product is now owned by the startup previously known as Lorem. Co-founder and COO Charlie Fogarty explained that while Lorem originally had a broader mission of connecting small businesses and developers, “We realized […] Learn more about your ad choi...

Last night, Qualtrics priced its IPO at $30 per share, selling 50.4 million shares in the process. Notably, the company’s IPO price was harder to chase down than usual, with a formal press release in scarce supply. SEC filings indicate that the company “anticipate[s]” a price of $30 per share, and reports from media and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Squarespace announced this afternoon that it is going public.  The online website creation and hosting service is a venture-backed entity, having raised Series A and B rounds in 2010 and 2014, respectively. Those deals were worth a combined $78.5 million, according to Crunchbase data. But Squarespace is perhaps best known for its epic 2017-era $200 million […] Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Rumors have been flying this week that SAP was going to buy Berlin business process automation startup Signavio, and sure enough the company made it official today. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the deal could be worth $1.2 billion. With Signavio SAP gets a cloud […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

eFounders is expanding its focus by creating a second startup studio called Logic Founders. This time, Logic Founders is going to focus on fintech startups exclusively. Camille Tyan (pictured above) is going to lead the new studio. Over the past ten years, eFounders has launched dozens of software-as-a-service companies trying to improve the way we […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...

Stacker, a company that helps non-developers create software from spreadsheets, announced that it has raised $1.7 million in a seed round. Stacker fits inside the growing no-code, and low-code niche that TechCrunch has explored at length over the last year. But its approach to the topic is worth examining, as is its new funding round. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

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 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices