TechCrunch Startup News

Building and growing a startup is hard, but pivoting said startup into something new and then achieving that same growth is even harder. But it’s not impossible. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, founder and CEO of PromisePay, and Jessica Matthews, founder and CEO of Uncharted Power, both have experiences doing this. At TechCrunch Disrupt, they shed some light […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

Meet Jefa, a startup that is building a challenger bank specifically designed for women in Latin America. The company is building a product that focuses on solving the problems that women face when opening a bank account and managing it. It is participating in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. “There are 1.4 billion people […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, leaders from three quantum computing startups joined TechCrunch editor Frederic Lardinois to discuss the future of the technology. IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested we could be as little as five years away from a desktop quantum computer, but not everyone agreed on that optimistic timeline. “I think within […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit p...

Varada, a Tel Aviv-based startup that focuses on making it easier for businesses to query data across services, today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Israeli early-stage fund MizMaa Ventures, with participation by Gefen Capital. “If you look at the storage aspect for big data, there’s always innovation, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

Meet Swan, a new French startup that wants to let other companies offer financial services by issuing cards, bank accounts and IBANs with just a few lines of codes. The company could be considered as a bank-as-a-service platform, like Treezor or solarisBank. Originally founded by startup studio eFounders, the startup just raised a $5.9M million […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

The robotics industry is having a major moment amid the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s true that category has been an exciting target for investments for a number of years now, but labor issues and concerns over transmission have led many sectors to take a good, long look at automation. Meal preparation is a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The spreadsheet-centric database and no-code platform Airtable today announced that it has raised a $185 million Series D funding round, putting the company at a $2.585 billion post-money valuation. Thrive Capital led the round, with additional funding by existing investors Benchmark, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital and CRV, as well as new investor D1 Capital. With this, […] Learn more about your ad c...

Toucan has developed a Chrome browser extension designed for anyone who wants to learn a new language but hasn’t found the motivation or the time. Once installed, the extension scans the text of any (English-language) website you’re visiting and will automatically translate some of the words into the language that you’re trying to learn. If […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

Primary care health tech startup Carbon Health has added a new element to its “omnichannel” healthcare approach with the launch of a new pop-up clinic model that is already live in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Brooklyn and Manhattan, with Detroit to follow soon – and that will be rolling out over the next weeks and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Diffblue, a spin-out from Oxford University, uses machine learning to help developers automatically create unit tests for their Java code. Since few developers enjoy writing unit tests to ensure that their code works as expected, increased automation doesn’t just help developers focus on writing the code that actually makes a difference but also lead to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Sprinklr has been busy the last few years acquiring a dozen companies, then rewriting their code base and incorporating them into the company’s customer experience platform. Today, the late-stage startup went back to the fund raising well for the first time in three years, and it was a doozy, raising $200 million on a $2.7 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bay Area-based Iron Ox today announced a $20 million Series B. The funding, led by Pathbreaker Venture and family office firms, brings the robotics company’s total funding up to $45 million to date. A number of other investors also took part in the round, including Crosslink Capital, Amplify Partners, ENIAC Ventures, R7 Partners, Tuesday Ventures, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

When we last reported on Snyk in January, eons ago in COVID time, the company announced $150 million investment on a valuation of over $1 billion. Today, barely nine months later, it announced another $200 million and its valuation has expanded to $2.6 billion. The company is obviously drawing some serious investor attention and even […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...

On the heels of new filings from both Sumo Logic and JFrog, Snowflake, a venture-backed unicorn looking to go public on the strength of its data-focused cloud service, set an initial price range for its IPO. The $75 to $85 per-share IPO price target values the firm at between $20.9 billion and $23.7 billion, huge […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech startup Revolut is expanding to Japan. After testing the service with 10,000 users, anybody can now sign up and open an account. The company originally obtained its authorization to operate from Japan’s Finance Service Agency in 2018. When you open an account, you get an electronic wallet and a Visa debit card. You can […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

Back in 2006, Joseph Heller went to China where he spent the next decade learning about the manufacturing business. Based on that experience he eventually built a startup called The Studio. The idea was to help connect people with a small business idea to manufacturers in China in a fully digital way. By 2016 he […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Lokalise, a Latvian startup that focuses on translation and localization of apps, websites, games and more. The company provides a software-as-a-service product that helps you improve your workflow and processes when you need to update text in different languages in your product. The company just raised a $6 million funding round led by Mike […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcast...

Disrupt 2020 is all about helping startups find and create ways to drive their business forward in these most challenging times. We partnered with cela to give exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley one sweet opportunity — networking with 13 accelerators. If you’re exhibiting — or plan to — don’t miss out on your chance to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episerver is announcing that it has reached an agreement to acquire Optimizely for an undisclosed sum. Optimizely was founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen. It became synonymous with A/B testing, subsequently building a broader suite of tools for marketers to experiment with and personalize their websites and apps, with more than 1,000 […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

We’re just about a month away from launching TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, but you have only 48 hours left to save yourself $100 on the price of admission. Join the global mobility community on October 6-8 at the lowest possible price. Snag your pass before the early bird expires on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Legion, an artificial intelligence driven platform for workplace management, has raised a $22 million series B round led by Stripes with participation from Workday Ventures and others. Legion is designed to help employers better manage their hourly workforces by automating certain decisions, like how much labor to deploy to meet the needs of the company […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Transposit is a company built by engineers to help engineers, and one big way to help them is to get systems up and running faster when things go wrong — as they always will at some point. Transposit has come up with a way to build runbooks for faster disaster recovery, while using data to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a business model, SaaS has expanded to epic size. A number of major SaaS companies filed to go public last week, and there are now thousands of SaaS startups growing all around the world. That scale makes it easier for banks and financial institutions to offer tailored solutions to this market around everything from […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gong announced a $200 million Series D investment just last month, and loaded with fresh cash, the company wasted no time taking advantage. Today, it announced it was buying early stage Isreali sales technology startup Vayo. The companies did not share terms of the deal, but Gong CEO Amit Bendov said the deal closed a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Edtech just keeps on booming. Today, Owl Ventures, a San Francisco-based education technology fund whose portfolio includes Byju’s, Labster, Masterclass and Quizlet, announced that it has closed a pair of investment vehicles totaling $585 million. Owl Ventures IV is a $415 million investment vehicle which will be used to invest in edtech startups Series A […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...