TechCrunch Startup News

A day after India’s largest wallet app Paytm entered the credit cards business, local ride-hailing giant is following suit. Ola has inked a deal with state-run SBI bank and Visa to issue as many as 10 million credit cards in next three and a half years, it said today. The move will help Visa and SBI bank acquire more customers in India, where most transactions are still bandied out over cash. Lear...

Voi Technology, the “micro-mobility” startup that operates an e-scooter service on the streets of a growing number of European cities, has unveiled a range of new scooters and a first e-bike more suited to rentals. The company is also revealing plans to expand to another 150 cities and towns, having ratcheted up 2 million rides in eight months since launching. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Mailchimp, a bootstrapped startup out of Atlanta, Ga., is known best as a popular tool for organizations to manage their customer-facing email activities — a profitable business that its CEO told TechCrunch has now grown to around 11 million active customers with a total audience of 4 billion (yes, 4 billion), and is on track for $700 million in revenue in 2019. (Note: Slack’s previous quarter was...

Dale Stephens Contributor Share on Twitter Dale Stephens was one of the first Thiel Fellows and ran an education company for six years. These days he works an executive coach, helping entrepreneurs and executives grow as fast as their companies. These days, most days are good days. My clients are founder and executives, I set my own schedule, and I live in a city I love. As an executive coach and...

Truecaller, an app that helps users screen strangers and robocallers, will soon allow users in India, its largest market, to borrow up to a few hundred dollars in the nation. The crediting option will be the fourth feature the nine-year-old app adds to its service in the last two years. So far it has added to the service the ability to text, record phone calls and mobile payment features, some of...

Intello, the New York City-based Saas management platform, announced a $2.5 million extended seed round today, along with some product enhancements. The round was led by Resolute Ventures . Harrison Metal and Magnetico Ventures also participated along with various individual angel investors including Zane Lackey from Signal Sciences, Chris Smoak from Atrium and Zach Sherman from Timber. Today’s in...

Razor startup Harry’s will be acquired by Edgewell Personal Care for $1.37B Edgewell Personal Care, which owns brands like Schick (razors), Banana Boat (sunscreen) and Wet Ones (moist wipes), is adding Harry’s to that list in a $1.37 billion acquisition. Founded in 2013, Harry’s is part of the current wave of brands using the internet to sell products directly to consumers. Learn more about your a...

Existing approaches to blocking malicious advertising aren’t working — at least according to digital ad veteran Seth Demsey. That should resonate with anyone who’s ever encountered an ad that immediately redirected them to a website filled with annoying gift card offers. And it’s the issue that the startup Demsey co-founded,clean.io, is working to address. Today, the company is unveiling the new c...

Coalition, a cybersecurity insurance company, has raised $40 million in its latest round of funding. Fintech investment giant Ribbit Capital led the investment with participation from Greenoaks Capital and Hillhouse Capital. Coalition’s insurance covers expenses incurred from liabilities related to third-parties, such as fines and penalties — as well as fraud, breach response, extortion and ransom...

Who would have thought Rent the Runway would emerge as a competitor to The Wing and all traditional brick-and-mortar retail? Its newest store, complete with co-working space, shows it’s more than just a designer gown rental service. Shortly after landing a $125 million investment at a $1 billion valuation, Rent the Runway (RTR) has replanted roots in San Francisco, opening an 8,300 square foot Wes...

When Espagon launched last Fall, the Israeli startup had an idea to monitor serverless, architectures, specifically AWS Lambda. But the company didn’t want to confine itself to monitoring a narrow class of applications, and today it announced it is now able to monitor a broader set of microservice development approaches. CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira says when it launched, the startup wanted t...

Shape Security has been helping big companies stay safe from fraudulent activities like password reuse and bot traffic on their publicly facing websites and apps. The company now wants to help smaller companies have that same type of protection, and today it announced a new cloud service called Connect aimed at that market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sendbird, a startup that enables developers to add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code, announced a secondary Series B investment of $50 million today. This additional funding comes on top of the $52 million, the company raised in February. The new money was led by Tiger Global Management with significant participation from the Iconiq, the firm that led the initial Series B roun...

Ticketing startup SeatGeek has a new CTO. Brian Murphy previously held the same position at Tumblr (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media) and has also served as vice president of engineering at The New York Times and senior director of technology at Condé Nast. “Brian is an incredible leader and team-builder who has overseen engineering teams for some remarkable companies,” said SeatG...

Causes grew to a jawdropping 186 million users as one of the first ten Facebook platform apps. Started by Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, it was meant to turn a generation into activists and philanthropists. Causes acquired Votizen to augment shallow clicktivism with a way to remind friends to vote. But after Facebook went mobile and the web platform waned, Parker arranged Causes’ sale to his new...

Unshackled Ventures isn’t like other venture capital funds. The firm invests in immigrant founders and helps them secure visas so they can ditch their corporate job and launch the startup of their dreams. Today, Unshackled is announcing its sophomore fund of $20 million, topping its debut effort by $15.5 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Plum, the money management chatbot, raises another $4.5M and lands on iOS Plum, the chatbot-based app that helps you manage your money, is disclosing $4.5 million in further funding. The round, which quietly closed in the summer, was led by venture firm VentureFriends and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). It brings total funding for the London and Athens-based fintech to...

Early-stage US VC Joyance to scout for health and wellness startups in Europe Good news for European startups with a health or wellness bent. Joyance Partners, a $20M US VC firm that invests in early-stage startups in the health and ‘better living’ space is launching into the European market with a dedicated European partner. The move could be seen as taking advantage of leaps in the capability of...

Jude Gomila, who previously sold his mobile advertising company Heyzap to RNTS Media, is taking on a new challenge — building a “knowledge base” that can fill in Wikipedia’s blind spots, particularly when it comes to emerging technologies and startups. While Gomila is officially launching Golden today, it’s already full of content about things like the latest batch of Y Combinator startups and mor...

Cable television provider Altice USA has confirmed plans to pay $200 million for the millennial-focused, digitally-native news network Cheddar in all-cash, or all-cheddar, rather, deal. The price tag comes at a 25 percent premium to the media startup’s $160 million Series D valuation. Jon Steinberg, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cheddar and former president and chief operating offi...

Seven years ago, Rachel Haurwitz finished her last day as a student in the University of California laboratory where she helped conduct some of the pioneering research on the gene editing technology known as CRISPR, and became employee number one at Caribou Biosciences, a company founded to commercialize that research. In those seven years, the market for CRISPR applications has grown tremendously...

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor A record $2.5B went to US insurance startup deals last year, and big insurers are in all the way Space tech rockets higher The San Francisco Bay Area is a global powerhouse at launching startups that go on to dominate their industries. For locals, this has long been a blessing and a curse. On the bright side, the tech startup machine produc...

Edtech and recruitment continue to converge. London-based online degree platform, FutureLearn, is taking £50 million (~$64.6M) from Australian-based online job matching group, Seek, in exchange for a 50 per cent stake in the business — just days after the same group led a massive Series E in U.S. online learning giant Coursera. U.K. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Over the past few months, Sinemia has gone from promising MoviePass competitor to the source of frustration for moviegoers across the country. After rumors surfaced earlier this week that it would be backing away from its troubled subscription-based movie ticket offering, it posted official word tonight that it will be shutting down operations in the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

London-based startup Wheely has raised a $15 million Series B round led by Concentric with Oleg Tscheltzoff, Misha Sokolov and other investors also participating. The company wants to build an Uber competitor focused on the luxury market. It’s a bit ironic when you think about it as Uber started as a luxury company. But everybody knows someone with horrific Uber stories. That’s why Wheely is build...