TechCrunch Startup News

Airbase is a startup with a plan to change the way you think about accounting around spending. Instead of multiple workflows, it wants to create a simpler one involving, well, Airbase. It’s a bold move for any startup to take on something as entrenched as financials, but it’s giving it a shot, and today the company launched with a $7 million Series A investment. First Round Capital was lead invest...

Victor Basta Contributor Victor Basta is the founder of the boutique investment firm Magister Advisors. More posts by this contributor Venture investing in the US and Europe are totally different industries If you’re hoping to create a unicorn on a budget, look to the European technology sector for inspiration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

KZen is about to release ZenGo, a mobile app to manage your cryptocurrencies securely and more easily. There are already countless crypto wallets out there, but the startup thinks they’re all either too complicated or too insecure. If you own cryptocurrencies, chances are they’re sitting on an exchange, such as Coinbase or Binance. If somebody manages to log in to your account, nothing is stopping...

Airbnb has completed its acquisition of the last-minute hotel booking application, HotelTonight, the company announced on Monday. The deal is Airbnb’s largest M&A transaction yet and will accelerate the home-sharing giant’s growth as it gears up for an initial public offering. Airbnb reportedly began talks to acquire HotelTonight months ago and finally confirmed its intent to acquire the business...

Every year around this time, Uber drivers, Wag dog walkers, Bird scooter chargers, social media influencers and other gig economy workers face the unsightly challenge of paying their taxes. Companies like Uber and Lyft classify their drivers as independent contractors, which means you aren’t given any benefits and the company doesn’t withhold any of your taxes. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Armis is helping companies protect IoT devices on the network without using an agent, and it’s apparently a problem that is resonating with the market, as the startup reports 700 percent growth in the last year. That caught the attention of investors, who awarded them with a $65 million Series C investment to help keep accelerating that growth. Sequoia Capital led the round with help from new inve...

The SoftBank Vision Fund has been screaming from the venture headlines the last few months, driven by eye-popping rounds (and valuations!) into some of the most notable startups around the world. Yet, SoftBank isn’t the only player rapidly buying up the cap tables of top startups. Indeed, another firm, more than a century old, has been fighting for that late-stage equity crown. Baillie Gifford . L...

Redpoint Ventures has led a $65 million Series B in Cityblock, a healthcare company focused on providing improved care to low-income neighborhoods. The business launched roughly 18 months ago out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation incubator known for projects like mobility data startup Coord, which itself raised a $5 million round in October. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit p...

Online used car startup Shift Technologies has tacked on another $40 million in equity funding, hired a new COO with Amazon and Enjoy roots and scaled up its engineering staff — all in the past several months — as the company aims to double its revenue this year. The recent activity, along with what executives have told TechCrunch is a diligent focus on unit economics, is all directed toward a lar...

Klaviyo, a Boston-based email marketing firm founded in 2012, went about building its email marketing business the old fashioned way. First it built a profitable company, then it went looking for funding to accelerate the growth. Today, it announced a massive $150 million Series B with the entire sum coming from Summit Partners. The company had raised just $8.5 million before today’s announcement....

Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices. Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa history, with clean up features for In...

It’s been a year since All Raise emerged with the support of dozens of venture capital’s most powerful women. The 34 founding members had a lofty goal: Double the capital going to female founders in five years and double the representation of female VCs in 10 years. After a few experiments, some trial and error and the first-of-its-kind Women Who Venture Summit, All Raise cemented its reputation a...

The San Francisco-based startup Branch International, which makes small personal loans in emerging markets, has raised $170 million and announceda partnership with Visa to offer virtual, pre-paid debit cards to Branch client networks in Africa, South-Asia and Latin America. Branch — which has 150 employees in San Francisco, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City and Mumbai — makes loans starting at $2 to ind...

Women-focused co-working space The Wing has hired Rachel Racusen as vice president of communications. Racusen has been the director of communications at Snap, the developer of Snapchat, since late 2016. Racusen’s exit represents the latest in a series of departures at the “camera company.” Earlier this year, the company’s chief financial officer Tim Stone stepped down. Learn more about your ad cho...

When everyone always tells you ‘yes’, you can become a monster. Leaders especially need honest feedback to grow. “If you look at rich people like Donald Trump and you neglect them, you get more Donald Trumps” says Torch co-founder and CEO Cameron Yarbrough about our gruff president. His app wants to make executive coaching (a polite word for therapy) part of even the busiest executive’s schedule....

Raising venture capital isn’t easy; for some, it’s impossible. Clearbanc offers startups a fundraising alternative — despite itself being well-capitalized by VCs — and is today launching a new campaign to back 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in non-dilutive capital by the end of 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What happens when you’re working behind the scene with French President Emmanuel Macron and you suddenly become a minister? This is what’s happening to Cédric O this week who was appointed Minister for the Digital Economy on Sunday. I was the first journalist to interview him after his appointment. While Cédric O has been talking with the French tech ecosystem for years, he usually stays away from...

Today, investors took off their rose-colored glasses (and pink-colored mustaches) and looked at Lyft’s shares with fresh eyes after Friday’s ebullient debut. And — judging by the company’s share price at the end of the day — what they saw wasn’t exactly to their liking. Lyft’s shares suffered a pretty blue Monday in trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange today, closing down $9.28 (or 11.85 percent)....

FireHydrant, a NYC startup wants to help companies recover from IT disasters more quickly, and understand why they happened with the goal of preventing similar future scenarios from happening again. Today, the fledgling startup announced a $1.5 million seed investment from Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that invests in early stage enterprise startups. In addition to the funding,...

In 2007, Stefania Mallett and Briscoe Rodgers conceived of ezCater, an online marketplace for business catering, and began building the company in Mallet’s Boston home, mostly at her kitchen table. Recently, sitting at that same table, Mallett negotiated with Brad Twohig of Lightspeed Venture Partners the final terms of a $150 million Series D-1 at a $1.25 billion valuation. Learn more about your...

The internet is often lauded for the potential to increase the impact of a range of primary services in emerging markets, including education, commerce, banking and healthcare. While many of those platforms are now being built, a few are finding that a hybrid approach combining online and offline is advantageous. That’s exactly what Jio Health, a “full stack” (forgive the phrase) healthcare startu...

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imaginationto adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. Learn more about your ad ch...

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor To get big faster, younger unicorns start buying startups sooner Small VC funds continue to raise, despite pressure from above After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft aregoing publicon U.S. markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Lyft raised more than $2 billion Thursday afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 apiece, the top of the expected range of $70 to $72 per share, per reports. This gives Lyft a fully-diluted market value of $24 billion. The company will debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday morning, trading under the ticker symbol “LYFT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dutch news organization The Correspondent surprised some of its supporters earlier this week, when co-founder and CEO Ernst Pfauth posted an update on Medium saying that the company would not be opening a newsroom in New York City. Which was odd, since the organizationraised $2.6 millionin a crowdfunding campaign last fall with the express purpose of launching in the United States. At least, that’...