TechCrunch Startup News

Women-focused co-working space The Wing has made its way to California, opening its first of two planned locations in the state this morning. On Sansome Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, The Wing hopes to attract professional women able to shell out $215 per month for access to its 8,000-square-foot workspace, which is complete with conference rooms, a cafe, a library stocked with book...

SoftBank may soon own up to 50 percent of WeWork, a well-funded provider of co-working spaces headquartered in New York, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. SoftBank is reportedly weighing an investment between $15 billion and $20 billion, which would come from its $92 billion Vision Fund, a super-sized venture fund led by Japanese entrepreneur and investor Masayoshi Son. WeWor...

So many new unicorns valued at $1 billion-plus, countless$100 million venture financings, an explosion of giant funds— it’s no surprise 2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for venture capital investment in U.S.-based companies. There are more than 2.5 months remaining in 2018 and already U.S. companies have raised $84.1 billion — more than all of 2017 — across 6,583 VC deals as of Sept. 30, 201...

SoundCloud moves painfully slow for a tech company, and no one feels that pain more than musicians who are popular on the site but don’t get paid. 10 years since SoundCloud first launched, and four years since it opened an invite-only program allowing just the very biggest artists to earn a cut of the ad and premium subscription revenue generated by their listeners, SoundCloud is rolling out monet...

Faraday Future investor Evergrande Health now says the troubled startup is trying to back out of deal Evergrande Health, the investor that bailed out besieged electric vehicle startup Faraday Future in a deal worth $2 billion this summer, is now accusing it ofattempting to break an agreement it made with previous backer Season Smart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...

RankScience closes $1.8M seed — and now only wants to replace human SEO staff if you don’t have any A couple of years ago YC-backed RankScience, which offers AI-enhanced SEO split-testing, put a few SEO experts’ noses out of joint when the fledgling startup brashly talked about replacing human expertise with automation. Two years on its pitch has mellowed, with the team saying their self-service p...

Flutterwave and Ventures Platform CEOs will join us at Startup Battlefield Africa Startup Battlefield is returning to Africa this December. TechCrunch will be hitting Lagos, Nigeria, bringing with it our Battlefield competition and a day’s worth of panel discussions, focused on topics facing the city’s startup scene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

JFrog wants to change the way we deal with software updates. Instead of large numbered updates you have to manually download, it sees a future of continuous delivery where software is delivered as binaries and updated in the background. Investors must like that vision very much because they showered the company with a $165 million Series D investment today, which the company reports pushes its val...

Ryan Hoover Contributor Share on Twitter Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt and host of Product Hunt Radio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nearly a year after German fintech startup N26 announced that it would launch its service in the U.K., the company is launching in the U.K. N26 is already quite popular in the Eurozone with over 1.5 million customers. In this new market, it will face tough competition from existing players, such as Revolut, Monzo, Starling and many others. N26 is going to roll out its product in multiple phases. S...

KZen, a company run by former TC editor Ouriel Ohayon, has raised $4 million in seed to build a “better wallet,” obviously the elusive Holy Grail in the crypto world. Benson Oak Ventures, Samsung Next, Elron Ventures invested. Ohayon, who has worked at Internet Lab and founded TechCrunch France and Appsfire, wanted to create an easy-to-use crypto wallet that wouldn’t confound users. Learn more abo...

Subscription startup Bespoke Post is creating its own brands and products for men Bespoke Post says it has more than 100,000 subscribers signed up to receive a monthly “box of awesome” (that’s what it calls its bundles of curated men’s products). Next up: Creating brands and products of its own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

People procrastinate about buying insurance because it’s such a boring and complicated chore to compare policies. But Cover combines plans from 45 insurance companies into a single marketplace so it’s easy to find the best one for your car, home, rental, business, personal property, pets, jewelry and more. Now Cover is building powerful onboarding tricks like a driving school that earns you lower...

Ettitude, recently graduated from the ERA accelerator, is looking to ride the growing wave of e-commerce by offering eco-friendly sheets. The company offers bamboo lyocell sheets and pajamas, which feel like a hybrid between silk and cotton, and stay cool longer than cotton or other fabrics. Bamboo lyocell fabric is essentially organic fabric made from weaving together tiny fibers of organic bambo...

Serverless has become a big buzzword of late, and with good reason. It has the potential to completely alter how developers write code. They can simply write a series of event triggers, while letting the cloud vendor worry about providing whatever amount of compute resources are required to complete the job. It represents a huge shift in how programs are developed, but it’s been difficult to find...

Dressed in a Naruto t-shirt and a hat emblazoned with the phrase “lone wolf,” Ne-Yo slouches over in a chair inside a Holberton Schoolclassroom. The Grammy-winningrecording artist is struggling to remember the name of “that actor,” the one who’s had a successful career in both the entertainment industry and tech investing. “I learned about all the things he was doing and I thought it was great for...

Cryptocurrency speculation is over. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Vinay Gupta will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about cool use cases that could make blockchain projects useful, beyond financial services. Gupta worked on the initial release of Ethereum back in 2015. He contributed when it comes to project management. He then worked with the Consensys team on other cryptocu...

WndrCo, the consumer tech investment and holding company founded by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, has invested $30 million in The Infatuation, a restaurant discovery platform. The Infatuation made waves earlier this year when itpurchased Zagat from Google,which had paid $151 million for the 40-year-old company in 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...

What happens when you bring together an entrepreneur, a product designer and an investment banker who all really love collector vehicles? You get Rally Rd., an app for buying and selling equity shares in classic cars. Launched in 2016, the company’s SEC-compliant platform lets users purchase shares in Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis and other classic models for as little as $50 per share. The com...

Six months after completing Y Combinator’s 12-week accelerator program, The Lobbyis announcing a $1.2 million investment. The startup connects job seekers to Wall Street bankers, venture capitalists and other finance“insiders” for advice and personalized career coaching. Founder and former investment banker Deepak Chhugani wants to help people who don’t come from elite backgrounds or have the netw...

Fast, healthy food is one of those concepts that just seems too good to be true. But Farmer’s Fridge, a Chicago-based startup that recently closed a $30 million Series C round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aims to make that a reality. Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up healthy foods — salads, sandwiches, granola, etc. — for people on the go, for...

Despite the increase in women in the U.S. workforce and public pledges from several high-profile CEOs to close the gender pay gap, women, especially working mothers, often find themselves without the resources necessary to succeed at work. Maven, a digital health startup and benefits platform focused on improving access to healthcare for women, has emerged specifically to help businesses help thei...

Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Warby Parker and a long list of other startups of the 21st century have appointed C-level employees to roles focused exclusively on data science. These digital-age companies have established “data cultures,” which provide employees broad access to high-quality data, advocate for data literacy and have data-driven decision-making processes,according to Carl Anderson, who previou...

French startup BlaBlaCar just released some interesting metrics. The company has reached profitability if you look at revenue between January 2018 and today. BlaBlaCar forecasts that 50 million people will book a ride on BlaBlaCar in 2018, which represents a 40 percent increase compared to 2017. BlaBlaCar is a marketplace for long-distance rides. People driving from point A to point B can find rid...

Renaud Laplanche spent ten years building LendingClub. In the process, he created an industry from scratch. Circumventing conventional banking channels for consumer credit began in 1996 when Chris Larsen started E-LOAN, which ultimately led to Prosper Marketplace. But LendingClub, which Laplanche founded in 2007, was and remains the poster child for the business of marketplace lending. Learn more...