Instagram today is rolling out over a half dozen new messaging features, following promises late last year that its DM (direct message) inbox would get a significant upgrade in 2022. The changes include the ability to share music previews in DMs, the ability to send a message silently, the ability to see who’s online to
Month: March 2022
Tips from a 2013 TechCrunch pitch-off winner Zach DeWitt 8 hours Zach DeWitt Contributor As a partner at Wing Venture Capital, Zach Dewitt focuses on early-stage investments in transformative enterprise technologies. After winning the 2013 TechCrunch Meetup and Pitch-off, I decided to drop out of business school to pursue my startup full time. Two years
More Americans than ever want to escape the rut of a low-paying job, but quitting to pursue a new profession is a risky proposition. Pursuit has raised $10M in funding for a promising and potentially self-sustaining new model for training up new tech workers in which learners only pay they land a real position. The
Google announced a major update to Google Meet today that includes a number of long-requested features and plenty that you didn’t even know you needed. There is a long list here, but the main additions are likely in-meeting reactions to give immediate, updates to the Meet companion mode, emoji-based feedback, the ability to use Meet
French startup Deepki has raised a $166 million Series C funding round (€150 million). The company is building a software-as-a-service platform for the real estate industry. It’s a monitoring and analytics product that helps you take better decisions. Companies using Deepki can track and analyze ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) criteria, starting with carbon emissions
Managing Apple devices can be a chore for small businesses — it takes time to set up each device, and it can be difficult to manage them in the field without being invasive, especially when it comes to “bring your own” devices. Last year, Apple introduced a new program in beta called Apple Business Essentials
Tushop, a social-commerce platform in Kenya that enables the group-buying of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs), is set for expansion across Nairobi after raising $3 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by 4DX Ventures. Founded last year by Cathy Chepkemboi, also the CEO, Tushop uses community-leaders, who collect orders from their neighbors and also
In a country where 50% of its 100 million people are active smartphone users, two out of every three individuals have little or no access to formal financial services in Egypt. With banks doing their best to deepen financial services to the underbanked and unbanked across the North African country, startups are also playing their
And that’s day two in the books! TechCrunch once again spent much of the day watching a parade of startups present as part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort, Demo Day part two. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. But we did learn quite a lot. You can find all our coverage here, but what matters is
OpenStack, the massive open source infrastructure-as-a-service project that allows enterprises and public hosting services to run their own on-premise clouds, today released version 25 of its software, dubbed Yoga. Like all large open source projects, OpenStack has gone through its ups and downs, but as the Open Infrastructure Foundation, the organization behind OpenStack and a
Last year, Visa surprised the European fintech industry as it announced that it would acquire Tink for €1.8 billion ($2.15 billion at the time of the deal). Klarna now wants to compete directly with Tink with a new business unit that has its own brand — Klarna Kosma. Like Tink, Klarna offers an open banking
Tumblr is expanding its tip jar feature by introducing blog-level tipping for its iOS and web applications, the company announced on Wednesday. The company rolled out its tip jar feature last month allowing users to leave tips on posts. Today’s expansion will allow users to leave tips on blogs. Tumblr says the expansion will benefit
Wicked fast VPNs, data organization tools, auto-generated videos to spice up your company’s Instagram stories … Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 open source founders have some interesting ideas up their sleeves. And since they’re open source, some of these companies will let you join in on the fun of collaboration too. Here are all of the
The second day of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day is now behind us, and the TechCrunch team is recovering from watching hundreds of pitches in quick succession. Every accelerator demo day is a marathon, but the American group has worked with more startups over time, making its pitch sessions a veritable deluge of new
Plastic bags are bad. Ban them from supermarkets, and the problem is solved, right? Right? Right? Turns out, as is often the case, there may be a little bit more to that story. Researchers at the University of Georgia suggest that banning the sale of plastic bags may come with a side-dish of unintended consequences.
Healthcare has a hiring crises. Nearly 20% of medical workers have quit their jobs during the pandemic, according to a recent Morning Consult survey. Some studies estimated the healthcare system’s burnout cost at about $4.6 billion a year before the spread of COVID-19, a number that has likely risen. Organizations have increasingly ramped up benefits
The race is certainly on in the electrification of boating … even if everyone is jockeying for position before the market materializes. Flux Marine is joining the likes of Pure and Zin in trying to convert some of our waterways’ gas-guzzling outboards to cleaner, quieter battery powered ones, and the company just raised $15.5 million
Apple today announced it will begin to allow a subset of applications sold on its App Store to link to an external website where users can create or manage their accounts with the app developer. The change to Apple’s App Store Review guidelines only applies to what Apple calls “reader” apps — meaning, apps designed
Twitter has announced that it’s expanding access to its “Professional Accounts” profile setting to all users globally. Up until now, users have had to apply to convert their account into a professional one. Now, everyone on the platform can opt into a professional account directly from their account settings. A professional account, which Twitter refers
Dozens of startups in Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort do something that could be described as artificial intelligence. Though the term has lost much of its meaning, it’s still an important part of the tech landscape, and both using it and enabling it are fertile ground for new companies. Here are 14 notable startups from
As the private fundraising market becomes increasingly parsimonious, startups raising capital previously valued purely on growth with no care for operating burn will have to endure the market’s sentiment shift in their proximate funding round. Startups that lack impressive growth and have high levels of burn? They’re likely in even more trouble. Precisely how many
It’s been almost exactly four years since Docker founder Solomon Hykes left the company that kickstarted the container revolution. Docker has gone through its share of ups and downs since then, including selling its enterprise business to Mirantis in 2019, but Hykes, who was long the public face of Docker, mostly stayed on the periphery,
The European Union has announced a new bundle of sustainability-focused policy proposals that will expand existing ecodesign rules on energy efficiency by encouraging longer product lifespans, supporting the growth of circular economy business models and helping consumers combat greenwashing and make more environmentally friendly purchasing choices, as regional lawmakers work to make good on a
Spotify’s popular playlist creation tool, Blend, is getting its biggest update since its offiical launch last year. The feature currently allows two Spotify users to see where their musical tastes overlap by mixing together their favorite songs to find those they have in common. This Blend then updates daily with new songs based on everyone’s
As competition heats up for creator talent, Pinterest today announced it was more than doubling its initial investment in its Creator Fund with an additional $1.2 million in a combination of cash grants, ad credits, and other creator resources for underrepresented groups. The comapny last year announced the debut of its $500,000 Creator Fund alongside
Dapio, the U.K.-based cashless payment solutions provider for businesses, today announced that it has raised $3.4 million to fuel the launch of its “Tap to Pay” solution for Android users in the U.K. and Europe. African payments giant Flutterwave co-led the growth round with Techstars. Daniel Gould, venture partner at Asymmetry Ventures, and PactVC participated.
Andrew Gershfeld Contributor Andrew Gershfeld is a partner at Boston-based Flint Capital, an investment company supporting entrepreneurs from Israel, Europe and the U.S. at an early stage of their business. Around May 2020, nearly everything moved online, and investment pitches were among the first to do so. The entire milieu around startup funding shifted overnight.
When Pinecone launched last year, the company’s message was around building a serverless vector database designed specifically for the needs of data scientists. While that database is at the core of what the company is doing, it is moving towards a more refined use case for that database around AI-driven search, helping those data scientists
When we started covering Builder.ai a few years ago, the startup was tapping into a new wave of businesses wanting their own native apps. The previous wave of agency-built and outsourced apps was waining, and Builder.ai realized it could tap into this trend by creating a turnkey, almost drag and drop approach, at least on
China’s augmented reality startup Nreal is on a roll. The company, which hopes to bring AR to the masses by making bright-color, lightweight smart glasses, has just received $60 million in a Series C extension round, bringing its total funding in the last 12 months to a handsome $200 million. The new investment is led by
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