Embedded insurance — selling coverage at the same time as another product or service — is on the rise. According to data platform Dealroom, it accounts for a growing share of all policies sold, and startups in this space raised nearly $800 million in 2021 alone. Having recently polled investors on all things insurtech, we
Month: September 2022
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Friday! We don’t know about you, but we are both ready for some R&R after ploughing through a wall of deep-cringe texts from the Musk/Twitter trial. We hope you get some,
Meet Reflect, a new analytics tool that has been specifically designed for HR teams. While many teams now rely on sophisticated data visualization and business planning tools, HR teams can’t easily measure different metrics and see how they evolve over time. And yet, human resources have become a key component for tech startups and innovative
Amazon is launching two new designs for its Echo Dot Kids devices, the company announced at its virtual event today. The Echo Dot Kids devices now come in new Owl and Dragon designs. The two new designs join Amazon’s current Echo Dot Kids devices: the Tiger and the Panda. The new designs will be available
YouTube TV launched a new option that allows subscribers to purchase add-ons without subscribing to the full channel offering in the service’s Base plan. With this new à la carte plan, subscribers can access more than 20 add-on channels, from Showtime and HBO Max to NBA League Pass, MLB.TV and Starz, among others. This confirms
HSBC Asset Management, the investment arm of Britain’s HSBC Group, has led a seed round of $4 million in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup Bizbaz, the two said Friday. Founded in June 2019, Bizbaz offers its proprietary customer intelligence and risk management solutions to banks, insurance companies and fintech startups. The startup has
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Before we get into this week’s show notes, some programming notes: Ok, now to the show. This week, Natasha, Mary Ann and Rebecca took the mic, with Theresa on production duty, to talk
Virtual reality (VR) has struggled to transition too far beyond gaming circles and specific industry use cases such as medical training, but with the burgeoning metaverse movement championed by tech heavyweights such as Meta, there has been a renewed hope (and hype) around the promise that virtual worlds bring. Just yesterday, Los Angeles-based AmazeVR announced
The inquest into the death of British schoolgirl, Molly Russell, has concluded that social media was a factor in her demise, the BBC reports. The 14-year-old had viewed thousands of pieces of content about self-harm and suicide on online platforms, including Instagram and Pinterest, prior to her death in November 2017. Reaching a conclusion on
You already know whether you’re an Amazon Echo type person. If so, you’re probably looking at one right now, thinking “should I upgrade that thing or is it pointless?” Probably the latter — unless you also have Amazon’s Eero mesh Wi-Fi product, in which case: it’s probably still pointless, unless it’s pretty old. In which
The digital ads market is robust, with Statista predicting that worldwide spend will reach nearly $900 billion by 2026. But fake and fraudulent ad traffic remains a major problem in the space. Global losses from ad fraud totaled $35 billion in 2020 alone. And beyond the wasted spend, invalid traffic can inflate metrics, leading brands
Truepill, a platform that helps other companies offer diagnostics, telehealth services and prescriptions, has conducted its fourth layoff of the year. Sources say the layoff impacted around 65% of the existing staff across the engineering, human resources, design, IT and finance teams. The layoff comes around two months after its last round, which impacted about
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. When Phil Libin co-founded Evernote he spent tons of money making the perfect working environment with chic offices, a shuttle bus and headphones to block out all of his employees’ distracting co-workers. He’s since seen the work-from-home light and co-founded mmhmm to make working remotely more efficient
Anyone who has followed global news events of late will have noticed the devastating floods that have engulfed pretty much every corner of the world, from the U.S. and Europe, to Africa, Australia and Asia, where India and Pakistan have been hit by some of their worst floods in recent memory. By pretty much all
The Vision Fund, a venture capital arm of SoftBank, has launched a sweeping layoff process, cutting at least 30% of its workforce globally, or approximately 150 of the 500 employees, according to a report by Bloomberg. The news comes nearly two months after SoftBank chief executive officer and founder Masayoshi Son said the company would
Amazon showed its Eero Wi-Fi lineup some love this morning during a hardware event, announcing the Eero PoE 6, a Wi-Fi 6 Power over Ethernet (PoE) access point that can provide up to 2,000 square feet of coverage and support up to 100 devices. A complementary new product, the Eero PoE Gateway, delivers up to
Today, Nielsen announced that Roku plans to enable four-screen measurement across desktop, mobile, connected TV and traditional TV. This is the first time Roku will use the digital methodology, Nielsen One, the data measurement firm’s cross-media measurement tool, which launches in December. In the age of streaming, it’s becoming more challenging for companies to measure
It’s demo day season. This morning marked the kickoff of VC firm 500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day, which saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches to prospective investors — and customers. Participants ran the gamut from fintech and sustainability to edtech and developer tools, and several stood out from the rest of
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Today we are mostly listening to acoustic covers of songs we love (a surprise Iron and Wine cover, perhaps?), and mentally preparing ourselves for TechCrunch Disrupt. Which reminds us — did you
All new passenger cars, pickup trucks and SUVs sold in New York state must be zero emissions by 2035, Governor Kathy Hochul announced Thursday. “By revving up our clean transportation transition and making major investments to make EVs more accessible, we’re supercharging our fight against climate change,” Hochul tweeted. NEW: All new vehicles sold in
Since E-bike manufacturer Ride1Up closed a $6.5 million Series A led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund, the San Diego-based company has seen steady sales growth since its launch in 2018, especially as consumers switched to ebikes during the pandemic over public transit. Indeeed, last year ebikes reportedly outsold EV and plug-in hybrid automobiles. So it was
Two and a half years after unveiling Stadia on stage at GDC, the game streaming service is officially done. Subscribers will have access to the games library through January 18 of next year, after which point, it will shut down for good. Google adds in a blog post that it expects to have all refunds
Meta’s researchers have made a significant leap in the AI art generation field with Make-A-Video, the creatively named new technique for — you guessed it — making a video out of nothing but a text prompt. The results are impressive and varied, and all, with no exceptions, slightly creepy. We’ve seen text-to-video models before —
Software-as-a-service dev platform Airplane today closed a $32 million Series B funding round led by Thrive Capital with participation from Benchmark, bringing the startup’s total raised to $40.5 million. Ravi Parikh says that the new funds will be put toward growing Airplane’s 19-person team while expanding its product to new markets. Airplane was founded in
The rise in software supply chain attacks, like the SolarWinds hack, prompted last year’s executive order from the Biden Administration requiring vendors to provide a software bill of materials (SBOM). SBOMs can help security teams understand if a newly disclosed vulnerability impacts them — in theory. But industry experts caution that they aren’t always comprehensive
Paul Huelskamp and Alex Meek were hiking near Mount Tamalpais in Marin County a few years ago when the peaceful quiet of the woods began to give way to the clatter of a diesel generator. When they came upon it, they saw it “spewing black smoke” into the otherwise cool, crisp air, Huelskamp recalled. The
Aiven, which provides fully-managed and hosted services for major open source projects including Kafka, Cassandra, and Grafana, has announced its first ever acquisition — the Finnish company has snapped up Kafkawize, a self-service open source data governance tool for Apache Kafka. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition comes amid a renewed focus
Away from the premium smartphone feature-utility hyperbole swirling around dynamic islands, mobile devices remain much of a muchness. But ethical mobile brand Fairphone has always done innovation differently — applying attention to supply chain conditions and novel modularity to support repairability and lifespan longevity, with a dual mission to make consumer electronics more ethical and
In a bid for the TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels crowd, Adobe today announced updates to Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements — its lightweight photo and video editing software bundle — that focus on improving the audio track selection and adding artistic effects to videos. Photoshop Elements 2023 and Premiere Elements 2023 also add
Una Brands, an e-commerce aggregator focused on brands in the Asia-Pacific region, announced the first close of its Series B round at $30 million today. The funding was led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC Ventures. Headquartered in Singapore, Una Brands has a presence in Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, China and the United
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