Tech

An app called BeReal, founded by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, launched in December 2019 with its idea of asking users to post an unedited photo once per day after receiving a push notification. Upon receiving the alert, the user has up to 2 minutes to share what they’re up to

When people think of NFTs, the first use case most of them likely think of is visual art. From Beeple’s $69 million sale of a digital collage at Christie’s to the Bored Apes Yacht Club collection, visual art has seemed to be most prominent use case for NFTs due to close similarities with traditional fine

Asia had more IPOs than other regions in Q1 2022, but its tally dropped from Q4 2021 Anna Heim 7 hours Sometime in 2021, the world passed the 1,000-unicorn milestone. This was captured by Crunchbase’s private unicorn board, which is dedicated to tracking startups with valuations above $1 billion; the list kept on increasing and

The internet is full of mysteries. Who really wrote “My Immortal,” and was it supposed to be a satire? Who is behind the group of hackers known as Anonymous? And why can’t Elon Musk just log off? But a new question arose about two and a half months ago, when writer and reverse engineer Steve

A multi-year, $100 million Xprize competition for startups trying to remove or reverse carbon emissions has its first crop of big winners. Though the bulk of this Musk money won’t be given away until 2025, these 15 companies are each getting $1M today to keep the lights on til then. The Carbon Removal Xprize, funded

Databases are an essential part of doing business in the digital world, but not every organization is achieving success with them. In a 2019 Vanson Bourne survey, enterprises said that they’ve been held back by legacy database technologies — specifically relational databases systems. Relational databases weren’t designed with newer apps or the cloud in mind,

Zenly has always felt like the small social app that could become the next big thing. But it turns it Zenly is quietly becoming a social giant without anyone paying much attention — at least until now. Originally designed in Paris, the app was acquired by Snap back in 2017. But that acquisition was just the

Cultivated meat, grown in a bioreactor rather than out on the range, might be one of the big food trends of the decade. But it’s relying on tech built around multiplying yeast and bacteria cells, not animal tissue — and Unicorn Biotechnologies wants to change that with new equipment created with mass food production in

Eye-tracking has long been one of the those computing holy grails. Whether it’s accessibility concerns, opening up new form factors or just trying to put a novel spin on the ways we interact with our devices, decades of consumer electronics are littered with attempts to use the gauze to unlock a new form of input.

On Tuesday, April 26, at 2:30 p.m. PDT/5:30 p.m. EDT, I’m hosting a Twitter Space with Sophie Alcorn, an immigration law attorney based in Silicon Valley and author of Dear Sophie, a column that appears on TechCrunch+ each Wednesday. We’ll discuss a number of relevant issues for technology workers and founders who are considering setting

Ordinary Folk, a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-Series A funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring and expand into Hong Kong while scaling in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Sean Low, the startup has two main platforms: Noah is

Over the last few days, my WeChat has been inundated with people reminiscing about the first post they ever published on the app’s newsfeed, which marked its 10-year anniversary this week. The newsfeed feature, called Moments, is like a social network that lives within the WeChat super app. Unlike many other social networks, which either

European Union lawmakers have taken a step closer to agreeing rules to standardize how a range of mobile gadgetry is charged. Today MEPs in the European Parliament’s internal market and consumer protection (IMCO) committee adopted their position on a Commission proposal announced last fall, ahead of a full vote by the parliament next month to

When it comes to presentation creation, PowerPoint and Keynote remain the de facto tools by incumbent advantage. PowerPoint has over one billion installs and 500 million users alone, thanks to Microsoft’s longtime bundling of Office with certain Windows editions. But this hasn’t stopped startups from trying to disrupt the status quo. Besides Prezi, there’s Pitch,

Last year, SEON, which has an anti-fraud platform designed to fight accounts raised a $12 million Series A. It does this by looking at a customer’s ‘digital footprint’ – especially their social media – in order to weed out false accounts and thus prevent fraudulent transactions. Clients included Patreon, AirFrance, Rivalry and Ladbrokes. The London-based

Everyone thought it was a little bonkers when Panic announced that they would be making a monochrome handheld gaming machine with a sort of subscription model where you can’t choose the games you get. DOA, right? Well, the preorders sold out so perhaps not. And fortunately, Playdate is a fun, weird and promising device that’s

As part of its continued investment into expanding its mobile gaming business, Netflix today announced it will, for the first time, launch a mobile game alongside a TV series from the same franchise. The game and show will be based on the popular Exploding Kittens card game. The mobile game will launch in May exclusively

CoinDCX has doubled its valuation to $2.15 billion (post-money) in eight months following a fresh $135 million funding, it said today, as the Indian cryptocurrency exchange looks to aggressively expand its product offerings and talent base, including some to double down on compliances in the world’s second largest internet market. Steadview and existing backer Pantera

For the bulk of the past two years, the pandemic has put the kibosh on corporate travel of nearly any kind. This has dampened investors’ enthusiasm in travel and expense (T&E) startups, predictably, whose expertise lies in creating software for travel and other forms of expensing. But as the appetite for in-person events and interactions

Slope, which provides businesses an easy way to offer buy now, pay later services, has had a busy six months. That’s not much of a surprise, given that the buy now, pay later market size was valued at $16 billion in 2021 and is poised to grow nearly six times by 2029. Its API technology

From mega-rounds to early-stage deals, Europe had a strong start to the year Anna Heim 7 hours VC funding into Europe (including the U.K.) was up in the first quarter of 2022, CB Insights and Crunchbase data show. In other words, the region escaped the global quarter-on-quarter slowdown in startup investment. But Europe isn’t the

The United States is the world’s largest cannabis market, but as more European countries consider legalizing recreational use, investors are looking for opportunities in production, distribution and retail. Much like the U.S., laws governing this plant-based drug differ across the EU, which means entrepreneurs must navigate complicated legal frameworks even as they compete with an

Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter on May 1, sign

The alternative protein space is hot, hot, hot as evidenced by both the number of companies developing products and the venture capital going into the space. Investment into alternative proteins, for example, plant-based meats and dairy substitutes was $5 billion in 2021, according to both the Good Food Institute and Crunchbase data. The latest company

Clipboard Health, an app-based marketplace that matches nurses with open shifts at nearby healthcare facilities, today announced that it raised $80 million over two unannounced rounds, a $50 million Series B round in 2021 and a $30 million Series C round this year, at a $1.3 billion valuation post-money. CEO Wei Deng says that the

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week. We are sitting on the precipice of a very busy few weeks, so let’s get right to

Steve Blank Contributor More posts by this contributor Managing customer discovery when you can’t leave the house Cram downs are back, and I’m keeping a list. At the turn of the century after the dotcom crash, startup valuations plummeted, burn rates were unsustainable and startups were quickly running out of cash. Most existing investors (those

The value of later-stage startups is in decline, data indicate. This particular market movement isn’t a surprise, but the scale of the contraction is worth noting. Forge Global, a secondary market for private-company shares, “said the prices of companies on its platform had fallen 19.9 per cent in February and March compared with the fourth