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Monday’s news that a COVID-19 vaccine candidate looks to be incredibly effective gave investors reasons to believe in a better future. Perhaps COVID-19 won’t be with us for years, investors...

Tailscale raises $12 million for its WireGuard-based corporate VPN

Tailscale has raised a $12 million funding round. Accel is leading the round with Heavybit and Uncork Capital also participating. The company is building a better corporate VPN by leveraging...

Hopin raises $125M for its online events platform on the back of surging growth

This morning Hopin, a startup that provides online events software, announced that it has closed a $125 million Series B round of capital. The new funds come mere months after...

E-scooter startup Tier raises $250 million round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2

Berlin-based micro-mobility startup Tier has raised a significant Series C round of $250 million. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is leading the round, which proves that the Vision Fund team is...

Hong Kong insurtech startup Coherent gets $14 million Series A led by Cathay Innovation

Based in Hong Kong, Coherent helps insurance providers go digital. With their services more relevant than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic, the startup announced it has raised $14 million in...

The race to be China’s top fintech platform: Ant vs Tencent

As Ant Group seizes the world’s attention with its record initial public offering, which was abruptly called off by Beijing, investors and analysts are revisiting Tencent’s fintech interests, recognized as...

Adobe acquires marketing workflow startup Workfront for $1.5B

Adobe just announced that it is acquiring marketing workflow management startup Workfront for $1.5 billion. Bloomberg first reported the sale would be happening earlier today. Workfront was founded back in...

Cookware startup Great Jones raises $1.75M as it expands into bakeware

Great Jones is expanding into a new area of the kitchen tomorrow, with what co-founder and CEO Sierra Tishgart described as the startup’s biggest launch since it released its first...

What happens to high-flying startups if the pandemic trade flips?

So much can change in a day. This morning, news that a trial COVID-19 vaccine candidate had an effective rate of more than 90% shook the financial world. The Pfizer...

Equity Monday: Vaccine news scrambles the stock market, shakes up startups

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news,...

Positive vaccine news punishes pandemic-boosted companies like Zoom, Peloton, Etsy

Stock markets worldwide are soaring on news that a vaccine candidate is 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, and could start coming to market in a matter of months. This is...

Singapore-based sales productivity platform Nektar raises $2.15 million seed round

Nektar co-founders Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha Singapore-based Nektar.ai, a productivity platform for sales teams, has raised $2.15 million in seed funding. Founded earlier this year, Nektar has been...

Here comes the next IPO wave

Nov 7, 2020

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. Are you tired? I...

Software companies are reporting a pretty good third quarter

Nov 6, 2020

What a difference a week makes. This time last week, in the wake of earnings from tech’s five largest American companies and early results from other software companies, it appeared...

Challenger bank Starling is out raising a new £200M funding round

Nov 6, 2020

Starling founder Anne Boden recently told TechCrunch that the U.K. challenger bank is on track to be profitable by Christmas, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t out raising additional capital...

Inside fintech startup Upstart’s IPO filing

While the world awaits the Airbnb IPO filing that could come as early as next week, Upstart dropped its own S-1 filing. The fintech startup facilitates loans between consumers and...

The volcano method for understanding the fintech revolution

The Department of Justice moved to block the long-impending Visa-Plaid deal today. The transaction was announced in early 2020, making the decision by the government to try and scuttle its...

Reposite streamlines the most tedious tasks for travel agents

Meet Reposite, a software-as-a-service startup that wants to help travel agents of all kinds deal with their daily tasks. While the travel agency industry is huge, most people who work...

4 questions as Airbnb’s IPO looms

Almost on command after we asked yesterday if a rash of technology IPOs were about to land, news broke that Airbnb plans to drop its S-1 filing early next week with...

Singapore-based digital business assistant Osome raises $3 million

Osome’s founding team, Anton Roslov, Victor Lysenko and Konstantin Lange Osome, a Singapore-headquartered business assistant app that digitizes accounting and compliance tasks, has raised $3 million. An extension of Osome’s...

Vivid Money raises $17.6 million for its European challenger bank

German fintech startup Vivid Money has raised a $17.6 million Series A funding round (€15 million). Ribbit Capital is leading the investment. Today’s funding round gives Vivid Money a valuation...

As tech stocks rally, bring on the IPOs

Nov 4, 2020

During yesterday’s tense voting and this morning, shares of American-listed technology companies are shooting higher. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite is up around 3.35% this morning, more than double what the...

Intel has acquired Cnvrg.io, a platform to manage, build and automate machine learning

Nov 4, 2020

Intel continues to snap up startups to build out its machine learning and AI operations. In the latest move, TechCrunch has learned that the chip giant has acquired Cnvrg.io, an...

Pulled Ant Group IPO costs Alibaba nearly $60B in market cap

News today that Ant Group’s IPO is suddenly on hold in both Shanghai and Hong Kong caused a sell-off of Alibaba shares. This afternoon, equity in sister-company Alibaba is off...

4 takeaways from fintech VC in Q3 2020

Fintech has been a key startup story in recent quarters, with leading players in the genre raising titanic rounds at eye-popping valuations. Consider companies like Robinhood, and its epic capital...

China postpones Ant’s colossal IPO after closed-door talk with Jack Ma

The Shanghai stock exchange announced postponing Ant Group’s colossal initial public offering, a day after Chinese regulators weighed a slew of new fintech rules and summoned Jack Ma and other...

Indonesian logistics platform Logisly raises $6 million Series A to digitize truck shipments

Indonesia’s logistics industry is very fragmented, with several large providers operating alongside thousands of smaller companies. This means shippers often have to work with a variety of carriers, driving up...

NerdWallet acquires small business loan marketplace Fundera

Financial guidance company NerdWallet announced at the end of last week that it has acquired Fundera. New York City-based Fundera was co-founded in 2013 by Jared Hecht, who previously co-founded...

Booming edtech M&A activity brings consolidation to a fragmented sector

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force teachers, students and parents to adopt new technologies, edtech’s total addressable market has massively grown in the last several months. The shift has...

Coupa Software snags Llamasoft for $1.5B to bring together spending and supply chain data

Coupa Software, a publicly traded company that helps large corporations manage spending, announced that it was buying Llamasoft, an 18 year old Michigan company that helps large companies manage their...

TVision raises $16M to measure viewer attention on connected TVs

TVision is building what its team hopes will become the standard for measuring streaming viewership — and to accelerate those efforts, it’s raised $16 million in new funding. The New...

Pandemic’s impact disproportionately reduced VC funding for female founders

The last few quarters did not play out as as expected for venture capitalists or entrepreneurs; instead of a pandemic-fueled recession that cauterized the flow of private investment into startups,...

Twilio wraps $3.2B purchase of Segment after warp speed courtship

It was barely a month ago we began hearing rumors that Twilio was interested in acquiring Segment. The $3.2 billion deal was officially announced three weeks ago, and this morning...

Email creation startup Stensul raises $16M

Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding. When the company raised its $7 million Series A two years...

Equity Monday: Edtech and insurtech stay red-hot

Warren gets $1.4 million to help local cloud infrastructure providers compete against the giants

Started as a side project by its founders, Warren is now helping regional cloud infrastructure service providers compete against Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and other tech giants. Based in Tallinn,...

Is Wall Street losing its tech enthusiasm?

Oct 31, 2020

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. Over the past few...

Equity shot: Boo! It’s the Halloween earnings special!

Oct 31, 2020

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. As promised, the whole gang is back, this time to...

Nestlé acquires healthy meal startup Freshly for up to $1.5B

Nestlé USA just announced that it has acquired Freshly for $1.5 billion — $950 million plus potential earnouts of up to $550 million based on future growth. Founded in 2015,...

Teampay adds $5M to its Series A at higher valuation after growing ARR 320% growth since the round

What do you call the grey area between a Series A and a Series B? In 2020, when the money is taken on opportunistically, you call it a Series A-1...

Passion Capital backs UK fertility workplace benefits provider, Fertifa

UK-based Fertifa has bagged a £1 million (~$1.3M) seed to plug into a fertility-focused workplace benefits platform. Passion Capital is investing in the round, along with some unnamed strategic angel...

B8ta remains bullish on IRL shopping with new acquisition

Coronavirus cases in the United States are reaching new peaks. E-commerce is continuing to boom. And B8ta, a San Francisco startup which is betting on the future of physical retailers,...

Is the Great 2020 Tech Rally slowing?

Yesterday’s earnings deluge made plain that tech shares are not rocketing higher as 2020 comes to a close. Indeed, in pre-market trading this morning, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are...

Tech optimism…in this economy?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. A few notes before we get into this. One, we...

Donut launches Watercooler, an easy way to socialize online with coworkers

If you miss hanging out with your coworkers but don’t want to spend a single second more on Zoom, the latest product from Donut might be the answer. The startup is...

The Wanderlust Group raises $14.2M to double-down on getting folks outdoors

The Wanderlust Group, a Rhode Island-based startup focused on building software for the boating world, announced that it has closed a $14.2 million Series B round of capital this week....

VCs poured capital into European startups in Q3, but early-stage dealmaking appeared to suffer

The global recovery in venture capital activity did not miss Europe, new data indicates. According to a PitchBook report, European venture capital activity rose in Q3 2020, putting the continent...

More chip industry action as Marvell is acquiring Inphi for $10B

It’s been quite a time for chip industry consolidation, and today Marvell joined the acquisition parade when it announced it is acquiring Inphi in a combination of stock and cash...

Wise raises another $12 million to double down on embedded business banking

Fintech startup Wise has raised a $12 million Series A round. The company offers business bank accounts with an interesting go-to-market strategy. Wise partners with other companies so that they...

Redpoint and Sequoia are backing a startup to copy edit your shit code

Code is the lifeblood of the modern world, yet the tooling for some programming environments can be remarkably spartan. While developers have long had access to graphical programming environments (IDEs)...

Hebbia wants to make Ctrl-F (or Command-F) actually useful through better AI

Deep learning has made tremendous strides in recent years, with new systems and models like GPT-3 offering higher quality interpretations of human language, empowering developers to use these concepts in...

As venture capital rebounds, what’s going on with venture debt?

The American venture capital world has staged an impressive comeback from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. For a moment, there was worry that startups would struggle to raise...

3 lessons from Root’s IPO pricing

Last night neo-insurance provider and former startup Root priced its IPO at $27 per share, $2 per share ahead of its $22 to $25 target price range. According to Root,...

Priori raises $6.3M to help large companies hire outside legal help

Priori Legal, a startup rethinking the way that large corporations hire outside counsel, has raised $6.3 million in Series A funding. Founded by CEO Basha Rubin and CPO Mirra Levitt...

That dreadful VPN might finally be dead thanks to Twingate, a new startup built by Dropbox alums

VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a mainstay of corporate network security (and also consumers trying to stream Netflix while pretending to be from other countries). VPNs create an encrypted...

Lunchbox raises $20M to help restaurants build their own ordering experiences

With many restaurants forced to rely entirely on the delivery and takeout business during the pandemic, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether the industry can survive while paying hefty...

Sidekick Health scores $20M for its gamified digital care platform

Nordic digital therapeutics company, Sidekick Health, has closed a $20 million Series A led by pan-European VC Wellington Partners and healthcare focused VC Asabys Partners. Existing investors, Novator and Frumtak...

Rockset announces $40M Series B as data analytics solution gains momentum

Rockset, a cloud-native analytics company, announced a $40 million Series B investment today led by Sequoia with help from Greylock, the same two firms that financed its Series A. The...

Lightyear scores $3.7M seed to digitize networking infrastructure procurement

Lightyear, a New York City startup that wants to make it easier for large companies to procure networking infrastructure like internet and SD-WAN, announced a $3.7 million seed round today....

Boom raises $7M Series A in bid to become the ‘Amazon for commercial photography’

Milan-headquartered scale-up Boom, which offers a two-sided tech platform to let companies book and manage commercial photo shoots, has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The round is led...

Impact America Fund closes $55M to invest in startups targeting the world’s overlooked

The entire asset class of venture capital is built atop systemic racism. The numbers don’t lie: only 2% of partner-level VCs are Black, and 81% of venture capital firms don’t...

Hubilo raises $4.5 million, led by Lightspeed, to focus on virtual events

Earlier this year, the founders of event analytics platform Hubilo pivoted to become a virtual events platform to survive the impact of COVID-19. Today, the startup announced it has raised...

This startup wants to fix the broken structure of internships

Internships are an opportunity for students to experiment with new career paths and land a full-time offer ahead of graduation. For companies, the weeks-long programs help recruit and train job-ready...

What would Databricks be worth in a 2021 IPO?

TechCrunch recently covered Databricks’ financial performance in 2020, contrasting its recent performance to some historical 2019 data that the company shared. The data-and-analysis focused unicorn grew its annual run rate...

Ant Group could raise as much as $34.5B in IPO in what would be world’s largest IPO

The long-anticipated IPO of Alibaba-affiliated Chinese fintech giant Ant Group could raise tens of billions of dollars in a dual-listing on both the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges. Shares for...

Equity Monday: SAP’s warning, and IPO updates for both Airbnb and Databricks

Linktree raises $10.7M for its lightweight, link-centric user profiles

Simple, link-centric user profiles might seem might not seem like a particularly ambitious idea, but it’s been big enough for Linktree. The Melbourne startup says that 8 million users —...

Why you have to pay attention to the Indian startup scene

Oct 24, 2020

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. Back in August during...

Boston startups expand region’s venture capital footprint

Oct 23, 2020

This year has shaken up venture capital, turning a hot early start to 2020 into a glacial period permeated with fear during the early days of COVID-19. That ice quickly...

Here’s how fast a few dozen startups grew in Q3 2020

Oct 23, 2020

Earlier this week I asked startups to share their Q3 growth metrics and whether they were performing ahead of behind of their yearly goals. Lots of companies responded. More than...

Nordic challenger bank Lunar raises €40M Series C, plans to enter the ‘buy now, pay later’ space

Oct 23, 2020

Lunar, the Nordic challenger bank that started out life as a personal finance manager app (PFM) but acquired a full banking license in 2019, has raised €40 million in Series...

Quibi’s shortform life

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Myself, along with Danny and Natasha had a lot to...

How unicorns helped venture capital get later, and bigger

The venture capital industry’s comeback from fear in Q1 and parts of Q2 to Q3 greed is worth understanding. To get our hands around what happened to private capital in...

Chinese live tutoring app Yuanfudao is now worth $15.5 billion

Yuanfudao, a homework tutoring-app founded in 2012, has raised $2.2 billion from investors, surpassing Byju’s as the most valuable edtech company in the world. The Beijing-based company is now worth...

Freelancer banking startup Lili raises $15M

It’s only been a few months since Lili announced its $10 million seed round, and it’s already raised more funding — namely, a $15 million Series A. The startup, founded...

WoHo wants to make constructing buildings fast, flexible and green with reusable “components”

Buildings are the bedrocks of civilization — places to live, places to work (well, normally, in a non-COVID-19 world) and places to play. Yet how we conceive buildings, architect them...

Adyen alumni raise €2.6M seed to launch Silverflow, a ‘cloud-native’ card payments processor

Silverflow, a Dutch startup founded by Adyen alumni, is breaking cover and announcing seed funding. The pre-launch company has spent the last two years building what it describes as a...

Acapela, from the founder of Dubsmash, hopes ‘asynchronous meetings’ can end Zoom fatigue

Acapela, a new startup co-founded by Dubsmash founder Roland Grenke, is breaking cover today in a bid to re-imagine online meetings for remote teams. Hoping to put an end to...

This serial founder is taking on Carta with cap table management software she says is better for founders

Yin Wu has co-founded several companies since graduating from Stanford in 2011, including a computer vision company called Double Labs that sold to Microsoft, where she stayed on for a...

Founders don’t need to be full-time to start raising venture capital

“More than 50% of our founders still are in their current jobs,” said John Vrionis, co-founder of seed-stage fund Unusual Ventures. The fund, which closed a $400 million investment vehicle...

Lessons from Datto’s IPO pricing and revenue multiple

Last night Datto priced its IPO at $27 per share, the top end of its range that TechCrunch covered last week. The data and security-focused software company had targeted a...

Mine raises $9.5M to help people take control of their personal data

TechCrunch readers probably know that privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA give them additional rights around their personal data — like the ability to request that companies delete...

How Yext reinvented itself on its way to going public

Last week, Yext CEO Howard Lerman dropped by Extra Crunch Live for a chat about his former startup, pivoting and becoming the CEO of a public company. Yext, which focuses...

Syte, an e-commerce visual search platform, gets $30 million Series C to expand in the U.S. and Asia

Syte’s cofounders, chief executive Ofer Freyman, chief revenue officer Lihi Pinto-Fryman and chief operating officer Idan Pinto Tel Aviv-based visual search and product discovery platform Syte, already used by brands...

MindLabs raises £1.4 million for its new platform, a “Peloton for mental health”

Ideally, mental wellness should be considered part of a healthy daily routine, like exercise. But even exercise is difficult to turn into a regular habit. Peloton addressed physical fitness by...

Synthetaic raises $3.5M to train AI with synthetic data

Synthetaic is a startup workign to create data — specifically images — that can be used to train artificial intelligence. Founder and CEO Corey Jaskolski’s past experience includes work with...

Root targets $6B+ valuation in pending IPO, a boon for insurtech startups

This morning Root Insurance, a neo-insurance provider that has attracted ample private capital for its auto-insurance business, is targeting a valuation of as much as $6.34 billion in its pending...

As startups accelerate in record Q3, Europe and Asia rack up huge VC results

Venture capital activity in Europe and Asia saw a strong return to form in Q3, data indicates. The two continents enjoyed more venture capital investment into their local startups than...

There’s a housing crisis, and Abodu wants to solve it fast with quality backyard homes

Housing prices have soared in many markets across the United States over the past decades as populations have grown, square footage has increased, and new unit construction has languished. Houses...

Perch raises $123.5M to grow its stable of D2C brands that sell on Amazon

While Amazon gradually builds out its own-branded line of products, third-party sellers continue to account for a significant part of the transaction volume and growth on its marketplace — by...

Eat Just partners with Proterra to launch a new subsidiary in Asia

Eat Just, the plant-based food startup, is launching a new Asian subsidiary through a partnership with Proterra Investment Partners Asia. The agreement includes building Eat Just’s first factory in Asia,...

Intel agrees to sell its NAND business to SK Hynix for $9 billion

SK Hynix, one of the world’s largest chip makers, announced today it will pay $9 billion for Intel’s flash memory business. Intel said it will use proceeds from the deal...

Juniper Networks acquires Boston-area AI SD-WAN startup 128 Technology for $450M

Today Juniper Networks announced it was acquiring smart wide area networking startup 128 Technology for $450 million. This marks the second AI-fueled networking company Juniper has acquired in the last...

Late-stage deals made Q3 2020 a standout VC quarter for US-based startups

Remember back in March when the VC game was done for the year, checkbooks were snapping shut and startup layoffs led the headlines? So much for all that. Q3’s venture...

Are VCs cutting checks in the closing days of the 2020 election?

Before the 2016 election, Vice Ventures founder and general partner Catharine Dockery was bullish about the future of recreational cannabis in the United States. “We saw quite a bit more...

Singapore tech-based real estate agency Propseller raises $1.2 million seed round

Propseller, a Singapore-based real estate agency that combines a tech platform with in-house agents to close transactions more quickly, announced today it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. The...

Alibaba Group will spend $3.6 billion to take control of Chinese supermarket giant Sun Art