David Barret

It’s been an Extra Crunch summer. We’ve heard how to craft your pitch deck around the one thing that really hooks an investor, and how the industry experience of Retail Zipline’s Melissa Wong ticked every box for Emergence when raising her Series A. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve also gotten a […]

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 private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]

Apple is bringing its 3D maps to more cities within the Apple Maps app, including London, L.A., New York, and San Francisco. The experience, launching with iOS 15, follows several years of investment in Apple’s mapping platform to make the app more competitive with the market leader, Google Maps. This has included not only the […]

It’s been a big year for Nintendo news. Between the impossible fever dream of last week’s Super Mario movie casting and the eagerly anticipated sequel to the Switch’s best game, it’s easy to lose track of the other big developments from the gaming giant. Nintendo recently held an intimate (and sufficiently socially distanced) event in […]

Blue Origin’s second human spaceflight will have a space industry veteran and sector-focused investor on board when it takes off: Dr. Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of Planet Labs and current partner at venture capital firm DCVC. Boshuizen will occupy one of four seats on Blue Origin’s next trip of its New Shepard fully reusable suborbital spacecraft […]

The head of Instagram has just announced that it’s “pausing” a planned version of the social media software aimed at under 13 year olds. The development comes hard of the heels of critical reporting in the Wall Street Journal which unearthed internal documents that suggest the Facebook-owned company was aware the social media service caused […]

When businesses can connect more personally with their customers, those customers in turn are more loyal. However, as consumer behavior changes, especially as it did over the past 18 months, it is more difficult to establish that connection amid all of the messages put in front of them. Optimove, specializing in customer relationship management marketing, […]

Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Shopee, which recently expanded to several Latin American nations, appears to be preparing to launch in another international market: India. The company, owned by Singapore-headquartered Sea, has quietly launched a website for sellers in India, TechCrunch has learned, following months-long subtle campaign to attract merchants in the South Asian nation. The […]

Regional seed and early-stage venture capital firm, Flat6Labs, has finished raising $10 million for its seed fund targeted at Tunisian startups, according to a statement released by the company. The seed fund, called Anava Seed Fund (ASF), at first sought a close of $3 million but instead closed 3.3x of the initial figure. The fund […]

As cybersecurity becomes a bigger and more complex problem for organizations, a startup aiming to increase its accuracy in fighting breaches — by bringing in an ever-wider funnel of data and vantage points to identify issues — is expanding its business. SenseOn, which employs cloud-based, AI powered techniques for its so-called “triangulation” approach to the […]

Customer service is one of the most important relationships between a business and its customer, and that was made even more clear during the global pandemic. Though Thankful AI CEO Ted Mico and his co-founder Evan Tann didn’t start out with experience from the business side, they started the Venice, California-based company in 2018 out […]

Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Aria and Rebecca have a lot to share this week, so I’ll keep my intro short. I want to direct your attention to my latest podcast episode over […]

The meteoric rise of collaborative design startup Canva — now valued at $40 billion — and conversely, the viral interest we’ve been seeing in the market for NFTs where you can “buy” a share of a limited-edition digital asset, are two examples of how the tech world today revolves around — and values — catchy […]

Swedish electric motorcycle manufacturer Cake has announced the close of a $60 million Series B that the company will use to help set up manufacturing facilities in Europe, North America and Asia, as well as scale up its retail capabilities. “We are in the process of implementing initiatives to scale the business, structuring and laying […]

Swedish electric vehicle maker Polestar is reportedly preparing to go public via special purpose acquisition with Gores Guggenheim Inc., reports the Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter. The SPAC deal, which sources say could be reached by Monday, would value Polestar at $21 billion. Polestar falls under Volvo Car Group’s electric performance […]

Signal is down for many users right now. Its status website says the encrypted messaging app is “experiencing technical difficulties” and many people are getting an in-app error message that says the same thing. The company says it is “working hard to restore service as quickly as possible.” TechCrunch has contacted Signal for comment. Signal’s […]

Ascend Money, a Thailand-based fintech startup behind TrueMoney, an e-wallet service, announced today it has raised a $150 million Series C round at a valuation of $1.5 billion. The Series C round was led by Charoen Pokphand Group, which is a major shareholder of Ascend Money, with participation from Bow Wave Capital Management and returning […]

After working as an investment banker in Canada for a decade, Halima Iqbal moved back to Pakistan in 2017 and quickly realized how difficult it is for women to access financial services. “I had a really hard time opening up a basic bank account. It took me about three and a half months,” Iqbal told […]

Covid-19 really put the kibosh on live events in the last 18 months, but in the world of tech, it also meant that live event startups that found a way to survive and grow throughout the period got a lot of attention. In the latest development, Dice — a London company that has built a […]