StartUp

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

We’re still in IPO-land this morning, working our way through the Accolade S-1 filing. Yesterday we dug through the Procore filing, a vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. That was a former startup that we could get our

There are plenty of accelerators aiming to sway young startups to join their ranks rather than apply to Y Combinator, but Pioneer‘s sell is a bit different.

First off, they are fully remote; founders selected to participate in the program chat with advisors via video chat. Second, Pioneer is largely looking at companies that aren’t companies yet, f

“We want to change the way freight moves,” says Oren Zaslansky, the chief executive and founder of Flock Freight.

His company, which has been operating in stealth mode for the last two years, has finally emerged with a new solution for freight shipping that purports to bring in more money to shippers, remove inefficiencies in the current

As the company experiences its second day of outages, Robinhood, the popular trading app with a purported 10-million-strong user base and a $7.6 billion valuation, said it will offer compensation for yesterday’s outage on a case-by-case basis, according to a company spokesperson.

The company issued a statement early Tuesday documenting that the

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: “We’re just building games. And to be honest, we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Despite this self-proclaimed ignorance, End Game has just raised $3 million in seed funding from an impressive group of investors:

Earlier today, during an eye-popping market selloff, DoorDash announced that it has privately filed to go public. The decision to file privately will allow the high-valued startup to get its S-1 documents in good order with the SEC before showing the rest of us what it has up its sleeve.

The move to announce its private filing is more interesting

Years ago, Teel Lidow arrived at the airport to take a standard, eight-hour flight from Santiago, Chile to New York City. The journey ended up taking three days, involved an emergency landing, and passengers entering two countries (Ecuador and Peru) they never planned to enter.

When they finally arrived in New York, the airline handed out a piece

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

All around, this has been a tough week. The coronavirus is spreading and worry is running high as infections mount. In economic terms, global markets were repeated declines last night (domestic results here), and the U.S. indices

TC Early Stage SF goes down on April 28, and we are more excited than ever to introduce this brand new event to the community.

The day-long event is meant to give early-stage founders the chance to pick their own adventure, hearing from a wide variety of experts in fundraising, marketing and operations in a more intimate, Q-A-centered

SmartNews, the news aggregation app that hit a unicorn valuation last year, has spent its time growing its local news feature. With the United States presidential election underscoring both the importance of local news and its challenges, SmartNews has a huge opportunity to gain new users.

In early 2019, SmartNews had 40 local partners. Over the

It wasn’t a fad. Yolo became the country’s No. 1 app just a week after launch by letting teens ask for anonymous replies to questions they posted on Snapchat. But nine months later, Yolo is still in the top 100 iOS apps and has 10 million active users. Now it’s safeguarding the app from predators while revealing a smart new feature for spinning up

DoorDash prepares to go public, Roblox raises $150 million and Reddit’s CEO takes aim at TikTok. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 27, 2020.

1. DoorDash, the $13B on-demand food delivery startup, says it has confidentially filed for an IPO

The company said that its Form S-1 (a draft registration statement) was filed with the SEC and is now

Brooklinen, a startup that sells bedding and other home goods online, has raised $50 million in new funding from growth equity firm Summit Partners.

Recent headlines are spurring bigger questions about the direct-to-consumer retail business, with Blue Apron exploring a potential sale and Casper also disclosing disappointing growth and persistent

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What a week. What an insane, heart-stopping, odd and stuffed week. I’m utterly exhausted. But, in better news, all of that is great fodder for podcast and chat, so today’s Equity is pretty okay, if I may say so.

Danny and

Applied XLabs is a new startup building tools that can automate data-gathering for journalists — and eventually, for knowledge workers in other industries.

The company is emerging from Brooklyn-based Newlab, with The Boston Globe as its launch partner. It will be led by Francesco Marconi (pictured above), who was previously R-D chief at The

A 9-year-old is smashing the shuttle far and wide, frantically pacing back and forth on the court in Bangalore, India, as her competition refuses to back down. Her rival is not a human. She is playing against a machine that is mimicking the game of badminton legend P.V. Sindhu, toned down a few notches to adjust for the age difference.

By the

Coding and other computer science expertise remain some of the more important skills that a person can have in the working world today, but in the last few years, we have also seen a big rise in a new generation of tools providing an alternative way of reaping the fruits of technology: “no-code” software, which lets anyone — technical or non-t

Ampere, the chip startup run by former Intel President Renee James, announced a new chip today that she says is designed specifically to optimize for cloud workloads.

Ampere VP of product Jeff Wittich says the new chip is called the Ampere Altra, and it’s been designed with some features that should make it attractive to cloud providers. This i

The on-demand food delivery wars continue to heat up in the U.S. DoorDash announced today that it has filed confidentially to go public. The company noted that its Form S-1, a draft registration statement, was filed with the SEC and is now being reviewed. It did not say how many shares it would potentially sell, the share price range for the IPO

DocSend has become one of the most popular tools for sharing venture fundraise decks, not only because of the control it offers, but also because of the analytics it can provide founders on how VCs read decks and where they might get stuck as they are perusing from slide to slide.

The company has been generous sharing its data with us on what times

Stem, a startup that helps independent musicians get paid, is expanding with a new financing program called Scale.

Co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis described the company’s core offering as a way for collaborators to “memorialize the split” of the proceeds from a song — once they’ve uploaded a track, Scale can automatically handle splitting the

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re starting on a somber topic, so I’ll hold off on our usual jokes and attempts at puns. The impact of the coronavirus known as COVID-19 is starting to show up in U.S.-based technology earnings, and it’s something we need t

iPrice Group, which helps comparison shoppers in Southeast Asia by pulling together prices from different e-commerce platforms, has closed a $10 million Series B. Led by ACA Investments, the round also included participation from Daiwa PI Partners and returning investors Line Ventures, Mirae Asset-Naver and Asia Growth Fund.

The company’s last

A quick hit as we have a podcast to record, but a few public companies in the broader SaaS market reported earnings in the past week. Their results are worth unpacking as they paint a good picture of what the markets are hunting for in modern software companies.

Of course, we’re covering the firms’ share-price movements in the context of an epic

Cioplenu, an Augsburg-based startup that is building what it dubs an “operating system” for the production floor, has raised €4.2M in seed financing. Berlin-based Cherry Ventures led the round, and Munich’s 42Cap, which led Cioplenu’s pre-seed round in 2018, joined three fairly high-profile angels in the round.

The three angels include Fabian

A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications.

The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that it has raised

Every day, there’s another event-related cancellation owing to concern around coronavirus. Just today Microsoft announced it will not have a presence at the Game Developers Conference in mid-March “out of an abundance of caution.” Facebook also said today that it is canceling its annual F8 conference scheduled for May over coronavirus-outbreak

SparkLabs Group announced today that it has launched SparkLabs Connex, the latest program in its network of startup accelerators and venture funds. Focused on real estate technology (proptech) and the Internet of Things, SparkLabs Connex will tap into startup ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Seoul, Shenzhen, Taipei and Singapore.

The program will