StartUp

“If I was running Clearbanc by myself, it probably would have gone off the cliff eight times at this point,” says Clearbanc co-founder Andrew D’Souza. 

“If I were running the company by myself, it would be half its size,” adds Michele Romanow, Clearbanc’s other co-founder.

In addition to starting the $420 million-backed fintech company together,

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

Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest, has included more than a d

Funding of Latin American startups has doubled each year over the past two years.

And while most of this capital has been directed toward Brazil and Mexico, this surge is starting to have an

With so many new investors, the old seed fundraise playbook needs a rewrite

Seed fundraising is rarely easy, but it certainly used to be a lot less complicated than it is today. In a simpler world, a seed investor (or maybe two) would lead a round, which meant that they would write the terms of the deal in a term sheet and then pass that document

When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is part of the Google Cloud Platform.

While

Matteo Franceschetti, CEO of Eight Sleep, would prefer that you don’t call his startup a mattress company.

Eight Sleep does sell mattresses, albeit smart ones packed with sensors and temperature regulation controls. The company has raised north of $70 million from backers including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. A great deal of this funding

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

As I write to you, SaaS and cloud stocks are busy setting fresh all-time highs and as we’ve seen, venture interest in modern software companies is pushing more money into the sector. But despite it appearing to be an incredibly

With Google and Facebook yielding massive control over the online ad market, leaving only scraps for other ad platforms, perhaps it was only natural that tech startups would take a step back and start to look for opportunities in selling billboards.

AdQuick, a marketplace for out of home (OOH) advertising, tells TechCrunch that it has closed a $6

Last February we launched Extra Crunch, and today we’re celebrating its one-year anniversary. As a token of appreciation to our readers, we’re offering a limited-time deal for annual Extra Crunch membership. From now until the end of February, new users signing up for Extra Crunch in the U.S. can get a full year of membership for only $99 plus tax

Too often, people are asked to give away their insights and time for free. Jen Horonjeff, founder and CEO of healthcare startup Savvy, knows this first hand and is trying to change that by applying a cooperative model to her business.

As an infant, Horonjeff was diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Since then, she has been diagnosed with a

Moving data to the cloud from an on-prem data warehouse like Teradata is a hard problem to solve, especially if you’ve built custom applications that are based on that data. Datometry, a San Francisco startup, has developed a solution to solve that issue, and today it announced a $17 million Series B investment.

WRVI Capital led the round with

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is launching margin trading today. Margin trading lets you trade on leverage. But it works both ways — margin trading lets you multiply your gains and your losses.

Margin trading is going to be available on Coinbase Pro, the company’s exchange interface for educated investors. Both retail and institutional investors

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

After having a good time with NEA’s Rick Yang last week, we thought we’d bring on another venture capitalist. So this week Danny and I had Elliott Robinson from Bessemer swing over for the show. As it turned out, he was

Mass is money when it comes to the rocket launch business, and any small savings you can eke out can add up to big savings. That’s been the driving force behind the growing commercialization of space and the rapid rise of the small satellite industry. Now Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space has received a $3 million grant from the Australian

Marketing startup Habu is emerging from stealth today and announcing that it has already raised $15 million in Series A funding.

The company comes out of super{set}, the startup studio created by Krux founders Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya. In fact, Chavez is Habu’s chairman, Vaidya serves as CTO and their former Krux colleague Matt Kilmartin (who e

Venture capital has been flooding the various subverticals under the robotics umbrella in recent years, and the construction space is one of the largest beneficiaries.

Last November, we surveyed 13 of the top robotics-focused VCs to find out which areas of robotics are exciting them most going into 2020. One of the most common areas of attention

YC-backed Astranis has raised $90 million of new combined debt and equity funding in a Series B round led Venrock, with a sizeable contribution by existing investor (and lead of their 2018 round) Andreessen Horowitz. The funding will be used to help the company launch its first commercial satellites, the bedrock of its future internet service

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

This morning we’re exploring Airbnb’s march to the public markets. The popular DIY hospitality startup promised last year that it would go public in 2020. That timeline means that its 2019 performance will be included in an

Entrepreneurs — particularly tech entrepreneurs — face the uphill struggle of building something new in the world. Sometimes that struggle can exact a heavy mental toll. As much as everyone knows they should be sleeping, exercising and meditating, it’s hard to keep all that up when you are trying to build a company.

As an entrepreneur whose startup

Tozny, a Portland, Oregon startup that wants to help companies more easily incorporate encryption into programs and processes, introduced TozID today. It is an identity and access control tool that can work independently or in conjunction with the company’s other encryption tools.

“Basically we have a Security as a Service platform, and it’s des

“Whatever your symptom, WebMD says you have cancer.” It’s a long-running joke that underscores the distrust of perhaps the top source of medical advice, stemming from a confusing site clogged with ads that’s been criticized for questionable information and pushing pills from its sponsors.

Health Guide is the new medical handbook for the internet,

​Tamatem, the leading mobile games publisher in the Arabic speaking market, has raised $3.5 million in additional funding — essentially an extension of the startup’s earlier Series A.

The round was led by existing investor ​Wamda Capital, with participation from Modern Electronics Company (a subsidiary of AlFaisaliah Group) and North Base Media.

Tama

Intuition Robotics, the company best known for its ElliQ robot, a digital home companion for the elderly, today announced that it has raised a $36 million Series B round co-led by SPARX Group and OurCrowd. Toyota AI Ventures, Sompo Holdings, iRobot, Union Tech Ventures, Happiness Capital, Samsung Next, Capital Point and Bloomberg Beta also

Headspace, the Los Angeles-based mindfulness and meditation company locked in a bitter competitive struggle with Calm for leadership in the mental wellness world, has raised new capital to try to take the pole position.

The company has just closed on $93 million in new equity and debt financing from a slew of investors as it pursues a number of

Simsim, a social commerce startup in India, said on Friday it has raised $16 million in seven months of its existence as it attempts to replicate the offline retail experience in the digital world with help from influencers.

The Gurgaon-based startup said it raised $16 million across seed, Series A and Series B financing rounds from Accel Partners,

Vedantu, a Bangalore-based startup that operates a learning app aimed at students aged between 12 to 18, has secured an additional $24 million as part of its Series C financing round. With the infusion of cash, Vedantu looks to serve more students and make its brand a household name.

The fresh infusion to its Series C, which Vedantu first unveiled

Meet Ramp, a new startup that offers corporate credit cards with 1.5% cash back on everything. The company thinks that a cash-back program combined with an analysis of your payments to help you spend less is more valuable than alternative corporate card offerings.

Ramp is launching publicly today and has raised $25 million in funding from Keith

Soylent, the once high-flying Los Angeles-based meal replacement startup that has raised $72.4 million in financing from investors including Google Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Andreessen Horowitz, has shaken up its executive team.

This week, the company announced in a blog post that the company’s chief financial officer, Demir Vangelov, would be t

Following the departure of its CTO last month, Tandem Bank, the U.K. challenger bank co-founded by fintech veteran Ricky Knox, has lost another key member of its team: chief product officer Matt Ford, who is departing for a career in venture.

Ford joined Santander InnoVentures, the venture capital arm of the Spanish incumbent bank, in December,

For decades, the best urban planning simulation wasn’t a simulation for urban planners at all, but the wildly popular city building game, SimCity, says Peter Calthorpe, an expert in the field and the co-founder of UrbanFootprint.

Calthorpe began his career as an urban planner and designer in the late seventies, and in the mid-eighties he wrote the