StartUp

Student loan debt in the U.S. totals $1.5 trillion, and more than 44 million Americans have outstanding student loan debt.

According to research by Villanova law professor Jason Iuliano, a million student loan debtors have filed for bankruptcy in the past five years. However, 99.9% of them did not include their student loan debt in their bankruptcy

It often feels like half of the new security startups that receive funding are from Israel. As YL Ventures’ Yoav Leitersdorf and Ofer Schreiber wrote last month, investments in Israeli cybersecurity startups increased to $1.4 billion last year, with average seed rounds of $4.7 million, up 30.5% from 2018.

I spent some time on the ground at

Negotiatus, a SaaS business meant to optimize and streamline the purchasing and procurement process for businesses, has today announced the close of a $10 million Series A round.

The funding was led by Rally Ventures, with participation from ERA, 645 Ventures, Green Visor Capital and Stage 2 Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to n

Fifty percent of families are scared they can’t cover the cost of a funeral. They end up overpaying because no one wants to comparison shop amidst a tragedy. That’s why ex-Googler Alison Johnston’s startup Ever Loved built a free funeral crowdfunding tool. Now it’s addressing one of the most expensive parts of saying goodbye: burial. Today Ever L

Spaceflight Industries, owner of both Spaceflight, Inc. and BlackSky, is selling the Spaceflight, Inc. portion of its business to Japanese industrial megacorporation Mitsui - Co, and Yamasa both of which will co-own the company in a 50/50 joint venture after its closing. The deal will see Spaceflight continue to operate as an independent

Companies spend a lot of money and time testing their security defenses (or at least they should). Sometimes they hire a set of consultants called a “red team” to attack (in a safe way) their systems and see where vulnerabilities are. Today, Randori, a Boston-based security startup, introduced Randori Attack Platform, which effectively packages

Japanese orbital debris removal technology startup Astroscale is going to be working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on the agency’s first mission to remove some of the junk that currently exists on orbit. They’ve been selected by the agency to participate in its Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration project (CRD2), which

The market has tightened expectations for ride-hailing companies

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

This afternoon we’re digging into Lyft’s earnings results, unpacking the company’s performance, the market’s expectations and why shares in the American ride-hailing giant are

Following TechCrunch’s coverage of 500 Startups’ 25th batch (and numbers 24, 23, 22, and 21, in case you wanted to go back in time), today we’re saying hello to the accelerator’s 26th cohort.

500 Startups, in case you weren’t aware, is a seed-stage accelerator and a collection of venture funds. The group, now with a few dozen accelerator batches

Around 70% of the world’s population now has some form of bank account or — thanks to mobile phones — a facility to receive and send money virtually, according to the World Bank. But when it comes to people crossing borders and setting up lives in new countries, they essentially leave behind their financial histories, starting again from scratch in

Remember when “mobility” meant laptops and cell phones? Those were quaint times. Now the category encompasses the future of transportation — everything from flying cars and autonomous vehicles to delivery bots and beyond. There’s no better place to explore this rapidly moving industry than TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, our day-long conference in San

MoEngage, a San Francisco and Bangalore-based startup that helps firms better understand their customers and improve their engagement, has raised $25 million in a new financing round as it looks to grow its network in North America and Europe.

The Series C was led by Eight Roads Ventures . F-Prime Capital, Matrix Partners India and Ventureast also

Much has been made about the roles and responsibilities of board members these days. This is especially true in the venture-backed

There was a lot of moving and shaking in the cybersecurity unicorn world in 2019.

It was a year that saw two of the biggest exits in cybersecurity history: CrowdStrike went public valued at $3.35 billion and Cloudflare rocketed 20% in its first day on the stock market.

Clearly, the cybersecurity market is booming. Recent data suggests that

Revolut, the European banking and money transfer app that now claims over 10 million customers, has partnered with open banking API provider TrueLayer to add bank account aggregation features to its app.

The new functionality means that Revolut’s U.K. customers — both consumer and business — can now connect their external U.K. bank accounts to Rev

Model9, an Israeli startup launched by mainframe vets, has come up with a way to transfer data between mainframe computers and the cloud, and today the company announced a $9 million Series A.

Intel Capital led the round with help from existing investors, including StageOne, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israel. The company reports it has now

German fintech startup N26 is shutting down its operations in the U.K. Customers who opened a bank account in the U.K. will have to transfer their deposits, spend everything with their card or withdraw money at an ATM, as all accounts will be automatically closed on April 15, 2020.

Many European fintech companies take advantage of a European

Impala has raised another round of funding just a few months after raising an $11 million Series A round. This time, the startup is raising a $20 million Series B round led by Lakestar. Latitude Ventures is also participating in the round.

The company is building a service that works pretty much like Plaid, but for hotel rooms. The hotel industry

The worlds of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity have become deeply entwined in recent years, as organizations work to keep up with — and ideally block — increasingly sophisticated malicious hackers. Today, a startup that’s built a deep learning solution that it claims can both identify and stop even viruses that have yet to be identified ha

Alpha Foods, the vegetarian prepared food manufacturer, has raised $28 million in financing for its portfolio of vegetarian burritos, tamales, nuggets, pizzas, burgers, patties and sausages.

The Glendale, Calif.-based company was launched by Loren Wallis, the founder of the dairy substitute, Good Karma Foods, and Cole Orobetz, a former director

You’ve been busy. I’ve been busy. But people are talking about Slack all over Twitter, so let me catch us both up.

All the ruckus concerning Slack and its publicly traded stock appeared to kick off with a Business Insider story, which had the following headline:

Slack just scored its biggest customer deal ever, as IBM moves all 350,000 of its

Last year we embarked on a mission to democratize information for startups, and today we are celebrating the one-year anniversary of our membership program, Extra Crunch. 

Since launching Extra Crunch, we’ve published more than 1,000 articles, onboarded a few new hires, overhauled our technical infrastructure, expanded into five new European c

Sixgill, an Israeli cyberthreat intelligence company that specializes in monitoring the deep and dark web, today announced that it has raised a $15 million funding round led by Sonae IM, a fund based in Portugal, and London-based REV Venture Partners. Crowdfunding platform OurCrowd also participated in the round, as did previous investors Elron

U.S. femtech startup CurieMD is offering menopause diagnosis and treatment prescription via a telehealth platform — beginning in California, where it launched late last year.

Founder Dr. Leslie Meserve  says the goal is to widen access to treatment and support services for mid-life women, spying a business opportunity in offering an auxiliary

Europe has emerged as a key region for hatching and scaling fintech companies. And today, one of the more prominent fintech startups is announcing a large round of funding, from a mix of strategic investors, to keep growing its business.

Dublin-based Fenergo builds solutions for banks and other financial management companies to help with regulatory

There have been plenty of stories written about the so-called “Slack-lash” and the growing unrest among workers dealing with DM interruptions that take their attention away from the task at hand. Slack is a poster child for the problem, but VCs have invested heavily in a number of collaboration tools over the past several years that have com

Over the last few years, Facebook has been busy building out AI capabilities in areas like computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and ‘deep learning,’ in part by acquiring promising startups in the space.

Understandably, this has seen the U.S. social networking giant look to the U.K. for AI talent, including an acqui-hire of NLP startup

11 entrepreneurs share their hopes and predictions for the year ahead

To get a better sense of what lies ahead for the European startup ecosystem, we spoke to several investors and entrepreneurs in the region about their impressions and lessons learned from 2019, along with their predictions for 2020.

We asked for blunt responses, and we weren’t d

Just a couple days after mobile analytics and marketing company Localytics was acquired by Upland Software, two of its founders are announcing their new startup, Demand Sage.

CEO Raj Aggarwal and CTO Henry Cipolla previously co-founded and served in the same roles at Localytics, and they founded Demand Sage with Chief Product Officer Randy Dailey —