StartUp

“It’s an open secret that every company is on fire,” says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. “At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before.” Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the

Fundraising is the single most

Route planning sounds like it’s a problem for big logistics companies like Amazon, FedEx and UPS, but in reality, it’s something every small business with more than a few mobile employees deals with. OptimoRoute, which today announced that it has raised a $6.5 million Series A round led by Prelude Ventures, is tackling exactly this problem. Built

Are you a student enthralled by robots and the AI that powers them? Do you live within striking distance of UC Berkeley? Ready to learn from the greatest minds and makers in the field? Then we want you at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 on March 3 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

We’re investing in the next generation of makers by making our d

In a little less than three months, TechCrunch will bring its Early Stage event to SF for the very first time. Early Stage is meant to bring together more than 50 experts across startup core competencies, from funding to marketing to operation.

Today, I’m pleased to announce another four experts being added to the agenda. We’re thrilled to be joi

Netskope has always focused its particular flavor of security on the cloud, and as more workloads have moved there, it has certainly worked in its favor. Today the company announced a $340 million investment on a valuation of nearly $3 billion.

Sequoia Capital Global Equities led the round, but in a round this large, there were a bunch of other

Starling Bank, the U.K.-based challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, has raised another £60 million from its existing investors Merian Global Investors and Harry McPike’s JTC.

The investment brings the total raised by Starling to £323 million and follows two funding rounds of £105 million in aggregate led by Merian in 2019.

Boden told

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

This week was something fun. First, we were back as a group in the San Francisco studio, which is always fun. Even better, we had NEA’s Rick Yang on hand to chat with Danny and Alex about the week. Yang, as old-school

Deepnote, a startup that offers data scientists an IDE-like collaborative online experience for building their machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $3.8 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Accel, with participation from YC and Credo Ventures, as well as a number of angel investors, including OpenAI’s Greg

Donny Hall, the chief executive and co-founder of the used car certification service SureSale, knows used cars. The serial entrepreneur built and sold a previous business, CarSure, which was an insurance plan for vehicle repairs.

After selling that business in 2017 to Innovative Aftermarket Systems, Hall decided that his next venture would be to

This morning Carta, a startup that helps private companies manage equity, announced it has created an investing vehicle called Carta Ventures. The well-funded unicorn wants to invest in young startups that it sees building off of its data-driven perspective into the world of private companies, helping to foster an ecosystem around its core

There’s a new launch startup in the mix called Astra, which has been operating in semi-stealth mode for the past three years, building its rockets just a stone’s throw from the heart of startup central in Alameda County, Calif. Astra’s approach isn’t exactly a secret — its founders didn’t set out to hide anything and industry observers have follo

Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse company, doesn’t tend to do small rounds. On Friday night word leaked out about its latest mega round. This one was for $479 million on a $12.4 billion valuation. That’s triple the company’s previous $3.9 billion valuation from October 2018, and CEO Frank Slootman suggested that the company’s next finance e

It’s no secret that it’s hard to make the economics work at rideshare companies. That may explain the success to date of HopSkipDrive, a six-year-old, L.A.-based company that pairs drivers with both families but also, crucially, school districts. Specifically, the now 100-plus person company has deals in place with school districts in 13 markets

As the insuretech space fills up, a new entrant is joining the fight.

Y Combinator -backed Goodcover is launching today to take on the likes of big insurance, as well as insurance startups like Lemonade, Jetty, Hippo and Zebra.

The company offers renters insurance in California. The twist? Goodcover returns unclaimed premiums to policy holders at

As founding executive director of Tech:NYC, Julie Samuels is one of the state’s most prominent advocates for the tech sector, both in Albany and at City Hall.

Samuels, a lawyer by training,

When Fair laid off 40% of its staff in October, CEO Scott Painter promised it wasn’t shuttering leasing services to on-demand fleets. But just one week later, Painter was removed as CEO and replaced in the interim with Adam Hieber, a CFA from Fair investor SoftBank. Today, according to two sources, Fair announced at an all-hands meeting that it w

Datree, the early-stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort.

Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million seed round announced in 2018.

Si

Scape Technologies, the London-based computer vision startup working on location accuracy beyond the capabilities of GPS, has been acquired by Facebook, according to a regulatory filing.

Full terms of the deal remain as yet unknown, although a Companies House update reveals that Facebook Inc. now has majority control of the company (more than 75%).

As the national conversation pushes companies to reexamine the HR processes suppressing sexual harassment and bias reporting, tech startups are looking to find a way to smooth out the process and encourage communication.

LA-based AllVoices is building an encrypted communications platform for offices that allows employees to anonymously send

As we have previously reported, an increasing number of startups are exploring cooperative business models where workers (and sometimes users) are owners in the company. Driver’s Seat, which participated in the first batch of the Start.coop accelerator, is one such example. 

Driver’s Seat is designed to help gig workers own and use their data so

With Casper’s public offering earlier this week, we’ve closed the book on the first two venture-backed IPOs of note in 2020. Casper, joined by One Medical, carried over $870 million of private capital, venture and otherwise, across the finish line.

Even though each IPO featured an unprofitable tech-enabled business that had posted sub-30% growth

Time to mark September 14-16 on your calendar for the startup extravaganza that is TechCrunch’s Disrupt San Francisco 2020. Registration for our flagship, 10,000-person event is officially open, and pass prices will never be lower. Super early-bird passes are now available, and if you reserve your seat today, you can save up to $1,800.

There are

Moteefe, the e-commerce platform for on-demand production of merchandise has raised $5 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is Gresham House, and Force Over Mass Capital. It brings total funding to date to $12.5 million, and will be used to expand into new geographies including Australia and LATAM. The U.K. company also plans to launch

A startup called Our.News is working to make its users smarter consumers of the news.

In other words, it’s confronting some big, seemingly intractable problems. For one thing, there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation online — as Our.News founder and CEO Richard Zack put it, “Unfortunately, you have thousands of people all over the world who in

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup that raised $940 million in financing from SoftBank Vision Fund last year, is the first company to receive a driverless exemption from the federal government.

The exemption granted by the the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is for Nuro’s newest — and until Thur

Antler is a “company builder” that emerged a couple of years ago, running startup generator programs and investing from an early stage, bringing a heady mix of technologists, product builders and operators together with its own technology stack.

Now, plenty of “company builders” have come and gone. It’s a bit like Apocalypse Now: everyone goes in th

Meet AssoConnect, a French startup that is building a software-as-a-service application to give you all the tools you need to manage your nonprofit organization (association in French).

The company just raised a $7.7 million (€7 million) funding round with XAnge and ISAI leading the round. Various business angels, such as Nicolas Macquin, Rodolphe

Snafu Records is bringing a new approach to finding musical talent — founder and CEO Ankit Desai described the Los Angeles-headquartered startup as “the first full-service, AI-enabled record label.”

It’s a world that Desai knows well, having spent the past five years working on digital and streaming strategy at Capitol Records and Universal Music G

Funko Pops. You’ve probably noticed them at your local GameStop, Hot Topic or spread out all over your co-worker’s desk. These lil’ vinyl figurines and their big ol’ heads have taken over retail shelves in the last few years. You can now find a Funko Pop! (or thirty) for just about every fandom; there are more than 8,000 different Pops, and that