Just Eat cuts its take for 30 days to help restaurants during the COVID-19 crisis

U.K. takeout marketplace Just Eat has announced a 30-day emergency support package for restaurants on its platform to help them through disruption caused by the coronavirus crisis.

From tomorrow (March 20) until April 19 the package — which Just Eat says is worth £10 million+ — will see funds directed back to U.K. partner restaurants in the form of

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Listen to the TechCrunch staffYC Demo Day wrap-up call here

It’s been a bonkers week in the world, with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren’t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator’s Winter batch, it was Demo Day week.

TechCrunch has covered Y

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Deepgram, a startup focused on high-quality, real-time speech recognition, announced a $12 million Series A this morning.

The startup, founded a half decade ago, according to Crunchbase data, with just a few million in raised capital, is interesting, as its success to date was founded on two consecutive experiments. The first dealing with its

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With most new social media startups seeming to dial in on specific communities to thrive in a still Facebook-dominated sphere, some of the more broadly focused social investments from top VCs are going into online gaming.

The latest is Mainframe Industries, a Nordic game studio building a massively multiplayer online title. The team doesn’t have m

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Focused on health in the home, Novi lands $1.5M to help CPG companies source clean, safe ingredients

Kimberly Shenk has been focused for a while now on “clean” products that are made without harmful chemicals. In 2017, Shenk and friend Jaleh Bisharat launched NakedPoppy, a site that curates and sells cosmetics that have been vetted by chemists (including some of its own products).

Interestingly, as the young startup was announcing $4 million in

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Revolut launches Revolut Junior to help you manage allowance

Revolut is introducing a new product specifically targeted toward kids aged 7-17 years old — Revolut Junior. Revolut Junior is a new app and service that integrates directly with the main Revolut app on the parent’s side.

Parents or legal gardians who are also Revolut users can create a Revolut Junior account for their kid. After that, your kid

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Quantum Machines raises $17.5M for its Quantum Orchestration Platform

Quantum Machines, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building both hardware and software to operate quantum computers, today announced that it has raised a $17.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Israeli tech entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz (who, among other companies, co-founded Habana Labs and Anapurna Labs and sold them to Intel

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Why is Blue Apronstock skyrocketing?

Back in 2017, a formerly hot, formerly profitable company called Blue Apron went public. It didn’t go well. Today as the global stock market continues to fall, shares in the former venture darling are soaring, up more than 140% in midday trading.

Before its IPO, the company had to reduce its price range from $15 to $17 per share to $10 to $11 per

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Where top VCs are investing in remote events

The novel coronavirus pandemic has rapidly moved companies into a remote-first world.

Nearly all of the world’s largest events have been canceled, put on pause or pivoted to online-only. In the tech world, event cancellations thus far have included SXSW, GDC, Mobile World Congress, Google I/O, Facebook F8, E3 and others.

As more and more hosts

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A new initiative from a Los Angeles investor is taking stock of venture firms and their ability to commit capital in an effort to match firms that are still open for business and cutting checks to startups that are fundraising in the age of COVID-19.

Laurent Grill, one of the investors at Luma Launch (which is the corporate investment arm of the

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As Uber and Lyft continue to melt, the 2019 unicorn class loses its shine

You’d be excused for feeling that mid-2019 was in a different decade as far as venture-backed IPOs go.

Last year saw a number of successful flotations of venture-backed technology and technology-enabled companies, and most performed well after they began trading. But despite some early success, a number of the most famous 2019 IPOs have seen their

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Join TC tomorrow at 9 am PT for a chat about the latest YC startup batch

Hello TechCrunch friends and family, tomorrow morning at 9 am Pacific Time we’re gathering on Zoom for an in-depth chat about our favorite startups from the latest Y Combinator Demo Day. This year’s installment of the twice-yearly startup event happened yesterday, a week early and online only.

Like many other things, Demo Day was adapted to a new

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Remote Year, which helps you work while traveling the world, lays off 50% of staff

Remote Year wants to help people travel around the world and keep their job while doing so. The Chicago startup relies on the idea that “great work can be done anywhere.” And to prove it, it brings people to 12 cities in 12 months, all while they’re working full-time jobs. Think co-working spaces in Ljubljana, code from bungalows in Thailand and

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Manage remote teams with a transparent culture

Many companies have been designed to optimize productivity when everybody is in the office. As offices close due to the coronavirus outbreak, many people are experimenting with remote work at scale for the first time.

Employees have to learn what it means to work remotely — but managers also have to learn how to keep their teams on track. That’s why

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Dear Sophie: How do I get visas for my team to work from home?

Here’s another edition of

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Glossier NYC, in normal times, is typically visited by more than 2,000 people every day, with lines of people from all over the world curling out the door. And when you enter, it’s tempting to touch, well, everything.

The walls are adorned with flowers, mirrors and giant versions of the makeup company’s flagship product: Boy Brow. Makeup is sold o

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All Raise CEO Pam Kostka on how the world isn&t ending

This isn’t thefirst economic downturn All Raise CEO Pam Kostka has been through. 

“I was here during the dot-com bust and rush, and here during the financial fallout that happened, so we’re a little overdue for some corrective action in the market,” Kostka said. “While I’ve been through boom and bust cycles before, this one is more meaningful becaus

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CO2-based vodka startup Air Co. fully redirects its tech to making hand sanitizer for donation

A NYC-based startup that developed technology that extracts carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with water to create vodka has redirected its entire production capacity toward producing hand sanitizer, every bottle of which will be donated through collaboration with NYC officials, and potentially to local restaurants who employ delivery

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Venture investment in esports looks light as Q1 races to a close

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

Today we’re taking a look at the world of esports venture capital investment, largely through the lens of preliminary data that we’ll caveat given how reported VC data lags reality. That phenomenon is likely doubly true in the c

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Quit Genius raises $11M Series A to expand into opioid, alcohol addiction treatment

Quit Genius, the YC-backed startup that uses cognitive behavioral therapy to help folks quit smoking and vaping tobacco products, has today announced the close of an $11 million Series A round.

The new funding was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Startup Health and Triple Point Ventures.

Quit Genius was built by

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Lightspeed-backed WorkOS launches to help startup services become enterprise-ready

With the explosive popularity of B2B services startups, it was only natural that a B2B startup would come along that’s offering a service to help startups become enterprise services themselves.

WorkOS, which is launching out of stealth with seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others, is building a toolkit to help startups meet the

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As a former Jam City executive, Jill Wilson led teams behind several of the top-grossing video gaming franchises, like Cookie Jam and Panda Pop. Currently she's running her own startup, Robin Gamings, where a group of mostly females is working to develop a new particular niche in mobile enjoyment they're calling way of life gaming. As the name suggests, the suggestion is to produce a.

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You have to actually get work done, not just video call all day, but apps like Zoom want to take over your screen. Remote workers who need to stay in touch while staying productive are forced to juggle tabs. Meanwhile, call participants often look and sound far away, dwarfed by their background and drowned in noise.

Today, Around launches its new

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Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.

In a bit of a surprise twist,

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Use accelerated retargeting to increase conversions

We’ve aggregated many of the world’s best growth marketers into one c

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Lunchbox and Eniac launch a website for supporting local businesses

Many of you are probably looking for ways to support the restaurants and small businesses that are being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, going out to your favorite restaurant right now is a real risk to public health — and that’s assuming it’s still open.

A new website called Help Main Street is offering a simple way for people

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Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.

In a bit of a surprise twist,

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The 20 best startups from Y CombinatorW20 Demo Day

With world events overtaking the tech world’s preferences to meet for coffees and convene at events, Y Combinator skipped its famous two-day live Demo event and went for a radical experiment: no demos at all, but instead a long list of the nearly 200 startups in its Winter 2020 batch, with links to their sites and one-page slides. We’ve done the

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With the travel market in tatters, when can Airbnb go public in 2020?

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

This morning we’re tracking Airbnb’s latest losses, its anticipated and real Q1 revenue growth, and what the company’s current situation likely means for its public debut, something the company has promised will occur in 2020.

Last

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Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website simultaneously.

In a bit of a

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