Before founders begin building AI systems, they should think carefully about their risk appetite, data management practices and strategies for future-proofing their AI stack.

Bacterial secretions might dye your future wardrobe, and that’d be an improvement. That’s because textiles usually get their hues from toxic chemicals, and the resulting wastewater—laden with dyes, acids and formaldehyde—destroys rivers, such as those surrounding Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Wastewater treatment, when it happens, is just one of the energy-intensive (read: carbon-spewing) […]

The cannabis industry is doing well in the United States: over 75% of the population lives in a state where access is permitted, and the legal market is expected to generate $33 billion this year.

While Substack was correct that it had identified a niche worth exploiting, it may not be a market slice that is amenable to venture-speed revenue expansion.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Happily we were once again at full strength this week, with Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and Mary Ann Azevedo chatting, and Grace handling production. You can tell from the topic list today that we are in […]

Joywell uses a proprietary microbial fermentation process to produce sweet proteins that are nearly identical to those found in exotic fruits and berries.

Indian fintech Jar, which closed a $32 million financing round in February this year, is in talks to raise new funding as it looks to scale its product and expand its offerings. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup is engaging with several investors to raise about $50 million at a $350 million valuation, according to four people familiar […]

Much of the world’s attention around blockchain is on the highs and lows of cryptocurrency values. Startups like FlexID remind us that distributed ledger technology has the potential to play other roles, including offering trusted records of identities without the need for a centralized authority. One of the startups working toward this vision is Zimbabwe’s […]

Substack, the five-year-old newsletter platform that has aggressively positioned itself as a disruptive force in media, has abandoned efforts to raise a Series C round, the New York Times is reporting today.  According to its sources, Substack held discussions with potential investors in recent months about raising $75 million to $100 million at a valuation […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

The excitement around web3 and the metaverse have pulled plenty of entrepreneurs who defined the first generation of native mobile apps to begin questioning what’s next. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley is on the co-founding team of a new startup called LivingCities, alongside Matt Miesnieks, who sold his most recent startup 6D.ai to Niantic for an […]

More than 80% of food delivery orders in Latin America are still made over phone calls and settled with cash. OlaClick, a young startup that is helping these restaurants sell online and collect money digitally, announced on Thursday it has received backing from scores of investors, including Gradient, Meta and Delivery Hero. Gradient Ventures, Google’s […]

TechCrunch has been covering the demo days of the seed-stage venture firm Pear VC since 2015. (There we are in the front row in 2016, surrounded by investors, typing away.) A few things have remained true since that time. There are typically 10 or so companies that present and not many more. A lot of […]

Plenty of entrepreneurs have used the crypto boom to plot the next step of their Silicon Valley character arcs, but few of them have an active television series chronicling their misdeeds. This week, Adam Neumann made his post-WeWork debut, co-founding a blockchain-based carbon credits market, and — more impressively — raising $70 million in funding […]

We tear down the deck Lumigo used to land a $29 million Series A round led by Redline Capital last year.

Typically part of the product team, product ops sits at the intersection of product, engineering and customer success.

OnlyFans founder Tim Stokley is getting into the web3 game with a new NFT startup, Zoop, launching this summer. On Zoop, people can buy, sell, and trade 3D NFT “playing cards” of their favorite influencers and celebrities. The limited-edition digital cards on Zoop will be officially licensed, according to the company, though it wasn’t clear […]

Not every q-commerce company will fail. But startups that raised huge sums of money to build super-rapid consumer delivery models are laying off staff, attempting to merge, and otherwise stay alive.

Longtime engineer and product designer Michael Sayman has been building apps since he was a kid, landing him roles at Facebook, Google, Roblox, and most recently Twitter, where he’s often been tasked with developing products aimed at a teenage audience. Sayman was only 17 when he joined Facebook, but had already built several apps — […]

Companies use its emissions reductions engine during the product development phase to understand how to create products with lower carbon footprints.

Humble Bee Bio is on a mission to create a biodegradable alternative to plastics by synthesizing the biology of bees. While the New Zealand-based company is still at an early stage – it’s about halfway through its proof of concept – if Humble Bee is successful, its bioplastics are likely to make it into the […]

Early-stage proptech startups have a potential new source of capital in 1Sharpe Ventures, which recently closed its $90 million inaugural fund. Roofstock co-founder and chairman Gregor Watson and real estate investor Rob Bloemker started the venture firm in 2021, and had their first close last year. The pair say the fund was “oversubscribed.” For the […]

Assembled, which bills itself as a workforce management platform for customer support teams, today announced that it raised $51 million in a Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Emergence Capital and Basis Set Ventures. CEO Ryan Wang says that the new capital will be put toward product development, including […]

Over the last decade, the rate at which organizations create data has accelerated as it becomes cheaper to store, access, and process data. But as data continues to grow in scale and complexity, it’s becoming scattered across apps and platforms — often leading to problems where it concerns data quality. According to a 2020 O’Reilly […]

When I wrote my big TC1 on Bowery Farming late last year, there was a lot of talk of the company’s third commercial farming site in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Today the facility finally comes online after a big press unveiling. The New Jersey–based vertical farming startup says the facility, built on a former brownfield lot, is […]

Fintech startup and alternative credit asset manager Viola Credit has closed its latest $700 million fund, which provides asset-based lending capital to fintech, proptech and insurtech startups. If this fintech play reminds you of Silicon Valley Bank, think again. The latter provides corporate lending, also known as venture lending. Instead, Viola provides lending capital to fintech […]

Joby Aviation — the publicly-traded electric air vehicle company with a current market cap of $3.1 billion — has received the necessary certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin on-demand commercial air taxi operations, the company said on Thursday. While it’s a significant milestone that puts Joby closer to its stated goal of launching […]

Although we’ve long understood that asteroids are not simply the rubble of the universe, but potentially profitable stores of precious minerals, humanity has never been able to unlock this value. Y Combinator startup Astroforge wants to succeed where other companies have failed, by becoming the first to mine an asteroid and bring the material back […]

Wale Ayeni, one of Africa’s well-known investors, has a new role as the head of Helios Digital Ventures, the venture capital strategy of private equity firm Helios Investment Partners, TechCrunch has learned. This appointment comes a month after Ayeni left the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, where […]

Between one-to-one therapy and free online forums, people search for a range of solutions to mental health therapy online. Especially since the pandemic increased anxiety and depression rose by 25% globally (according to WHO) and also deepened an epidemic of loneliness. Among players in the online group emotional support space there is Pace (which raised […]