レベル3 (1,000〜5,000語)

"The not-so-secret secret here is that the key to great retention is really simple," says growth expert Susan Su.

The Tumblr community often refers to itself as the Wild West of the internet, and they’re not wrong. A text post with over 70,000 notes puts it best: “Tumblr is my favorite social media site because this place is literally uninhabitable for celebrities. No verification system, no algorithm that boosts their posts, it’s a completely […]

More than half of the U.S. population has stayed away from considering life insurance because they believe it’s probably too expensive, and the most common way to buy it today is in person. A startup that’s built a platform that aims to break down those conventions and democratize the process by making life insurance (and […]

Pivot Bio makes fertilizer — but not directly. Its modified microorganisms are added to soil and they product nitrogen that would otherwise have had to be trucked in and dumped there. This biotech-powered approach can save farmers money and time and ultimately may be easier on the environment — a huge opportunity that investors have […]

On Tuesday, R-Zero, a pandemic-era biosafety company, announced the acquisition of CoWorkr — a company that develops room occupancy sensors. The acquisition marks a shift in focus for R-Zero as people return to work, vaccines are rolled out and companies that sprung up in response to the COVID-19 adapt to another phase of the pandemic.  […]

A famous poem advises us not to compare ourselves with others, "for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself." The same holds true for startup fundraising.

Maya Moufarek, founder of Marketing Cube, spent more than 15 years working for companies like Google and American Express before launching her own agency. Today, her London-based firm works with startups around the world — and her startup clients have raved about the results, based on what we’ve heard in our TechCrunch Experts growth marketing […]

Research says that counterfeit medication is the cause of 1 million deaths per year. One-tenth of this number comes from Africa. Counterfeiting is hard to detect, investigate, quantify or stop. It is a global problem, with annual earnings from substandard drugs standing at over $100 billion. Some technologies have helped deal with this menace; for […]

Electric fat-tire bike manufacturer Rad Power Bikes has unveiled the latest model of its flagship RadRover. The updates on the RadRover 6 Plus are emblematic of the company’s mission to enhance rider experience, especially for those who don’t identify as bike riders but are looking for a more eco-friendly way to travel. With those updates, […]

Online learning continues to see a huge boost of attention and use in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and today a startup building tools specifically for enterprises to deliver on their internal education remits is announcing a big round of funding that points to the startup’s own growth and ambitions. Go1, which provides curated […]

When Robinhood raised its $3 million seed round in 2013, it was a couple of months old with huge ambitions of democratizing securities access to the underserved and unserved. Robinhood has since taken the world by storm and grown to serve more than 30 million users with its zero-commission trading.  In the past, we’ve seen […]

When you hire a marketing consultant, you don’t necessarily expect to wind up discussing your life purpose. Yet, that is what Spanish marketing expert and entrepreneur Alex Barrera often ends up doing with startup founders who hire him to help improve their pitch. They think they are going to get help convincing investors, and they […]

In order to understand the changes that are sweeping fintech and reconfiguring the way that the industry works with small businesses, it’s important to understand open banking.

Don't wait until it's too late to build your early-stage marketing team — but don't hire too hastily, either.

Switzerland-based privacy startup Nym Technologies has raised $6 million, which is being loosely pegged as a Series A round. Earlier raises included a $2.5 million seed round in 2019. The founders also took in grant money from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research fund during an earlier R&D phase developing the network tech. The latest […]

The General Services Administration has denied a senator’s request to review documents Zoom submitted to have its software approved for use in the federal government. The denial was in response to a letter sent by Democratic senator Ron Wyden to the GSA in May, expressing concern that the agency cleared Zoom for use by federal […]

The global social market is rapidly growing. With over 1.25 million online social sellers in Egypt alone, the Egyptian social e-commerce market is forecast to be worth more than $14.8 billion by 2024. One of its players, Taager, is a social e-commerce platform enabling online merchants with end-to-end logistics. Today, it is announcing that it […]

After operating in beta for a year, Nooks, a virtual workspace space targeting distributed teams, has attracted thousands of users and millions of dollars in venture capital. The Stanford student-led upstart has raised a $5 million seed round led by Tola Capital, with participation from Floodgate and investors such as Julia and Kevin Hartz (CEO […]

In 2020 and 2021, we all became well-acquainted with nasal swabs. But small sticks we stuck up our noses, it turns out, were harder to come by than anyone could have predicted. A May 2020 survey of 118 labs in the U.S. found that 60% reported limited swab supplies — making lack of swabs the […]

Another US femtech startup has joined the race to build up data-sets to support research into and understanding of a range of health issues that can affect women. Evvy has today launched an at-home test kit for the vaginal microbiome. The user returns their swab to the startup for analysis — and gets detailed information […]

Anyone, an audio app that’s building a ‘marketplace for advice’ one five-minute phone call at a time, is launching new versions of its iOS and Android apps today* and beginning to large-scale onboarding after operating in a limited closed beta for the past six months. The app — which was founded around 18 months ago […]

Investment apps in Southeast Asia are attracting a lot of funding, and now some are raising fast follow-on rounds, too. For example, Indonesian robo-advisor app Bibit raised $65 million in May just four months after a $30 million growth round. Now Singapore-based Syfe is announcing that it has closed a $40 million SGD (about $29.6M […]

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

One of the great things about editing all of our deep-dive EC-1 startup profiles is that you start to notice patterns across successful companies. While origin stories and trajectories can vary widely, the best companies seem to come from similar places and are conceived around very peculiar themes. To wit, one common theme that came […]

Small and medium-sized businesses in Latin America finding it difficult to get the funds they need to export their goods to the United States is a gap Marco Financial is looking to bridge.

For many of us, going to work these days no longer means going into a specific office like it used to; and today one of the startups that’s built a platform to help cater to that new, bigger world of employment — wherever talent might be — is announcing a major round of funding on […]

Allan Jones dropped out of college and spent a decade learning how to run a startup. In 2016, that education resulted in the launch of Los Angeles-based Bambee, which helps small companies by acting as their HR department with the goal of keeping them in compliance with government rules and regulations. But he found getting […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices […]

Last year, during the pandemic, a free browser extension called Netflix Party gained traction because it enabled people trapped in their homes to connect with far-flung friends and family by enabling them to watch the same Netflix TV shows and movies simultaneously. It also enabled them to dish about the action in a side bar […]

Just like NYC's flooded subway system, internet infrastructure doesn't attract much attention until there's a notable failure.