レベル3 (1,000〜5,000語)

Union54, the first Zambian startup backed by Y Combinator, has gotten another major venture capital firm on its term sheet: Tiger Global. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the VC juggernaut led its just-completed $3 million seed round, coming only two months after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch. San Francisco-based venture capital firm Runa […]

Representatives from TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security today to discuss how to protect kids online. This hearing follows Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen‘s document leaks to the Wall Street Journal, which — among many things — exposed Facebook’s knowledge that Instagram is toxic for […]

Healthcare spending accounts for almost 18% of U.S. GDP, so it’s no surprise that digital health is attracting record levels of investment. This year, VCs invested $14.7 billion in healthtech startups

YouTube and Snapchat were asked by lawmakers to defend whether or not their respective social media apps were appropriately rated on the U.S. app stores, given the nature of the content they hosted. In a line of questioning led by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Snap was given specific examples of the types of content found […]

Finding a way to connect with people who might buy from you, while spending less time pursuing those who will never be interested, is something akin to a holy grail of the world of sales and marketing. Now, a startup called UserGems, which has built a platform that combines AI with data mapping to help […]

African automotive company Autochek has secured a $13.1 million seed round almost a year after raising $3.4 million pre-seed in November 2020. The company, led by CEO Etop Ikpe, has seen astonishing growth in demand since launching in August last year, not just from a consumer perspective but also from its business and banking partners. […]

Digital lenders that share personal data of loan defaulters, with third parties, risk license withdrawal in Kenya after lawmakers added a clause – granting the banking regulator the mandate to revoke permits of operators who breach customer confidentiality – to the new law passed by the country’s National Assembly.  Typically, loan apps collect borrowers phone […]

Vendease, an online marketplace that allows restaurants and other food businesses to buy supplies straight from manufacturers and farms, has raised a seed round of $3.2 million, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The news is coming seven months after TechCrunch announced that the company, founded in January 2020, took part in Y Combinator’s winter batch […]

Buy now, pay later services like Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay and many others have seen their businesses grow in huge leaps, as consumers buying goods increasingly turned to alternatives to credit to delay paying for them in full. Now a Berlin-based startup called Billie that has built a similar service — but specifically targeting B2B transactions […]

Social-audio apps need to leverage the same strategies used by major news organizations.

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 alone. […]

Early-stage entrepreneurs eager to ship usually spend more time calculating their startup’s burn rate than selecting an optimal development environment. As a result, technical debt can accumulate.

Arbisoft is the latest addition to our series profiling startup software consultants. Its CEO Yasser Bashir shared thoughts on agile development, data science, customer and employee satisfaction, etc.

If I went to Stanford and worked with some YC-backed startups, chances are that I’ll find it relatively easy to find one or two co-founders, get millions in funding and build a billion-dollar company. However, as someone who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and studied at the University of Nigeria, those chances are much slimmer, […]

Moves, a Toronto-based gig economy fintech startup, wants to reward gig workers with stocks from the companies for which they drive. The first version of the Moves Collective, as the startup’s new service is called, launches on Thursday with Uber stocks available and then quickly offer Lyft, DoorDash and Grubhub shares, says CEO of Moves, […]

If you’ve been on Twitter lately, you’ve probably seen the red flag meme that’s going around — you quote a phrase that would be a “red flag” for someone to say to you, then add a bunch of red flag emojis. Twitter itself joined in on the fun, as well as brands like Dr. Pepper, […]

So what happens when a pandemic forces office shutdowns and a move to remote work for everyone? Great things, as it turns out.

There are currently no approved cures for Fragile X syndrome — the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability. At the moment, the treatments are designed to manage symptoms, from anxiety to OCD or, in rare cases, seizures. But a new clinical trial is soon to be underway at a U.K. startup.  On Wednesday, drug […]

Our latest longform look at a notable tech company examines Automattic, “the leading commercial complement to the open-source WordPress publishing platform.”

If you follow tech press, you’ve probably noticed more outlets covering the blockchain-based, play-to-earn trend, wherein individuals playing crypto-powered games can ostensibly earn a living off their gaming skills if they earn assets within the game or tokens that they can then sell for “real” money. A Vietnam company called “Axie Infinity” has been driving […]

There is no question that fintech has exploded in recent years. But along with that, we have also seen a related surge in funding into companies that provide the infrastructure that financial institutions — incumbents and fintechs alike — need in order to operate faster and more competitively. São Paulo-based Pismo is one of those […]

Organizations that have made the leap into using big data to drive their business are increasingly looking for better, more efficient ways to share data with others without compromising privacy and data protection laws, and that is ushering in a rush of technologists building a number of new approaches to fill that need. In the […]

Fintech startup N26 has raised a $900 million Series E round at a $9 billion valuation. That represents a big jump from the company’s Series D valuation of $3.5 billion. The Berlin-based startup operates a digital bank with 7 million clients across 25 countries. Third Point Ventures and Coatue Management are leading today’s round. Dragoneer […]

The necessity of animal testing is a sad one for the process of drug discovery, but there’s seemingly no good alternative to mice, even though they’re not particularly accurate human analogues. Quris claims to have the first real option in its combination of AI with data from a “patient on a chip” that provides remarkably […]

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 alone. And […]

We can’t check out every investing outfit’s demo day. But one event that we try to catch every year is that of Pear, which is held annually each fall and features (blessedly) just a dozen or so very nascent startups. Pear, a seed-stage venture firm founded in 2013, has an impressive track record when it […]

Climate in the last decade has been unprecedented in many ways, none of them good. Wildfires in California have consumed entire towns; thousands of miles away, New Yorkers inhale the ashes.

Security cameras, for better or for worse, are part and parcel of how many businesses monitor spaces in the workplace for security or operational reasons. Now, a startup is coming out of stealth with funding for tech designed to make the video produced by those cameras more useful. Spot AI has built a software platform […]

If you're interested in becoming a TechCrunch contributor, I'll be on Twitter Spaces on Tuesday, October 19 from 3 to 3:30 p.m Pacific to answer questions about our editorial guidelines and talk about what we're generally looking for in guest posts.

On Saturday, some Instacart shoppers will go on strike, protesting the company’s low pay and lack of communication with its laborers. The action is led by the Gig Workers Collective, formed in early 2020, though Instacart shoppers have organized several walk-offs since 2016. At the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.S., for instance, the […]