Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy news pertaining to startups and venture capital. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I profiled an e-commerce startup Part & Parcel. Before that, I wrote about Stripe’s grand plans. Remember, you can […]
Streaming services have made music ubiquitous, driving more exploration by consumers who don’t have to pay for each song or album individually. Musicians are correspondingly able to find their own niche of fans scattered around the world. (This is the third installment of our EC-1 series on Kobalt Music Group and changes in the music […]
At TechCrunch Disrupt, the original tech startup conference, venture capitalists remain amongst the premier guests. VCs are responsible for helping startups — the focus of the three-day event — get off the ground and as such, they are often the most familiar with trends in the startup ecosystem, ready to deliver insights, anecdotes and advice […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Kate and Alex were back at TechCrunch’s San Francisco headquarters to chat the news with Kleiner Perkin’s Mamoon Hamid. Hamid is best known as a former member of the Social Capital team, and for driving generational […]
Postmates, the popular food delivery service, has raised another $225 million at a valuation of $2.4 billion, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday, ahead of an imminent initial public offering. Private equity firm GPI Capital has led the investment, first reported by Forbes, which brings Postmates’ total funding to nearly $1 billion. GPI takes […]
A conversation with Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg about raising $300 million and the open web Romain Dillet @romaindillet / 8 hours Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and soon Tumblr, is now worth $3 billion. But its founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg has a bigger goal. He wants to make the web better, […]
Twenty+ startups, each with six minutes to tell the world what they’re about. If they can prove to our panel of judges that they’re the best of the best, they’ll walk away with $100,000 and their name forever etched on the Disrupt cup. That’s the core idea behind the Startup Battlefield, a pillar of TechCrunch […]
About 18 months ago, Jenny Gyllander created an Instagram account by the name @thingtesting. The premise was simple. Gyllander, who was at the center of the London startup ecosystem as an investor with the British seed fund Backed.VC, would upload photos of interesting direct-to-consumer products with a caption that served as a bite-sized review. The […]
As expectations from seed investors intensify, a new stage of investment has established itself earlier in the venture-backed company life cycle. Known as “pre-seed” investing, one of the first legitimate outfits to double down on the stage has refueled, closing its second fund on $77 million. Afore Capital’s sophomore fund is likely the largest pool […]
President Emmanuel Macron announced in a speech ahead of France Digitale Day that the French government has convinced institutional investors to invest more heavily in late-stage VC funds and asset managers in one way or another. Institutional investors have committed to investing $5.5 billion (€5 billion). “We’ll have €2 billion that will go in so-called […]