Startups

Bird Buddy, the AI-powered smart bird feeder, is bringing the popular pastime of bird-watching into the digital age — and growing its line of products in support of the hobby. With the startup’s original affordable bird feeder, connected camera, and companion mobile app, birdwatching enthusiasts and newcomers alike can view photos and videos of bird

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, we’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

How far has the psychedelics medicines industry come over the past 12 months? Well, it depends on where you look. If you look at the stock market, the view isn’t very good: the charts are all down and in the red, and all you can see are psychedelics companies tottering by, doing their best to

For founders and investors, there’s no platform like TechCrunch Disrupt. Just as the industry is always evolving and innovating — especially in recent months — we’re doing the same to keep Disrupt on the cutting edge for first-time founders, seasoned investors, visionaries and everybody in between. It’s time to disrupt TechCrunch Disrupt This year, we’re

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, we’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous

We are a good 47 pitch decks into our Pitch Deck Teardown series, and one piece of feedback we’ve gotten frequently is that it’s easy to be a critic: What would we have done? Well, we’re not ones to turn away from a challenge here at TechCrunch+. So for this week’s pitch deck teardown, we’re

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, we’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous

Founded in 2014, Blossom Finance was first intended for Muslim entrepreneurs in the United States. The microfinancing platform connects investors with small businesses using mudarabah, a shariah-compliant profit-sharing agreement. But founder Matthew Joseph Martin soon realized that the startup, backed by investors like Boost VC and Tim Draper, was serving a relatively niche market in

TechCrunch Disrupt, our yearly flagship startup event, returns to San Francisco on September 19–21 — and you can bet TechCrunch+ will be in the house. It’s going to be the biggest and best Disrupt we’ve ever hosted: Along with a few to-be-announced surprises, we’ll have Startup Battlefield, as well as six new stages with targeted

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous

In recent years, calling oneself a startup founder was certainly seen as a flex. For those who wielded that role or the coveted CEO position, you were likely to be placed on a pedestal or be viewed as a visionary, aided by a venture capital market that experienced an overextended bull run in the background. 

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior reporter Natasha Mascarenhas.  After a Tahoe-based tech conference, Sheel Mohnot, the fintech investor behind Better Tomorrow Ventures, is beatboxing in his head — all day, every day. And while it may feel like an uncommon takeaway from an event

Robotics is a fascinating topic. It can be frustrating, too. When I started covering the space nearly 15 years ago, there was a sense that something big was looming, just over the horizon. But roboticists are a pragmatic bunch, offering projects for adoption more than a decade into the future. There were times in the

Anthony Cimino Contributor Anthony Cimino, head of policy at Carta, works with policymakers and innovators to drive economic opportunity through expanding equity ownership and private market liquidity. More posts by this contributor What the growing federal focus on ESG means for private markets Holli Heiles Pandol Contributor With the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, the

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Y Combinator’s new era, with smaller batches, a refocus only on early-stage investing and a new chief executive, is in full swing. As The TechCrunch team sat through

Sitting through hundreds of startups on YC Demo Days, you’re not always sure whether you are actually perceiving patterns or if your brain, as coffee battles with monotony, is inventing them in a kind of pareidolia for business plans. This year, though, the theme was pretty obvious: “AI can do that, probably! Maybe.” Certainly today’s

Last year’s techwide reckoning continues. In 2023, layoffs have yet again cost tens of thousands of tech workers their jobs; this time, the workforce reductions have been driven by the biggest names in tech like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Zoom. Startups, too, have announced cuts across all sectors, from crypto to enterprise SaaS.  The

As unease spread amongst a handful of entrepreneurs, alarmed at radical “reforms” proposed by the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government regarding the independence of the judiciary, WhatsApp groups were fired up, and were quickly flooded with volunteers from the tech industry. Last week, the country hit its thirteenth week of protests, many of which were directly coordinated

Post, a Twitter alternative of sorts that’s rethinking how publishers should engage with social media — and how they should monetize their readership — has opened its doors to the public. The startup, like others in this space, gained ground in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as many began to look for

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Reporter’s note: Before we get into this, thank you to the Startups Weekly readers who pointed out that last week’s link to my column was

Stripe competitor Checkout.com announced last month that Céline Dufétel was appointed as its new president. She had previously served as the London-based fintech startup’s CFO and COO for about 18 months before her promotion. In her expanded role, which still includes serving as the company’s COO, Dufétel oversees all operational and go-to-market teams, including finance

Back in February, Northspyre announced it had raised $25 million to bring costs under control for big building projects. (TechCrunch’s Mary Ann Azevedo mentioned the fundraise in her fintech newsletter.) It’s a huge industry with powerful potential — so how does a company like that tell the story of what it’s building? We’re lucky enough

If you think embedded insurance is the only hot thing in insurtech these days, we’ve got a surprise in store for you: While it’s true that startups that help sell insurance together with other products and services are enjoying tailwinds, there are plenty of other opportunities in the space, several investors told TechCrunch+. You see,

With a drier than normal investment scene, founders are looking for more effective ways to reach the right VCs. Toward that end, over the past few weeks, thousands of founders have applied to land capital through a common app, but instead of hoping to land into a university, they’re hoping to land capital from top

Yesterday, the ride-sharing company Lyft said its two co-founders, John Zimmer and Logan Green, are stepping down from managing the company’s day-to-day operations, though they are retaining their board seats. According to a related regulatory filing, they actually need to hang around as “service providers” to receive their original equity award agreements. (If Lyft is sold

Fertility treatment is a huge industry, but traditionally it has been very geographically and demographically limited. U.S. fertility clinics are concentrated in the top 10 metropolitan areas across the country, and around 82% of recipients of care have historically been Caucasian, heterosexual married women living in a big city making more than $100,000 a year.

Early-stage investments inherently have a higher risk of failing, but these risks also come with potentially higher rewards — getting in at the ground floor of a startup’s journey gives VCs more negotiation clout. This is particularly true at the very early pre-seed stage, where companies might barely have a functioning product to shout about.

Generative AI is disrupting industries — with understandable controversy. Earlier this month, Danny Postma, the founder of Headlime, an AI-powered marketing copy startup that was recently acquired by Jasper, announced Deep Agency, a platform he describes as an “AI photo studio and modeling agency.” Using art-generating AI, Deep Agency creates and offers “virtual models” for