Browsing Category: Startups

  • Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech’s winners and losers

    Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China. From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • New AngelList data set sheds light on the signaling risks of seed-stage investments

    One of the big, ongoing debates in VC and founder circles concerns whether to accept money from top-tier, later-stage venture capitalists during a seed round. Even as their funds reach monstrous sizes, more and more top funds are investing in the earliest stages of a startup’s life, intensifying the question for founders of so-called “signaling …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • Podium rolls out payments for its customer-focused local-business SaaS service

    Podium, a Utah-based SaaS company focused on small business customer interactions, added payments technology to its product suite today. The move accretes a new income stream to the company’s quickly growing annual recurring revenue (ARR). While I tend to stay away from product news, Podium’s decision to add payment technology to its service hit a …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • Unpacking Procore’s S-1 filing

    Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re in for a treat, as we get to dig into Procore’s S-1 filing. In case you aren’t familiar, Procore sells software that helps manage construction projects, but it offers more than a single …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • Equity Monday: Surprise IPOs, Briza’s $3M round, and are we worried about unicorn liquidity?

    Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton, going over the huge Roblox round and what …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • mParticle raises $45M to help marketers unify customer data

    mParticle, which helps companies like Spotify, Paypal and Starbucks manage their customer data, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series D funding. Co-founder and CEO Michael Katz told me that the company has benefited from broader shifts — like new privacy regulation and the shift away from cookie-based browser tracking — that …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • AudioTelligence raises $8.5M Series A to bring its ‘autofocus for sound’ to voice assistants

    AudioTelligence, a startup that spun out of University of Cambridge-funded CEDAR Audio, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding for its “autofocus for sound”. Leading the round is Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Enterprise, and CEDAR Audio. Founded in 2017 and based in Cambridge, U.K., the company has …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • India’s Spinny raises $43.7M to expand its online platform for selling used cars

    Spinny, an online platform for selling used cars, has secured $43.7 million from a cohort of influential investors in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more Indian cities. The Series B financing round for the Gurgaon-based startup was led by the Fundamentum Partnership, the growth-capital fund backed by tech veterans Nandan …

    March 2, 2020 | by Raheel
  • Notivize makes it easier for non-technical teams to optimize app notifications

    A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications. The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that …

    February 28, 2020 | by Raheel