The Startup Battlefield is the crown jewel of Disrupt, and we can’t wait to see which of the thousands of applicants will be selected to pitch to panels of top-tier VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place on October 28–30 in San Francisco. It’s always epic, and every contender is on the road to making a huge […]
First group of Startup Battlefield judges at Disrupt 2024 Read More »
In 1996, two companies, Patersons HR and Payroll Solutions, formed a venture called CloudPay to provide payroll and payments services to enterprise clients. CloudPay grew quietly over the next several decades, adding workflow automation features to maintain pace with upstart rivals. It’s still growing, CFO Andy Thomson assures TechCrunch. Thomson claims that CloudPay is handling
CloudPay, a payroll services provider, lands $120M in new funding Read More »
Boston-based Flint Capital just closed its third fund at $160 million, four times the amount of its initial 2013 fund. The capital will be split evenly between early and late stage investments, with the firm doubling down on IT, cybersecurity, fintech and digital health startups. Its success is in large part because of a unique
Flint Capital raises a $160M through an unusual fund-raising strategy Read More »
Every day, employees across the world spend incalculable hours performing tediously repetitive tasks, such as, for example, converting documents into PDFs and then uploading them to a drive, from where it’s sucked into a database and emailed to a team. While UiPath helped pioneer this kind of ‘robotic’ process, it’s also pivoted to an AI-driven mode
AI business agent startup Bardeen pulls in strategic investment from Dropbox and Hubspot Read More »
Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we settle in to the second half of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech IPOs, Reddit, Astera Labs, Ibotta and Rubrik, in March and April, which made it seem like this year could spur the momentum investors
Digital transformation — the process of transforming outdated apps and processes with cloud technologies and digital workflows — can be a risky undertaking. In 2023, Harvard Business Review reported that while 89% of large companies have a digital and AI transformation underway, they’ve only captured 31% of the expected revenue uplift and 25% of anticipated
Mechanical Orchard, led by ex-Pivotal CEO, scores $50 million round led by Alphabet’s GV Read More »
In a sign that big tech companies are ready and willing to shell out cash for database tech, Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, on Wednesday announced that Microsoft’s venture arm M12 led a $25 million strategic investment in its business. The capital will go toward R&D, Neon co-founder
Database startup Neon nabs a Microsoft investment Read More »
Amazon has released an upgraded version of its in-house image-generating model, Titan Image Generator, for AWS customers using its Bedrock generative AI platform. Simply called Titan Image Generator v2, the new model brings with it several new capabilities, AWS principal developer advocate Channy Yun explains in a blog post. Users can “guide” the images they
Amazon upgrades its AI image generator Read More »
Despite the tight venture capital market, unicorns are still being created every month. Using data from Crunchbase, CB Insights, and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the newly minted unicorns so far this year. The list includes Elon Musk’s xAI, which is already valued at a staggering $24 billion, as well as a good number of other
38 startups have become unicorns so far in 2024: Here’s the full list Read More »
When Mosa Meat served up a first-of-its-kind, lab-grown hamburger in 2013, it cost over $300,000. Eleven years later, around 200 startups worldwide remain hopeful that growing meat from cells, rather than slaughtering animals, will one day be a major portion of our food supply. Despite their optimism, such success is not a given. In 2024,
Even after $1.6B in VC money, the lab-grown meat industry is facing ‘massive’ issues Read More »
