If you’re a fan of the punk scene from the early 2000s, you may recognize Nick Gross, the drummer for the band Goldfinger. Now, he’s empowering young people to pursue their passions through his career exploration platform, Find Your Grind. The platform highlights alternative professions not usually emphasized in schools, including being a pop-punk band […]
Isabelle leads Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s iconic launchpad and competition for the world’s most promising early-stage startups. You can contact or verify outreach from Isabelle by emailing [email protected]. She scouts top founders across 99+ countries and prepares them to pitch on the Disrupt stage in front of tier-one investors and global media. Before TechCrunch, she designed
How Glīd won Startup Battlefield 2025: Mentorship, mission-focus, and meditation Read More »
There’s a new AI-powered toy for kids called Stickerbox, and, before you groan, I’m here to report that it’s surprisingly fun. Stickerbox, a product born out of Brooklyn-based startup Hapiko, is a voice-activated sticker printer. The device takes whatever creative idea you have in your head and transforms it into a printed sticker that you
Hands on with Stickerbox, the AI-powered sticker maker for kids Read More »
Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users are watching billions of videos every day, with companies benefitting massively from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is pressure to create more content than ever before to be relevant and make a living out of
Newsletter platform beehiiv recently celebrated its four-year anniversary by launching a suite of new features, including an AI website builder, as well as support for podcasts and selling digital products. In other words, beehiiv is about more than newsletters now. Co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk (who writes a popular startup newsletter of his own) spoke
Beehiiv’s CEO isn’t worried about newsletter saturation Read More »
Byju Raveendran, the embattled founder of Indian ed-tech giant Byju’s, has blasted a U.S. bankruptcy court’s order directing him to pay more than $1.07 billion. He is denying wrongdoing, accusing lenders of misleading the court, and vowing to appeal a ruling that marks a dramatic fall for a onetime poster boy of India’s startup boom.
Byju’s founder to appeal U.S. court order to pay over $1B in bankruptcy case Read More »
Build Mode is back with another episode! This season is highlighting lessons learned from the world of go-to-market strategies. Startup Battlefield editor Isabelle Johannessen sat down with Luna co-founder Jas Schembri-Stothart and Untapped Solutions founder Andre Peart for their unique perspectives on reaching niche customer segments following their own candidacy during the 2024 Startup Battlefield competition. If our first episode, with Deon Nicholas, co-founder of Forethought AI, we
Why these founders ditched social ads for Taylor Swift concerts and prison tablets Read More »
Luna co-founder Jas Schembri-Stothart and Untapped Solutions founder Andre Peart share how they cracked go-to-market for audiences most startups avoid. In this episode of Build Mode, they reveal the guerrilla tactics, trust-building strategies, and creative experiments that helped them reach teenage girls and formerly incarcerated workers—from crashing Taylor Swift concerts to keynoting re-entry conferences. Episodes of Build Mode drop
Beyond growth hacks: real stories of reaching untapped markets Read More »
TechCrunch’s editor-in-chief, Connie Loizos, sits down with Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at Alphabet’s X, to explore what it takes to build a factory for truly game-changing innovation. Astro reveals the three components that define a true moonshot — a huge problem, a science fiction-sounding solution, and a glimmer of breakthrough technology — and why
Astro Teller isn’t afraid of killing ideas; here’s why Read More »
As Nicholas Rudder built his last startup, an educational marketplace called ScholarSite, he kept running into the same problem: tax. “Marketplaces are liable for tax on their entire GMV (gross merchandise value) not just their take rate, so every new country meant a maze of registrations, filings, deadlines, and risk,” Rudder told TechCrunch. “It became a constant distraction.
a16z leads $21M Series A into AI-native tax compliance software Sphere Read More »
