Startups

Hero wants to save the day for companies facing a working capital crunch

Startups /

Hero, a new fintech startup based in Paris, is announcing an €11.3 million all-equity funding round led by Valar Ventures ($12.2 million at today’s exchange rate). For the past couple of years, the company has been quietly building an ambitious banking product for small companies that can essentially replace everything you’d expect from a traditional […]

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SurrealDB is helping developers consolidate their databases

Startups /

Brothers Tobie Morgan Hitchcock and Jaime Hitchcock spent years building cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems together, ranging from tools to let golf courses measure “golfer engagement” to online platforms designed to assess job candidates. While the systems they built had wildly different functions, the unifying thread running through all of them was a dependence on databases

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After 20 months of trying to raise funds, insurance startup Loop cuts staff

Startups /

Loop, the car insurance company co-founded by Harlem Capital co-founder John Henry, has laid off staff as the company struggles with fundraising.  Henry took to Instagram to post the email his co-founder Carey Nadeau sent to impacted staff on June 16th. Nadeu also posted the letter to LinkedIn. It stated that this was the “absolute

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Today’s your last chance to apply for the Startup Battlefield 200

Startups /

Today’s the day, startup founders. It’s your final opportunity to join Startup Battlefield 200, the world’s preeminent startup competition, at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. It’s your last chance to launch on a global stage like 900+ other Startup Battlefield companies have, including Vurb, Trello, Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Redbeacon, Qwiki, Getaround and Soluto. Startup Battlefield

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Privacy app maker Proton transitions to non-profit foundation structure

Startups /

Proton, the Swiss company behind a suite of privacy-focused apps such as ProtonMail, is following in the footsteps of Signal and Mozilla by transitioning to a new non-profit foundation model. The newly setup Proton Foundation will serve as the main shareholder to the existing corporate entity that is Proton AG, which will continue as a

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India’s Oyo, once valued at $10B, finalizes new funding at $2.5B valuation

Startups /

Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is finalizing a fresh fundraise of about $100 million to $125 million that slashes its valuation to $2.5 billion, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.  That’s a steep decline in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s value, which was worth $10 billion in 2019. The startup, struggling to raise from

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Black founders are creating tailored ChatGPTs for a more personalized experience

Startups /

At first, John Pasmore was excited about ChatGPT.  The serial founder had been in the artificial intelligence space since at least 2008. He recalled the days when experts declared it would take decades before the world saw anything like a ChatGPT. Fast-forward — that day has now come.  But there is a catch.  ChatGPT, one of

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