Startups

There is perhaps no firm that has done as much to promote the adoption of Ethereum as the dominant cryptocurrency platform for actual product development as Consensys. Founded by Ethereum Foundation co-founder Joe Lubin, Consensys has emerged as an investor, accelerator, educator and product developer in its own right in little more than three years

When Mitra Raman went off to college, all she wanted was a bowl of her mother’s homemade rasam. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Raman grew up eating traditional South Indian cuisine almost every day, but didn’t quite know how to make it just like mom when she left home. On her next visit back home,

Mobike made a roster of announcements about its bikesharing program today, including the end of customer deposits in China and full integration into Meituan Diaping’s app. The developments, its first since its acquisition by Meituan for $2.7 billion in April, are meant to help Mobike become a stronger competitor against Ofo, its biggest rival, and

Food delivery startup Deliveroo opened its first shared kitchen in Paris earlier today. Deliveroo first launched this concept of shared kitchens called Deliveroo Editions in London last year. As the AFP reports, the company is starting with 12 kitchens in a warehouse in Saint-Ouen, right next to the north-western part of Paris. So far, 8

The European fintech wave can’t stop and won’t stop. That’s why I’m excited to announce that the founder and CEO of Starling Bank Anne Boden is joining us at Disrupt Berlin. While it feels like everybody is talking about challenger banks, Boden started thinking about building a new bank back in 2014. She ditched a

Health insurance startup Alan has launched a new product in France called Alan Map. It’s a dead simple way to find GPs, dentists, ophthalmologists and more around you. You first type your address and the name of a doctor or the type of doctor you’re looking for. There’s a big map front and center with

Planck Re, a startup that wants to simplify insurance underwriting with artificial intelligence, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A. The funding was led by Arbor Ventures, with participation from Viola FinTech and Eight Roads. Co-founder and CEO Elad Tsur tells TechCrunch that the capital will be used to expand Planck

This is a comeback story. Or at least the first chapter to one. Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has

After years of teasing, Original Stitch has officially launched their Bodygram service and will be rolling it out this summer. The system can scan your body based on front and side photos and will create custom shirts with your own precise measurements. “Bodygram gives you full body measurements as accurate as taken by professional tailors

Meet OpenPhone, a startup in the current Y Combinator batch. The company has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams. “Both my cofounder and I grew up

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor VCs serve up a large helping of cash to startups disrupting food US startups off to a strong M&A run in 2018 These days, it seems like everyone with extra cash has some kind of pricey drinking habit. It might be fine wine, craft beer or cocktails.

TechCrunch is excited to announce that the Startup Battlefield Latin America is coming to São Paulo on November 8 this year. This is the first event TechCrunch has ever held in Latin America, and we are all in to make it a memorable one to support the fast-emerging startup ecosystem in the region. The Startup

Shak Lakhani, the 21-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Avro Life Science, started researching biomaterials when he was 15 years old. Every summer and after school the teenager would travel nearly two hours by bus and train from the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Toronto where he lived to the tissue engineering lab at the University

Two sites that are actively cataloging failed crypto projects, Coinopsy and DeadCoins, have found that over a 1,000 projects have failed so far in 2018. The projects range from true abandonware to outright scams, and include BRIG, a scam by two “brothers,” Jack and Jay Brig, and Titanium, a project that ended in an SEC

It’s been more than four years since “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” was published, and it remains — including to minds of many of us at TechCrunch — one of the best, most authentic, most instructive business books ever written. It’s partly for this reason that we’re so excited to announce its author, Ben

TrendKite is making its first two acquisitions — according to CEO Erik Huddleston, they give the company “the last two components” needed for a complete PR analytics platform. Until now, TrendKite’s main selling point was the ability to look at the articles written about a company and measure things like the audience reached and the

SimpliSafe, the company behind the well-received SimpliSafe home security service, today announced that Hellman & Friedman, the massive venture fund and private equity firm, has taken a controlling interest in the company. While the two companies didn’t disclose the terms of the transaction, sources close to SimpliSafe tell us that the deal valued the company

Sequoia Capital has been at the top of its game in the U.S. for decades, thanks to early investments in Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and PayPal, as well as, more recently, its stakes in the messaging startup WhatsApp, the payments company Stripe and the video conferencing unicorn company Zoom. Yet unlike a lot of top-tier firms

For the past twelve years I’ve followed the rise of the startup – defined as a small business with global ambitions – from my perch at TechCrunch. During that period I watched business reporting change from a sleepy backwater on the back of the Sports section into a juggernaut, a force that controls the global

The challenges faced by parents of kids with special needs are always unique, but in one way they are surely much alike: making sure the kids are getting what they need from schools is way harder than it ought to be. ExceptionAlly is a new startup that aims to help parents understand, organize and communicate

An app like Bannersnack is something you never think you need — until you do. Designed by a digital marketer from Romania, Gabriel Ciordas, the app was originally called FlashEff and was used to create Flash banners for online marketers. Over time, however, HTML5 and graphics overtook Flash and the company pivoted to offering easy-to-use

Honk Technologies, a marketplace for towing services for consumers and insurance companies, has raised $18 million in a new round of funding a little over a year after inking a massive contract with the insurance company, Farmers. The investment was led by Altpoint Ventures, with participation from existing investors Structure Capital and Venture 51. The

Silicon Valley, for better and oftentimes worse, provides an uncanny valley view of the ups and downs of IRL Silicon Valley. The HBO series has shown what it’s like to deal with an incumbent who steals an idea or IP, the humiliation of saving the day, only to be fired as CEO by your VC,

Jay-Z is behind a new venture fund called Marcy Venture Partners that is being launched with Walden Venture Capital managing director Larry Marcus and longtime business partner Roc Nation president Jay Brown, according to California regulatory filings. The fund was first reported by Axios. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter is no stranger to the venture world. The

Getting mental health services can be burdensome. And if you’re already going through a tough time, you’re probably looking for help sooner than later. But based on the current landscape, it can take months to find the right therapist who also takes your insurance. This is where Meru Health hopes to come in. By providing

Open source sustainability has been nothing short of an oxymoron. Engineers around the world pour their sweat and frankly, their hearts into these passion projects that undergird all software in the modern internet economy. In exchange, they ask for nothing in return except for recognition and help in keeping their projects alive and improving them.

Fredrik Thomassen as a consultant used to have the resources to offload the annoying project tasks — like making PowerPoint presentations — but now that it’s gone, he and his team wanted to make that available for everyone. Now the startup, called Konsus, wants to turn that around even faster. Konsus is a design marketplace

It’s hard to say precisely how Sphero’s pivot to education is going in these early stages, but it recently got an infusion of funding and is already out acquiring new startups. The BB-8 maker announced this morning that it’s picked up Specdrums​ — the fellow Boulder, Co-based startup is a Kickstarter success story that lets

File sharing tools are a dime a dozen these days. There’s Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud. But what if you want to share something quickly and easily from the command line? That’s why programmer Remco Verhoef created Transfer.sh. The service has basically a file dump. You send a file to transfer.sh via curl and it

In the world of gaming, cross-compatibility between platforms has always bene a bit of a white whale. While most players hope for it, console makers and game publishers haven’t always been so willing. Until recently. Microsoft, Nintendo and PC game makers have started making games more cross-compatible. Most notably, the companies have made Fortnite Battle