Month: April 2023

Meet Visa, Mayfield, DuploCloud and more at Disrupt

Published by skeptic

TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, scientists, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs. It’s where you’ll find inspiration, gain knowledge, forge new relationships and discover tools to help you build your business. Shameless, but helpful, plug: Buy your pass now for significant savings. Prices increase on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Who doesn’t like to save money? Pivotal partners at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 We’re fortunate to partner with some of the startup world’s leading companies to help make magic at Disrupt. We say fortunate because they’re passionate, thoroughly engaged and hands-on. They consistently deliver highly relevant content, educational expertise, resources and connection to the event. Their participation elevates, engages and supports early-stage founders. Our partners also come to Disrupt to connect and explore opportunities with other companies within the startup ecosystem. They form alliances, forge partnerships, and look for potential investments, and sometimes they become a startup’s new client. …

The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK

Published by skeptic

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within. The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March. WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too. “Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch …

Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them?

Published by skeptic

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out, you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best. Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that. That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people. “We’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach us is through someone we mutually know.” A VC firm’s website For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to think …

Spend management space sees a large raise, and layoffs, in the same week

Published by skeptic

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, we’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s our job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know.  About a year ago, it seemed like myself and other colleagues were writing story after story about spend management companies raising tranches of venture capital — remember Mary Ann’s roundup story from basically this same time last year? On Friday, PitchBook’s Q1 2023 B2B fintech investment report showed that investment into enterprise fintech was $11.8 billion. Though it is a decrease from …

‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’

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The first female co-chair of the DC-based Internet Innovation Alliance, Kim Keenan has fought for digital equity for more than a decade, previously serving as president and CEO of the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council (MMTC) and as general counsel and secretary of the NAACP. The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight. During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U.S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option. Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan cooperation brought America a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve universal connectivity. To date, more than $90 billion has been earmarked by …

Elon exposes his burner, Tile embraces the cat life, and Elizabeth Holmes avoids prison

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Hey, TechCrunch people. If you’re looking for a recap of the week’s news in tech, you’ve come to the right place. It’s Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular recap column. Glad to have you. Before we get on with the meat of it, a PSA that tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 are available now. Disrupt, of course, is TechCrunch’s flagship in-person event, focused on founders, investors and the future of tech year after year. In San Francisco on September 19–21, expect to hear from thought leaders in the fields of AI, fintech, hardware, sustainability, SaaS, security and more. It’ll be well worth the trip. In the nearer term, tune into the next TechCrunch Live show, which will spotlight Cambrian BioPharma, a startup billing itself as a pharmaceutical outfit with a revolutionary approach to managing drug development. Founder James Peyer will be joined by Maryanna Saenko of Future Ventures, who invested in Cambrian’s Series A, B and C rounds. Now, without further ado! most read Elon exposed: Elon Musk tweeted a photo on Monday night that …

This Week in Apps: Users pan Snapchat’s AI, Bluesky has a moment, Apple wins antitrust appeal

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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more. Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters Bluesky is having a moment Image Credits: Jose A. Bernat Bacete (opens in a new window) / Getty Images If anyone was waiting for a winner …

Pitch for the check you want 

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Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Tech’s guiding principles these days aren’t too difficult to find: discipline, focus and cash conservation. But I’ve always found those same focuses to be especially in conflict with what it means to be an early-stage founder pitching your vision: You have to have Elon Musk-level ambition, big dreams and the ability to sell a company to investors before there are any real metrics behind it. In some ways, it’s the job of the investor to see the reason to say yes anyway. In other ways, the downturn is very much making early-stage founders professionalize sooner and sooner; philosophically looking more like the late-stage company pitching for its Series C than the buzzy pre-seed. I’ve been noticing small things about how early-stage founders have changed their pitches, suggesting that the checks are currently less about the messiah and more about the monetization. Read the rest of my column on …

A pot of gold at the intersection of DevOps and generative AI?

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Welcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Generative AI isn’t just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks. Investors and Big Tech alike are betting that it will also affect enterprise infrastructure and cybersecurity, and they are putting money where their mouth is. — Anna Dev tools plus generative AI Y Combinator Demo Days are a strong indicator of the trends investors might be interested in — and that’s one of the main reasons why TechCrunch always watches them pretty closely. In its Winter 2023 batch, three areas stood out, the accelerator said: “open source, dev tools and AI.” Dev tools startups in that batch drew particularly strong interest among investors, with four of them raising additional funding just weeks after Demo Day, Insider reported. AI-related startups, on the other hand, were very popular with founders, representing 34% of the winter cohort. While these areas can be looked at separately, I’m more …

Persona and Index Ventures talk identity, and identifying a good deal

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Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license when you left the house, but these days it’s not so easy: Identity fundamentally underpins how we engage with the digital world, and identity services can take on many forms (and, unfortunately, abuses). I’m excited to host a TechCrunch Live event with Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song, one of the early movers in the space, about how his company identified ID management as an opportunity. This TechCrunch Live event takes place on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 12:00 p.m. PDT. Register here for Hopin access, where viewers can ask questions and network with other attendees. Along with Rick, Index Venture’s Mark Goldberg is speaking at the event, too. Mark made a prescient move to spot and back Persona during its Series B fundraise and backed the company again for its $50 million Series C. Rick Song co-founded Persona with Charles Yeh in 2015, and according to PitchBook, the company’s valuation is $1.5 billion as of Persona’s Series C in 2021. Since its …