TechCrunch – Tech

2019/04/18

VCs bet on cannabis vaping, ED meds and mobile fertility clinics

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a bit of a reunion with Kate and Alex on as usual, with the addition of Extra Crunch denizen extraordinaire Danny Crichton. Danny, you may recall, has been a semi-regular Equity co-host over the past year.

As Kate explains up front, Equity is out a day early this week due to the Big TechCrunch Robotics Affair in Berkeley today. We’ll be back on Friday with IPO news regarding Zoom and Pinterest and we can’t wait.

Ok, all that sorted, what did we talk about? Alex wanted to talk about some market signals that he reads as bullish. Whatever went wrong at the end of 2018 has healed over he thinks because there have been a whole lot of supergiant venture capital rounds and some other stuff.

Next, we

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2019/04/16

Brex, the credit card for startups, raises $100M debt round

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Brex, widely known for its billboards littered across San Francisco, has secured a $100 million debt financing from Barclays Investment Bank .

The company, which provides a corporate credit card designed specifically for startups, has previously raised $215 million in equity funding at a $1.1 billion valuation in the less than two years since it graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator.

Debt, Brex chief executive officer Henrique Dubugras tells TechCrunch, will power the company’s next phase of growth.

“Because we raised so much equity so fast, we put a lot of it to work on the lending; this will allow us to scale way beyond our equity,” Dubugras said, adding that the company has no plans to raise additional equity funding right now: “Especially after this debt raise because now a lot of the capital that was tied up we can get back.”

This year, the company has

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2019/04/12

Listen to us talk about ‘undercorns,’ IPOs and what going public is really about

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Kate and Alex were here yesterday to dig into the Uber IPO filing; for today’s episode, we put that aside and discussed everything else that happened this week. Lucky for us, for the second half of our Thursday podcast-a-thon, the excellent Phil Libin joined us. He was the perfect guest for an IPO-heavy week.

You may know Libin as a co-founder of Evernote, or part of General Catalyst, a venture shop. What’s he up to now? We took the time to let him explain it, so listen up and you’ll find out.

This week we talked about a few other IPO results, including what’s going on with Lyft’s stock price (it’s going down and Uber’s expected IPO price range isn’t helping) in the wake of the company’s own

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2019/04/11

Equity Shot: A deep dive into the Uber S-1

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

It’s time for another Equity Shot, a quick-take episode centered around a breaking news event. This time, as you already guessed, Kate Clark and I sat down to dig into the Uber S-1. It’s a huge, complex document, but we did our best to summarize what’s inside.

First, we talked through yearly results, looking back a half-decade into Uber’s revenue growth. In the filing, Uber reported 2018 revenues of $11.27 billion, net income of $997 million and adjusted EBITDA losses of $1.85 million. We highlighted those numbers, talked about operating losses and the company’s gyrating net results that included the positive impacts of various divestitures.

Yes, this S-1 required a bit more unpacking than most. We apologize for the frantic scrolling, we were pouring through the document live

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2019/04/11

GuestReady, a service for Airbnb hosts, doubles down on Europe with another acquisition

This post is by Jon Russell from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

GuestReady, a service that helps shared economy hosts manage their business on Airbnb and other rental sites, is getting into expansion mode again after it completed its fourth acquisition.

The company, which has raised $3.7 million from investors to date, just announced that it has acquired France-based rival BnbLord, a startup that it claims is the largest Airbnb host platform in France and Portugal, through an undisclosed deal.

The deal represents a doubling down on those two markets and it follows the acquisition of Portugal-based Oporto City Flats last December, while GuestReady also took over We Stay In Paris, a French competitor. GuestReady’s first acquisition saw it capture U.K/France service Easy Rental in 2017.

GuestReady CEO and co-founder Alexander Limpert told TechCrunch that latest deal is its largest to date. The acquisition will double GuestReady’s presence to over 2,000 properties in Europe, where it covers the UK, France

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2019/04/09

Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron at TC Sessions: Mobility on July 10

This post is by Kirsten Korosec from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Some of the first users of autonomous taxis are senior citizens living in a massive retirement community in Florida.

It’s there, in a 40-square-mile area known as The Villages, that autonomous driving startup Voyage has planted its flag. Once the door-to-door self-driving taxi service is fully operational, all 125,000 residents will have the ability to summon a self-driving car to their doorstep using the Voyage mobile app.

Voyage’s strategy to target retirement communities makes the startup, and its founders, stand out in a sea of emerging competitors. And now, TechCrunch is excited to announce an opportunity to gain insights into Voyage, its mission, and plans for the future.

Co-founder and CEO of Voyage Oliver Cameron will participate in TechCrunch’s inaugural TC Sessions: Mobility, a one-day event on July 10, 2019 in San Jose, Calif., that is centered around the future of mobility and transportation.

Cameron previously led the

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2019/04/06

Startups Weekly: US companies raised $30B in Q1 2019

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Let’s start this week’s newsletter with some data. Nationally, startups pulled in $30.8 billion in the first quarter of 2019, up 22 percent year-on-year, according to Crunchbase’s latest deal round-up.

A closer look at the numbers shows a big drop in angel funding and a slight decrease in mega-rounds, or financings larger than $100 million. The number of mega-rounds fell to 57 deals in Q1 and deal value was down too. With that said, mega-rounds still accounted for $16.4 billion, making Q1 2019 the second-best quarter on record for mega-rounds.

The bottom line is these monstrous deals represented a big chunk (29 percent) of all the dollars invested in U.S. startups in Q1. As investors move downstream and startups opt to stay private longer and longer, we’ll continue to see a greater pick up in mega rounds.

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.

OK, on to

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2019/03/29

Equity Shot: Lyft is public — what does that mean for other IPO-ready unicorns?

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Sure, we just aired a new episode yesterday but things keep happening, and after talking about this crop of IPOs for so long, we can’t help ourselves. (You can follow us on Twitter, here and here, by the way, if Equity isn’t enough for you.)

Lyft, as you know, started trading today, closing the loop on a long saga that brought the smaller of the two domestic ridehailing unicorns to the public markets.

After so much speculation about which of the two would get out the door first, Lyft did, and now we get to see what sort of pricing shenanigans happen next. Does Uber drop rates and punish Lyft? Or does Uber work to cut its losses, lowering its expenses and providing a clearer path towards profitability before

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2019/03/29

Lyft’s IPO, Casper the friendly unicorn and WeWork’s staggering losses

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the full gang around, with Connie Loizos in the studio with Kate Clark and our guest Barrett Cohn from Scenic Advisement. Alex was on the line from Providence.

Lucky for us, news of Lyft’s IPO pricing broke right before we hit record. That shook things up a bit, but it was far better to have it break as we were getting our notes together rather than after we kicked off. Let’s start there.

Lyft is going out at $72 per share, the top-end of its boosted range. The firms fully diluted $24 billion valuation (give or take) will be supported by around $2.4 billion in new capital, giving Lyft fresh runway to continue its expensive growth strategy.

Next, we turned to podcast industry stalwart Casper.

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2019/03/22

Equity Shot: Pinterest and Zoom file to go public

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What a Friday. This afternoon (mere hours after we released our regularly scheduled episode no less!), both Pinterest and Zoom dropped their public S-1 filings. So we rolled up our proverbial sleeves and ran through the numbers. If you want to follow along, the Pinterest S-1 is here, and the Zoom document is here.

Got it? Great. Pinterest’s long-awaited IPO filing paints a picture of a company cutting its losses while expanding its revenue. That’s the correct direction for both its top and bottom lines.

As Kate points out, it’s not in the same league as Lyft when it comes to scale, but it’s still quite large.

More than big enough to go public, whether it’s big enough to meet, let alone surpass its final private valuation ($12.3

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2019/03/21

To fund Y Combinator’s top startups, VCs scoop them before Demo Day

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hundreds gathered this week at San Francisco’s Pier 48 to see the more than 200 companies in Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 cohort present their two-minute pitches. The audience of venture capitalists, who collectively manage hundreds of billions of dollars, noted their favorites. The very best investors, however, had already had their pick of the litter.

What many don’t realize about the Demo Day tradition is that pitching isn’t a requirement; in fact, some YC graduates skip out on their stage opportunity altogether. Why? Because they’ve already raised capital or are in the final stages of closing a deal.

ZeroDown, Overview.AI and Catch are among the startups in YC’s W19 batch that forwent Demo Day this week, having already pocketed venture capital. ZeroDown, a financing solution for real estate purchases in the Bay Area, raised a round upwards of $10 million at a $75 million valuation, sources tell TechCrunch.

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2019/03/20

Attend TC Sessions: Mobility, a one-day event on the future of transportation

This post is by Kirsten Korosec from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

The way people and packages move from Point A to Point B is in the midst of a remarkable transformation driven by technological innovations in AI, robotics, electric battery development, digital platforms and manufacturing.

A mobility revolution is in the making. And TechCrunch is here — and we’re not just along for the ride. We’re here to uncover new ideas and startups, root out vaporware and dig into the tech and people spurring this change.

In short, we’re helping drive the conversation around mobility. And it’s only fitting we dedicate an event to the topic.

TechCrunch is hosting a one-day event on July 10, 2019 in San Jose, Calif., that’s centered around the future of mobility and transportation: TC Sessions: Mobility.

TC Sessions: Mobility will present a day of programming with the best and brightest founders, investors and technologists who are determined to inventing a future Henry Ford might

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2019/03/19

Grab launches SME loans and micro-insurance in Southeast Asia

This post is by Jon Russell from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

In its latest move beyond ride-hailing, Southeast Asia’s Grab has started to offer financing to SMEs and micro-insurance to its drivers.

The launch comes just weeks after Grab raised $1.5 billion from the Vision Fund as part of a larger $5 billion Series H funding round that’ll be used to battle rival Go-Jek, which is vying with Grab to become the top on-demand app for Southeast Asia’s 600 million-plus consumers.

Grab acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business in 2018 and it has spent the past year or so pushing a ‘super app’ strategy. That’s essentially an effort to become a daily app for Southeast Asia and, beyond rides, it entails food delivery, payments and other services on demand. Financial services are also a significant chunk of that focus, and now Grab is switching on loans and micro-insurance for the first time.

Initially, the first market is Singapore, but the plan

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2019/03/09

Transportation Weekly: Waymo unleashes laser bear, Bird spreads its wings, Lyft tightens its belt

This post is by Kirsten Korosec from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch . This is the fifth edition of our newsletter and we love the reader feedback. Keep it coming.

Never heard of TechCrunch’s Transportation Weekly? Catch up here, here and here. As I’ve written before, consider this a soft launch. Follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you see it each week. (An email subscription is coming).

This week, we explore the world of light detection and ranging sensors known as LiDAR, young drivers, trouble in Barcelona, autonomous trucks in California, and China among other things.

ONM …

There are OEMs in the automotive world. And here, (wait for it) there are ONMs — original news manufacturers. (Cymbal clash!) This is where investigative reporting, enterprise pieces and analysis on transportation lives.

This week, we’re going to put our on analysis hats as

Bird Rocking Out GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

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2019/03/09

Startups Weekly: What’s up with YC? Plus, mobility layoffs and Airbnb’s grand plans

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Where to begin… Netflix darling Marie Kondo is hitting up Sand Hill Road in search of $40 million to fund an ecommerce platform, Y Combinator is giving $150,000 to a startup building a $380,000 flying motorcycle (because why not) and Jibo, the social robot, is calling it quits, speaking to owners directly of its imminent shutdown.

It was a hectic week in unicorn land so, I’m just going to get right to the good stuff.

Changes at Y Combinator

Where to begin! Not only did the prolific accelerator announce long-time president Sam Altman would be making an exit, but TechCrunch scooped the firm’s decision to move its headquarters to San Francisco. Y Combinator is going through a number of changes, outlined here. Interestingly, sources tell TechCrunch that YC has no succession plans. We’re guessing that’s because Altman had already mostly transitioned away from the firm, with CEO Michael

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2019/03/08

Changes at YC, $1.5B more for ride hailing, and Airbnb buys HotelTonight

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We’re back to basics this week with Kate Clark at the helm, Alex Wilhelm in the sidecar, and a stack of venture capital news and happenings to get through. And to make everyone feel included, we kicked off the episode with a roll-call of new VC funds.

Then, of course, we dug into the recent news out of Y Combinator . The famed accelerator is shopping around for a San Francisco HQ, signaling the end of an era where Silicon Valley ruled the world as home to YC and other the top-tier venture funds that have since moved South to The City by the Bay.

Next up was the new Grab round, a fresh $1.46 billion from the Vision Fund into what TechCrunch noted is now a $4.5

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2019/03/03

Transportation Weekly: Polestar CEO speaks, Tesla terminology, and a tribute

This post is by Kirsten Korosec from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch . This is the fourth edition of our newsletter, a weekly jaunt into the wonderful world of transportation and how we (and our packages) move.

This week we chat with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, dig into Lyft’s S-1, take note of an emerging trend in AV development, and check out an experiment with paving. Oh, and how could we forget Tesla.

ONM …

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2019/03/02

Come to TechCrunch’s SXSW panels and party

This post is by Josh Constine from TechCrunch

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Meet TechCrunch’s writers at our annual Crunch By Crunch Fest party in Austin, Texas. RSVP here to join us on Sunday March 10th from 1pm to 4pm at the Swan Dive at 615 Red River St @ E.7th st, just 3 blocks from the convention center. Hang out with TechCrunchers and fellow readers, enjoy free drinks, and check out a live performance by electro-RnB musician Elderbrook. With over 200 million Spotify plays and a sound familiar to fans of Hot Chip and Passion Pit, Elderbrook will make this the weekend’s best dance party.

RSVP here for your free ticket (required for entry, first-come first-serve, 21+, please only sign up if you’ll come)

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2019/02/16

Startups Weekly: Is Y Combinator’s latest cohort too big?

This post is by Kate Clark from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Greetings from Chittorgarh, one of my stops on a two-week excursion through Goa and Rajasthan, India. I’ve been a little too busy exploring, photographing cows and monkeys and eating a lot of delicious food to keep up with *all* the tech news, but I’ve still got the highlights.

For starters, if you haven’t heard yet, TechCrunch launched Extra Crunch, a paid premium subscription offering full of amazing content. As part of Extra Crunch, we’ll be doing deep dives on select businesses, beginning with Patreon. Read Patreon’s founding story here and learn how two college roommates built the world’s leading creator platform. Plus, we’ve got insights on Patreon’s product, business strategy, competitors and more.

On to other news…

Y Combinator’s latest batch of startups is huge

So huge the Silicon Valley accelerator had to move locations and set up two stages at

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2019/02/12

Startups, demo tables are still available for TC Sessions: Robotics+AI

This post is by Emma Comeau from TechCrunch

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

TechCrunch is known for helping startups get to the next level by providing a platform for them to showcase their work at a demo table. Startup demo tables for TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI on April 18 are still available for any early-stage robotics or AI startup with $3M or less in funding. This is your chance to get your robotics or AI startup the exposure it needs to make connections and grow.

Startup demo tables get your company in front of over 1,000 people who are specifically interested in robotics and AI – including some heavy-hitter investors and TechCrunch writers. Each demo table not only comes with its own dedicated space but also includes 3 tickets for your entire startup crew to enjoy the show. The event attracts a flock of students from schools like UC Berkeley and Stanford, making it a great opportunity for you to find your next engineer or intern.

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