Venture
Our venture capital news features interviews and analysis on all the VCs, the VC-backed startups, and the investment trends that founders, investors, students, academics – and anyone else interested in the way that tech is transforming the world – should be tracking.
Announcing the agenda for the Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated Space Stage to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and AI as the other industry-focused stages — all under…
The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible…
Ex-HubSpot exec builds an AI-powered CRM that learns for you, with $4M seed led by Sequoia
Christopher O’Donnell has hobbies. He likes music and playing guitar, but above all, he loves building software. Which is why three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM…
Paris-based VC Breega hits first close of $75M Africa fund to back pre-seed and seed startups
Paris-based VC firm Breega has observed Africa’s tech ecosystem mature over the years. From receiving less than a billion dollars in venture capital per year to a record-high $6 billion,…
‘Lawyer-in-the-loop’ startup Wordsmith wants to bring AI paralegals to all employees
Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has somehow managed to attract the backing of two well-known venture capital firms. The startup targets in-house legal teams and law firms with…
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General Catalyst merges with Venture Highway in India push
General Catalyst is linking up with Venture Highway to make a deeper push into India, where it plans to invest over $500 million in coming years.
Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence — especially generative AI — is the technology story of 2024. OpenAI, with its rollouts of viral services like ChatGPT and billions in…
In this week’s episode of Equity, Haje Kamps and Mary Ann Azevedo delve into the recent decision by fintech company Brex to abandon its co-CEO…
Steve Case on why policy is crucial to make sure AI success isn’t concentrated to a few players
Steve Case is no stranger to how policy can help aid innovation. His former company AOL would have been dead in the water if not…
Zal Bilimoria just raised a $50M fourth Refactor Capital fund, and still relishes his solo GP status
Being a solo GP hasn’t slowed Bilimoria a bit. He went on to raise three additional funds and has now closed a new fund to invest in biotech, climate and…
Loop Golf looks to take the stress out of booking a tee time
Golf has exploded in popularity in recent years thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of Netflix’s Full Swing documentary series. More than 531 million rounds of golf were played…
Black founders are customizing ChatGPT as crypto makes a comeback
This week on Equity, we discussed some big news that really matters: How Black founders are addressing the diversity gap in AI chatbots. We’ve all…
There has been a lot of bad news about social media startups lately. Multiple companies, including Twitter alternative Post News, and IRL have shut down. And ShareChat’s valuation has dropped…
Raspberry Pi goes public, Musk drops his OpenAI lawsuit and startups compete with Apple Intelligence
In today’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Mary Ann Azevedo, Becca Szkutak and Haje Kamps dug into three very different but all interesting deals of the week. Haje…
What StepStone’s $3.3B venture secondaries fund tells us about LPs’ current appetite for venture
StepStone raised the largest fund dedicated to investing in venture secondaries ever, the firm announced last week. This fundraise doesn’t just say a lot about StepStone’s venture secondaries investing prowess,…
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GPTZero’s founders, still in their 20s, have a profitable AI detection startup, millions in the bank and a new $10M Series A
GPTZero’s growth and financials made it one of the AI startups ruthlessly pursued by VCs. And Footwork’s Nikhil Basu Trivedi won the deal.
When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway, in 2019, he knew he was not the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans…
NEA’s Vanessa Larco says generative AI will change the SaaS pricing model – and that’s a good thing
Vanessa Larco, a partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), believes that generative AI’s impact on the world of SaaS could be huge. The investor joined…
Foresite Capital raises $900M sixth fund for investing in life sciences companies
Venture fundraising has been a slog over the last few years, even for firms with a strong track record. That’s Foresite Capital’s experience. Despite having 47 IPOs, 28 M&As and…
Friends & Family Capital, a fund founded by ex-Palantir CFO and son of IVP’s founder, unveils third $118M fund
Small VC firms require deep trust, mutual support and long-term commitment among the partners — a kinship that, in many ways, resembles a family dynamic. Colin Anderson (Palantir’s ex-CFO and…
Gorilla, a Belgian startup that helps energy providers crunch big data, raises $25M
Gorilla, a Belgian company that serves the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised €23 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led…
From Sword Health to Stripe, these startups are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year
Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech…
Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves.
The VC queen of portfolio PR, Masha Bucher, has raised her largest fund yet: $150M
Five years ago, Day One Ventures had $11 million under management, and Bucher and her team have grown that to just over $450 million.
How Urvashi Barooah broke into venture after everyone told her she couldn’t
When Urvashi Barooah applied to MBA programs in 2015, she focused her applications around her dream of becoming a venture capitalist. She got rejected from every school, and was told…
Apple’s WWDC is just hours away, and we’re gearing up for big announcements on — you guessed it — AI. TechCrunch’s Brian Heater tells us…
After hits like Reddit and Scopely, Collaborative Fund easily raised a $125M fund to tackle climate, health and food
“We were motivated to fundraise because we think the ’24 vintage is going to be a good one,” founder Craig Shapiro said.
With €50 million to invest, Italian Founders Fund looks for entrepreneurs with global ambitions
While funding for Italian startups has been growing, the country still ranks eighth in Europe by VC investment, according to Dealroom. Newly created Italian Founders Fund (IFF) hopes to help…
Cat-sitting startup Meowtel clawed its way to profitability despite trouble raising from dog-focused VCs
Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5…
Deal Dive: Human Native AI is building the marketplace for AI training licensing deals
AI systems and large language models (LLMs) need to be trained on massive amounts of data to be accurate but they shouldn’t train on data that they don’t have the…
