Rebecca Szkutak, Author at TechCrunch

Kevin Hartz’s A* raises its second oversubscribed fund in three years

Rebecca Szkutak — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Venture firms raised $9.3 billion in Q1 according to PitchBook data, which means this year likely won’t match or surpass 2023’s $81.8 billion total. While emerging managers are feeling the fundraising market’s frost the most, some emerging VCs like A* have enough name recognition, and a good enough track record, to still find success. A*, […]

Materia looks to make accountants more efficient with AI

Rebecca Szkutak — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 13:06:39 +0000

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 reason people aren’t as interested in the field is the large amount of drudge work involved: Accountants have to rifle through large amounts of unstructured […]

Loop Golf looks to take the stress out of booking a tee time

Rebecca Szkutak — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 12:42:04 +0000

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 in the U.S. in 2023 alone, according to the National Golf Foundation. Because of this surge in interest, golfers are finding that nabbing a tee […]

YC-backed Hona looks to reduce the communication friction between law firms and their consumer clients

Rebecca Szkutak — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 12:01:35 +0000

When Manny Griffiths worked with a personal injury lawyer after his wife’s car accident, he was surprised by the lack of information and communication from their lawyer regarding their claim. The couple sometimes wouldn’t hear from their lawyer for months and found the entire process to be really opaque. Griffiths dug deeper and learned that […]

Deal Dive: BeReal got its best-case scenario exit

Rebecca Szkutak — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

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 more than 50% after a recent funding round. But amid the negative headlines, the recent exit of French social network BeReal looks like a bright […]

What StepStone’s $3.3B venture secondaries fund tells us about LPs’ current appetite for venture

Rebecca Szkutak — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 19:19:53 +0000

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, but also about how LPs are thinking about the current venture market. The fund, StepStone VC Secondaries Fund VI, raised $3.3 billion. This marks a […]

Why being the last company to launch in a category can pay off

Rebecca Szkutak — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 23:48:52 +0000

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 to millennials scrolling through Instagram. But he found that launching after his peers ended up being a blessing in disguise in all areas but one. […]

How Urvashi Barooah broke into venture after everyone told her she couldn’t

Rebecca Szkutak — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 21:27:19 +0000

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 she was being unrealistic about her prospects in the venture industry — but she didn’t let that deter her. Now, nine years later, Barooah, 33, […]

Cat-sitting startup Meowtel clawed its way to profitability despite trouble raising from dog-focused VCs

Rebecca Szkutak — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

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 million households with one, a lot of innovation in the pet category has focused exclusively on dogs. And even if the service serves both species, […]

Deal Dive: Human Native AI is building the marketplace for AI training licensing deals

Rebecca Szkutak — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 17:00:00 +0000

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 rights to use. OpenAI’s licensing deals with The Atlantic and Vox last week show that both sides of the table are interested in landing these […]

In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch

Rebecca Szkutak — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 19:20:08 +0000

When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be looking for one. She thought […]

Deal Dive: How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items

Rebecca Szkutak — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills in 2022 alone, according to data from return logistics software company Optoro. New York-based (Re)vive wants to help […]

OneScreen.ai brings startup ads to billboards and NYC’s subway

Rebecca Szkutak — Fri, 31 May 2024 01:34:13 +0000

When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window. Now, as the CEO of OneScreen.ai, he’s helping startups like fintech Ramp and technical recruiter Karat advertise on billboards and beyond. “I think billboards are […]

Deal Dive: Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so

Rebecca Szkutak — Sat, 25 May 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right is extremely difficult. That’s why the founders of WeatherXM have been looking to make weather forecasts more accurate for the past 12 years. In 2012, […]

From Sword Health to Stripe, these startups are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year

Rebecca Szkutak — Fri, 24 May 2024 18:00:00 +0000

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 IPOs, Reddit, Astera Labs, Ibotta and Rubrik, in March and April, which made it seem like this year could spur the momentum investors had hoped […]

Peter Thiel-founded Valar Ventures raised a $300 million fund, half the size of its last one

Marina Temkin, Rebecca Szkutak — Wed, 22 May 2024 19:45:35 +0000

The perception in Silicon Valley is that every investor would love to be in business with Peter Thiel. But the venture capital fundraising environment has become so difficult that even Valar Ventures, one of the VC firms he helped found, has raised a much smaller fund this year compared to previous ones. Thiel set up […]

VCs wanted FarmboxRx to become a meal kit, the company bootstrapped instead

Rebecca Szkutak, Dominic-Madori Davis — Tue, 21 May 2024 21:07:18 +0000

Some startups choose to bootstrap from the beginning while others find themselves forced into self funding by a lack of investor interest or a business model that doesn’t fit traditional VC. FarmboxRx decided to bootstrap because founder Ashley Tyrner didn’t like the advice she was getting from potential backers. Tyrner told TechCrunch’s Found podcast that […]

Contour Venture Partners, an early investor in Datadog and Movable Ink, has raised $42M for its fifth fund

Rebecca Szkutak — Mon, 20 May 2024 20:20:44 +0000

Longtime New York-based seed investor, Contour Venture Partners, is making progress on its latest flagship fund. The firm closed on $42 million, raised from 64 backers, for Contour Venture Partners Fund V, according to an SEC filing from May 17. The firm is targeting $90 million for its fifth flagship fund and started fundraising in […]

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Rebecca Szkutak — Sat, 18 May 2024 14:26:59 +0000

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying to sell their innovative tech through old-school methods like repeated cold emails and calls. Khanna, a former product marketer, and Hughes, a former sales manager, […]

Spoor uses AI to save birds from wind turbines

Rebecca Szkutak — Thu, 16 May 2024 12:03:17 +0000

Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can wreak havoc on bird populations. Meet Spoor, the startup using AI to help wind farms mitigate that risk. Spoor is a software that uses machine […]