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.
Khosla-backed Marble, built by former Headway founders, offers affordable group therapy for teens
Rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts are surging among U.S. teens. A recent report from the Center of Disease Control found that nearly one in three girls have seriously…
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…
Brex’s compliance head has left the fintech startup to join Andreessen Horowitz as a partner
Ali Rathod-Papier has stepped down from her role as global head of compliance at corporate card expense management startup Brex to join venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a partner…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Rippling bans former employees who work at competitors like Deel and Workday from its tender offer stock sale
Investor demand has been so strong for Rippling’s shares that it is letting former employees particpate in its tender offer. With one exception.
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In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch
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…
Kleiner Perkins leads $14.4M seed round into Fizz, a credit-building debit card aimed at Gen Z college students
Carlo Kobe and Scott Smith believed so strongly in the need for a debit card product designed specifically for Gen Zers that they dropped out of Harvard and Cornell at…
