Latest from Rebecca Szkutak
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…
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…
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…
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…
YC-backed Hona looks to reduce the communication friction between law firms and their consumer clients
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.…
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,…
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…
Perhaps it is not surprising to hear that many of the pots and pans we use are coated in a poisonous chemical called Teflon that…
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…
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…
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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…
Sunday is helping people take better care of their lawns — and the environment too
There is estimated to be 40 million acres of lawn or turf grass in the U.S., making the grass in people’s backyards one of the…
Deal Dive: How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items
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…
Welcome back to Friday Equity! We kick things off with the Deal of the Week. First up, xAI. Elon Musk has once again proven that…
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.…
What’s one to do after creating a billion-dollar startup? Well, if you’re Rubrik co-founder Arvind Jain, you simply start another one. Jain co-founded Glean, an…
Musk’s xAI raises fresh capital while Synapse’s bankruptcy could impact millions
We’re kicking off the short week with news about Elon Musk, and no, it’s not about X or Tesla. Instead, we’re talking about Musk’s other…
Deal Dive: Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so
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…
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…
The proposed AI ‘kill switch,’ and why it’s rough out there for emerging fund managers
It was an event-filled week in startup land, and the Equity crew had a blast breaking it down for you. On today’s episode of TechCrunch’s…
Peter Thiel-founded Valar Ventures raised a $300 million fund, half the size of its last one
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…
VCs wanted FarmboxRx to become a meal kit, the company bootstrapped instead
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…
Contour Venture Partners, an early investor in Datadog and Movable Ink, has raised $42M for its fifth fund
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…
Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century
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…
AI’s busy week, and why the heck are so many VCs leaving their firms?
If there was one thing we heard about this week, it was AI. As a matter of fact, there were so many AI updates to…
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…