Extra Crunch roundup: BNPL bonanza, scraping Toast’s S-1/A, early-stage SaaS pricing

Are founders in fundraising mode short-sighted when it comes to working with Chinese venture funds? Runa Capital’s Asia business development manager Denis Kalinin studied data from iTjuzi, a database of Chinese venture capitalists, and found: “…Chinese funds invested around $250 billion in 2020 (three times higher than the figure reported in Crunchbase). This figure puts […]

Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will reshape Middle East, official warns

Gulf states are having to reconsider their alliances and especially whether they can still trust the US, says senior sourceThe Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan is a shattering earthquake that will shape the Middle East for many years, a senior Gulf of…

Equity Monday: Market pessimism, new iPhones and IPOs

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]

Vector.ai’s productivity platform for freight forwarders raises $15M A round led by Bessemer

With supply chains under constant stress because of the pandemic, freight forwarding has become one of the hottest startup sectors in the last two years. Indeed, international freight forwarding is now a $199 billion market. And the evidence is mounting. In November last year, digital freight forwarder Forto raised another $50 million in a round led […]

Chinese crackdown on tech giants threatens its cloud market growth

As Chinese tech companies come under regulatory scrutiny at home, concerns and pressures are escalating among investors and domestic tech companies including China’s four big cloud companies, BATH (Baidu AI, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud), according to an analyst report. Despite a series of antitrust and internet-related regulation crackdowns, the four leading cloud […]

China roundup: Tencent takes on sites trying to circumvent its age limits

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The enforcement of China’s new gaming regulations is unfolding like a cat-and-mouse game, with the country’s internet giants and young players constantly trying to outsmart each […]