If you’re standing at the water’s edge of the San Francisco Bay, chances are that you have half a dozen high-speed internet providers clamoring for your attention, eager to give you gigabits of internet. That isn’t the case for billions of people in rural communities around the world, who often have to make do with […]
Lessons from founders raising their first round in a bull market
In a bull market, it’s especially hard to understand people and their value systems. The pandemic does not help us engage, understand culture nor help build a human connection.
Doyobi, a Singapore-based edtech startup focused on teachers, gets $2.8M seed
The edtech boom has focused primarily on students, but teachers are learners, too. Doyobi, a Singapore-based professional development platform, wants to give educators new, more engaging ways of teaching STEM subjects. The startup announced today it has raised $2.8 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. The round included Tresmonos Capital, Novus […]
Mission-driven ventures are growing fast during the pandemic
You’ve heard of SPACs, meme stocks and buy now, pay later, but have you heard of the LTSE, First Women’s Bank and Upsolve?
Udemy targets valuation of $4B in major edtech IPO
Udemy’s slowing revenue growth is not bullish for edtech valuations more broadly; the company’s modest resulting revenue multiple is also somewhat beige.
Credo AI launches out of stealth with $5.5 million to help companies with ‘ethical AI’
There are many in the world of AI who worry about its implications. One of those people is Navrina Singh, a former product manager for Qualcomm, then Microsoft, who saw firsthand at Microsoft how a Twitter bot it developed in 2016 as an experiment in “conversational understanding,” was, to quote The Verge, “taught to be […]
VC Lab introduces free fund formation documents to make startup investing cheaper and easier
There may be plenty of funding for some startups these days. But plenty of companies will tell you otherwise. VC Lab, an accelerator for venture capital firms, wants to create investors who will back the rest of the world. A basic hurdle to this goal is the standard paperwork you need to set up a […]
Coinbase goes fishing for OpensSea’s catch
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was one of our strongest shows yet, with a wide diversity of news items that were genuinely fun (and complicated) to chew through. And even though we started off kind of grumpy, we laughed through […]
The venture bull market is great for founders, but not in the way they might expect
Venture firms have more dry powder, deal sizes are growing rapidly and valuations are soaring. But a closer look reveals that these trends apply very unequally across the funding continuum.
3 things GitLab’s wild IPO pricing says about public markets
At minimum, we can say that public markets are as welcoming to high-growth SaaS as private markets. And perhaps, with GitLab’s IPO pricing, slightly warmer.