Sustainable e-commerce startup Olive now ships beauty products, in addition to apparel

Earlier this year, a startup called Olive launched its new shopping site and app with the goal of making e-commerce more efficient, convenient, and sustainable by offering a way for consumers to aggregate their orders from across retailers into single shipments that arrive in reusable packaging, not cardboard. If items need to be returned, those […]

Chaldal, Bangladesh’s largest grocery delivery platform, raises $10M Series C

Founded in 2013, Bangladesh’s Chaldal was one of the first grocery delivery startups in the world to use the “dark” store model, picking up orders from its own warehouses instead of retail stores. Now the company says it is the country’s second-largest grocery player and the largest grocery e-commerce platform, with 27 warehouses located in […]

Logistics startup Stord raises $90M in Kleiner Perkins-led round, becomes a unicorn and acquires a company

When Kleiner Perkins led Stord’s $12.4 million Series A in 2019, its founders were in their early 20s and so passionate about their startup that they each dropped out of their respective schools to focus on growing the business. Fast-forward two years and Stord — an Atlanta-based company that has developed a cloud supply chain — […]

Intuit’s $12B Mailchimp acquisition is about expanding its small business focus

At first blush, the $12 billion Intuit-Mailchimp deal might not make a heck of a lot of sense. But people tend to pigeonhole companies, and in this case they might see Intuit as purely a financial software company and Mailchimp as an email marketing firm and nothing more. If that’s as far as your perspective […]

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 […]

The Equity crew riffs on the Intuit-Mailchimp news

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We are back! From this morning, I suppose. But the news cycle doesn’t wait for our publishing schedule, so the Equity crew got together to yammer all about the Intuit-Mailchimp acquisition. A $12 billion deal composed of stock and […]

GM invests in radar software startup Oculii as demand for automated driving features rise

Oculii, a software startup that aims to improve the spatial resolution of radar sensors by up to 100-fold, has scored a new investment from General Motors. The new funding, which the two companies say is in the millions, comes just months after Oculii closed a $55 million Series B. Oculii and GM have already been […]