startups News of 07/03/20

Let’S Stop COVID-19 From Undoing Diversity Gains

Rachel Sheppard Contributor Share on Twitter Rachel Sheppard is the director of global marketing at global pre-seed accelerator Founder Institute and co-founder of the Female Founder Initiative . ...

Pioneering CRISPR Researcher Jennifer Doudna Is Coming To Disrupt

Jennifer Doudna, a woman whose work has triggered the explosion in innovation in the field of synthetic biology and has given researchers around the world a way to program and reprogram the living world, will be speaking at Disrupt in September . ...

Lemonade And Accolade Open Sharply Higher As Public Markets Rally

Despite today’s bucket of plus-and-minus economic data , stocks are heading higher in regular trading. And among the shares rising the most are today’s two venture-backed IPOs: Lemonade and Accolade. TechCrunch wrote this morning that ...

The Great Stink In Software Pipelines

Greg Law Contributor Share on Twitter Greg Law is the co-founder and CTO at Undo.io , a software failure replay platform provider. It’s the summer of 1858. London. The River Thames is ...

Get Your Pitchdeck Critiqued By Accel’S Amy Saper And Bessemer’S Talia Goldberg At Early Stage

The art of the pitchdeck. Few things are more critical to the success of startups seeding capital. And make no mistake, it is an art. At TechCrunch Early Stage, our two-day virtual event focused on giving entrepreneurs all the resources they need to ...

Why I Flip-Flopped On Opposing Remote Work

David Cancel Contributor Share on Twitter David Cancel, a five-time entrepreneur and author of the book "Conversational Marketing," is CEO and founder of Drift . More posts by this ...

QuestDB Nabs $2.3m Seed To Build Open Source Time Series Database

QuestDB , a member of the Y Combinator summer 2020 cohort, is building an open source time series database with speed top of mind. Today the startup announced a $2.3 million seed round. Episode1 Ventures led the round with assistance from Seedcamp, ...

Top LA Investors Discuss The City’S Post-COVID-19 Prospects

When it comes to venture capital, Los Angeles is a city on the rise. In the past year, it’s seen one of the most profitable venture-backed exits of any tech ecosystem (with the $4 billion sale of Honey to PayPal) and investors are minting ...

High-Flying IPOs For Lemonade And Accolade May Encourage Other Unicorns To Go Public

If you’d predicted in late March and early April that Q3 would kick off with a wide-open IPO market and receptive investors, I doubt anyone would have believed you. If you suggested that valuations would look pretty good as well, you might even ...

Meet BukuWarung, The Bookkeeping App Built For Indonesia’S 60 Million “Micro-Merchants”

In Indonesia, there are about 60 million “micro-merchants,” typically small store owners who sell food and other staple items, and have close relationships with their customers. Many often extend informal lines of credit to shoppers, but ...

OurPeople, The Team Communication And Engagement Platform, Raises $2m

OurPeople , the U.K. startup that’s built a team communication and engagement platform for desk-less workers, has raised $2 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Alpine Meridian, an investment firm that specialises in digital ...

Student-Led Accelerator Envision Is Shaking Up Which Startups Get Funded

Meet Envision , a new startup accelerator. The group, built and run by a collection of students and recent graduates, just closed the application process for its first cohort of startups. Its goal isn’t merely to find some companies and give ...

AR 1.0 Is Dead: Here’S What It Got Wrong

The first wave of AR startups offering smart glasses is now over, with a few exceptions. Google acquired North this week for an undisclosed sum . The Canadian company had raised nearly $200 million, but the release of its Focals 2.0 smart glasses ...

Extra Crunch Is Now Available In Greece, Ireland And Portugal

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added Extra Crunch support in Ireland, Portugal and Greece. That adds to our existing support in Europe as we are already in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and ...

Point Launches New Challenger Bank With Rewards On Debit Card Purchases

Meet Point , a new challenger bank in the U.S. that has been available as a private beta for the past year. Today, the company is launching a major new version of its service and opening its doors to everyone. But you’ll have to get an invite to ...

Portfolio Companies Of Startup Studio EFounders Have Raised $148 Million This Year

European startup studio eFounders has looked back at the first half of 2020 to share some metrics about its portfolio companies. The startup studio that is focused on building software-as-a-service enterprise startups has now launched 25 companies ...

Minneapolis-Based VC Shop Bread & Butter Focuses On Its Own Backyard

While many investors say sheltering in place has broadened their appetite for funding companies located outside major hubs, one firm is doubling down on backing startups in America’s heartland. Launched in 2016 by Brett Bohl , The Syndicate ...

Contrary Capital Wants To Invest In The Next Big Tech Mafia

Contrary Capital, which has raised money from Tesla, Reddit, SoFi and Twitch, knows a thing or two about how to work with tech’s brightest mafias. Now it wants to invest in them, before anyone else. The San Francisco fund and accelerator, which ...

This Public Spreadsheet Lists Black Founders Who Have Raised VC, And The Investors Backing Them

Finding out how many Black founders have successfully raised venture capital, and which venture capital firms invested in their startups hasn’t been an easy task, historically. Venture capital data is often diceable by stage, say, or by startup ...

Vendia Raises $5.1m For Its Multi-Cloud Serverless Platform

When the inventor of AWS Lambda, Tim Wagner, and the former head of blockchain at AWS, Shruthi Rao, co-found a startup, it’s probably worth paying attention. Vendia , as the new venture is called, combines the best of serverless and blockchain ...