Is capital moral or amoral? In the predominant view held in Silicon Valley today, capital is amoral — cash is cash, and regardless of where it comes from, once it leaves the hand of its investor or donor, it no longer has that individual’s taint. That money might have previously been spent on acquiring access

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I noted Peloton’s secret weapons. Before that, I wrote about a new e-commerce startup, Pietra. Remember, you can send me tips,

Pagerduty‘s CEO Jennifer Tejada and Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie both guided their companies to successful IPOs, with Box going public in 2015 and Pagerduty listing its stocks only a few months ago. Both of them will join us on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt SF (October 2) to talk about their experiences

With the scheduled 2020 shutdown of Google Hire, the tech giant’s applicant tracking system, there’s more room for startups to emerge as the go-to tool for hiring managers. Agave, which has $1 million in funding from SV Angel, Box Group and others, is aiming to serve that need. Agave is a free hiring platform that

We’re in a price-hike homestretch, startup fans. Early-bird savings head south, and ticket prices head north in just a few short hours. Want to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Buy your passes by 11:59 p.m. (PST) tonight, September 6 — avoid the costly stroke of midnight. Wring even more savings

Huboo, a U.K. startup that operates a multi-channel fulfilment service for e-commerce businesses of varying sizes, has raised £1 million in seed funding. Backing the majority of the round is London venture capital firm Episode 1, alongside a number of unnamed private individual investors. Launched in November 2017 by Martin Bysh and Paul Dodd after

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week, we recorded on location at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco, a show that saw talks from Box’s Aaron Levie, Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar and venture capitalists Maha Ibrahim, Rebecca Lynn and Jason Green. The latter,

Medium seems to be building a tool to save and reformat online articles for future reading. That’s according to Jane Manchun Wong, a reliable source of scoops on unreleased features. Wong said she spotted this one by reverse engineering Medium’s Android app and monitoring network traffic. The “Save to Medium” feature appears to scrape web

Getaround, a used car marketplace and winner of TechCrunch Disrupt New York Battlefield 2011, will enter the unicorn club with a roughly $200 million equity financing. The deal values Getaround, founded in 2009, at $1.7 billion, according to an estimate provided by PitchBook. Getaround declined to comment, citing internal policy on “funding speculation.” “Getaround and

Scooter startup Lime is ending the juicer model in Paris. The company has announced that it will stop working with freelancers to recharge scooter batteries at night. Lime is switching to Amazon’s model by partnering with third-party companies. Lime has often been criticized for relying on freelancers to take care of its scooters. As Libération

Milkbasket, a Gurugram-based micro-delivery startup, is in talks to close a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprints in milk, groceries, fruits, and vegetables delivery market that has attracted the attention of many in recent months including Amazon India. The four-year-old startup is in advanced stages of talks with private equity funds

The Disrupt Battlefield is one of the best parts of the conference. Twenty+ startups step on to the Disrupt Main Stage with a product, a pitch and a dream. They have six minutes to convey how they’re going to fundamentally disrupt their industry, and six minutes of Q&A with world-renowned judges from the VC world.

Mental health issues are thought to impact one in every five people in the US, and the stress of working life can be an exacerbating factor. Now, one of the startups that’s using technology to build ways to support this population has raised a significant round of funding to expand its platform to aid in

Railsbank, the open banking and compliance platform co-founded by CEO Nigel Verdon, who previously founded Currencycloud, has raised £10 million in Series A funding. The new injection of capital will be used for further expand beyond Europe, including the U.S., Australia and South East Asia. The latter includes a new office in Singapore where a

Reach Robotics, the company behind the spider-like MekaMon robot you might’ve seen on the shelves at the Apple Store, is closing down. Billed as the “world’s first gaming robot,” MekaMon is part video game, part STEM tool. You could plop it down on the carpet and point your phone at it to battle virtual augmented

Our countdown to the super early-bird deadline and serious savings continues unabated, people! The best pricing for passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 ends in four days. When the clock strikes 11:59 p.m. (CEST) on 6 September, your chance to save up to €600 evaporates. Save your euros for another day and buy your pass right

Monese, the European banking app aimed at customers with a ‘thin’ credit file or those who have moved country, is launching “Monese Savings” in partnership with fintech Raisin. The new feature sees Monese customers gain access to Raisin’s cross-border deposits marketplace so that they can shop around for a competitive interest rate via the various

Fintech startup Revolut has been growing like crazy and now has 6 million customers. The company has to scale its support team accordingly. That’s why Revolut just announced plans to open a customer operations centre in Porto, Portugal. There are already 70 people working for Revolut in Porto. Eventually, Revolut plans to hire 400 people

India’s Oyo said on Monday it has acquired Copenhagen-based data science firm Danamica as the fast-growing lodging startup works to expand its business in Europe. Neither of the parties disclosed financial terms of the deal, but a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Oyo paid about $10 million to acquire the Danish firm.

Spotawheel, a startup operating in Greece and Poland with a car dealership model quite similar to Carvana in the U.S., has picked up €5 million in new funding. Backing the online used car dealership is Venture Friends, which led the round, with participation from Velocity Partners and unnamed “strategic” investors. The investment includes both equity

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about a new e-commerce startup, Pietra. Before that, I wrote about the flurry of IPO filings. Remember, you can

Happy (almost) Labor Day to all the hardworking members of the early-startup community — entrepreneurs, founders, investors, engineers and everyone in between. We know how hard you work to build your dream, so we’re cutting you a break and extending our early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 through 11:59 p.m. (PST) on

Some days, it feels like there’s almost no end to the number of jobs that might be replaced altogether or in some part by smart machines, from radiologists to truck drivers to, gulp, journalists. You might be tempted to sob about it to your friendly restaurant server, but wait! It’s a robot, too! So it

Household debt in the U.S. continues to rise and as of this year now stands at nearly $14 trillion. Now, one of the startups that’s building tools to help consumers better cope with that is announcing a round of funding and plans for an IPO — signs of the demand for its services, and its

Nobody likes them, but price hikes happen, people. Price hikes happen. And the early-bird price for passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 disappears tonight, August 30 at 11:59 p.m. (PST). Avoid the pain of paying more and enjoy saving up to $1,300. You have only a few hours left. Buy your Disrupt SF passes right

The direct-to-consumer trend in fashion has been one of the most interesting evolutions in e-commerce in the last several years, and today one of the trailblazers in the world of footwear is picking up some money from a list of illustrious backers to bring its concept to the masses. Atoms, makers of sleek sneakers that

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we were back in the SF studio, with Kate and Alex on hand to chat venture, business, startups, and IPOs with Iris Choi. Choi is a partner at Floodgate, and one of the very few folks

Die Zeit läuft ab, Leute translates very roughly to “time is running out, people!” You have only one week left to save a fat stack of euros on your pass to Disrupt Berlin 2019. Join us and startuppers from more than 50 countries on 11-12 December for the lowest possible price. Our super early-bird pricing

As someone who covers Africa’s tech scene, I’m frequently asked about Andela. That’s not surprising, given the venture gets more global press (arguably) than any startup in Africa. I’ve found many Silicon Valley investors have heard of Andela but aren’t exactly sure what it does. In a bite, Andela is Series D stage startup―backed by

Scott Sanborn Contributor 2019 has already been an active year for U.S. tech IPOs. Some highly anticipated unicorns, such as Uber and Lyft, have disappointed investors with their IPO debuts and their first results as public companies. Others, such as Fiverr, Zoom and CrowdStrike, have soared. And food-tech brand Beyond Meat (two words you normally