Research Startups

Pinstripe wants to redefine the way online sellers sell secondhand clothing

Pinstripe aims to reimagine the secondhand market by offering sellers the opportunity to have both a digital storefront and a physical retail presence. Launched in June, the platform offers an alternative approach compared with other marketplaces like Archive, Depop, Facebook Marketplace, and Poshmark. With Pinstripe, sellers take their clothes to local consignment stores, vintage shops, and retailers, where store employees handle the handoff process, freeing sellers from the burden of dealing

Nov 6, 2024

AI coding assistants can help startups develop products, seed VCs believe

By now, there’s hardly a coder in the world who isn’t using an AI copilot in some way. But using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could be just the beginning. AI coding may one day involve agents that can write the programs themselves based on a natural language prompt. Such programs may even replace human engineers. AI coding startups that can generate code from a natural language prompt include Replit and Bubble, among many others. Eventually, some

Nov 6, 2024

What’s next for the startup-friendly Inflation Reduction Act

President-elect Donald Trump spent plenty of time on the campaign trail railing against key portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, from solar and wind tax credits to electric vehicles and environmental justice initiatives. But his return to the presidency doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the landmark legislation. While Trump’s administration is unlikely to be supportive of most climate tech startups, it will have a harder time ending the broadly popular law. The Inflation Reduction Act,

Nov 6, 2024

How Trump’s election could affect the startup-friendly Inflation Reduction Act

President-elect Donald Trump spent plenty of time on the campaign trail railing against key portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, from solar and wind tax credits to electric vehicles and environmental justice initiatives. But his return to the presidency doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the landmark legislation. While Trump’s administration is unlikely to be supportive of certain climate tech startups, it will have a harder time ending the broadly popular law. The Inflation Reduction Ac

Nov 6, 2024

Faber launches third VC fund with $34M first close, aims for $64M

The startup ecosystem in the Iberian Peninsula — the region encompassing Spain and Portugal — has been on a roll the last couple of years. The value of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023, according to Dealroom data, with venture investment of €2.2 billion across some 850 rounds. Meanwhile, Portugal has produced a slew of VC firms such as Shilling, Indico, Armilar, Bynd and more. Lisbon-based venture firm Faber has become the latest to double down on the region — it recently launch

Nov 6, 2024

MoradaUno wants to make it easier to rent apartments in Mexico

Renting in Latin America is restrictive. Most landlords require three months of rent as a deposit and a guarantor that owns property in the same city to co-sign the lease. Santiago Morales, the co-founder and CEO of proptech MoradaUno, said this dynamic makes 40% of prospective renters ineligible. His company wants to get more tenants into rentals by underwriting their risk. “That’s the largest pain point in the industry today,” Morales told TechCrunch. “People not being able to rent where they

Nov 6, 2024

Research Grid raises $6.4M to automate clinical trial admin

Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn’t mind the work, but there was one thing she consistently hated: administrative tasks. “I think most people do, especially in research,” she told TechCrunch. She would rather be analyzing data or building relationships with patients, she said. “But I was spending so much time doing manual tasks that didn’t require any medical expertise. It’s a process that’s completely broken, and I knew it could be fixed.” So, she did what any probl

Nov 6, 2024

Research Grid raises $6.48M to automate clinical trial admin

Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn’t mind the work, but there was one thing she consistently hated: administrative tasks. “I think most people do, especially in research,” she told TechCrunch. She would rather be analyzing data or building relationships with patients, she said. “But I was spending so much time doing manual tasks that didn’t require any medical expertise. It’s a process that’s completely broken, and I knew it could be fixed.” So, she did what any probl

Nov 6, 2024

Canoo’s CFO and top lawyer are the latest executives to leave

EV startup Canoo has lost its chief financial officer and its head lawyer, the latest in a string of executive departures as the company continues to struggle to find mass adoption of its electric work vans. CFO Greg Ethridge and general counsel Hector Ruiz both resigned from Canoo on October 31, the company announced Tuesday in a regulatory filing. Ethridge and Ruiz did not respond to requests for comment. Canoo also announced it has furloughed 30 workers in Oklahoma for 12 weeks “as part of

Nov 5, 2024

Nodal connects hopeful parents with surrogates as reproductive freedom hangs in limbo

Many people who want to have children can’t, or shouldn’t, carry a pregnancy for a variety of reasons. Gestational surrogacy can be a great option for those individuals — if they can endure the lengthy wait times and afford to pay for the costly service. New York-based Nodal looks to make the process less expensive, more transparent, and faster. Nodal is a marketplace for prospective parents to get matched with vetted surrogates. Nodal founder and CEO Dr. Brian Levine told TechCrunch that his c

Nov 5, 2024

What the Chainsmokers bring to the cap table for cybersecurity startup Chainguard

For this week’s episode of Found we’re taking you backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Becca Szkutak had the chance to talk with Dan Lorenc, the CEO and co-founder of cybersecurity startup Chainguard, following their conversation onstage with prominent investors, The Chainsmokers. The pair discuss how the EDM duo’s venture fund MANTIS went from being viewed skeptically by traditional VCs to becoming a highly sought-after investment partner in the B2B space, how Lorenc scaled the company in a d

Nov 5, 2024

Symbiotic Security helps developers find bugs as they code

Symbiotic Security, which is announcing a $3 million seed round today, watches over developers as they code and points out potential security issues in real time. Other companies do this, but Symbiotic also emphasizes the next step: teaching developers to avoid these bugs in the first place. Ideally, this means developers will fix security bugs before they ever get into a code repository, which in turn should also speed up the overall development process. And since the developers get to learn o

Nov 5, 2024

Swiggy IPO nets $606 million from institutional investors

Swiggy has raised around $606 million from a set of more than 75 anchor investors as part of its $1.35 billion initial public offering, as the Indian food delivery and quick commerce startup prepares for the country’s second-largest listing of the year next week. The Bengaluru-based startup, which is seeking an $11.3 billion valuation in the IPO, received bids worth $15 billion for the $600 million portion. Indian institutional investors received about 56% of the overall anchor allocation, sour

Nov 5, 2024

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has more than 130,000 job cuts across 457 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether. By tracking these layoffs,

Nov 5, 2024

Printful and Printify ink a merger deal

Two veteran European companies in the world of on-demand printing are merging, and you may have not even realised they were separate companies to begin with. Printful and Printify, both startups with Latvian roots providing custom printing services, are coming together as a single company. They are framing the move as a natural fit to unlock greater economies of scale, efficiencies and profitability. But reading between the lines, it also underscores the struggles that startups in the on-demand

Nov 5, 2024

DeepRoute raises $100M in push to beat Tesla’s FSD in China

DeepRoute.ai, a Shenzhen-based autonomous driving technology startup, raised $100 million from Great Wall Motor. The startup aims to get its automated driving systems into as many vehicles in China before Tesla takes off next year, according to a Reuters report. DeepRoute did not publicly disclose the name of its automaker backer, but reports in the Chinese media, including a press release, point to Great Wall Motor. The automaker is one of China’s biggest, with new vehicle sales hitting 970,61

Nov 5, 2024

AI startups will need ‘quality of revenue’ to raise in 2025, seed VCs warn

Fundraising in 2025 will continue to be a “tale of two cities,” VC Renata Quintini, co-founder of early-stage VC Renegade Partners, said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. “Some companies, really having the promise of going after big markets growing fast, [will be] receiving a lot of funding and momentum.” But on the other side, the “companies that need to build real businesses and efficient businesses” will struggle to raise cash, Quintini warned. She’s referring to the tight fundraising

Nov 5, 2024

Flash, founded by ex-Flipkart exec, launches in the U.S. to help shoppers juggle multiple online orders

Flash, the payment management service that tracks all your online purchases, announced Tuesday its entry into the U.S. market, giving American customers the ability to manage all of their spending in one place while also earning rewards, such as gift cards and cashback. The U.S. is home to many big spenders, making it a strategic choice to launch the app here. The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce estimates that online shopping in the U.S. brought in about $291.6 billion during the s

Nov 5, 2024

AI safety advocates tell founders to slow down

“Move cautiously and red-team things” is sadly not as catchy as “move fast and break things.” But three AI safety advocates made it clear to startup founders that going too fast can lead to ethical issues in the long run. “We are at an inflection point where there are tons of resources being moved into this space,” said Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “I’m really worried that right now there’s just such a rush to sort of push

Nov 5, 2024

Datadog challenger Dash0 aims to dash observability bill shock

The end of zero-interest rates has driven companies to look for savings wherever they can, but one area continues to be a major budget drain. Observability — collecting and understanding data and systems — typically remains an organization’s second-highest cloud expenditure, right after cloud provisioning itself. People have even gone so far as to talk of an observability cost crisis, underscored by anecdotes like Coinbase spending $65 million on its Datadog bill. And why is observability so p

Nov 5, 2024

Bowery Farming is ceasing operations

Agtech unicorn Bowery Farming is shutting down, according to PitchBook, which cited internal documents and multiple company employees. The New York-based agtech company was known for building vertical farms that could produce crops including: lettuces, herbs, and berries. The company has raised more than $700 million in funding, according to PitchBook data, from VCs including First Round Capital, General Catalyst, and GV, among many others. The company’s most recent fundraising round valued it

Nov 4, 2024

The brightest bling of TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

At TechCrunch Disrupt, our team sits front and center, furiously typing away at our laptops to publish real-time news from impressive speakers like NFL quarterback-turned-founder Colin Kaepernick, Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas, and Ashton Kutcher. We are a well-oiled machine. Some writers have been covering Disrupt since the old days, before Meta was Meta and before the show “Silicon Valley” gave us the free marketing of a lifetime (thank you, HBO). And yet, this year, even the longest

Nov 4, 2024

DeepRoute raises $100M in push to beat Tesla’s FSD in China

DeepRoute.ai, a Shenzhen-based autonomous driving technology startup, raised $100 million from an unidentified Chinese automaker. The company aims to get its automated driving systems into as many vehicles in China before Tesla takes off next year, according to a Reuters report. China lifted certain restrictions on Tesla vehicles in April, clearing a path for the automaker to launch its advanced driver assistance system called Full Self-Driving (FSD) in China. Tesla said in September it plans t

Nov 4, 2024

No, startups shouldn’t always take the highest valuation, seed VCs say

One of the lessons that the wild Silicon Valley venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught is this: Bigger valuations are not always better. “I think we’ve all kind of seen the negative impact of having a valuation too high from the last, call it, three years,” Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of Hustle Fund said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. When a VC bull market hits and startups are able to easily raise a lot of money before they have real, provable businesses,

Nov 4, 2024

ChatGPT Search is not OpenAI’s ‘Google killer’ yet

Last week, OpenAI released its highly anticipated search product, ChatGPT Search, to take on Google. The industry has been bracing for this moment for months, prompting Google to inject AI-generated answers into its core product earlier this year, and producing some embarrassing hallucinations in the process. That mishap led many people to believe that OpenAI’s search engine would truly be a “Google killer.” But after using ChatGPT Search as my default search engine (you can, too, with OpenAI’s

Nov 4, 2024

Founders should seek sector alignment when looking for a family office investor

Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, according to a recent report from PwC. Despite their prevalence in startup deals, family offices can be a mysterious class of investors for founders to navigate, as they are not nearly as public or as easy to find as VCs. Multiple family office investors said during a TechCrunch Disrupt panel that the ea

Nov 3, 2024

‘If you actually are solving a problem, you don’t talk about any of the hype,’ investor says

The hype is palpable: As tech folks from near and far converge for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Fransisco — one of the only places where Waymo is available to the public — there’s ample chatter about the autonomous vehicle service. “If you think about AI hype and all, everyone gets excited about what 10 years down the line looks like, when you look at self-driving cars,” Pegah Ebrahimi, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “You don’t get pe

Nov 3, 2024

Wesley Chan on what he looks for as he’s shopping for potential unicorns

Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments into multi-billion-dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and, most recently, Canva. Chan comes from an unconventional background — he grew up in an immigrant family and had only middling grades in high school. But he landed a job washing test tubes in a lab at Caltech and impressed lab manager Ellen Rothenberg enough to get her help in getting into MIT. From there, his serendipitous journey continued: He majored

Nov 3, 2024

Can you build a startup without sacrificing your mental health? Bonobos founder Andy Dunn thinks so

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder’s seat, working on an in-person social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his $310 million Bonobos exit don’t have as much to do with entrepreneurship as they do with staying sane. When Dunn was in college, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he didn’t get adequate treatment until 2016, when he was hospitalized during a manic episode for the second time. “The manic state is just a disaster — that’s like bei

Nov 2, 2024

CoffeeSpace is a Hinge-like app that wants to help you find your co-founder

CoffeeSpace is on a mission to help people find partners for their startup ideas online. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, has launched a social networking app that matches people exploring startup ideas and looking for co-founders. The startup’s algorithm only matches candidates who meet each other’s requirements. You can filter through potential candidates based on several different filters, including expertise, location, industry

Nov 2, 2024

CareYaya is enabling affordable home care by connecting healthcare students with elders

CareYaya, a platform that matches people who need caregivers with healthcare students, is working to disrupt the caregiving industry. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, is looking to enhance affordable in-home support, while also helping students prepare for their future healthcare careers. The startup was founded in 2022 by Neal Shah, who came up with the idea for the startup based on his own experience as a caregiver for his wife after she becam

Nov 2, 2024

How national interest startups should be thinking about government contracts

National interest technology can show up in a lot of ways, like in data analysis and cybersecurity, as well as satellites and weapons. Many startups with dual-use applications are increasingly looking at the government as an attractive customer due to its wide range of use cases and the amount of federal dollars available. And while there are several grant programs (like those offered via the Inflation Reduction Act) that provide nondilutive funding for startups, Rebecca Gevalt, managing partn

Nov 2, 2024

Microsoft and A16Z set aside differences, join hands in plea against AI regulation

Two of the biggest forces in two deeply intertwined tech ecosystems — large incumbents and startups — have taken a break from counting their money to jointly plead that the government cease and desist from even pondering regulations that might affect their financial interests, or as they like to call it, innovation. “Our two companies might not agree on everything, but this is not about our differences,” writes this group of vastly disparate perspectives and interests: Founding A16Z partners Ma

Nov 1, 2024

When to sell your company? Look for these signals

Part of the mythology of Silicon Valley is the committed founder driving the company to a blockbuster IPO. In reality, startups are 16 times more likely to get acquired. It’s not an outcome that’s frequently discussed, either. “It’s one of these things that a lot of people don’t really talk about. In Silicon Valley, we always talk about IPOs,” said Naveen Rao, VP of AI at Databricks and two-time founder, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Thursday. That silence can make the arduous process

Nov 1, 2024

The Chainsmokers want to bring a different kind of value add to B2B companies

The potential value a celebrity investor can bring to a consumer company, beyond just writing a check, is obvious: marketing and promotion. But that value is less clear when it comes to backing B2B startups. Alex Pall and Drew Taggart, also known as the Chainsmokers, think their VC fund Mantis VC can bring a value add traditional VCs can’t. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 alongside one of their founders, Dan Lorenc, the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup Chainguard, Pall said that the group

Nov 1, 2024

New funding rounds confirm that money attracts money

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Money attracts money, as the saying goes. This week seemed to confirm it, with a couple startups announcing new rounds of funding only months after their previous ones, and familiar names launching new ventures. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits:Romain Dillet / TechCrunch Whether it’s about IPOs, lobbying, or launchi

Nov 1, 2024

A new app launches to help keep voters informed for elections

Around the corner is perhaps one of the most important elections this nation has ever seen, yet many people are still unaware of the details needed to cast informed ballots. It’s not necessarily their fault — some voting information can be quite hard to find, especially when it comes to learning about, say, the political stances of judges up for recall or what a certain new amendment might mean for everyday life. In a very Silicon Valley way, there is an app looking to help with that called My

Nov 1, 2024

Former Caribou founder launches Further, a fintech that’s focused on helping people buy homes

Buying a home has always been complicated. You have to figure out how much money to put down and how that down payment will affect a monthly mortgage bill. Then there are the closing costs and fees. Kevin Bennett launched Further to try to help make the financial process easier to navigate — especially for first-time buyers. Further is a fintech platform that walks users through the financial side of home buying. The company’s first product, which goes live Friday, is a calculator that shows wh

Nov 1, 2024

How to build a company that can save the world and generate a profit

For startups that hope to save the world, or at least make it a better place, balancing impact with profit can be tricky. “Investor and shareholder expectations are often not aligned with how hard and intractable the problems are that we face as a society,” Allison Wolff, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, said on the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “I think in some ways, we’re a little bit stuck.” But it’s not impossible. Wolff’s company develops cloud-based software for utilitie

Nov 1, 2024

Kalshi secures tens of millions in loans from VCs, eyes $50M+ round amid election betting boom, source says

Investors are rushing to throw millions at a hot startup called Kalshi as loans or even as unusual we’ll-figure-it-out later cash. Kalshi is an exchange that allows people to bet, as official commodity trading contracts, on the outcomes of cultural events, from election results to how long Taylor Swift’s latest album will top the charts. Betting on the outcome of the upcoming U.S. election has spiked demand so high that Kalshi surged to the top spot on Apple’s app store, after years of being u

Oct 31, 2024