Byterat nabs $4M seed round to collect and analyze data for battery labs

After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — as a host of TechCrunch’s recently ended Found podcast, I have learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups. I’ve heard stories about how founders know when it is the right time to expand from their core product, to how startups approach hiring, to what got entrepreneurs to take the leap in the first place, and everything in between. While not a founder myself, some of the learnings and advice I heard on the show stood o

Jan 12, 2025

Index Ventures partner Jahanvi Sardana has a reminder for all those founders worried about finding TAM for their product or service: many startups have emerged from markets that, at the time, were essentially nonexistent.

Jul 25, 2025

Eight years ago, Brian Garrett and his partners sensed the ground shifting. At the time, Crosscut Ventures, where Garrett is co-founder and managing partner, had been investing in early stage startups in Los Angeles and Southern California for nearly a decade. It focused mostly on software companies, but it started shifting its attention to hardware, too, as promising founders gravitated toward it. “At that point, SpaceX was very established,” he told TechCrunch. “Mostly, people started to spi

Oct 29, 2024

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