Startups

Late-stage VCs may be preventing their startups from going public in 2024

While some investors are loudly bemoaning that the IPO window can’t stay shut forever, other VCs themselves are actually part of the problem. A lot of standard VC deal terms give investors the a

Pornhub says, ‘Bad Texas! No smut for you!’

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Pornhub has been playing a game of chicke

Pitch Deck Teardown: SuperScale’s $5.4M Series A deck

The company is promising to make marketing for games easier, and we know that great marketing is one of the crucial differences between an OK outcome and a smash-hit success.

TipTop, the new app from Postmates’ founder and CEO, now lets you buy devices with trade-ins and cash

Customers can trade in an old Samsung Galaxy for a discount on an iPad, an Apple HomePod mini for a Nintendo Switch, or an iPhone for a Nothing phone.

Microbiome startups respond as industry is accused of ‘questionable practices’

The biotech sector has embraced the microbiome in recent years, a green field market powered by cheap genome sequencing and venture dollars, promising bespoke treatments for everything from gut troubl

VCs will get liquidity in 2024 from the secondary market, not IPOs

If you asked a bunch of VCs at the end of 2023 if the IPO market would finally open again in 2024, most of them would have said yes. We know because TechCrunch surveyed more than 40 of them in Decembe

ShopMy lands $18.5M to help influencers earn more money from promoting products

ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced that it raised $18.5 million. The company will use the money to help scale its network of

Volley’s AI-enabled ball machine for racquet sports can simulate gameplay

A new sports tech startup, Volley, aims to revolutionize the way racquet sports players (platform tennis, padel and pickleball) train with its AI-enabled sports training machine. Unlike traditional te

Glacier is training AI-powered recycling robots

This week, Glacier co-founder Rebecca Hu chats with Found about wish-cycling and robots.

Enterprise SaaS investment makes a comeback — but not where you’d expect

When we examined venture investment amounts in enterprise SaaS startups, we were surprised at the top categories.

After losing access to Twitter’s API, Block Party pivots to privacy

Block Party, a startup developed by software engineer and tech diversity advocate Tracy Chou, was among the victims of Twitter’s (now X’s) API changes earlier this year, forcing it to pivo

Ready Player One creator debuts ‘Open,’ a metaverse battle royale experience

Earlier this year, Readyverse Studios — co-founded by blockchain tech company Futureverse and Ernest Cline, the mind behind the sci-fi franchise Ready Player One — announced “The Readyve

How many startups shut down last year compared to the year before? A lot

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our in

Techstars’ $80M partnership with J.P. Morgan is on the rocks, employees say

The fate of the Advancing Cities programs — and some of the around 20 people who work at Techstars in this program — is up in the air.

The incumbents go shopping for startups

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, I explored what happened to on

AI2 Incubator scores $200M in compute to feed needy AI startups

AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early developm

Anonymous social apps face another reckoning as UNC System to ban Yik Yik, Fizz, Sidechat & Whisper

Anonymous social apps are in for a reckoning. Yes, again. This week, University of North Carolina (UNC) System President Peter Hans announced a plan to block the use of popular anonymous social apps o

NFT fantasy sports startup Sorare lays off 13% of staff as web3 gaming continues to sputter

Web3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February. The move comes as the startup wants certain teams to be concentrated at the company’s

k-ID launches a solution that helps game developers comply with ever-changing child safety regulations

Making a video game successful is already hard. Doing so while complying with the growing number of child safety laws and regulations around the world is an almost insurmountable task. A new technolog

This Korean startup wants to take on Carta in cap table management

A South Korean startup called QuotaLab is on a quest to follow in the footsteps of Carta, the cap table management company that’s used by a host of startups and investors in the U.S. Carta start
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