Page 13 - Extra Crunch News Today

My mom cuts to the chase when she is describing my beat to others. In her words, I cover companies like Uber before they become companies like Uber. And honestly? I can’t exactly disagree with the description. The best feeling in tech journalism is telling a story about a startup before it becomes a household […]

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. TechCrunch isn’t a public-market-focused publication. We care about startups. But public tech companies can, at times, provide interesting insights into how the broader technology market is performing. So we pay what we might call minimum-viable attention to former startups that made it all the way to an IPO. Then there are the Big Tech companies. In the United States the list is well-known: Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple and Ama...

Optimism reigns at consumer trading services as fintech VC spikes and Robinhood IPO looms But services that help consumers trade might need to retool their models over time to ensure long-term income With the Coinbase direct listing behind us and the Robinhood IPO ahead, it’s a heady time for consumer-focused trading apps. Mix in the impending SPAC-led debut of eToro, general bullishness in the cryptocurrency space, record highs for some equities markets and recent rounds from Public.com, M...

Fintech startups set VC records as the 2021 fundraising market continues to impress New data indicate Q1 2021 was the biggest fintech VC quarter ever While waiting for full first-quarter venture capital results for fintech startups to drop, we knew that they were going to be outsized. The Exchange previously explored the pace at which huge venture rounds were invested into the startup niche, noting that by mid-March the fintech market had already recorded a record number of $100 million rounds....

Zomato juice: Indian unicorn’s proposed IPO could drive regional startup liquidity The IPO parade that has continued in 2021 is not a strictly domestic affair. Other countries are getting in on the unicorn liquidity rush. This week, India-based food-delivery unicorn Zomato filed to go public. As TechCrunch reported, the company intends to list “on Indian stock exchanges NSE and BSE.” The Zomato IPO is incredibly important. As our own Manish Singh reported when the company’s numbers beca...

What can the OKR software sector tell us about startup growth more generally? Optimism reigns supreme In the never-ending stream of venture capital funding rounds, from time to time, a group of startups working on the same problem will raise money nearly in unison. So it was with OKR-focused startups toward the start of 2020. How were so many OKR-focused tech upstarts able to raise capital at the same time? And was there really space in the market for so many different startups building softwar...

8 investors, founders and execs predict cybersecurity, fintech will take Belfast by storm Things have been looking up for Belfast since the end of the Troubles. The city has undergone infrastructure improvements over the past two decades, tourism has boomed thanks to attractions such as the shipyard where the RMS Titanic was built and Game of Thrones shooting locations, and employment has risen steadily in the city since 2016, according to Northen Ireland’s Department for the Economy. The cit...

Building a creator-focused OS Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading.  A week ago TechCrunch covered Pico’s $6.5 million funding round and described it as “a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data.” The Exchange has also covered Pico before, most recently during a m...

Extra Crunch roundup: Klaviyo EC-1, micromobility’s second wave, UiPath CFO interview, more Origin stories are satisfying because we already know the hero will overcome the odds — and in doing so, they’ll reveal their core strengths. This week, we published a four-part series about how Klaviyo co-founders Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen bootstrapped their startup into an e-commerce marketing automation platform now valued at $4.15 billion. Neither founder was bitten by a radioactive spider ...

After going public, once-hot startups are riding a valuation roller coaster To close out the week, a short meditation on value, or, more precisely, how assets are valued in today’s markets. Do you recall the pre-direct-listing hype Coinbase enjoyed? After reporting its estimated first-quarter financial performance, interest in the domestic cryptocurrency trading giant ran red-hot. When Coinbase set a $250 per-share direct listing reference price, it was broadly viewed as modest, if not downr...