Startups

Honasa Consumer, the parent firm of skin and personal care brand Mamaearth, has raised about $92 million in an anchor round ahead of its initial public offering starting Tuesday in a major boost to the Indian startup that in many ways is testing the current appetite of the local public markets. A g

When Rosie Nguyen resigned from her startup Fanhouse in July, she felt like she was losing a child. Nguyen wasn’t ready to leave, but she wasn’t on board with where the company was headed, either. When Fanhouse’s board, which consisted of her co-founder and an investor, decided to

Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign up! Last week, we chronicled one CEO’s big PR flub, one firm’s new infusion of capital

W elcome to the technewss Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It's inspired by the daily technewss+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. After looking at the last quarter in venture capital from various angles, I have to admit it w

Kenyan B2B e-commerce company MarketForce has shut down operations in three of its five markets in Africa and is in the early stages of launching a social commerce spinout. technewss has learned that MarketForce's super-app dubbed RejaReja, which enables informal retailers (mom-and-pop stores)

Chances are that however busy you are, Keith Rabois is busier. He’s an active investor as a general partner at Founders Fund, the early-stage outfit co-founded 18 years ago by Peter Thiel. He’s also the CEO of OpenStore, the company that he co-founded in 2021 to acquire and scale commer

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. For my column this week, I told the story of how an ex-colleague was impersonated by an AI-powered spambot and almost tricked me. It a nutshell: AI is often used for good, but it is increasingly used for nefarious purpos

Good morning, and welcome to the end of another week! In an overall quiet year, the last few months have been pretty spicy when it comes to M&A activity: Atlassian bought Loom; Cisco bought Splunk; and Microsoft finally closed on its bid to buy Activision. Full technewss+ arti

Arc, the web browser startup that’s convincing some power users to give up Chrome, is now inviting other non-Arc users to test drive its capabilities with the launch of a trio of new “shareable” features. The company this week introduced the ability to share special views, includi

Back in graduate school, Penelope Jones thought she was suffering alone, a not uncommon feeling among doctorate students. She was studying electrolytes, a key part of batteries, and a portion of her experiments involved programming specialized lab equipment. “It was awful,” she told technewss+

Rapido, the eight-year-old Indian bike taxi startup, is expanding into the cab market in the South Asian nation, where Uber and its homegrown competitor Ola dominate. The Bengaluru-based startup has begun a pilot of its cab service in the southern city of Hyderabad, technewss has learned and confi

Denmark-based Soundboks just released its latest $1,000 Bluetooth speaker. Now in its fourth generation, the latest Soundboks speaker is just like the older models: It’s a large, unabashed black box designed to withstand a rowdy, off-the-grid weekend of music. While the speaker has been wildl

Why are seed deals still so expensive? The global venture capital market has contracted steadily over the past year, but seed valuations have not, avoiding the massive cuts to round size and median valuations that later startup investment stages have suffered. And according to Accel’s Philipp

This week, I heard from an ex-colleague I hadn't heard from in a few years. Let's call him Jeremy. He wrote me a lovely email, referring to a moment I have such a clear memory of. He asked about my health, mentioned that he'd seen I recently had pneumonia. After telling me a little bit