Startups

Benjamin Döpfner has been building companies since he was a teenager.  One of his more recent ventures was based in Berlin, and at the time of its founding in 2019, Germany actually had negative interest rates — meaning that the company was paying back 50 basis points, or half a percent for

Stripe has announced that it’s laying off 14% of its workers, impacting around 1,120 of the fintech giant’s 8,000 workforce. The latest round of layoffs follows a string of cutbacks in the fintech sphere, with Brex last month revealing it was scything 11% of its workforce, while just ye

At a time when large rounds are a thing of the past, especially in the early stages, Apiiro, an applications security startup, announced a $100 million Series B today from several top-shelf Silicon Valley firms. What is attracting this kind of investment in a time when investors otherwise are in a

More than 100 venture capital firms including Bloomberg Beta, 776 and M13, with over $106 billion in assets under management, are standing together to launch VCs for Repro, a coalition stating that criminalizing abortion is a violation of human rights that stifles innovation. Announced today, the g

Matt McKinney was a data science manager at Uber, helping launch Uber Freight, along with software engineer Shaosu Liu. One of the main problems the pair saw there was that while they were able to grow the top line, they found it difficult to grow the bottom line because they were “losing a bunch

Dropit, a retail technology platform that bridges the digital divide by unifying merchants’ online and in-store inventories, has raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded in 2014, London-based Dropit counts retail brands including L’Occitane, Abercrombie & Fitch and

Silicon Valley-based VC firm 500 Global and Germany's economic development agency Gesellschaft fu?r Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) will train managers of leading accelerators in Africa over the next two years to help them establish sustainable business models that commandeer greater influ

Lugano, Switzerland-based venture capital fund Privilège Ventures just launched its fourth fund. The CHF 20 million (just over $20 million) fund is earmarked for women-led early-stage startups across Europe. “We don't just want to support women,” Jacqueline Ruedin Rüsch, founding general

We are living in the era of so-called microsatellites, which are equipped with thermal cameras and other regalia to, for instance, alert farmers before crops are damaged, predict droughts and aid in the juggling of supply chains. Climate change is making less land available for agricultural food pr

Meet Fintecture, a French startup that wants to upgrade B2B payments. While many payment companies have focused on B2C payments with Stripe leading the way, B2B payments haven't changed much over the years. “In the U.S., there are still a lot of paper checks. In Europe, it's mostly transf

Meet Bump, a French software-as-a-service startup that wants to help you maintain and use APIs across your organization. The company automatically generates documentation for your APIs so that other teams always know how to use certain APIs. Over time, Bump becomes the central repository for all th

SparkLabs Korea, a Seoul-based seed to early-stage accelerator, held a demo Day on Thursday for its 19th cohort of companies. The latest demo day marks its tenth year after SparkLabs launched its accelerator program in December 2012. The accelerator has backed more than 270 startups since its incep

Chris Sacca's Lowercarbon is doubling down on a startup that is racing to bring solar modules to rooftops in India. SolarSquare said on Thursday it has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Lowercarbon and Elevation Capital, just months after securing its seed financing. Existin

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hellooooo, guess what? It's November! We guess it was actually November yesterday, too, but we failed to notice, because LOL what even is time, amirite. Anywa