Startups

Square Peg Capital, one of Australia's largest venture capital firms with current assets under management of about $3 billion USD, is digging deeper into Southeast Asia. The firm is currently raising $550 million in new funding, and if its recent investment history is anything to go by, a good

An ambitious Chinese startup wants a slice of the flourishing global work automation market. Laiye, a Beijing-based company that provides a one-stop platform for automating office tasks of varying degrees of complexity, just picked up $160 million from a Series C funding round to expand globally. G

A European music streamer, Deezer is going public via a SPAC deal, valuing the Spotify competitor at $1.1 billion. Deezer will merge with the “blank-check” company I2PO, which is headed by former WarnerMedia executive Iris Knobloch. Founded in 2007, the company previously tried to IPO i

For over a year, Andreessen Horowitz has quietly piloted its own take on an accelerator for early-stage entrepreneurs, and today, the firm announced the program's official debut. In exchange for an unannounced percentage of ownership, “a16z START” will offer early-stage founders up

If 2020 and 2021 were the years of the SPAC, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the reprimand. Nearly all of the electric vehicle manufacturers that took a shortcut to an IPO by merging with a special purpose acquisition company over the last two years are being investigated by the Securities and

The alternative protein space is hot, hot, hot as evidenced by both the number of companies developing products and the venture capital going into the space. Investment into alternative proteins, for example, plant-based meats and dairy substitutes was $5 billion in 2021, according to both the Goo

Zambian card-issuing fintech Union54 has raised $12 million in a seed extension round led by Tiger Global. Other participating investors in this financing round include existing ones such as Vibe VC and new investors Earl Grey Capital and Packy Mccormick’s Not Boring Capital. It’s been

UrbanPiper, a restaurant management platform that processes 18% of all online food orders in India, has raised $24 million in a new financing round from a number of investors including Swiggy and Zomato, the three firms said Monday. The six-year-old startup's Series B funding was led by existin

Sequoia Capital India, one of the most prolific and successful investors in India and Southeast Asia, addressed the fraudulent practices allegations levelled against some of its portfolio startups and pledged to take proactive steps to do more to drive increased compliance. In a blog post publishe

I have been thinking a lot about silos, or the lack thereof, within startupland. There's sometimes an artificial wall that is put up between companies at different stages of growth, when in reality, everyone is in the same room, clinking glasses and tripping over the same rug. Let me be more pr

The parent company of Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast will buy D&D Beyond, the role-playing game’s popular digital suite of tools. The company announced the news this week in a press release, disclosing that it would buy D&D Beyond from current owner Fandom in a

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Friday, April 15, 2022, where we are continuing to stick our heads in the sand regarding the war in Ukraine and the Earth slowly ro

Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine has been going on for almost two months, and during this time, all sectors of the economy, including IT, have had to stand by the military. Ukrainian IT did not break down — it shrank a little, but it is standing firmly, providing employment to p

Throughout the web3 world, companies, protocols and projects alike are pushing to onboard a billion users — what they see as the tipping point for cryptocurrency use to grow exponentially. But that number is only possible — obviously — through increased adoption. That means major play