Startups

When Alex Zhou moved to the Midwest for college in 2007, he had limited access to Asian groceries and products. Zhou had to drive two hours to purchase his favorite Asian products at the nearest local Asian market. The experience inspired him to launch Yami, a direct-to-consumer marketplace for As

Financial technology startups raised $121.6 billion last year — up 153% year-over-year in terms of global VC deal value — and include a range of outfits, from payments companies to digital banks to corporate spend players. It's not as typical for us to hear, though, about venture capitalist

Credit card giant Visa has launched an NFT creator program in an effort to bring small businesses into the digital economy. “We've seen rapid growth in the NFT ecosystem over the past year,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, told technewss. “We think NFTs represent a new form of e-c

It’s no secret that digital supply chains are increasingly under attack as hackers look to use this vector to get access to company networks and confidential information. But that also means businesses have to figure out ways to secure their assets even when they sit outside of the attack sur

Here's a bummer of a statistic for you: Around 30% of bee colonies disappear every year. Scientists coined the phrase “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) to describe what's been a devastating ongoing trend in the world's bee population. No one issue has been identified, but exp

Dapio, the U.K.-based cashless payment solutions provider for businesses, today announced that it has raised $3.4 million to fuel the launch of its 'Tap to Pay' solution for Android users in the U.K. and Europe. African payments giant Flutterwave co-led the growth round with Techstars. Dani

A new player is preparing to enter India's crowded and yet duopoly-sided UPI payments market. Bengaluru-headquartered Slice, which became a unicorn late last year, plans to introduce UPI payments for its users within weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter. The sta

Day one of Y Combinator’s Demo Day confab for the Winter 2022 batch is over. We shook up our coverage this year, divvying things up by sector and geography. Our goal was to avoid a huge list, the sort that we compiled in years past. technewss has notes on the ever-growing contingent of compa

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. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, March 29, 2022! Haje and I are now flying solo with the newsletter. It will be all hands on deck today and tomorrow

Since inception, Y Combinator has invested in thousands of startups, and more recently, even hundreds within a single batch. Given the accelerator's growth, competitive tensions feel nearly inevitable. Still, one has to wonder if there is a fundamental shift afoot. Whereas YC always backed comp

Startup accelerators are increasingly putting the brakes on demo days. The often flashy events reserved for founders to connect with investors have long been part of the likes of Y Combinator’s program, seen as the “graduation” of startups’ journey. But demo day isn’t

"">Y Combinator's latest batch — W22 — features 414 startups from 42 countries, representing more than 80 sectors. Just like last year’s batches, about half of the companies in the W22 batch (where YC’s Standard Deal comes to full effect for the first time) are based outside of t

The adoption of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, has skyrocketed in the past year, and participants believe this is just the beginning, claiming more use cases will form in the subsector. DAOs are community-led groups that, in theory, allow participants to make operational decisions

Airhouse, a startup in the e-commerce infrastructure market, announced this morning that it closed an $11 million Series A round of funding. The capital event was led by DNX Ventures, with participation from a number of other investors and angels. Crunchbase data indicates that Airhouse previously