Startups

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, February 14, 2022! Oh, what we have for you today. If you wanted mega-rounds, Apple's latest hijinks, and even s

Joby Aviation is partnering with Japanese airline ANA to bring aerial ridesharing services to Japan. Toyota Motor Corporation will be partnering with the two companies, as well, in order to explore ways to connect the air taxis to ground-based transportation. Joby’s intent to start up operati

The very first hire at our SaaS startup was (surprise!) not an engineer. It might seem counterintuitive, but the first person on board at Wingback was a Fractional Head of Remote — and it was the best decision we made. My co-founder, Torben Friehe, and I knew we wanted to be an as

When I was in school — which, judging by how my spine feels most mornings, was fourteen thousand years ago — keeping track of how you were doing on your homework felt, itself, like homework. Parents, meanwhile, were generally in the dark about your overall progress until report cards came at th

Upcycling polyethylene (the normal ubiquitous plastic we are all familiar with) into high-value plastics that can compete with “virgin” plastic (meaning plastics made directly from petro-chemicals) is a fiendish problem to solve. The fact that it's been extremely hard to do so means

Like many startup founders, Anjali Jindal Naik, co-founder and COO of autonomous sidewalk robot maker Cartken, was raised by entrepreneurs. Her parents owned a furniture store in North Carolina, and Naik spent much of middle school and high school helping out with managing warehouse deliveries, an

Air conditioners are a major source of greenhouse gases. On Project Drawdown's 2017 list of over 100 opportunities to reduce human-caused global warming, cleaner tech for refrigeration and air-conditioning is at the very top. So, here at my house, what's so dirty about our air conditioner?

Banked is a fintech startup that offers an alternative to card schemes. Consumers are able to pay without entering financial data, no need to create an account, no financial details are shared, authorization is biometric and the merchant receives the funds in real time. Businesses use it to drive c

Remedial Health has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding to digitize pharmacies and stem the supply of fake and substandard pharmaceutical products, starting with Nigeria before expanding to the rest of Africa. The round was led by Global Ventures and Ventures Platform, with participation from In

Gaia is a startup that is effectively out to “de-risk” the whole process of IVF fertility treatment, using products like personalized insurance and payment plans. It’s almost BNPL for babies — but not quite. It's now closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by London&

Investors are justling to find the next killer app for the metaverse. BUD, an app that allows users to create their customizable 3D experiences and interact with others, said today it has landed $15 million funding in a Series A+ round. Featuring cuddly characters that are reminiscent of Animal Cro

The Indian government-run insurer Life Insurance Corporation of India filed draft papers with the market regulator on Sunday, announcing its plans to sell 5% of its shares to raise nearly $8 billion in the country’s biggest IPO. The Narendra Modi’s government plans to sell about 316 mil

Welcome to my new weekly fintech focused column. I'll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it turns i

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week's startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. In the beginning of the pandemic, we learned which companies were unprepared to handle a cataclysmic event. Now, as the world slowly starts to reopen in light