Startups

If there’s a sector that has seen the biggest uptick in the number of startups and venture capital in emerging markets since the start of last year, it has to be the digitization of mom and pop stores. Today, a new activity takes us to Morocco, where YC-backed company Chari just raised a $5 m

Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures have minted a new unicorn in India: CoinSwitch Kuber. The two firms have co-led a $260 million investment in the Bangalore-based cryptocurrency trading startup, valuing the young firm at $1.9 billion, they said on Tuesday. This is a16z's first investmen

The founders of Tazah Technologies, a B2B agriculture marketplace in Pakistan, met while serving leadership roles at Uber subsidiary Careem. Abrar Bajwa and Mohsin Zaka bonded during long working hours as the platform dealt with COVID-19's impact. Eventually, the two started talking about creat

While working as a software engineer in Japan, Singapore and San Francisco for the past 10 years, Ryo Chikazawa, CEO and co-founder of Autify, came to realize that there's one common problem in the software development industry; software testing takes excessive time. Chikazawa and co-founder Sa

SmartRyde, a Japanese online pre-booked airport transfers service platform, is a marketplace that connects travelers to local transportation operators/online travel agencies (OTAs). Sota Kimura, co-founder and CEO of SmartRyde, founded SmartRyde in 2017 after he experienced trouble getting a taxi f

Byteboard, a service designed to replace the pre-onsite technical interview part of a company’s hiring process with a web-based alternative, will be spinning out of Google, technewss learned and Google confirmed. The product was originally incubated as part of the company’s internal R&

At this year’s technewss Disrupt, we assembled an all-star panel of venture capitalists working across the entire range of startup growth and got their insights on assessing product-market fit — a perennial and evergreen challenge for entrepreneurs at all levels of experience. Human Ventur

Entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups are more likely to face an uphill climb than their white, male counterparts, but their challenges stretch well beyond systemic bias and a general lack of access to capital. Women, transgender and Black startup founders must navigate myriad issues for which

It’s that time again! Today is the 28th Demo Day for Alchemist, an accelerator that primarily focuses on enterprise companies — or those that sell to other companies, primarily, rather than directly to consumers. This latest cohort comes in at 23 companies. Like the last few Alchemist batch

Ouster, a lidar company that went public this year via a SPAC merger, said it would acquire solid-state lidar startup Sense Photonics in an all-stock deal that was valued at around $68 million at close of markets on Monday. Once the acquisition is complete, Ouster said it would establish a new busi

Appsmith, which provides open source software that helps companies quickly build internal applications, announced an $8 million Series A round of funding this morning. Unlike some upstart tech companies that we have seen in the internal application market, Appsmith doesn’t sport a no- or low-

A year ago, we told you about the opportunity that former Tesla CIO Jay Vijayan was chasing. His plan? To pull car dealers into the 21st century with a snazzy end-to-end automotive SaaS platform like the one he helped develop inside Tesla. Customers could use it to order a car to their precise spec

When the dot-com bubble popped 20 years ago a lot of people thought that software development was going to get broadly outsourced. Instead, Silicon Valley evolved a new ethos around technical, product-focused founders and strong, central engineering teams. And yet, software development outsourcing

Both Anchor and Descript have made their names as being among the most significant Podcast creation platforms of recent times, but hoving into the rear-view mirror recently has been Podcastle, an all-in-one platform that can cover off recording, production and publishing, all on the one platform. I