Want to double your rate of return? Seek counsel from experienced executives

Does it really take an average of seven to eight years for a successful startup to exit? What can early-stage founders do to accelerate outcomes? We wanted to know if founding teams can execute faster with a higher degree of success if they're able to take advantage of relevant executive expert

Industrial automation startup Bright Machines hauls in $435M by going public via SPAC

Bright Machines is going public via a SPAC-led combination, it announced this morning. The transaction will see the 3-year-old company merge with SCVX, raising gross cash proceeds of $435 million in the process. After the transaction is consummated, the startup will sport an anticipated equity valu

Ankorstore raises another $102 million for its wholesale marketplace

French startup Ankorstore has raised a $102 million Series B funding round (€84 million). Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures are leading today's funding round with existing investors Index Ventures, GFC, Alven and Aglaé also participating. This is a significant funding round, as it comes

Fave, with $2.2 million seed, looks to connect creators with their fandoms

After seven years at Google, Jacquelle Amankonah Horton knew there was a white space in social between fans and creators. She built Fave to fill in that gap, and the company today announced the close of a $2.2 million seed round. Female Founders Fund, HYBE, Sony Music, Warner Music, Concord Music,

Fresh out of YC, Houm raises $8M to improve the home rental and sales market in LatAm

As a longtime real estate developer based in Chile, Benjamin Labra was able to spot gaps in the buying and renting markets in Latin America. To meet demands, he started Houm, an all-in-one platform that helps homeowners rent and sell their properties in the region. Fresh out of Y Combinator's W

Sequoia leads $5M pre-seed in Egypt’s 1-month-old digital bank Telda

Egypt has a population of over 100 million people. The country has a high mobile and internet penetration necessary for a young and tech-savvy population with 61% below 30. But despite its youthful population, two out of every three individuals are currently unbanked in Egypt. It’s the same s

India’s Moglix valued at $1 billion in $120 million fundraise

Moglix, an industrial business-to-business marketplace in India, said on Monday it has raised $120 million in a new financing round at $1 billion valuation, becoming the 13th firm from the world’s second largest market to attain the unicorn status this year. The startup’s Series E finan

Extra Crunch roundup: Selling SaaS to developers, cracking YC after 13 tries, all about Expensify

Before Twilio had a market cap approaching $56 billion and more than 200,000 customers, the cloud-communications platform developed a secret sauce to fuel its growth: a developer-focused model that dispensed with traditional marketing rules. Software companies that sell directly to end users share

As M&A accelerates, deal-makers are leveraging AI and ML to keep pace

The global pandemic has changed the way we work, including how and where we work. For those involved in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry, a notoriously relationship-driven business, this has meant in-person boardroom handshakes have been replaced by video conference calls, remote col

Every early-stage startup must identify and evaluate a strategic advantage

Whether you’re building a company or thinking about investing, it’s important to understand your strategic advantage. In order to determine one, you should ask fundamental questions like: What’s the long-term, sustainable reason that the company will stay in business? The most imp

Stripe acquires Bouncer, will integrate its card authentication into the Radar fraud detection tool

On the heels of a $600 million fundraise earlier this year, payments giant Stripe has been on an acquisition march to continue building out its business. In the latest development, the company has acquired Bouncer, a startup based in Oakland that has built a platform to automatically run card authe

Why SPACs aren’t targeting African startups

"" data-block="true" data-editor="8hk9t" data-offset-key="48aeu-0-0"> "" data-offset-key="48aeu-0-0"> One. That’s the number of African tech companies that have gone public on the NYSE in the last 10 years. Two, if you’re counting local exchanges. The former is African-focused e-commerce

Substack acquires team from community consulting startup People & Company

New media poster child Substack announced today that they’ve added a small community-building consultancy team to its ranks, acquiring the Brooklyn-based startup People & Company. The small firm has been working with clients to build up their community efforts, and its team will now be ta

Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact

Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social — marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. It’s little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunti