Startups

In an Extra Crunch Live this past week, Cleo Capital founding partner Sarah Kunst broke down what founders can learn from Supreme, a sought-after streetwear brand. She argued that founders, similar to Supreme, should build a brand around themselves that is so well-respected and has clout that whene

“Your board will never be the same.” With that prediction, Nigel Travis, board director and former CEO of Dunkin' and Papa John's, kicked off a recent discussion about the future of corporate governance with chief executives and current and aspiring board members. Just a

Once the path less traveled, bootstrapping today has become a much more viable and common approach to building a startup. By not taking venture capital dollars early, bootstrapping can force founders to remain disciplined in serving their paying customers well. It's also a pretty compelling way

Igor Marinelli and Gabriel Lameirinhas were raised around manufacturing plants. Marinelli’s father worked for International Paper in a plant outside of São Paulo, while Lameirinhas’ father worked in a cement plant.  Throughout their lives, the two friends had heard their parents comp

As indoor farming expands, a number of new companies are cropping up to provide better data and monitoring tools for the businesses aimed at improving efficiencies and quality of indoor crops.  One of these companies, the Copenhagen-based Nordetect, is entering the U.S. market with around $1.5 mil

The private equity giant Blackstone is today announcing the final close of its first growth equity fund — Blackstone Growth — with $4.5 billion in capital commitments from a wide range of family offices, entrepreneurs, endowments, strategic institutional investors, pension funds and oth

For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business can easily run out of money or have considerable savings. Most restaurants don’t have access to deal directly with farms to get better dea

Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it’s not a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments. For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew

Challenger banks continue to make significant advances in attracting customers away from the big incumbents by providing more modern, user-friendly tools to manage their money. Today, one of the trailblazers in this area, Kuda Technologies, is announcing funding to continue building out its specifi

In cybersecurity, nothing is “unhackable.” Security bugs are an unavoidable consequence of an online world, but how companies receive and respond to hackers can make or break them. Get it right, and you build bonds with the security and hacker community and improve your security by fixi

OpenReel, a startup that makes it easier for teams to record videos remotely, has raised $19 million in Series A funding. CEO Lee Firestone told me that he and CTO Joe Mathew first started a video agency together, but when they were given “a pretty significant project” that involved rem

The running line from any CEO of an acquired company is that the company can do so much more with resources of the company that acquired it than it could on its own. Just seven months after being acquired, Drone co-founder Brad Rydzewski says that his company really has benefited greatly from being

Sentry, the company that helps developers catch bugs before they result in downtime, has added support for React Native, Android and Xamarin to its Performance Monitoring software. The company, which reached unicorn valuation in its last funding, also updated its Flutter SDK with support for new la

Five years ago, entrepreneur Dan Sommer bet big on the adult learning space when he was building out Trilogy Education, an online and in-person bootcamp in collaboration with universities to train workforces on the latest tech skills. In 2019, Sommer sold that company for $750 million to 2U in one