Startups

There is no one-size-fits all model for building a startup. At technewss Disrupt, we heard from a handful of founders about alternative approaches to creating a sustainable company that ensures more than just VCs and early founders benefit from its success.  One way is building

Book clubs can be magical. Bring together a group of friends, tear apart a book and all of a sudden the words have a second, paperless, life. But what if the author could join in the banter? Imagine riffing with Roxane Gay, debating with Ta-Nehisi Coates and eavesdropping on Jhumpa Lahiri. The expe

2020 has been a year of social upheaval. Around the world, society is identifying different problems in our culture and pushing for widespread change. While there are notable steps we can all take, from altering exclusionary company policies to signing action-oriented petitions, the VC and investme

Bangalore-based Rephrase.ai has an ambitious vision for reshaping how movies and videos are made. CEO Ashray Malhotra laid it out for me yesterday, saying that his co-founder Nisheeth Lahoti “came up with this concept — he wants to build an engine that can take any script as input and creat

Climate change is on everyone's minds these days, what with the outer Bay Area on fire, orange skies above San Francisco, and a hurricane season that is bearing down on the East Coast with alacrity (and that's just the United States in the past two weeks). A major — and growing — source

With the U.S. presidential election now 40 days away, all eyes are focused on how online conversations, in conjunction with other hallmarks of online life like viral videos, news clips and misleading ads, will be used, and often abused, to influence people’s decisions. But political discourse

Sometimes raising venture capital can be as simple as talking to your existing investor and having them wire over another check. When we last caught up with Petal in January 2019, the startup was hot off its $30 million Series B round and was accelerating its mission to take on the world of credit

ShareChat, an Indian social network that focuses entirely on serving users in non-English languages, said on Thursday it has raised $40 million from a clutch of investors after the Indian startup added tens of millions of new users in recent months. The five-year-old Bangalore-based startup said Dr

Switzerland-based machine learning code review startup DeepCode — which bills itself as “Grammarly for coders” — has been acquired by Snyk, a post-unicorn valuation cybersecurity startup focused on helping developers secure their code. Financial terms of the deal have not be

Four years after its foray into the Chinese market, followed by rapid and cash-hemorrhaging expansion, WeWork decided to wind down its involvement in the country. WeWork’s Chinese unit has secured a $200 million investment led by Shanghai-based equity firm Trustbridge Partners, which first ba

Peterson Ventures, a 12-year-old, Salt Lake City, Utah-based seed-stage fund, has long operated fairly quietly, but many of its bets have become known brands in the respective worlds of consumer and enterprise software investing. Among these is the shoe company Allbirds; the men’s clothing co

Holy cats, it's less than two weeks until TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 kicks off for two program-packed days focused squarely on mobility and transportation technology. On October 6-7, thousands of people from around the world will gather virtually to talk trends, demo products, share insight an

Conventional wisdom says your company should be up and running and have some traction before you raise. But MasterClass co-founder David Rogier says entrepreneurs should try to raise funds before launching. Before going live, David raised $6.4 million — $1.9 million in a seed round and $4.5 milli

It's been a long road for Palantir as it has submitted amendment after amendment with the SEC related to its S-1 filing over the past two months. But after weeks of back and forth, it's official: Palantir's S-1 has been marked effective, which means that it has been accepted by the SEC