The head of Citi Ventures on how, and why, to leverage corporate venture arms like his

At our recent Early Stage event, we had the opportunity to talk at length with Arvind Purushotham, the managing director and global head of Citi Ventures, about how startups should think about corporate venture arms, including what a check from an enterprise like Citi can mean, and how to leverage

Growth marketing roundup: SEO for 2021, pitch tactics, reviews and more

Google favors large sites more than ever, basically because it is trying to avoid providing misinformation in our polarized age. But sometimes the small sites have key new information — like the content that your startup is trying to share with the world. How can you stand out in the right searc

How pitch training can help startups get their story right

When you hire a marketing consultant, you don’t necessarily expect to wind up discussing your life’s purpose. Yet, that is what Spanish marketing expert and entrepreneur Alex Barrera often ends up doing with startup founders who hire him to help improve their pitch. They think they are

With open banking on the horizon, the fintech-SME love story is just beginning

The fintech sector has been hugely successful (and hugely profitable) for much of the last decade, and even more so during the pandemic. But it might come as a surprise to learn that many in the industry believe that the story is just beginning and the sector is poised to achieve much more, with fi

ServiceMax promises accelerating growth as key to $1.4B SPAC deal

ServiceMax, a company that builds software for the field-service industry, announced yesterday that it will go public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a deal valued at $1.4 billion. The transaction comes after ServiceMax was sold to GE for $915 million in 2016, before being sp

In an increasingly hot biotech market, protecting IP is key

After a record year for biotech investment in 2020 — during which the industry saw $28.5 billion invested across 1,073 deals — the market for new innovations remains strong. What’s more, these innovations are increasingly coming to market by way of early-stage startups and/or their scient

Extra Crunch roundup: Think like a VC, CockroachDB EC-1, handle your stock options

Ants and camels are famously resilient, but when it was time to select a name for a startup that offers open-source, cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the final candidate. Database technology is fundamental infrastructure, which part

Virgin Galactic president Mike Moses on what’s next for the company’s growing fleet

This last weekend featured the much-ballyhooed launch of Virgin Galactic’s first (nonpaying) passengers, with founder and CEO Richard Branson along for the ride. After the festivities, I had the chance to talk with the company’s president, Mike Moses, who seems to be familiar with every

Digital lending platform Blend valued at over $4B in its public debut

Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business. If you've refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there's a good chance that company is Blend. Founded in 2012, the start

Visualping raises $6M to make its website change monitoring service smarter

Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE, a relatively new firm with investors who

Tumblr’s parent company is buying popular podcast app Pocket Casts

""> Pocket Casts will soon have a new home. Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress.com, is buying the podcast app from a collective of public radio groups, including NPR and BBC Studios. Automattic didn’t disclose how much it will pay for Pocket Casts. Co-founders Russell Ivano

Rivian delays deliveries of R1T, R1S electric vehicles again

Rivian is pushing back deliveries of its long-awaited R1T electric pickup truck and R1S SUV several more months due to delays in production caused by “cascading impacts of the pandemic,” particularly the ongoing global shortage of semiconductor chips, according to a letter sent to custo

Crypto investors like Terraform Labs so much, they’re committing $150 million to its ‘ecosystem’

There are many blockchain platforms competing for investors’ and developers’ attention right now, from the big daddy of them all, Ethereum, to so-called “Ethereum Killers” like Solana, which we wrote about in May. Often, these technologies are seen as so promising that inves

An insurtech startup exposed thousands of sensitive insurance applications

A security lapse at insurance technology startup BackNine exposed hundreds of thousands of insurance applications after one of its cloud servers was left unprotected on the internet. BackNine might be a company you’re not familiar with, but it might have processed your personal information if