Dear EU: It’s time to get a grip

The EU for all its lethargy, faults and fetishization of bureaucracy, is, ultimately, a good idea. It might be 64 years from the formation of the European Common Market, but it is 29 years since the EU’s formation in the Maastricht Treaty, and this international entity is definitely still act

Loom spins up a pregnancy and postpartum education program

Erica Chidi, the co-founder of LOOM and a first-generation Nigerian-American, learned how to wrap the language of self-care around her body from an early age. She spent the early part of her life in South Africa, then the epicenter of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, watching her father work as an endocr

Only two more weeks until TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising kicks off in just two weeks and we “see you shiver with antici…pation” (two points for the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” reference). And who can blame you? We sure don't. On July 8-9, this two-day virtual bootcamp will deliver leading sta

Daily Crunch: Google and Jio Platforms unveil ‘extremely optimized Android’ phone for Indian consumers

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 24, 2021. There's an ocean of tech news to get through today, but up top if you care about the advertising market,

Sneaker marketplace GOAT hits $3.7B valuation in Series F raise

Sneaker and streetwear empire GOAT just doubled its valuation in a massive new raise. The GOAT Group parent company shared today that it has raised $195 million in a Series F raise valuing the fashion giant at some $3.7 billion. The raise was led by a handful of hedge funds and P/E firms including

SmartAsset rethinks financial advisory, and becomes a unicorn in the process

SmartAsset, a marketplace that connects consumers to financial advisors, announced today that it has raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding. The financing values New York-based SmartAsset at over $1 billion, and brings its total raised since its 2012 inception to just over $161 million,

After raising $10M, Ryte launches ‘Carbon KPI' to measure the CO2 footprint of web sites

As we become more and more aware of the kind of impact we are having on this planet we call our home, just about everything is having its CO2 impact measured. Who knew, until recently, that streaming Netflix might have a measurable impact on the environment, for instance. But given vast swathes of

Check out the expert speakers joining us on Extra Crunch Live in July

What are the most important factors when you’re pitching your startup for fundraising? What questions come to the minds of the VCs you’re pitching? How do you get the deal across the finish line? Or choose the right investors for your company to begin with? Extra Crunch Live looks to an

SPAC charts are exercises in the limits of hype

Having read more SPAC investor decks in the last twelve months than I’d like to admit to, I thought I was over being irked by their bullishness. Call me conservative, but public companies shouldn’t be full of shit, and companies going public should probably aim for a similar target. Tha

Microsoft announces Windows 11, generally available by the holidays

After weeks of leaks and hype, Microsoft today officially announced Windows 11, the next version of its desktop operating system. While the company may have once said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, forgoing major point launches for a regular cadence of bi-annual upgrades, but it c

Creator tools startup Spore raises $1M to build closer bonds between influencers and their fans

Few spaces have grown hotter in the past year than the creator economy has, but for all of the new tools available to those starting a podcast, newsletter or storefront, most players have been more focused on building out their own platform opportunity rather than selling full independence to creat

Tonkean raises $50M Series B to accelerate is no-code business automation service

Business operation automation startup Tonkean announced this morning that it closed a $50 million Series B round of capital. Accel led the round, which came just over a year after the startup raised a $24 million Series A. Lightspeed Ventures, which led the company’s preceding venture capital

JW Player raises $100M to build subscriptions and other monetization tools around its video software

JW Player, a very early mover in the market for online video technology — it powered YouTube’s first video player, before Google acquired it and it built its own — has long been profitable through a business model of providing one-to-many video streaming tools to publishers and ot

Volvo’s flagship electric SUV will come with Luminar’s lidar and software as standard

Volvo Cars and Luminar Technologies are beefing up their partnership. The two companies said Thursday that Luminar's autonomous driving stack – a combination of hardware and software that includes lidar sensors and a proprietary perception system – will be standard on Volvo's forthcomin