Author: TechCrunch News

Freight forwarding — the process of organising how and where items will be shipped around the world, and specifically the technology that underpins that work — continues to be a huge area of the logistics market, not least because of the huge boom in e-commerce in the last year, and because of the Covid-19-mandated need…

Fintech in Africa is a goldmine. Investors are betting big on startups offering a plethora of services from payments and lending to neobanks, remittances and cross-border transfers, and rightfully so. Each of these services solves unique sets of challenges. For cross-border payments, it’s the outrageous rates and regulatory hassles involved with completing transactions from one African…

The vast majority of people in India, the world’s second most populous nation, don’t have health insurance coverage. A significant portion of the population that does have coverage get it from their employers. Plum, a young startup that is making it easier and more affordable for more firms in the nation to provide insurance coverage…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices…

A venture capitalist once told me candidly that whenever you see the phrase “democratization” in tech marketing material, think of it as a red flag. Democracy, generally speaking, often comes with an ironic caveat: It disproportionately benefits white and male participants. Now, you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t start off your…

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Hello from Friday, I presume that…

Here in the U.S. the concept of using a driver’s data to decide the cost of auto insurance premiums is not a new one. But in markets like Brazil, the idea is still considered relatively novel. A new startup called Justos claims it will be the first Brazilian insurer to use drivers’ data to reward…

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Welcome to the Daily Crunch for May 28, the last edition before a long weekend here in the United States. But impending holiday or not, there’s plenty to catch up on, not…

This may seem like a great time to launch a SaaS startup, but the landscape is crowded with well-designed applications that promise “blazingly fast and delightfully simple” experiences, according to seed-stage investor John Chen of Fika Ventures. Most SaaS startups will fail, but not because of a sour marketing campaign or server downtime. The majority…

John Chen Contributor Share on Twitter John is a principal at Fika Ventures in Los Angeles. More posts by this contributor How Silicon Valley should celebrate Labor Day Rebuilding employee philanthropy from the bottom up By the time I joined Box in late 2012, the “consumerization of the enterprise” movement was well underway. The playbook…