Author: TechCrunch News

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Mary Ann took over this week’s show with Chris and Grace, which meant that our overdeveloped senses of curiosity filled up the script just fine (even on a somewhat short week). Unintentionally, today’s episode was built around…

Microsoft said in January this year that Teams, its online collaboration platform, was being used by over 100 million students — boosted in no small part by the COVID-19 pandemic and many schools going partly or fully remote. Now, it’s made another acquisition to continue expanding its position in the education market. The company has…

The aviation industry is notoriously difficult to decarbonize, in part because airplanes use a petroleum-based fuel to fly. Alder Fuels wants to change that. The new clean tech company, headed by Bryan Sherbacow, is developing a low-carbon jet fuel that can be used as a 100% drop-in replacement for petroleum fuel, without needing to adapt…

Supabase, the backend-as-a-service startup, announced this week that it raised a $30 million Series A. Supabase is often described as an open source alternative to Google’s Firebase … which is a pretty good way to put it for those who know what Firebase is. For those who don’t: Supabase is a collection of tools that…

Artem Milinchuk Contributor Artem Milinchuk is the founder and CEO of FarmTogether, a fintech platform channeling funding into natural assets, starting with U.S. farmland. Farmland as an asset class has proven itself to be a stable investment decade after decade. Farmland’s negative correlation with the Dow Jones Industrial Average sits at an eye-popping -43% for…

The travel industry was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, and startup Headout was no exception. A marketplace that let tourists make same-day bookings for tours, events and activities, the app expanded around the world after launching in 2015. Then COVID-19 hit. But business is growing again thanks to rebounds in domestic travel and…

Cao Cao Mobility, the ride-hailing unit of Chinese automaker Geely Automobile Holdings, has announced a $589 million (RMB 3.8 billion) Series B raise that the company says will help it upgrade its technology and expand its fleet, according to a statement released by the company (in Chinese). The raise, which Cao Cao announced on Monday,…

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. Hello and welcome back to the Daily Crunch for Tuesday, September 7, 2021! Your regular host Alex Wilhelm is AFK for the next few days, so I (Greg Kumparak) will be handling…

Francophone Africa has its first unicorn, and if you’ve been following tech on the continent, you will be very unsurprised to hear that it’s coming from the world of fintech. Wave, a U.S. and Senegal-based mobile money provider, has raised $200 million in Series A round of funding. The investment is the largest-ever Series A…

Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber is in advanced stages of talks to raise a new financing round at up to $2 billion in valuation, several sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. If the talks materialize in a deal, CoinSwitch Kuber will become the second crypto startup in the world’s second largest internet market to…