Author: TechCrunch News

Challenger bank Point has raised a $46.5 million Series B funding round. The company offers an account associated with a debit card. And the startup positions itself as a premium debit card company and tries to offer credit card rewards with debit cards. Existing investor Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures is investing more money in the…

Forum Brands, an e-commerce acquisition platform, announced today that it has secured $100 million in debt funding from TriplePoint Capital. The financing comes just just over two months after the startup raised $27 million in an equity funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Brenton Howland, Ruben Amar and Alex Kopco founded New York-based Forum…

Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. To…

Heroes, one of the new wave of startups aiming to build big e-commerce businesses by buying up smaller third-party merchants on Amazon’s Marketplace, has raised another big round of funding to double down on that strategy. The London startup has picked up $200 million, money that it will mainly be using to snap up more…

Square’s popular free invoicing software is becoming the company’s next big subscription service. The company is poised to announce a paid subscription offering called Invoices Plus, which will offer sellers a set of advanced features, including some that had previously been available with the free service. The service itself had been quietly introduced to individual…

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 to Daily Crunch for August 30, 2021. The startup world is gearing up for Y Combinator Demo Day this week, but the rest of tech isn’t taking a pause.…

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The biggest news of the week again comes from Beijing’s ongoing effort to dampen the influence of the country’s tech giants. Regulators are now going after…

Ho Chi Minh City-based Vietcetera, a digital medial network originally created for millennials and Gen-Z, will broaden its target demographic after getting $2.7 million in pre-Series A funding. The capital was raised over two rounds this year, led by media-focused venture firm North Base Media. Other investors included Go-Ventures, Gojek’s corporate venture arm; East Ventures;…

Urbanbase, a Seoul-based company that develops a 3D spatial data platform for interior planning and design, announced today it has raised $11.1 million (13 billion won) in a Series B+ round as it scales up. This round of funding was led by Hanwha Hotel & Resort, which is a subsidiary of South Korean conglomerate Hanwha…

Dr. Yifat Aran is a visiting scholar at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and an Assistant Professor in Haifa University Faculty of Law. She earned her JSD from Stanford Law School where her dissertation focused on equity-based compensation in Silicon Valley startups. More posts by this contributor The ownership of startups is often a…