Startups Weekly: 2019 VC spending may eclipse 2018 record

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups & venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I struggled to understand WeWork’s growth trajectory. Before that, I noted some thoughts on scooter companies’ struggle to raise new cash. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here. What’s on my...

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A 23-year-old B2B company has shown how keen India is for tech IPOs

Away from the limelight of the press and the frenzy of fundraising, a tech startup in India has achieved a feat that few of its peers have managed: going public. IndiaMART, the country’s largest online platform for selling products directly to businesses, raised nearly $70 million in a rare tech IPO for India this week. The milestone for the 23-year-old firm is so uncommon for India’s otherwise burgeoning startup ecosystem that, beyond being over-subscribed 36 times, pent up demand for IndiaMART’s stock saw its share price pop 40% on its first...

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Daily Crunch: Layoffs at HQ Trivia

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions The cuts hit HQ’s HR, marketing and product engineering teams, according to LinkedIn profiles of employees let go. The cuts could further hamper morale at the startup following a tough first half of the year. It also could leave the company short-handed as it attempts to diversify revenue with the upcoming...

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Waresix hauls in $14.5M to advance its push to digitize logistics in Indonesia

Waresix, one of a handful of startups aiming to modernize logistics in Indonesia — the world’s fourth most populous country — has pulled in $14.5 million to grow its 18-month-old business. This new investment, Waresix’s Series A, is led by EV Growth — the growth-stage fund co-run by East Ventures — with participation from SMDV — the investment arm of Indonesia corporation Sinar Mas — and Singapore’s Jungle Ventures. The startup previously raised $1.6 million last year from East Ventures, SMDV and Monk’s Hill Ventures. It closed a seed round in...

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Karamel is an app to find activities for your kids

French startup Karamel wants to help you find things to do for your kids. The company is launching a mobile app that lets you find and book kid-friendly activities around you. The startup also just raised a $450,000 round (€400,000) from Kima Ventures, Roxanne Varza and Thibaud Elzière. Varza participates in the Atomico Angel Programme, which means that Atomico handed out $100,000 to invest in multiple early-stage companies. Atomico and Varza both see returns if the company eventually succeeds. Karamel wants to become a one-stop shop for things...

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Investing elsewhere with Revolutions’s Clara Sieg

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. I was in the studio alone this week with the wonderful Clara Sieg of Revolution, an early-stage venture capital fund that invests in disruptive startups from underrepresented geographies. As you might have guessed, we talked about the rising trend of investors backing companies from “second-tier” markets like Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Philadelphia, Seattle, etc. Clara herself hails from Pittsburgh, an up and coming...

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Clever Cloud launches GPU-based instances

French startup Clever Cloud is a cloud hosting company that operates a Platform as a Service (or PaaS). The company just launched GPU-based instances for machine learning purposes under a new brand, Clever Grid. Behind the scene, the company uses Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. You get billed by the minute and the most basic instance costs €0.42 per hour, or €10 per day, or €300 per month. For this price, you get 6GB of RAM, an 8-core CPU, a one GPU and 250GB of storage. Of course, you can pay more to access beefier machines. If you max out your GPU instance,...

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Smart scooter company Gogoro launches GoShare, an end-to-end vehicle sharing platform

Founded in 2011, Gogoro now makes the best-selling electric scooters in Taiwan, where it is headquartered. The startup has always seen itself as an end-to-end platform developer, however, and today it marked a major milestone with the announcement of a new vehicle sharing system. Called GoShare, the program will start operating with a pilot fleet of about 1,000 Gogoro smart scooters next month in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, before becoming available as a turnkey solution for partners. Gogoro, which develops everything from their scooters and batteries...

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UnitedMasters releases iPhone app for DIY cross-service music distribution

{rss:content:encoded} UnitedMasters releases iPhone app for DIY cross-service music distribution https://ift.tt/2LBc1LS https://ift.tt/2Yyh9np July 04, 2019 at 08:25PM Alphabet-backed UnitedMasters, the music label distribution startup and record label alternative that offers artists 100 percent ownership of everything they create, launched its iPhone app today. The iPhone app works like the service they used to offer only via the web, giving artists the chance to upload their own tracks (from iCloud, Dropbox or directly from text messages), then...

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UnitedMasters releases iPhone app for DIY cross-service music distribution

Alphabet-backed UnitedMasters, the music label distribution startup and record label alternative that offers artists 100 percent ownership of everything they create, launched its iPhone app today. The iPhone app works like the service they used to offer only via the web, giving artists the chance to upload their own tracks (from iCloud, Dropbox or directly from text messages), then distribute them to a full range of streaming music platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and more. In exchange for this distribution, as well as analytics...

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HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions

HQ Trivia is struggling after a mutiny failed to oust its CEO. Downloads per month are down 92% versus last June according to Sensor Tower. And now four sources confirm that HQ laid off staff members this week. One said about 20% of staff was let go, and another said six to seven employees were departing. That aligns with Digiday reporter Kerry Flynn’s tweet that 7 employees were let go bringing HQ to under 30 (shrinking from 35 to 28 staffers would be a 20% drop). That will leave the company short-handed as it attempts to diversify revenue with...

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HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions

{rss:content:encoded} HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions https://ift.tt/2LC5IYy https://ift.tt/2FSAPey July 04, 2019 at 06:43PM HQ Trivia is struggling after a mutiny failed to oust its CEO. Downloads per month are down 92% versus last June according to Sensor Tower. And now four sources confirm that HQ laid off staff members this week. One said about 20% of staff was let go, and another said six to seven employees were departing. That aligns with Digiday reporter Kerry Flynn’s tweet that 7 employees were let go bringing HQ to under...

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HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions

HQ Trivia is struggling after a mutiny failed to oust its CEO. Downloads per month are down 92% versus last June according to Sensor Tower. And now four sources confirm that HQ laid off staff members this week. One said about 20% of staff was let go, and another said six to seven employees were departing. That aligns with Digiday reporter Kerry Flynn’s tweet that 7 employees were let go bringing HQ to under 30 (shrinking from 35 to 28 staffers would be a 20% drop). That will leave the company short-handed as it attempts to diversify revenue with...

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Why you should naturalize — now, not later

It’s no secret that America thrives on tech-savvy immigrants who put down permanent roots: Three in five of the country’s biggest tech companies — Apple, Facebook, and Google among them — were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Those giants combined boast a market cap of over $4 trillion and employ nearly two million workers. Considering such clear economic benefits, you’d expect an efficient, straightforward process for turning America’s tech-savviest new arrivals into U.S. citizens. But that’s not the case. Naturalizing has...

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