Here comes the next IPO wave

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. Are you tired? I am. What a week. But, if you kept your eyes off American politics and instead focused on the stock market, this was not a week of stress at all. It was a celebration. Yes, the election appears to be influencing stocks, with investors delighted at what could be a divided government. Their bet is that with different parties in control of different bits of the government, nothing...

Read More

The gig economy, cannabis and car data are tech-election winners in 2020

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. The US is settling in for some new form of national gridlock, but state and local propositions are busy defining how technology businesses will be allowed to work (legally) in the US. Policies on topics as broad as customer usage and employment or as narrow as a drug chemical got the vote across the country. The results provide a blueprint for what you might expect to see in many more places. Perhaps...

Read More

Extra Crunch roundup: B2B marketplaces, edtech M&A, breaking into the $1M ARR club

I’ve worked at TechCrunch for a little over a year, but this was one of the hardest weeks on the job so far. Like many people, I’ve been distracted in recent days. As I write this, I have one eye on my keyboard and another on a TV that sporadically broadcasts election results from battleground states. Despite the background noise, I’m completely impressed with the TechCrunch staff; it takes a great deal of focus and energy to set aside the world’s top news story and concentrate on the work at hand. Monday feels like a distant memory, so here’s...

Read More

Startups making meat alternatives are gaining traction worldwide

Startups that produce lab-grown meat and meat substitutes are gaining traction and raising cash in global markets, mirroring a surge of support food tech companies are seeing in the United States. New partnerships with global chains like McDonald’s in Hong Kong, the launch of test kitchens in Israel and new financing rounds for startups in Sydney and Singapore point to abounding opportunities in international markets for meat alternatives. In Hong Kong, fresh off a $70 million round of funding, Green Monday Holdings’ OmniFoods business unit was...

Read More

Provizio closes $6.2M seed round for its car safety platform using sensors and AI

Provizio, a combination hardware and software startup with technology to improve car safety, has closed a seed investment round of $6.2million. Investors include Bobby Hambrick (the founder of Autonomous Stuff); the founders of Movidius; the European Innovation Council (EIC); ACT Venture Capital. The startup has a “five-dimensional” sensory platform that — it says — perceives, predicts and prevents car accidents in real time and beyond the line-of-sight. Its “Accident Prevention Technology Platform” combines proprietary vision sensors, machine...

Read More

Funded by Connect Ventures, Purple Dot plans to take on Klarna-style purchase debt

In recent times startups have appeared offering credit at an e-commerce basket checkout so that a customer can buy a product without needing to pay right away. Klarna or Clearpay are the two most notable in this field. But what if you flipped the model around so that consumers could buy the item at a lower price later on, and the retailer could reduce waste? This is the model of Purple Dot, which bills itself as a “worth-the-wait” payment option for fashion brands. It’s now raised a seed round of £1.35 million, led by Connect Ventures, with support...

Read More

Chinese autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai hits $5.3 billion valuation

Pony.ai, the Chinese autonomous vehicle startup and relative newcomer to the industry, is now valued at $5.3 billion following a fresh injection of $267 million in funding. The round was led by TIP, an innovation fund within the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board that focuses on late-stage venture and growth equity investments in companies that deliver disruptive technology. Existing partners Fidelity China Special Situations PLC, 5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital), ClearVue Partners and Eight Roads also participated in the round. The...

Read More

French startups can apply to the Next40 and French Tech 120

Last year, the French government and the government-backed initiative La French Tech unveiled an index of French startups so that it would be easier to identify them. The 40 top-performing startups get the label Next40, and the top 120 startups are grouped into the French Tech 120 — it’s a play on words with the CAC40 and SBF 120 stock indexes. Here’s a list of the 40 private companies in this year’s Next40: Image Credits: La French Tech But creating a club without perks would be a bit useless. That’s why you get some perks as a member of the...

Read More

Software companies are reporting a pretty good third quarter

What a difference a week makes. This time last week, in the wake of earnings from tech’s five largest American companies and early results from other software companies, it appeared that tech shares were in danger of losing their mojo. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. But then, this week’s rally launched, and more earnings results came in. Generally speaking, the Q3 numbers from SaaS and cloud companies have been medium-good, or at least good...

Read More

Slintel grabs $4.2M seed to grow sales intelligence platform

As the pandemic rages on, companies are looking for an edge when it comes to sales. Having the right data about the customers most likely to convert can be a huge boost right now. Slintel, an early stage startup building a sales intelligence tool, announced a $4.2 million seed round today. The investment was led by Accel with help from Sequoia Capital India and existing investor Stellaris Venture Partners. The company reports it has now raised $5.7 million including a pre-seed round last year. Deepak Anchala, company founder and CEO, says that...

Read More

Challenger bank Starling is out raising a new £200M funding round

Starling founder Anne Boden recently told TechCrunch that the U.K. challenger bank is on track to be profitable by Christmas, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t out raising additional capital already. According to well-placed sources, Starling has hired Rothschild with the aim of raising a new £200 million round. The draw is its expected profitability, which one source says is already creating private equity investor interest. Starling declined to comment. Having raised £363 million to date, including a £100 million state-aid grant, Starling now boasts...

Read More

PUBG Mobile plots return to India following ban

{rss:content:encoded} PUBG Mobile plots return to India following ban https://ift.tt/3l3g3eB https://ift.tt/38habeg November 06, 2020 at 06:20AM PUBG Mobile, the sleeper hit title that was banned in India two months ago over cybersecurity concerns, is plotting to make a return in the world’s second largest internet market, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The South Korean firm has engaged with global cloud service providers in recent weeks to store Indian users’ data within the country to allay New Delhi’s concerns about user...

Read More

Steve Bannon’s show pulled off Twitter and YouTube over calls for violence

Former Presidential advisor and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon had his show suspended from Twitter and an episode removed by YouTube after calling for violence against FBI director Christopher Wray and the government’s leading pandemic expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Bannon, speaking with co-host Jack Maxey, was discussing what Trump should do in a hypothetical second term. He suggested firing Wray and Fauci, but then went further, saying “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them...

Read More

Facebook takes down ‘Stop the Steal 2020’ group organizing around false claims of election chicanery

Facebook has taken down a group that had amassed more than 300,000 members and was sharing misinformation and organizing around false allegations of impropriety during the 2020 elections. The group, called “Stop the Steal 2020,” was organizing protests targeting the election officials currently counting ballots cast in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Phoenix and Las Vegas. “In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,”...

Read More

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is reportedly looking for $2B before its Hong Kong public offering

ByteDance, the company behind the social media sensation TikTok, is in talks to raise another $2 billion before the initial public offering of a large chunk of its international businesses on the Hong Kong StockExchange, according to a Bloomberg report. The new financing would give the Chinese tech powerhouse a valuation of $180 billion, according to people cited by Bloomberg. Investors, including ByteDance’s existing backers like Sequoia, are in the running to finance the new investment, the Bloomberg report said. Sequoia had emerged as one of...

Read More