A first look at Coursera’s S-1 filing

After TechCrunch broke the news yesterday that Coursera was planning to file its S-1 today, the edtech company officially dropped the document Friday evening. Coursera was last valued at $2.4 billion by the private markets, when it most recently raised a Series F round in October 2020 that was worth $130 million. Coursera’s S-1 filing offers a glimpse into the finances of how an edtech company, accelerated by the pandemic, performed over the past year. It paints a picture of growth, albeit one that came at steep expense. Revenue In 2020, Coursera...

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Deep Science: AI adventures in arts and letters

There’s more AI news out there than anyone can possibly keep up with. But you can stay tolerably up to date on the most interesting developments with this column, which collects AI and machine learning advancements from around the world and explains why they might be important to tech, startups or civilization. To begin on a lighthearted note: The ways researchers find to apply machine learning to the arts are always interesting — though not always practical. A team from the University of Washington wanted to see if a computer vision system could...

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How and when to hire your first product manager

In the world of early-stage startups, job titles are often a formality. In reality, each employee may handle a dozen responsibilities outside their job description. The choose-your-own-adventure type of work style is part of the magic of startups and often why generalists thrive here. However, as a company progresses and the team grows, there comes a time when a founder needs to carve out dedicated roles. Of these positions, product management might be one of the most elusive — and key — roles to fill. Product management might be one of the most...

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Dan Siroker’s new startup Scribe automates Zoom note-taking

Optimizely co-founder Dan Siroker said the idea for his new startup Scribe goes back to a couple of personal experiences — and although Scribe’s first product is focused on Zoom, those experiences weren’t Zoom-related at all. Instead, Siroker recalled starting to go deaf and then having an “epiphany” the first time he put in a hearing aid, as he recovered a sense he thought he’d lost. “That really was the spark that got me thinking about other opportunities to augment things your body naturally fails at,” he said. Siroker added that memory was...

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How Rani Therapeutics’ robotic pill could change subcutaneous injection treament

A new auto-injecting pill might soon become a replacement for subcutaneous injection treatments. The idea for this so-called robotic pill came out of a research project around eight years ago from InCube Labs—a life sciences lab operated by Rani Therapeutics Chairman and CEO Mir Imran, who has degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering from Rutgers University. A prominent figure in life sciences innovation, Imran has founded over 20 medical device companies and helped develop the world’s first implantable cardiac defibrillator. In working...

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Address cybersecurity challenges before rolling out robotic process automation

Alan Radford Contributor Alan Radford is regional CTO of One Identity and has a passion for helping organizations solve unique challenges in the identity and access management space. Robotic process automation (RPA) is making a major impact across every industry. But many don’t know how common the technology is and may not realize that they are interacting with it regularly. RPA is a growing megatrend — by 2022, Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations globally will have adopted RPA and its received over $1.8 billion in investments in the...

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Eco raises $26M in a16z-led round to scale its digital cryptocurrency platform

‍Eco, which has built out a digital global cryptocurrency platform, announced Friday that it has raised $26 million in a funding round led by a16z Crypto. Founded in 2018, the SF-based startup’s platform is designed to be used as a payment tool around the world for daily-use transactions. The company emphasizes that it’s “not a bank, checking account, or credit card.” “We’re building something better than all of those combined,” it said in a blog post. The company’s mission has also been described as an effort to use cryptocurrency as a way “to...

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Early-stage investor Mayfield shows how to scale up your biotech startup at TC Early Stage in April

Founders in the earliest stages of startup life face a hefty learning curve. Just some of the core competencies you need to lock down include how to raise VC funding, recruiting the right people, finding product-market fit and building a killer go-to-market team. The list goes on and on…and on. You’ll learn about all those topics and more at TechCrunch Early Stage Operations & Fundraising taking place on April 1-2.  Do you science? Are you inspired to use biology as technology? If your entrepreneurial interests lean toward the scientific...

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The technology selloff is getting to be somewhat material

Tech stocks are getting hammered today, with previously high-flying shares of software companies taking even more damage. For a sector that has enjoyed a year in the sun, recent trading sessions have punctured a period of market adoration. It is too soon to say that the market is repricing tech stocks, but the selloff has reached the point of materiality and is therefore something we need to note. As we write, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite is off another 1.2% today after previous declines. The now-infamous ARK Innovation ETF is off 6.5% and the...

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YC-backed Pangea discusses growth, fundraising ahead of demo day

Pangea, a marketplace startup that wants to connect college freelancers and companies in need of digital help, is seeing its growth rate accelerate as it races toward the impending Y Combinator demo day. It’s traditional around this time that startups in the accelerator reach out to say hello. Provided that they are willing to chat growth metrics, we’re willing to listen. Pangea, based in Providence, Rhode Island, is one such company. TechCrunch previously covered the company when it announced a $400,000 pre-seed round last April. Now most of the...

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Understanding how investors value growth in 2021

We’re not digging into another IPO filing today. You can read all about AppLovin’s filing here, or ThredUp’s document here. This morning, instead, we’re talking about an old favorite: software valuations. The folks over at Battery Ventures have compiled a lengthy dive into the 2020 software market that’s worth our time — you can read along here; I’ll provide page numbers as we go — because it helps explain some software valuations. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter...

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SoftBank makes mountains of cash off of human laziness

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. It was yet another crazy week, but did our best to get through as much of it as we could. Here’s the rundown, in case you are reading along with us! Square is buying Tidal in a deal that some are skeptical of, but one about which we found quite a lot to like. How capital-as-a-service...

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Scrum Ventures launches new program to connect startups with Japanese corporations

Masami Takahashi, the president of Scrum Studios Headquartered in San Francisco and Tokyo, Scrum Ventures is known for its accelerator programs focused on sports, food and smart city tech. Today it announced the launch of a new incubator program that will help startups from business partnerships with Japanese corporations. Called Scrum Studio, it will be spun out as an independent entity from Scrum Ventures, and headed by Masami Takahasi, who was previously strategy officer and general manager for WeWork Japan. Before that, he led Uber’s operations...

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How Pariti is connecting founders with capital, resources and talent in emerging markets

According to Startup Genome, Beijing, London, Silicon Valley, Stockholm, Tel Aviv are some of the world’s best startup ecosystems. The data and research organisation uses factors like performance, capital, market reach, connectedness, talent, and knowledge to produce its rankings. Startup ecosystems from emerging markets excluding China and India didn’t make the organisations’ top 40 list last year. It is a known fact that these regions lag well behind in all six factors, and decades might pass before they catch up to the standards of the aforementioned...

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Indonesian logistics startup SiCepat raises $170 million Series B

SiCepat, an end-to-end logistics startup in Indonesia, announced today it has raised a $170 million Series B funding round. Founded in 2014 to provide last-mile deliveries for small merchants, the company has since expanded to serve large e-commerce platforms, too. Its services now also cover warehousing and fulfillment, middle-mile logistics and online distribution. Investors in SiCepat’s Series B include Falcon House Partners; Kejora Capital; DEG (the German Development Finance Institution); Telkom Indonesia’s investment arm MDI Ventures; Indies...

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