Beyond ‘Netflix Party’: startups and their VCs bet we’ll browse more of the web together

Last year, during the pandemic, a free browser extension called Netflix Party gained traction because it enabled people trapped in their homes to connect with far-flung friends and family by watching the same Netflix TV shows and movies simultaneously. It also enabled them to dish about the action in a side bar chat. Yet that company — later renamed Teleparty — was just the beginning, argue two young companies that have raised seed funding. One, a year-old upstart in London that launched in December, just closed its round this week led by Craft...

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Growth marketing roundup: cool SaaS, marketing lies, VR ads and more

One might think that a short week due to a U.S. holiday calls for a short weekly recap, but we have plenty to share about growth marketing from our coverage over the week. With the help of your recommendations, this week we were able to interview Peep Laja and Lucy Heskins, and publish multiple guest columns on growth-related topics including homepage testing, marketing lies to watch out for, VR ad opportunities, company-naming and ad compliance. TechCrunch is collecting responses in this survey to find the best growth marketer for founders to...

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Cloud security platform Netskope boosts valuation to $7.5B following $300M raise

Netskope, focused on Secure Access Service Edge architecture, announced Friday a $300 million investment round on a post-money valuation of $7.5 billion. The oversubscribed insider investment was led by ICONIQ Growth, which was joined by other existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Base Partners, Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital. Netskope co-founder and CEO Sanjay Beri told TechCrunch that since its founding in 2012, the company’s mission has been to guide companies through their...

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Extra Crunch roundup: NS1 EC-1, Pakistan’s tech ecosystem, SPACs bonanza

Did you see the viral videos of yesterday’s flooding in New York City subways? In one, riders waded through brown, waist-deep water; another video showed a cascade rushing down a flight of stairs to a subway platform where passengers waited for a train. Infrastructure doesn’t attract much attention until it fails. Domain name services (DNS), the system that directs readers to techcrunch.com when they say or speak it into their web browser, are much the same way. For the latest entry in a series of longform articles that explore the inner workings...

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This early-stage marketing expert says ‘B2B SaaS is actually very, very cool now’

Doing more with less: This is what marketers get asked for when they join an early-stage startup. British consultant Lucy Heskins knows firsthand how overwhelming that can be, which is why her services can both replace and complement early in-house marketing staff. Either way, it often involves educating the founders about the job to be done. “Too many people fail to realize that marketing is the process of understanding your customers, building appropriate channels to reach them and ultimately meeting their needs (profitability),” she wrote on...

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WhatsApp is adding a ‘best quality’ setting for sending photos and videos

Kris Holt Contributor Share on Twitter Kris Holt is a contributing writer at Engadget. WhatsApp is working on a setting that will let users more easily bypass its iffy image compression and send photos and videos in the highest available fidelity. The “best quality” option will likely join “auto” and “data saver” choices in a future version of the app. It appears users will eventually have the choice of whether to compress photos and videos to perhaps save on their data allowance, send them in the best available quality or let WhatsApp...

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Didomi raises $40 million to help you manage customer consent

French startup Didomi has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Elephant and Breega. The company manages consent flows for web publishers and app developers. Didomi is already doing well in Europe with billions of consent interactions per month — it plans to expand to the U.S. with today’s funding round. “Jawad, Raphaël and I have co-founded Didomi to make privacy easier for everyone and an obvious choice for companies. This fundraising is a major milestone on our journey to deliver on this mission,” co-founder and CEO Romain Gauthier...

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Startups have never had it so good

The venture capital market is racing ahead, foot on the gas, middle finger out the window, hair on fire. That’s our read of the Q2 2021 data released thus far concerning how much money venture capitalists deployed around the world during the second three months of the year. Startups have never had it this good when it comes to accessing private-market funds. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. The second quarter of 2021 was the biggest quarter...

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Mmhmm, it’s the most ridiculous story we’ve ever heard

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. Natasha will be back with us starting next week. So, it was old times on the show with just two of our team to vamp on the news. And oh boy was there a lot of news to get into. Like, loads. What’s going on with Didi? Didi’s woes have continued this week, with the company seeing its share price continue to fall. The...

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PowerZ raises $8.3 million for its video game focused on education

French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The company is both an edtech startup and a video game studio with an ambitious goal — it wants to build a game that is as engaging as Minecraft or Fortnite, but with a focus on education. In February, PowerZ launched the first version of its game on computers. It doesn’t have a lot of content, but the company wanted to start iterating as quickly as possible. Aimed at kids...

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Circle is a good example of why SPACs can be useful

In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing earlier this year, other crypto companies may be looking to go public sooner than later. That appears to be the case with Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Circle will not direct list or pursue a traditional IPO. Instead, the company is combining with Concord Acquisition Corp., a SPAC, or blank-check...

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Rootly nabs $3.2M seed to build SRE incident management solution inside Slack

As companies look for ways to respond to incidents in their complex micro services-driven software stacks, SREs or site reliability engineers are left to deal with the issues involved in making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Rootly, a new early stage startup wants to help by building an incident response solution inside of Slack. Today the company emerged from stealth with a $3.2 million seed investment. XYZ Venture Capital led the round with participation from 8VC, Y Combinator and several individual tech executives. Rootly...

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