How pitch training can help startups get their story right

When you hire a marketing consultant, you don’t necessarily expect to wind up discussing your life’s purpose. Yet, that is what Spanish marketing expert and entrepreneur Alex Barrera often ends up doing with startup founders who hire him to help improve their pitch. They think they are going to get help convincing investors, and they do, but the byproduct of the process is that they reframe their startup’s vision. In this context, ethical and philosophical considerations aren’t that far away, because more often than not, this includes a deep look...

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With open banking on the horizon, the fintech-SME love story is just beginning

Lee Li Contributor Share on Twitter Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan and DouYin (now TikTok). The fintech sector has been hugely successful (and hugely profitable) for much of the last decade, and even more so during the pandemic. But it might come as a surprise to learn that many in the industry believe that the story is just beginning and the sector is poised to achieve much more, with fintech’s next decade expected to be radically...

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In an increasingly hot biotech market, protecting IP is key

John Flavin Contributor Share on Twitter John Flavin is founder and CEO of Portal Innovations, LLC. More posts by this contributor 2021 should be a banner year for biotech startups that make smart choices early Kevin O’Connor Contributor Share on Twitter Kevin A. O'Connor, Ph.D., is a partner in the Intellectual Property practice group at Neal Gerber Eisenberg. After a record year for biotech investment in 2020 — during which the industry saw $28.5 billion invested across 1,073 deals — the market for new innovations remains strong....

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Extra Crunch roundup: Think like a VC, CockroachDB EC-1, handle your stock options

Ants and camels are famously resilient, but when it was time to select a name for a startup that offers open-source, cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the final candidate. Database technology is fundamental infrastructure, which partially explains why it’s so resistant to innovation: Oracle Database was released in 1979, and MySQL didn’t reach the market until 1995. Since hitting the market six years ago, CockroachDB has become “a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender,” writes...

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Digital lending platform Blend valued at over $4B in its public debut

Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business. And if you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may or may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there’s a good chance that company is Blend. Founded in 2012, the startup has steadily grown to be a leader in the mortgage tech industry. Blend’s white label technology powers mortgage applications on the site of banks including Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, for example, with the goal of making the process faster, simpler and more transparent.  The...

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Visualping raises $6M to make its website change monitoring service smarter

Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE Ventures, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of Ignition Partners last year. Prior investors Mistral Venture Partners and N49P also participated. The Vancouver-based company is part of the current Google for Startups Accelerator class in Canada. This program focuses on services...

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Nym gets $6M for its anonymous overlay mixnet to sell privacy as a service

Switzerland-based privacy startup Nym Technologies has raised $6 million, which is being loosely pegged as a Series A round. Earlier raises included a $2.5 million seed round in 2019. The founders also took in grant money from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research fund during an earlier R&D phase developing the network tech. The latest funding will be used to continue commercial development of network infrastructure which combines an old idea for obfuscating the metadata of data packets at the transport network layer (Mixnets) with a crypto...

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