Most of the time, investors dont even know they are acting on these biases. They dont realize they may have already written you off, which is part of the problem.

A code repository used by the New York state governments IT department was left exposed on the internet, allowing anyone to access the projects inside, some of which contained secret keys and passwords associated with state government systems. The exposed GitLab server was discovered on Saturday by Dubai-based SpiderSilk, a cybersecurity company credited with discovering []

Snap today announced a multi-year deal with Universal Music Group, one of the largest music companies in the world. From Queen to Justin Bieber, users can clip songs from the expansive UMG catalog to use in their Snaps and on Spotlight, the apps TikTok competitor. This announcement comes after Snapchat added its Sounds feature in []

BuzzFeed had a hard time with growth in 2020, but its deck showcases big optimism about the future of its leading business (advertising) and growth business (commerce).

SmartAsset, a marketplace that connects consumers to financial advisors, announced today that it has raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding. The financing values New York-based SmartAsset at over $1 billion, and brings its total raised since its 2012 inception to just over $161 million, according to Crunchbase. TTV Capital led SmartAssets []

In the U.S, after you get vaccinated against COVID-19 you are given a small paper card issued by the CDC that is essentially the only evidence that youve received your shots. It might seem like a flimsy level of proof, one that you could easily lose, but replacing that paper copy with a digital one []

As we become more and more aware of the kind of impact we are having on this planet we call our home, just about everything is having its CO2 impact measured. Who knew, until recently, that streaming Netflix might have a measurable impact on the environment, for instance. But given vast swathes of the Internet []

Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies.

What are the most important factors when youre pitching your startup for fundraising? What questions come to the minds of the VCs youre pitching? How do you get the deal across the finish line? Or choose the right investors for your company to begin with? Extra Crunch Live looks to answer all these questions and []

Having read more SPAC investor decks in the last twelve months than Id like to admit to, I thought I was over being irked by their bullishness. Call me conservative, but public companies shouldnt be full of shit, and companies going public should probably aim for a similar target. Thats why S-1 filings for traditional []

Ecosystems make strange bedfellows. Heres one of the stranger in recent memory and one of the most unexpected bits of news from todays Windows 11 event. Microsoft announced today that it will be making Android apps available on the next major version of its operating system. Chief Product Officer Panos Panay called the addition, []

The other week at TC Sessions: Mobility, I spoke to a trio of executives at top automotive companies about why theyre all so bullish about robotics. There are the obvious implications, of course. Automakers have long employed robotics for manufacturing they were really ahead of the curve on those concerns about automating job loss. []

Happy Windows 11 day. Microsoft is giving us our best look yet at its upcoming operating system, which is due out over the holidays. Following a year when the vast majority of our interpersonal communications arrived through computer and phone screens, the company is putting its communication software front and center. Windows 11 will have []

After weeks of leaks and hype, Microsoft today officially announced Windows 11, the next version of its desktop operating system. While the company may have once said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, forgoing major point launches for a regular cadence of bi-annual upgrades, but it clearly believes that the changes []

Happs, an app that lets creators stream live video simultaneously across social platforms, has raised $4.7 million in a post-seed round. The product originally began as a platform for independent journalists, but expanded its mission last year to offer tools to all online creators while connecting them through a new social network. The funding was []

Few spaces have grown hotter in the past year than the creator economy has, but for all of the new tools available to those starting a podcast, newsletter or storefront, most players have been more focused on building out their own platform opportunity rather than selling full independence to creators. Spore wants to transform the []

Content is king, as the saying goes. But in actual fact, a lot of what companies do today with content, and thus the power of that content, is relatively limited by the tools that exist to present it. That is slowly changing, and now a startup called Sanity, which has built a system to make []

News that the firm is making $2.2 billion in capital available for crypto projects is driving this morning's headlines, but the dollar figure should not be a surprise.

As companies deliver code ever faster, they need tooling to provide some semblance of control and governance over the cloud resources being used to deliver it. Env0, a startup that is helping companies do just that, announced a $17 million Series A today. M12, Microsofts Venture Fund, led the round with participation from previous investors []

The business operation automation startup's CEO says the new capital will give it the space it needs to hire and build faster than if it continued to operate from a smaller capital case.

Throughout its four or so years of life, the Equity podcast crew has had the good fortune to record a few live shows. We sat on the small stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, for example, with Garry Tan one year, and Charles Hudson another. Weve also ventured to other venues and events with varying levels of []

Update: Google has now confirmed the delay, writing in a blog post that its engagement with UK regulators over the so-called Privacy Sandbox means support for tracking cookies wont start being phased out in Chrome until the second half of 2023. We plan to continue to work with the web community to create more private []

JW Player, a very early mover in the market for online video technology it powered YouTubes first video player, before Google acquired it and it built its own has long been profitable through a business model of providing one-to-many video streaming tools to publishers and others that want to bring video into their []

Electric propulsion developer Orbion Space Technology has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round, which it says it will use to scale production capacity of its Aurora propulsion system. The Michigan-based startup manufactures Hall effect plasma thrusters for use in small and cube satellites. Thrusters are used throughout the lifespan of a satellite []

Volvo Cars and Luminar Technologies are beefing up their partnership. The two companies said Thursday that Luminars autonomous driving stack a combination of hardware and software that includes lidar sensors and a proprietary perception system will be standard on Volvos forthcoming flagship electric SUV. Luminar had previously announced the production deal with Volvo []

A lot of startups were built to help people make all-cash offers on homes with the purpose of gaining an edge against other buyers, especially in ultra-competitive markets. Accepti.inc is a Denver-based company that is attempting to create a new category in real estate technology. To help scale its digital mortgage lending platform, the company []

Its no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we shop, especially when it comes to groceries. Grocery delivery apps experienced a record number of downloads in March 2020, and by the following month, Walmart Grocery (which is now integrated into the Walmart app) surpassed Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app on []

BMWs Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm is investing in Kodiak Robotics, a company that develops autonomous trucking technology. Kodiak will use the funds to build out a safety case for its self-driving tech stack so it can more quickly commercialize. It will also work on hiring fresh talent and expanding its truck fleet, with a []

Deliveroo has had another win in the UK courts, beating back an appeal by the IWGB union which has sought for years to challenge the gig platform over couriers rights but has continued to fail to overturn the companys classification of riders as self-employed. The latest appeals court ruling is the fourth judgment in the []

Visa has announced plans to acquire Tink for 1.8 billion, or $2.15 billion at todays exchange rate. Tink has been a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interface (API). Todays move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned []

Remittances specifically when people in developed countries send money to family or friends in emerging markets continues to be a huge lever to help those in more challenging economies survive and improve their lot. Today, a startup that has built a remittance platform that it believes is the most economically sympathetic and useful []

While the cryptocurrency markets most recent hype wave seems to be dying down after a spectacular rise, Andreessen Horowitzs crypto arm is reaffirming its commitment to startups building blockchain projects with a hulking new $2.2 billion crypto fund. Its the firms largest vertical-specific fund ever by quite a bit. Andreessen Horowitzs 2018 crypto fund []

Snowflake changed the conversation for many companies when it comes to the potentials of data warehousing. Now one of the startups thats hoping to disrupt the disruptor is announcing a big round of funding to expand its own business. Firebolt, which has built a new kind of cloud data warehouse that promises much more efficient, []

Illumio, a self-styled zero trust unicorn, has closed a $225 million Series F funding round at a $2.75 billion valuation. The round was led by Thoma Bravo, which recently bought cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint by $12.3 billion, and supported by Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, and Blue Owl Capital. The round lands more than two years after []

Jio Platforms, run by Indias richest man (Mukesh Ambani), and Google on Thursday unveiled the JioPhone Next, an affordable Android smartphone, as the top Indian telecom operator makes further push to expand its reach in the worlds second largest internet market. The Indian firm, which secured $4.5 billion investment from Google(and another $15.5 billion from []

US/Israeli startup, Sorbet which helps companies de-risk themselves against accrued paid time off (PTO) by employees has raised another $15M, in a round led By Dovi Frances Group 11, not long after a $6 million seed round only last April. Sorbet says it removes the burden of PTO from employers, allowing employees to []

Following Wises announcement earlier this month that it planned to go public by way of a direct listing on the LSE, today the company made the news formal with a regulatory filing. The London-based company formerly known as TransferWise and primarily in the business of transferring money across different currencies with 10 million []

After launching five years ago in the United States, Apples search advertising service finally arrived in mainland China this week. The feature, called Apple Search Ads, lets developers bid on an advertising slot based on users keyword search in the App Store, similar to how Google search ads work. JPMorgan previously estimated the giants annual []

Industries like real estate, automotive, and financial services have long and offline sales cycles and digital advertising tends not to perform well in these areas. The conversion rates are low and because the real-world assets are offline the temptation of advertisers is to buy leads and clicks, which can inflate customer acquisition costs. People are []

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Its a little thing, but one worth savoring. If youre tired of your Instagram feed mostly being a chaotic mashup of screencapped tweets and reshared TikToks, well, those things probably arent going away but one is about to look a lot better. Twitter just added the capability to share a tweet directly to Instagram Stories, []

Bird has announced the launch of shared e-bikes to its fleet of e-scooters, which it says can be found in over 250 cities around the world. The shared micromobility provider is also launching a so-called Smart Bikeshare platform that allows local shared bike and e-moped providers and transit apps to integrate with Birds app. Shared []

AI has been filling in the gaps for illustrators and photographers for years now literally, it intelligently fills gaps with visual content. But the latest tools are aimed at letting an AI give artists a hand from the earliest, blank-canvas stages of a piece. Nvidias new Canvas tool lets the creator rough in a []

Youve likely seen the headlines surrounding the pretty major decline in NFT sales from the markets recent peak, with some reports indicating as much as a 90 percent decline in recent weeks. And while plenty of crypto speculators are on the losing end of that rapid decline, others see a future where digital collectible and []

A company, however its incorporation papers may define it, is really just a set of people. If your principles dont reflect those peoples values, do those principles really represent the company?

Amazon revolutionized one-click shopping, and it has a nearly $2 trillion market cap to show for the effort. Now, a startup founded by JD Maresco, who previously cofounded the public safety app Citizen, says it plans to make it a lot easier for retailers who sell directly to their customers to make re-ordering their products []

While many entrepreneurs see board meetings as a chore, they can be a powerful tool if used well.

There are massive opportunities for business value creation in cybersecurity. Many unicorns will be built in these spaces, and there are a few specific areas worth betting on.

While every food delivery company is trying to get an edge on its rivals with discount codes, faster service, and a turn into the realm of spooky with ghost kitchens and dark stores, a startup built on a lighter, social concept letting people see what their friends are chomping on, making it possible to []

Its hard to understand just how steeply the cost of launching and operating satellites has dropped, particularly since the introduction of lower cost launch services from a number of commercial players, and the maturation of the smartphone supply chain. Swarm co-founder and CEO realized just how much the cost curve had changed when she and []