TechCrunch Master Template TechCrunch Newsletter
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The TechCrunch Top 3 Twitter starts rolling out Super Follows and ticketed Spaces: The great product push at Twitter continued today with an early rollout of its Super Follow feature. If you have 10,000 followers and tweet about once per day, you could be eligible to charge people from $2.99 to $9.99 per month for bonus tweets. The company is also rolling out ticketed Twitter Spaces, its live-audio product. Another startup taking on Google: While we await the launch of Neevaâs subscription search alternative, Brave has put its own search offering into the market. You can give it a test here, if youâd like. The short gist is that itâs a ânontracking search engine built on top of an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance tech products like Google search,â TechCrunch wrote. The early-stage startup funding market in focus: TechCrunch dug into the world of seed and early-stage venture capital rounds that startups are raising today. After a VC tipped us off to the concept of Series As coming late and Series Bs coming early, we asked a host of other investors about the idea. What did we learn? That some startups can start raising the moment they close their last round. Wild. |
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Startups Everyone and their favorite pup raised money today, so weâre breaking our startup coverage into two chunks. The first is focused on product news. The second on funding rounds. Letâs go: Airbank is building a small and midsized fintech service to help aggregate all of a companyâs bank accounts and financial data. Read the story here. Racial Inequity Drawdown is a framework that aims to âaddress racial inequity in startup investing and in the broader world,â TechCrunch reports. Squad launched a new mobile app that connects groups of friends through time-gated audio messages. You have 24 hours to hear what your friends said now that Squad has completed its focus-shift to more intimate collections of friends from interest groups. Turning to the money world, there are more rounds than we can get to today. But hereâs a selection of favorites: Mollie raises $800 million for its payment-integration service: Dutch startup Mollie is now worth $6.5 billion after raising nearly $1 billion in a single round. The startup âprovides a way for businesses to integrate payments into sites, documents and other services by way of an API,â TechCrunch wrote. Its new round and valuation implies that thereâs room yet in the payments space for more mega-unicorns. Still. Speaking of fintech, Australian startup Zeller just raised AUD$50 million at a AUD$400 million valuation. It provides POS and card services for SMBs. Lidar-focused Quanergy Systems is going public: Via a SPAC, of course. You can peruse its investor deck if you want all the gritty projections. What matters here is that the SPAC boom is not done, even if it appears to be slowing. And weâre hearing from Series-B-level founders that SPACs are already hitting them up. Expect more and weirder SPAC deals over time. Oyster is now a half-unicorn: Thatâs what we learned when the startup focused on supporting employees outside of a companyâs home country raised a $50 million Series B that valued it at nearly $500 million. Vantage raises $4M to help folks manage their AWS spend: All that growth that Amazonâs AWS cloud service has managed in recent years was built on rising customer spend. And some AWS customers want to spend less. And Vantage is going to help. G2 raises $157 million to help companies choose software: Software is such a huge category that even niches can support a host of competitors. But all that spend means lots of companies making choices about what software to leverage. G2 wants to help. And it is now a unicorn after its investors poured nine-figures of capital into its coffers at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Transmit raises $543 million in a Series A to help kill passwords: The company is now worth $2.2 billion, with plans to use its new money to âexpand its reach and investing in key global areas to grow the organization.â Any move to kill passwords is TechCrunch-approved. |
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| Anna Heim interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs and investors to find out how much early-stage founders should pay themselves. Startups run by CEOs who take home a small salary tend to do better over the long run, but there are other points to consider, such as geography, marital status, and frankly, what quality of life you desire. Waterly founder Chris Sosnowski raised his own pay to $14/hour last year; at his prior job, his salary topped $100,000. âWe had saved money up for over a year before we cut out my pay,â he told Anna. âI can live my life without entertainment ⦠so thatâs what we did for 2020.â How much are you willing to sacrifice? (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More |
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TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing Today weâre featuring one of the recommendations that was submitted to our survey. Stay tuned throughout the week as we highlight more responses! Name of Marketer: Ladder Recommendation: âThey really get what I need. By testing different messaging on different personas, we discover what works and what doesn’t to better understand our users and prospects. This is gold for a company at our stage. Showing those results to our investors blew their minds.â Submit your own recommendation here. |
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