BlaBlaCar is an iconic name in the French startup ecosystem. The carpooling and bus ticketing company has been around for so long that it’s hard to consider it a startup anymore. Still, BlaBlaCar is an extremely interesting company today due to its unique trajectory. What started as a scrappy online hitchhiking community became a startup […]

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Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and take a peek at the week that is to come. We’ll talk more about Wednesday, but this is Y Combinator Demo […]

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We last checked in on Zaver, a Swedish B2C Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A to $20 million. Total investment to date stands at $30 million. […]

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This morning, Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures. The deal is interesting on a number of fronts, including the round’s structure and how Skyflow has been impacted by the growth of AI. The new capital comes after Skyflow expanded its data privacy business to support […]

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Wonderschool, a startup that provides software and support to help individuals and local governments spin up childcare businesses, has acquired EarlyDay, which operates an early childhood educator marketplace. TechCrunch has covered Wonderschool since its infancy, including both of its seed rounds and its Series A (led by Andreessen Horowitz). Terms of the deal were not […]

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Have you noticed the massive gap between consumer and business apps on your phone? While consumer apps are both beautifully designed and easy to use, business apps are simply painful to use. A European startup is developing a suite of B2B apps that are designed for mobile first because phones have become the main computers […]

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In the summer after his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school in Worcester, Massachusetts, Cyvl.ai co-founder and CEO Daniel Pelaez needed a job. He went home and worked at his local public works department, where he noted that there was very little software for tracking road repairs. He was told to go […]

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A new study that zeros-in on the founders of so-called “Unicorns” (companies worth over a billion dollars) has found most have “underdog” founders, are often drawn from the top 10 universities, a rising female founder make-up, but no obvious monopoly at Seed stage of funding for VCs. The study (“Unicorn Founder DNA Report) by Defiance […]

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Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned. The company announced in January the award-winning app would be winding down operations as the market opportunity wasn’t “big enough to warrant continued investment.” However, despite an end-of-life date of February 2024, the app […]

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What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market, and leadership structure? Well, you might call it Stability AI. And no, that’s not some sort of elaborate wordplay. We’re being literal. Stability AI’s latest leadership shakeup is no joke, with its CEO […]

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Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days. While the majority of the focus remains on the model vendors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, or the bigger companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon, there are in fact, a lot of startups trying to attack the generative […]

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When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Thoras.AI founders Nilo Rahamani and Jennifer Rahamani weren’t even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes, but their parents were forced to flee along with their older siblings. Eventually they ended up immigrating to the U.S. and settling in northern Virginia, where they gave birth to twin girls, […]

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