Being a founder often feels like you’re building the plane midflight. You’re juggling fundraising, product-market fit, marketing strategy, hiring — while quietly wondering if you’re even doing it right. TechCrunch AllStage 2025, which is happening on July 15 at the SoWa Power Station in Boston, is built to answer those questions. Whether you’re pitching VCs, [...]
Ecommerce business forks over seven figures for domain name. BigCommerce (Nasdaq: BIGC), the Shopify competitor that helps customers sell stuff online, purchased a domain name for $2.444 million in Q1. The company disclosed the purchase in its financial results for Q1 published yesterday. While the company did not disclose what the domain name was, I [...]
Expired domains revenue continues to lift results at Tucows. Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) reported first-quarter earnings after the market closed yesterday. Overall revenue increased 8% year over year to $94.6 million, with the domain business growing 6% to $65.3 million. Gross margin for the domain business increased 9% to $20.2 million. The increase came despite domains [...]
At Stripe’s Sessions conference this week, Mark Zuckerberg pitched what he calls the “ultimate business machine”: a fully automated, end-to-end AI ad engine promising to replace agencies, creatives, and media buyers with a single black box. You just need to connect your bank account first. Zuckerberg claims this could be one of the most valuable [...]
Manus AI is one of the hottest AI agent startups around, recently raising $75 million at a half-billion-dollar valuation in a round led by Benchmark. But two unnamed sources told Semafor that the investment is now under review by the U.S. Treasury Department over its compliance with 2023 restrictions on investing in Chinese companies. Benchmark’s [...]
The U.S. Department of Labor has dropped its investigation into Scale AI’s compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), according to a source directly familiar with the matter. The FLSA is a federal law that regulates misclassification of employees as independent contractors and unpaid wages. TechCrunch first reported that Scale was the subject of [...]
For the first time, the FDA has just approved a device that lets people screen for cervical cancer from home. Known as the Teal Wand, from the company Teal Health, the prescription device lets patients self-collect samples and mail them to a lab to receive the same testing as would be done at a doctor’s [...]
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week was busy for startups: While there were no IPOs of note, there were other exits and even unusual liquidity events, as well as a significant [...]
HR tech startup Rippling has raised a $450 million Series G round at a $16.8 billion valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. It is also conducting a $200 million tender offer to give current and former employees some liquidity. The equity raise marks a big jump in valuation from a year ago. In April 2024, [...]
From cybersecurity and aerospace to generative 3D, startup leaders are scaling ambitious companies from European soil and taking on global markets. In this conversation at the StrictlyVC event in Athens, we talked to three founders about what it takes to go from idea to impact while navigating the continent’s unique challenges — and why building [...]