TechCrunch Startup News

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Verizon’s unlimited data carrier Visible starts selling iPhones, announces Android compatibility Jan 25, 2019

Show notes

When Verizon stealthily launched a new startup called Visible last year, it operated under a bring-your-own-device model — to sign up, you needed to already have an unlocked iPhone, and Visible would send you a new SIM card. Today, however, Visible is announcing that it’s partnering with Affirm and Apple to sell iPhones with 0 percent APR financing.

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After an abrupt shutdown, Munchery’s small business vendors are the ones picking up the bill Jan 25, 2019

Show notes

Munchery’s vendors claim the food delivery startup took advantage of them in its final hours, knowingly allowing them to continue making deliveries it couldn’t pay for. Earlier this week, Munchery surprised customers with an email announcing it wouldcease operations, effective immediately.

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How we’re finding the best lawyers for early-stage startups Jan 24, 2019

Show notes

We’re nearing 1,000 submissions from startup founders and leaders in Silicon Valley and across the world about the best early-stage tech lawyers to work with. As we’ve sorted through survey responses and begun scheduling interviews with the first qualified nominees, we’ve gotten a bunch of questions. We love questions. First of all, why are we creating a living list of great tech startup lawyers?Lawyers don’t create startups, but they can help great startups succeed.

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The Pill Club raises $51M as VCs find new opportunities in women’s health Jan 24, 2019

Show notes

Through telemedicine and direct-to-consumer sales platforms, startups are streamlining the historically arduous process of accessing contraception. The latest effort to secure a significant financing round is The Pill Club, an online birth control prescription and delivery service.

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Roger Dickey ditches $32M-funded Gigster to start Untitled Labs Jan 23, 2019

Show notes

Most founders don’t walk away from their startup after raising $32 million and reaching 1000 clients. But Roger Dickey’s heart is in consumer tech, and his company Gigster had pivoted to doing outsourced app development for enterprises instead of scrappy entrepreneurs. So today Dickey announced that he’d left his role as Gigster CEO, with former VMware VP Christopher Keane who’d sold it his startup WaveMaker coming in to lead Gigster in October.

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UK startup veteran and investor Wendy Tan White joins Alphabet X as Vice President Jan 22, 2019

Show notes

Wendy Tan White, a veteran of the U.K. startup scene — including founding SaaS website builder Moonfruit, which exited to Yell Group for $37 million — is joining Alphabet X (formerly Google X), TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, Tan White was approached by Google late last year, as she weighed up a number of other options, including raising a VC fund of her own dedicated to “deep tech”.

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Following a record year, Illinois startups kick off 2019 on a strong foot Jan 21, 2019

Show notes

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor SoftBank’s Vision Fund inches closer to $100B The top 10 cities for $100M VC rounds in 2018 so far Illinois’s startup market in 2018 was very strong, and it’s not slowing down as we settle into 2019.

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Alation announces $50M Series C investment as data catalog biz takes off Jan 21, 2019

Show notes

Alation, a startup that helps crawl a company’s databases in order to build a data search catalogue, announced a $50 million Series C investment today. The round was led by Sapphire Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors Costanoa Ventures, DCVC (Data Collective), Harmony Partners and Icon Venturesalso participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $82 million, according to Crunchbase data.

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Slack’s product chief is out ahead of direct listing Jan 18, 2019

Show notes

Slack is losing its chief product officer April Underwood ahead of a direct listing expected in 2019. Tamar Yehoshua, a long-time Google vice president, has been tapped to fill Underwood’s shoes as Slack’s new product chief. Underwood joined Slack, the provider of workplace communication tools, in 2015 as its head of platform after a five-year stint as Twitter’s director of product. She was promoted to the chief product role about 10 months ago.

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Squad is the new screensharing chat app everyone will copy Jan 18, 2019

Show notes

Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys.

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