TechCrunch Startup News

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Techstars will build and launch startups with new venture studio Jan 17, 2019

Show notes

Similar to Y Combinator, early-stage technology startup accelerator Techstars has spent much of the last decade supporting and seeding innovative projects, including Plated, ClassPass, SendGrid and PillPack. Now, it wants to take its service a step further. Today, Techstars is announcing the launch of Techstars Studio, a new venture that will have the accelerator developing and launching venture-scale businesses with the support of several corporate partners.

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YC-backed Upsolve is automating bankruptcy for everyone Jan 17, 2019

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The popular image of a Chapter 7 bankruptcy might be a large company like Enron failing, or maybe some lazy drifter trying to shirk their financial responsibilities. The reality is anything but those sorts of images. Today in America, the most common reason for bankruptcy is to discharge egregious sums of medical debt [1], which might have been incurred in a short stint in a hospital emergency room.

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For $5,800 per year, Chief helps women reach the C-suite Jan 16, 2019

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For decades, women in business have lacked the resources necessary to navigate to or sustain executive roles. Finally, venture-funded projects have emerged to fill this gap. The latest is Chief, a private network for New York-based women in senior roles intech, retail, enterprise, finance, media and more.

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Opendoor competitor Knock raises $400M Jan 16, 2019

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Home trade-in platform Knock has brought in a $400 million investment to accelerate a national expansion and double its 100-person headcount. Foundry Group has led the Series B funding round in New York-based Knock, with participation from Company Ventures and existing investors RRE Ventures, Corazon Capital, WTI and FJ Labs .Knock co-founder and chief executive officer Sean Black declined to disclose the startup’s valuation.

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Daily Crunch: Bing has a child porn problem Jan 15, 2019

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The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Microsoft Bing not only shows child pornography, it suggests it A TechCrunch-commissioned report has found damning evidence on Microsoft’s search engine.

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Startups Weekly: Will Trump ruin the unicorn IPOs of our dreams? Jan 14, 2019

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The government shutdown entered its 21st day on Friday, upping concerns of potentially long-lasting impacts on the U.S. stock market. Private market investors around the country applauded when Uberfinallyfiled documents with the SEC to go public. Others were giddy to hear Lyft, Pinterest, Postmates and Slack (via a direct listing, according to the latest reports) were likely to IPO in 2019, too.

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Elon Musk shows off the assembled Starship test rocket Jan 14, 2019

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After weeks teasing renderings and production photos, Elon Musk finally showed off the finished Starship test rocket last night. Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019 As you can well see, the Starship test rocket has a stainless steel skin, which had a few people scratching their heads.

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Meet Caper, the AI self-checkout shopping cart Jan 11, 2019

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The Amazon boogie-man has every retailer scrambling for ways to fight back. But the cost and effort to install cameras all over the ceiling or into every shelf could block stores from entering the autonomous shopping era. Caper Labs wants to make eliminating checkout lines as easy as replacing their shopping carts while offering a more familiar experience for customers.

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Uber’s IPO may not be as eye-popping as we expected Jan 11, 2019

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Uber is expected to raise $10 billion later this year in one of the largest U.S. initial public offerings in history. The float will value the ride-hailing giant somewhere between $76 billion — the valuation it garnered with its last private financing — and $120 billion — a sky-high figure assigned by Wall Street bankers that’s had even early Uber investors scratching their heads. A new report from The Information pegs Uber’s initial market cap at $90 billion.

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Daily Crunch: Well Facebook, you did it again Jan 10, 2019

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The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Facebook is the new crapware Well Facebook, you did it again. Fresh off its latest privacy scandal, the troubled social media giant has inked a deal with Android to pre-install its app on an undisclosed number of phones and make the software permanent.

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