Latest from Rebecca Szkutak
Fundraising
YC-backed Hona looks to reduce the communication friction between law firms and their consumer clients
When Manny Griffiths worked with a personal injury lawyer after his wife’s car accident, he was surprised by the lack of information and communication from their lawyer regarding their claim.…
There has been a lot of bad news about social media startups lately. Multiple companies, including Twitter alternative Post News, and IRL have shut down. And ShareChat’s valuation has dropped…
Startups
Raspberry Pi goes public, Musk drops his OpenAI lawsuit and startups compete with Apple Intelligence
In today’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Mary Ann Azevedo, Becca Szkutak and Haje Kamps dug into three very different but all interesting deals of the week. Haje…
Venture
What StepStone’s $3.3B venture secondaries fund tells us about LPs’ current appetite for venture
StepStone raised the largest fund dedicated to investing in venture secondaries ever, the firm announced last week. This fundraise doesn’t just say a lot about StepStone’s venture secondaries investing prowess,…
When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway, in 2019, he knew he was not the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans…
Startups
From Sword Health to Stripe, these startups are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year
Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech…
Perhaps it is not surprising to hear that many of the pots and pans we use are coated in a poisonous chemical called Teflon that…
When Urvashi Barooah applied to MBA programs in 2015, she focused her applications around her dream of becoming a venture capitalist. She got rejected from every school, and was told…
Apple’s WWDC is just hours away, and we’re gearing up for big announcements on — you guessed it — AI. TechCrunch’s Brian Heater tells us…
Startups
Cat-sitting startup Meowtel clawed its way to profitability despite trouble raising from dog-focused VCs
Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5…
AI systems and large language models (LLMs) need to be trained on massive amounts of data to be accurate but they shouldn’t train on data that they don’t have the…
Featured Article
In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch
When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be…
There is estimated to be 40 million acres of lawn or turf grass in the U.S., making the grass in people’s backyards one of the…
Startups
Deal Dive: How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items
The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion…
Welcome back to Friday Equity! We kick things off with the Deal of the Week. First up, xAI. Elon Musk has once again proven that…
When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window.…
What’s one to do after creating a billion-dollar startup? Well, if you’re Rubrik co-founder Arvind Jain, you simply start another one. Jain co-founded Glean, an…
We’re kicking off the short week with news about Elon Musk, and no, it’s not about X or Tesla. Instead, we’re talking about Musk’s other…
Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right…
It was an event-filled week in startup land, and the Equity crew had a blast breaking it down for you. On today’s episode of TechCrunch’s…
Venture
Peter Thiel-founded Valar Ventures raised a $300 million fund, half the size of its last one
The perception in Silicon Valley is that every investor would love to be in business with Peter Thiel. But the venture capital fundraising environment has become so difficult that even…
Some startups choose to bootstrap from the beginning while others find themselves forced into self funding by a lack of investor interest or a business model that doesn’t fit traditional…
Venture
Contour Venture Partners, an early investor in Datadog and Movable Ink, has raised $42M for its fifth fund
Longtime New York-based seed investor, Contour Venture Partners, is making progress on its latest flagship fund. The firm closed on $42 million, raised from 64 backers, for Contour Venture Partners…
When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…
If there was one thing we heard about this week, it was AI. As a matter of fact, there were so many AI updates to…
Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can…
Featured Podcast
OpenAI gears up for a big announcement, and Apple Store workers authorize a strike
Last week was a busy one for some Apple Store employees. Over the weekend, workers at Apple’s Towson, Maryland, store — the first Apple retail store to have a formally recognized union — voted to authorize a strike. While the date of the strike is still being determined, the union has been negotiating with Apple…
Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent…
Venture
Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed
Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…
Kyle Kuzma is a lot of things. He’s a forward for the Washington Wizards NBA team and a 2020 NBA champion. He’s also a style icon — depending on who…
