On-demand logistics startup Lalamove raises $300M for Asia growth and becomes a unicorn

Lalamove, a Hong Kong-based on-demand logistics startup, has closed a $300 million Series D round as it seeks expansion across Asia. In doing so, the company has officially entered the unicorn club. Founded in 2013 by Stanford graduate Shing Chow, Lalamove provides logistics and delivery services in a similar style to ride-hailing apps like Uber […]

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Investors are still failing to back founders from diverse backgrounds

The large majority of venture dollars are invested in companies run by white men with a university degree, according to a new report by RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC. This new data reveals that despite the lip service investors have paid to backing founders from diverse backgrounds, much, much, more work needs to be done to actually […]

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Taali takes its popped water lily snacks from Y Combinator to the world

Aditya and Aarti Kochhar Kaji didn’t set out to start the snack food business Taali Foods when they were studying for their business degrees at Harvard. The couple both hail from Mumbai and met at the University of Pennsylvania . They were married before starting at Harvard’s Business School and initially were interested in other areas […]

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How to prepare for an investment apocalypse

Micah Rosenbloom Contributor Micah Rosenbloom is a venture partner at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor Business school grads and quants are winning the battle to create the next P&G Startups need to respect the laws of retail physics Unlike 2000 and 2008, everyone in the startup world is expecting a crash to come […]

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How students are founding, funding and joining startups

Shawn Xu Contributor Share on Twitter Shawn Xu is a managing partner at The Dorm Room Fund. There has never been a better time to start, join, or fund a startup as a student.  Young founders who want to start companies while still in school have an increasing number of resources to tap into that […]

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Partech is doubling the size of its African venture fund to $143 million

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributor Zimbabwe’s government faces off against its tech community over internet restrictions Flutterwave and Visa launch African consumer payment service GetBarter Partech has doubled its Africa VC fund to $143 million […]

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How business-to-business startups reduce inequality

Sibjeet Mahapatra Contributor Share on Twitter Sib Mahapatra first explored VR at Redfin. He is co-founder of Recess Labs and a Venture Fellow at Notation Capital, where he researches frontier tech including AR and VR. More posts by this contributor VR, presence and the case of the missing killer app The bull case for Snapchat […]

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VCs give us their predictions for startups and tech in Southeast Asia in 2019

The new year is well underway and, before January is out, we polled VCs in Southeast Asia to get their thoughts on what to expect in 2019. The number of VCs in the region has increased massively in recent years, in no small part due to forecasts of growth in the tech space as internet […]

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A private equity bet in Latin America proves the strength of fintech investments there

Latin America is getting another fintech unicorn thanks to Advent International’s acquisition of a 51 percent stake of Prisma Medios de Pago, an Argentine payments company formed as a joint venture between Visa International and local banks. The deal, which values Prisma at $1.42 billion, is yet another sign of Latin America’s growing prominence for […]

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TechCrunch Conversations: Direct listings

Last April, Spotify surprised Wall Street bankers by choosing to go public through a direct listing process rather than through a traditional IPO. Instead of issuing new shares, the company simply sold existing shares held by insiders, employees and investors directly to the market – bypassing the roadshow process and avoiding at least some of Wall […]

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Startups Weekly: Squad’s screen-shares and Slack’s swastika

We’re three weeks into January. We’ve recovered from our CES hangover and, hopefully, from the CES flu. We’ve started writing the correct year, 2019, not 2018. Venture capitalists have gone full steam ahead with fundraising efforts, several startups have closed multi-hundred million dollar rounds, a virtual influencer raised equity funding and yet, all anyone wants to talk […]

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Backing Culture Genesis, T.I. launches Tech Cypha, an investment syndicate for tech deals

With an inaugural investment into the Los Angeles-based entertainment startup Culture Genesis, Clifford Harris Jr., who’s better known as “T.I.”, has launched a new syndicated investment vehicle called Tech Cypha. Launched by the music and cultural impresario with more hustle than hustle and his business partner Jason Geter, the new collaborative investment strategy focused on tech startups will […]

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