Indian budget hotel chain startup Oyo is looking to file for an initial public offering as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, joining a handful of firms in the world’s second-largest market that are working to explore the public markets. The seven-year-old startup, founded by 27-year-old Ritesh Agarwal, is planning…
Buying and selling on marketplace websites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace often lead to meeting a stranger somewhere to complete the purchase and pick up the item. With over 1 billion Facebook Marketplace users per month, Nymbull founder Jackson Wegelin doesn’t think that’s necessary for peer-to-peer transactions. And he estimates that between interacting with potential…
Our world is drowning in human-generated microplastics. And while these tiny fragments of non-biodegradable plastic — floating in the sea, embedded in the soil — are hard to see with the naked eye they pose a gigantic threat to life. Inexorably, plastic pollution is finding its way into the human food chain, with unknown implications…
Kavak, a Mexico City-based startup that operates a pre-owned car marketplace in Latin America, announced today that it has raised a massive $700 million in a Series E round that more than doubles the company’s valuation to $8.7 billion. This news is notable for a few reasons. For one, it’s a staggering sum for any…
Evermos’ founding team (l to r): Arip Tirta, Ghufron Mustaqim, Iqbal Muslimin and Ilham Taufiq. Image Credits: Evermos Evermos is an Indonesian social commerce startup with two goals: to let people earn extra income by opening online stores without spending capital and to help small brands grow into household names. The company, which focuses on…
Meet Tatum, a blockchain infrastructure startup that wants to make it much easier to develop your own blockchain-based product. The company operates a platform-as-a-service product so that you don’t have to manage your own nodes and learn how to interact with each client. Tatum is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. While blockchain…
Yesterday, the Gig Workers Collective — representing a body of about 13,000 Instacart shoppers — launched a #DeleteInstacart campaign, urging customers to delete the Instacart app as a show of solidarity with workers advocating for better treatment. The collective of shoppers asked that customers refrain from reinstalling the app until five demands are met. They…
Joseph Wengier Contributor Joseph Wengier competed in five Paralympics and won nine gold medals. He promotes the advancement of a more inclusive internet as an ambassador for accessibility technology company UserWay. After winning my first gold medal in the 1972 Paralympics, I went out with the swim team for a celebratory dinner. I’ll never forget…
We recently caught up with longtime VC Mark Suster of L.A.-based Upfront Ventures, which last raised both an early-stage fund and a growth stage fund several years ago and, according to regulatory filings, is in the market right now, though Suster couldn’t discuss either owing to SEC regulations. We did talk about a wide range…
The release of iOS 15 should be a major event for mobile operating systems. And yet, this year, there’s no breakthrough feature or overarching theme that makes this release stand out. Apple has focused on quality-of-life updates as well as new features for its own apps. The result is a solid update that is not…
