StartUp

Justin Kan’s hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm, the CEO tells TechCrunch exclusively. The startup has now laid off all its employees, which totaled just over 100. It will return some of its $75.5 million in funding to

As the company experiences its second day of outages, Robinhood, the popular trading app with a purported 10-million-strong user base and a $7.6 billion valuation, said it will offer compensation for yesterday’s outage on a case-by-case basis, according to a company spokesperson.

The company issued a statement early Tuesday documenting that the

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: “We’re just building games. And to be honest, we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Despite this self-proclaimed ignorance, End Game has just raised $3 million in seed funding from an impressive group of investors:

Alternative and holistic healthcare seekers in the Los Angeles area have a new service they can turn to in WellSet, the listing platform that launched on Tuesday. 

Through the service, customers coming off the company’s existing waitlist can access its marketplace for finding acupuncturists, massage therapists, functional medicine practitioners, c

Years ago, Teel Lidow arrived at the airport to take a standard, eight-hour flight from Santiago, Chile to New York City. The journey ended up taking three days, involved an emergency landing, and passengers entering two countries (Ecuador and Peru) they never planned to enter.

When they finally arrived in New York, the airline handed out a piece

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

All around, this has been a tough week. The coronavirus is spreading and worry is running high as infections mount. In economic terms, global markets were repeated declines last night (domestic results here), and the U.S. indices

It’s a bit gauche to talk about positive economic impacts of what may become a global pandemic, but the novel coronavirus hasn’t been bad news for every company.

Video conference provider Zoom appears to be one beneficiary; after going public in 2019, its share price rose from around $68 at the start of the year to $115 today. Why? As governments

SmartNews, the news aggregation app that hit a unicorn valuation last year, has spent its time growing its local news feature. With the United States presidential election underscoring both the importance of local news and its challenges, SmartNews has a huge opportunity to gain new users.

In early 2019, SmartNews had 40 local partners. Over the

It wasn’t a fad. Yolo became the country’s No. 1 app just a week after launch by letting teens ask for anonymous replies to questions they posted on Snapchat. But nine months later, Yolo is still in the top 100 iOS apps and has 10 million active users. Now it’s safeguarding the app from predators while revealing a smart new feature for spinning up

Brooklinen, a startup that sells bedding and other home goods online, has raised $50 million in new funding from growth equity firm Summit Partners.

Recent headlines are spurring bigger questions about the direct-to-consumer retail business, with Blue Apron exploring a potential sale and Casper also disclosing disappointing growth and persistent

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What a week. What an insane, heart-stopping, odd and stuffed week. I’m utterly exhausted. But, in better news, all of that is great fodder for podcast and chat, so today’s Equity is pretty okay, if I may say so.

Danny and

VC firm TLcom Capital closed its Tide Africa Fund at $71 million in February, and announced plans to invest in 12 startups over the next 18 months.

The group — with offices in London, Lagos and Nairobi — is looking for tech-enabled, revenue-driven ventures in Africa from seed-stage to Series B, according to TLcom Managing Partner Maurizio Caio.

He

A 9-year-old is smashing the shuttle far and wide, frantically pacing back and forth on the court in Bangalore, India, as her competition refuses to back down. Her rival is not a human. She is playing against a machine that is mimicking the game of badminton legend P.V. Sindhu, toned down a few notches to adjust for the age difference.

By the

Founders, it’s time to launch your company on the most famous stage in tech media. Startup Battlefield applications are now open. TechCrunch is scouring the globe to find the most innovative and game-changing startups to compete for the famous Disrupt Cup and a $100,000 equity-free prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020. Startups will gain

Ampere, the chip startup run by former Intel President Renee James, announced a new chip today that she says is designed specifically to optimize for cloud workloads.

Ampere VP of product Jeff Wittich says the new chip is called the Ampere Altra, and it’s been designed with some features that should make it attractive to cloud providers. This i

The Walt Disney Company is now accepting applications for its 2020 Disney Accelerator, the company said today.

The accelerator accepts 10 growth-stage startups for a three-month mentorship program that provides access to the creativity, imagination and expertise of Disney — including unique access to Disney’s leadership team.

“We created the Disney

DocSend has become one of the most popular tools for sharing venture fundraise decks, not only because of the control it offers, but also because of the analytics it can provide founders on how VCs read decks and where they might get stuck as they are perusing from slide to slide.

The company has been generous sharing its data with us on what times

Stem, a startup that helps independent musicians get paid, is expanding with a new financing program called Scale.

Co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis described the company’s core offering as a way for collaborators to “memorialize the split” of the proceeds from a song — once they’ve uploaded a track, Scale can automatically handle splitting the

Today we bring you another edition of “Dear Sophie,” an advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney.

iPrice Group, which helps comparison shoppers in Southeast Asia by pulling together prices from different e-commerce platforms, has closed a $10 million Series B. Led by ACA Investments, the round also included participation from Daiwa PI Partners and returning investors Line Ventures, Mirae Asset-Naver and Asia Growth Fund.

The company’s last

A quick hit as we have a podcast to record, but a few public companies in the broader SaaS market reported earnings in the past week. Their results are worth unpacking as they paint a good picture of what the markets are hunting for in modern software companies.

Of course, we’re covering the firms’ share-price movements in the context of an epic

Tens of thousands of Indians move to the United States to pursue higher education each year. But like many others who have arrived from a foreign land, they can’t secure education loans or personal loans from the banks at interest rates on par with those levied on local students.

The reason why these students — or anyone else moving to a different c

A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications.

The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that it has raised

Every day, there’s another event-related cancellation owing to concern around coronavirus. Just today Microsoft announced it will not have a presence at the Game Developers Conference in mid-March “out of an abundance of caution.” Facebook also said today that it is canceling its annual F8 conference scheduled for May over coronavirus-outbreak

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

We’re still in IPO-land this morning, working our way through the Accolade S-1 filing. Yesterday we dug through the Procore filing, a vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. That was a former startup that we could get our

There are plenty of accelerators aiming to sway young startups to join their ranks rather than apply to Y Combinator, but Pioneer‘s sell is a bit different.

First off, they are fully remote; founders selected to participate in the program chat with advisors via video chat. Second, Pioneer is largely looking at companies that aren’t companies yet, f

“We want to change the way freight moves,” says Oren Zaslansky, the chief executive and founder of Flock Freight.

His company, which has been operating in stealth mode for the last two years, has finally emerged with a new solution for freight shipping that purports to bring in more money to shippers, remove inefficiencies in the current