Brendan Smith didn’t intend to be in the critical minerals business.
But Smith and Grossman’s company, SiTration, has a different proposal: use its equipment to treat the wastewater and harvest more minerals in the process.
To turn the wafers into filters, Smith and Grossman tweaked an existing chemical treatment to etch minute pores in them.
For a larger mining site, the company would use about as much silicon as a medium-size solar farm, Smith said.
Although SiTration is starting with mining waste, including a pilot project with Rio Tinto, it’s also pitching its filtration systems to battery recyclers and metal refiners.
Post News, a microblogging site that emerged in the days after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is shutting down just a year and a half after launching in beta.
Founder Noam Bardin, previously CEO of Waze, broke the news in a post on Friday.
“At the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” Bardin said.
Instead of subscribing to various different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets.
But perhaps it was too soon to try to capture this nascent movement in a social platform.
Kenyan B2B e-commerce company MarketForce is winding down its B2B e-commerce business that served informal merchants (mom-and-pop stores) after a turbulent two-year period that saw it scale down operations severely.
The shutdown of the B2B e-commerce arm dubbed RejaReja comes months after MarketForce withdrew the service from all its markets, including Nigeria and Kenya, save for Uganda.
At its peak, it employed more than 800 people and served 270,000 informal merchants.
MarketForce had raised $42.5 million, including $40 million debt-equity in a Series A round in 2022 at over $100 million valuation, to fuel the business.
Several B2B e-commerce companies in Africa have also scaled back operations as the funding crunch persists.
Cover slide Problem slide 1 Problem slide 2 Product image slide Solution slide What Is Unique?
The business model comes up shortClosely related to the previous point: Pricing is one side of the business model, but there are many more parts to the puzzle.
The business model slide is very light on details, and the details that are there are a little confusing.
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Business banking startup Mercury, founded in 2020, is now launching a consumer banking product.
“We already have a few hundred thousand users of our business banking product, and a lot of people have expressed that they want a personal banking product,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.
The person also said the fintech partner banking market as a whole has been the target of more regulatory scrutiny.
Crossing overBut success in B2B banking doesn’t automatically queue up Mercury to handle consumer banking.
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LinkedIn quietly started to post information describing its new Premium Company Page six days ago.
Pricing for premium company pages is not immediately disclosed, but it appears admins of pages that are eligible for it can see it.
The Premium Company Page subscription in some ways will look very familiar, in that it taps into well-known LinkedIn mechanics.
Testimonials, which LinkedIn has really promoted as a feature on profile pages for individuals, also get a push here: admins can display these prominently at the top of their premium pages.
Last but not least, with LinkedIn big on verification lately, and here too a Page can get a golden badge with a premium subscription.
Moonlight is a free online tarot platform, where you can draw tarot cards on your own, do a reading in a multiplayer room or even book a session with a vetted tarot professional (that’s where the SaaS part comes in).
It was at one of these lessons that Baskin first imagined what an online tarot platform could look like.
As she was building out the idea for Moonlight, Baskin teamed up with Caroline Hermans, a game designer and former UX engineer at Google.
“I was worried that investors might think I’m a prankster — will that hurt me in actually making a business?
We’re all using technology, and I think they’re excited that someone’s making a platform who’s a tarot person, too.”
After considering a few ideas, they decided to go after what they saw as a largely unaddressed market: Tools to help small businesses secure U.S. government contracts.
“The federal contracting community has seen a shrinking of the small business industrial base for much of the past decade,” Doherty told TechCrunch.
It’s also expensive for them to bid on contracts — if they don’t win, they may run out of cash.”As a result of labyrinthine systems and mountains of paperwork, finding and bidding for U.S. federal contracts is a laborious process.
To attempt to give these small businesses a boost, Goltser, Mason and Doherty founded GovDash, a platform that provides workflows to support government contract capture, proposal, development and management processes.
New York-based, six-employee GovDash currently works with around 30 federal contractors across the U.S., Doherty said, and is “nearly” cash-flow positive.
How PayJoy built a $300M business by letting the underserved use their smartphones as collateral for loansLerato Motloung is a mother of two who works in a supermarket in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Then, in February 2024, she saw a sign about PayJoy, a startup that offers lending to the underserved in emerging markets.
Motloung is one of millions of customers that San Francisco–based PayJoy has helped since its 2015 inception.
And, unlike other startups offering loans to the underserved, it’s doing so in a way that’s not predatory, it says.
Last September, PayJoy announced that it had secured $150 million in Series C equity funding and $210 million in debt financing.
Yoshi Mobility has come a long way since gassing up cars on the side of the roadAlmost 10 years ago, Bryan Frist, Nick Alexander and Daniel Hunter had an idea to inject some technology into the automotive industry.
Using the initial entry point of gas, they started the Yoshi Mobility app to deliver gas to San Francisco-area consumers on their day of choice for $20 per month.
Expansion and new businessToday, Nashville-based Yoshi Mobility is settled into three business lines: preventative maintenance, virtual vehicle inspections and electric vehicle charging.
It has boots on the ground in 15 states, but can offer vehicle services to customers in all 50 states.
Yoshi Mobility has increased its revenue 10x monthly since its Series B in late 2020, Frist said.
