Vroom hits the brakes on its online used car business to go full throttle on auto financing and AIVroom is shutting down its online used car marketplace and shifting all of its resources and capital into two business units focused on auto financing and AI-powered analytics.
The company said it is suspending all used car transactions through vroom.com and plans to sell off its used vehicle inventory to wholesalers.
Vroom was part of a wave of U.S. startups that launched about a decade ago all aiming to disrupt used car sales and the traditional dealership model.
The drop in valuation continued into 2022, pushing Vroom shares to under $2.
Vroom shares closed at $0.53 on Monday and then dropped to $0.25 after the company announced its plans to shutter the e-commerce business.
TravelPerk, a business travel management platform targeted at SMEs, has raised $105 million in a fresh equity-based round of financing led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.
“In today’s climate, where startup funding is down by half and valuations are down across the board, this is a healthy and sober valuation,” Meir told TechCrunch.
Well-traveledFounded in 2015, Barcelona-based TravelPerk sells an all-in-one platform for companies to book, manage, and report all their domestic and international travel.
Customers can also extend the platform through integrations with expense management systems like Spendesk and HR software such as HiBob.
“[An] IPO has never been an objective per se for TravelPerk,” Meir said.
Top executives report to the CEO, the CEO answers to the board, and the board serves at the whim of the shareholders.
On Sunday evening, the oil supermajor filed a lawsuit in federal court asking for permission to ignore a shareholder resolution at its next annual meeting.
The new shareholder resolution calls on the oil company to reduce its Scope 3 emissions or those that result from the use of its products.
Other shareholders tended to be deferential to management, letting them run their business as they saw fit.
But as shareholder primacy took root in the public consciousness, more shareholders began to exercise their rights.
This new impediment to securing financing opportunities for BIPOC entrepreneurs is disconcerting.
Confronted with these challenges, angel investors and investment groups that fund BIPOC entrepreneurs must remain committed to keeping vital early-stage capital flowing.
This inherent color blindness removes a structural impediment that blocks minority investing within the conventional venture capital fund structure.
Eleven percent of all campaigns on the platform Honeycomb have been run by Black founders, and SeedInvest has seen 12% of campaigns run by Black founders.
Defining intentionally inclusive criteria in your fund/syndicate may also open the door to additional funding opportunities for BIPOC entrepreneurs.
How low can bitcoin ETF fees drop before it hurts a business?
On Thursday, Franklin Templeton’s Franklin Bitcoin ETF ranked sixth among the 11 for first day trading volume at $65.45 million by the end of the day.
(Note: A number of issuers, Franklin included, are waiving fees for a limited time.)
There’s reason to believe that spot bitcoin ETFs and other related products that may come to market will see strong demand over time, and major investment houses want a piece of the action.
An additional preexisting $2.3 billion from Grayscale’s GBTC fund, which converted into a spot bitcoin ETF on Wednesday, brought the 11 issuers’ total to $4.6 billion.
Supernal, the advanced air mobility company under Hyundai Motor Group, took the wraps off its latest iteration of an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft called the S-A2 that executives say is designed to shuttle passengers by 2028.
The S-A2 is essentially a more fully baked version of what it intends to launch commercially and confirms that, at least for now, Hyundai is still intent on getting into the yet-to-exist electric air taxi business.
Supernal has grown to a 600-person team and is also using technical and business capabilities of Hyundai Motor Group and aviation suppliers around the world as it works towards a commercial launch, according to Jaiwon Shin, Hyundai Motor Group president and CEO of Supernal.
The nuts and boltsThe aircraft shown Tuesday is a V-tail with a distributed electric propulsion architecture and eight all-tilting rotors.
The S-A2 is loaded with the kind of redundant components like the powertrain, flight controls and avionics — all of the safety critical systems required for commercial aviation.
But when is the right time to hire a CFO, and is a full-time CFO even necessary in this age of C-level-as-a-service?
It is common for founders to think narrowly about accounting when considering whether to hire a CFO.
It is common for founders to think narrowly about accounting when considering whether to hire a CFO.
Startup coach and CFO Evgeny Popov said that hiring a CFO was a no-brainer, akin to finding a CTO for your tech company.
“Unfortunately, hiring a CFO is not an obvious move for founders because most founders come from the product or tech worlds and don’t see the CFO as vital to growth.”
AppDirect, a San Francisco- and Montreal-based platform for buying, selling and managing tech through a network of IT advisors, has raised $100 million from CDPQ to expand its financing program for small- and medium-sized tech businesses.
“Our Invest program is purpose-built to empower our technology advisors,” Emanuel Bertolin, AppDirect’s chief revenue officer, said in a statement.
“To keep up with today’s ever-changing market, technology merchants need fast access to capital to accelerate their growth.”AppDirect’s Capital Invest program is a loan program, providing capital for tech businesses in the form of upfront payments.
Today, AppDirect offers a set of tools that let businesses monetize — or buy — tech products across a range of different channels and devices.
We also provide the opportunity for our advisor community to procure technology for their customers directly from the AppDirect catalog.”AppDirect launched the Capital Invest program in 2021.
Governance, risk management and compliance — GRC for short — remains one of the most active startup areas in terms of VC investments.
GRC helps organizations better manage risk while staying in compliance with regulations — and there’s an increasing number of regulations to worry about.
“Anecdotes is redefining compliance and risk management by transforming it from a labor-intensive task with skyrocketing associated costs into data-oriented processes.”Anecdotes’ platform automatically collects GRC-related “artifacts” (i.e.
Anecdotes’ competitors include VComply, a risk and compliance management startup that’s raised over $10 million in venture capital so far, and Cypago, which aims to automate compliance and governance for companies.
Kuznitsov asserts that Anecdotes is well-positioned, though, with around 100 customers including Snowflake, Coinbase SoFi, Grafana and Payscale.
The big idea was to become the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions in the world.
While the move made Carta more valuable in the eyes of its venture backers — a company has to scale after all!
In his post tonight, Ward downplayed the impacts of ending secondary trading on Carta, saying the revenue derived from the practice is minuscule compared with Carta’s other business offerings.
Striking a humble tone, Ward wrote that “ALL of my ideas around liquidity — auctions, investor matching, secondary trading, open tender offers, have not worked.
Many people think we are best poised to solve liquidity because we have cap table data.
