The folks at Collaborative Fund certainly like a challenge.
Oh, and they decided to raise their sixth flagship fund at a time when limited partners have grown more miserly.
Collaborative recently raised $125 million for its sixth flagship fund, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch, completing the process in just over 90 days.
“This fundraising environment is tougher than any I’ve seen since starting the firm well over a decade ago,” founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro told TechCrunch.
Part of that could be the fact that Collaborative has recently returned capital to its LPs, Shapiro said.
Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth.
While Serve’s debut in the public markets comes from a reverse merger and not a SPAC, the two alternate paths to IPO are not too dissimilar.
However, Serve Robotics said it’s expecting enormous growth fueled by money generated by going public.
“I never thought that I would start a robotics company and then be in the ads business,” said a tired, but excited, Kashani in a phone interview minutes before the bell rang.
Upon the closing of the merger, Uber held a 16.6% stake and Nvidia an 14.3% stake in Serve, according to regulatory filings.
Moove, an African mobility fintech that offers vehicle financing to ride-hailing and delivery app drivers, has raised $100 million in a funding round as it plots expansion into new markets.
Moove says it plans to use the new capital to expand its revenue-based vehicle financing platform to 16 markets by the end of 2025.
Moove takes a two-pronged approach to vehicle financing.
The vehicles provided to Moove customers vary from traditional options like Toyotas and Suzukis to electric vehicles (EVs) such as Teslas.
The vehicle financing startup operates large EV fleets in the UAE and the U.K.
Bitcoin hits new high, Solana price jumps as memecoins mania rises and Worldcoin faces heat in SpainWelcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
Hello and welcome back to the TechCrunch Crypto newsletter.
This week in web3Crunching numbersAs mentioned, this week the crypto space saw all-time highs for bitcoin, again.
Memecoins across the Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche blockchains have seen a huge rally as the crypto market continues to expand.
It’s important to remember that while some memecoins will retain price support for an extended period of time, some can plummet within days, or hours.
Bitcoin has increased 9.5% in the past seven days and is up 50% on the month, according to CoinMarketCap data.
There is, of course, no way of telling how high bitcoin can rise during the current bull frenzy.
The CoinMarketCap Crypto Fear & Greed Index is in “extreme greed” territory at 89.12 points, up from “neutral” at 59.3 points, in early February.
The index measures price and trading data of the biggest cryptocurrencies, with its user behavior data to measure crypto market sentiment from 0-100.
The last bitcoin halving was on May 11, 2020 and drove its price up about 600% from around $9,000 to $63,000 by the April 2021 mark.
The digital currency hit a new all-time high for the first time since November 2021 when it passed $69,000 on Tuesday morning, as demand surged in recent weeks following the spot bitcoin ETF approvals in the U.S. and the pending bitcoin halving in late April.
Bitcoin halving, which is usually referred to as “the halvening,” is a periodic decline in bitcoin mining rates, which means the number of bitcoin miners can potentially get for each block mined is cut in half.
This process is meant to control the supply of bitcoin over time and once the number of bitcoin in circulation hits 21 million, its total supply, the process will end.
The price jump increase is also being driven by the 11 spot bitcoin ETFs the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved in January.
The total market cap across the spot bitcoin ETF products is $53.74 billion, according to Blockworks data.
The much-teased and oft-leaked Nothing Phone (2a) is now officially official, just under a week after it made its limited debut at the company’s MWC after party.
Nothing’s third phone is the first that goes directly after the mid-tier/budget space, with a starting price of $349.
The phone is currently only available here for developers looking to integrate third-party apps with the light up “Glyphs” on the device’s back.
In the London-based firm’s home market, it’s available in both 8GB/128GB and 12GB/256GB models, running £319 and £319, respectively.
At 5,000 mAh, the battery is larger than the ones found on both the Phone (1) (4,500mAh) and Phone (2) (4,700 mAh).
GitHub today announced the general availability of Copilot Enterprise, the $39/month version of its code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses.
Many teams already keep their documentation in GitHub repositories today, making it relatively easy for Copilot to reason over it.
On top of talking about today’s release, I also asked Dohmke about his high-level thinking of where Copilot is going next.
“Different use cases require different models.
We will continue going down that path of using the best models for the different pieces of the Copilot experience,” Dohmke said.
Solana Mobile still has a long way to go until it hits breakeven Solana Labs co-founder teases possibility of third mobile deviceLast month, Solana Mobile’s flagship web3 smartphone, the Saga, sold out.
Last week the Solana Labs’ subsidiary launched its second phone and got over 40,000 preorders in less than a week.
“After Saga sold out, it felt like there’s an opportunity and the timing in the market was right,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
“The timing [for the new phone] worked out right around that moment.”And if the second device is a success, there will be a third phone launched later on, Yakovenko hinted.
“I think crypto was going through a hard bear market, and the Solana ecosystem was feeling the worst of it,” Yakovenko said.
Solana Mobile still has a long way to go until it hits breakeven Solana Labs co-founder teases possibility of third mobile deviceLast month, Solana Mobile’s flagship web3 smartphone, the Saga, sold out.
Last week the Solana Labs’ subsidiary launched its second phone and got over 40,000 preorders in less than a week.
“After Saga sold out, it felt like there’s an opportunity and the timing in the market was right,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
“The timing [for the new phone] worked out right around that moment.”And if the second device is a success, there will be a third phone launched later on, Yakovenko hinted.
“I think crypto was going through a hard bear market, and the Solana ecosystem was feeling the worst of it,” Yakovenko said.
