Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association.
Sonya Petcavich, the founder of cat-sitting app Meowtel, thinks that cats, and cat people, deserve more.
“Rover had been around for a few years, and Wag was picking up steam, but they were so dog focused.
Meowtel has made it to this point raising just under $1 million in venture capital.
ImpriMed, a dog oncology startup, raised $23 million in November, and Fi, a smart dog collar, has raised more than $40 million in venture capital.
The carpooling and bus ticketing company has been around for so long that it’s hard to consider it a startup anymore.
Today, the company is announcing that it’s secured a €100 million revolving credit facility ($108M at today’s exchange rate).
And the good news is that there are BlaBlaCar users all around the world — not just France.
When the war in Ukraine started, BlaBlaCar had millions of users in Russia.
Even if you don’t book your next train ride on BlaBlaCar, the company is also experimenting with last-mile carpooling.
Even as quick commerce is slowly fading in many markets and several heavily-funded startups have folded in the past two years, India is emerging as a striking outlier where the model remains vibrant.
Zomato’s Blinkit leads the quick commerce market in India, having cornered as much as 46% of the market share by GMV in the quarter that ended in December, according to a new analysis.
Reliance Retail-backed Dunzo, which pioneered the quick commerce model in India, has virtually lost its entire market share.
However, the long-term sustainability of the quick commerce model remains to be seen.
Flipkart is weighing entering the quick commerce market by as early as May this year, TechCrunch reported last week.
Plex CEO Keith Valory confirmed the round closed this month, but was unable to disclose Plex’s new valuation.
Recently, the company has been developing social features, as well, allowing Plex users to opt into a feature that tracks their viewing and shares it with friends.
To date, however, it’s Plex’s ad-supported streaming that’s been helping Plex grow its revenue.
And we’re in, at least, the top five if not higher in this space, and we feel like we’re doing really, really well,” he said.
As a result of Plex’s ability to track users’ media discovery behavior and consumption across platforms and services, the company has a unique perspective from a data standpoint.
Disney-owned animation studio Pixar is poised to undergo layoffs this year, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed.
The studio stressed the layoffs are not imminent, but will take place later this year as Pixar focuses on making less content.
According to insiders, the Pixar layoffs include headcount that was hired for Disney+ — hires Disney pushed on Pixar to produce for its streaming division, which hasn’t yet turned a profit.
In Q4, Disney+ added 7 million new subscribers, bringing its total to 150.2 million, including Hotstar, beating analysts’ expectations of 148.15 million subscribers.
A Disney subsidiary, Pixar is best known for films like “Finding Nemo,” “Monsters, Inc.” “WALL-E,” the “Toy Story” franchise, and others.
Founding a company during economic uncertainty and excelling takes more than just a hungry founder with a good idea.
Investors are engaging with fewer pitch decks from founders, according to DocSend data — investor activity dropped less than 2% year-over-year (YoY) from 2022 and 4% from 2021.
Just a few years ago, a founder’s market led to “zombie” companies raising money at unrealistic valuations with a “growth at all costs” mindset, proving there are pitfalls even in a highly founder-friendly market.
There will be founders who fail in 2023, but there will also be founders who succeed in ushering in the companies that define a generation.
Instilling solid building blocks for the company’s foundation is even more critical in a tighter economy and investor’s market.
Autonomous vehicle company May Mobility has launched its first driverless on-demand microtransit service on public roads in Sun City, Arizona in partnership with transit tech company Via.
May’s strategy of integrating its autonomous microtransit service into existing public transit, in partnership with cities, has also laid the groundwork for future, more challenging deployments.
More recently, May launched an on-demand service in Grand Rapids, Michigan in partnership with Via.
Beep operates autonomous shuttles for resident transportation in the Lake Nona community in Florida and for public transportation in Peachtree Corners, Georgia.
Riders can book the on-demand ride-hail service through May Mobility’s app, available in Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Kenyan e-commerce and fintech platform for mass market consumers Copia Global has appointed John Lazar, the ex-CEO of Metaswitch, a Microsoft subsidiary, to its board off the back of $20 million in new funding.
Without the capital to get it all the way to profitability, it made sense to hold off there.
Both companies have encountered headwinds that question the sustainability of B2C e-commerce in Africa even though they operate different e-commerce models.
However, both platforms are confronted with distinct objectives: Copia strives to achieve profitability in a single market, Kenya, while Jumia has to battle it out across 11 markets.
The founder and chairman noted that once the e-commerce company achieves profitability in the East African market, it plans to extend operations to 14 other countries it has strategically mapped out.
