It was while sourcing manufacturing equipment for Tesla factories that Will Drewery drew inspiration for Diagon, a startup that helps manufacturers procure equipment.
Companies in fields like automotive and aerospace can identify qualified suppliers from Diagon’s network of equipment suppliers, system integrators and service providers.
East Coast originsThe journey to Diagon for Drewery, who spent most of his career as an equipment buyer, started in Pittsburgh.
“This is why I felt the market needs a Diagon,” Drewery said.
“Now we are developing tools that help customers find suppliers better or help them interpret and summarize quotes better,” Drewery said.
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.
Meta-owned social network Threads is finally testing a “Recent” filter to sort search results by the latest.
“We’re starting to test this with a small number of people, so it’s easier to find relevant search results in real-time,” he said in a reply to a user.
A user part of the test posted that they could see “Top” and “Recent” filters on the search results screen.
They noted that the “Recent” filter isn’t strictly chronological, but it shows the latest posts better than the “Top” filter.
Earlier this year, the company accidentally rolled out the option to sort search results by the latest.
UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms.
To date, most legaltech startups that are deploying AI have concentrated on the big, juicy market of ‘Big Law’ — meaning large, either country-wide or global, law firms that are keenly pushing AI into their workflows.
These include Harvey (US-based; raised $106M); Robin AI (UK-based; raised $43.4M); Spellbook (Canada-based; raised $32.4M).
Lawhive targets its platform at small law firms or solo lawyers running their own shop.
That’s a very small number of big law firms in the US in the UK.
Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was last valued at $5 billion in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees as companies are not significantly hiring talent.
TechCrunch exclusively learned that Checkr conducted the layoffs across all departments and different levels on Tuesday.
“In response to economic conditions that have impacted companies’ hiring, we made the difficult and painful decision to reduce the size of our team.
This will allow us to operate more efficiently and ensure the long-term health of our business,” a Checkr spokesperson said in the statement.
The job cuts — which affected 32% of the company’s workforce — came nearly two years after Checkr announced the acquisition of Inflection, the startup behind GoodHire, a background-checking platform for small- and mid-sized businesses.
It’s easy to assume the e-commerce ship has sailed when you consider we have giant platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, and Wix dominating the sector.
E-commerce platform, ikas, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round as it seeks to expand its operations into new markets in Europe.
The company currently operates in Turkey and Germany, and says its platform simplifies store management for companies that want to have a digital presence.
Also investing in ikas is Re-Pie Asset Management, which has grocery delivery startup Getir in its portfolio as well.
The round saw participation from ikas’ existing investor Revo Capital, best known as the first institutional investor in Getir, Param, Midas and Roamless.
Hoping to stall a ban, TikTok says it generated $14.7B for US small businesses last yearAs U.S. lawmakers weigh a possible TikTok ban, the ByteDance-owned short-form video app released an economic impact report on Thursday.
In it, the company touts the platform generated $14.7 billion for small- to mid-size businesses (SMBs) last year, and a further $24.2 billion in total economic activity, supported through small business’s use of TikTok.
In addition, it says that over 7 million U.S. businesses rely on TikTok and that 224,000 jobs were supported by small business activity on the platform in 2023.
In March, a bill that could ban TikTok passed in the House of Representatives.
The Trump administration had previously sought to ban TikTok, calling it a national security risk, but Trump now opposes a ban, saying that Meta would benefit.
Agility Robotics on Thursday confirmed that it has laid off a “small number” of employees.
The well-funded Oregon-based firm says the job loss is part of a company-wide focus on commercialization efforts.
Ultimately, however, those efforts were placed on the back burner, as the company shifted focus to understaffed warehouses.
Two years ago this month, the company announced a $150 million Series B. Amazon notably participated in the round by way of its Industrial Innovation Fund.
Last month at Modex, Agility showcased updates to Digit’s end effectors designed specifically for automotive manufacturing workflows.
The round also includes existing investors, Notable Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and PLUS Capital.
“To have over 2 million workers on Homebase, which is over 2% of the workforce, is impressive for a private company,” Richards said.
In 2021, sources told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden that the company’s valuation was between $500 million and $600 million.
“We are using technology to give workers superpowers and in fact, make the work more human, not less,” Waldmann said.
Small businesses have always provided that, and this, to me, is why our mission is so important to make these jobs even better.”
And they’re calling their company… The Mobile-First Company.
Too many companies that offer B2B tools treat mobile apps as companion apps and second-class citizens.
Small companies don’t need a complicated enterprise software solution.
While Siel Brunet is more experienced with the needs of large companies, he has also seen how B2B apps don’t work well with small businesses.
Many small companies simply rely on consumer apps to fill their needs.
