Alex Chatzieleftheriou founded Blueground in 2013 after being frustrated with the dearth of short-term furnished apartments in Europe.
In 2022, the company gained a strong foothold in Latin America by buying Tabas, an operator of over 9,0000 furnished apartments in Brazil.
Blueground leases apartments in popular neighborhoods and then equips and furnishes them for renters.
The company didn’t reveal its new valuation, but Chatzieleftheriou said that the company’s value has increased since its previous round.
Sales jumped by 70% to $560 million in 2023 over 2022’s $300 million in gross revenue, Chatzieleftheriou said.
Startups are hiring fewer workers, and paying out less in equity compListen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday episode, in which we dig into critical startup news to stay abreast of what founders and venture capitalists are working on.
Today on the podcast, we got through the following:
Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to take Verve Motion’s SafeLift Exosuit for a spin.
You put it on over your shoulders and then snap yourself in with a pair of chest straps.
Next, another pair of soft straps are stretched around your thighs and Velcro-ed in place.
The thigh straps are connected to a pair of soft fabric cables that retract into the backpack with a bit of a yank.
Verve Motion sells SafeLift as part of a larger system featuring a wall of lockers/cubby holes used to store and charge the exosuits.
Turnitin laid off staff earlier this year, after CEO forecast AI would allow it to cut headcountPeople worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount.
TechCrunch learned that Turnitin laid off around 15 people earlier this year, as part of broader organizational changes.
Klarna recently announced that its AI Assistant can do the job of 700 workers, shocking the industry.
(Klarna later clarified that the customer service workers the AI was replacing were hired from outsourcing firms, not direct employees.)
Turnitin confirmed its layoffs in a statement to TechCrunch, but not the headcount:
As remote work becomes increasingly prevalent, organizations globally are adapting, especially regarding onboarding procedures for new employees and navigating cross-border payment complexities.
RemotePass, one such business out of the UAE, has raised $5.5 million in Series A funding led by New York-based 212 VC.
CEO Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi founded RemotePass in late 2020 to allow businesses to onboard, manage and pay their talent base in countries where they lack local legal presence.
Several companies are actively facilitating remote work and aiding employees in receiving payments from employers.
“Addressing today’s workforce challenges like talent mobility and remote work, RemotePass stands out as a key enabler.
In 2022, Walmart acquired earned wage access provider Even to offer early pay access to its employees.
Other big U.S. companies, including Amazon, McDonald’s and Uber, also offer employees early wage access programs.
Like other earned wage access providers, Wagely charges a nominal flat membership fee to employees withdrawing their salaries early.
“This is something that no other competitor is even close to because other earned wage access companies are focusing on different things,” he said.
One of the areas where global earned wage access providers have shifted their focus nowadays is lending — in some cases, to lend money to employers.
I was in Los Angeles earlier this week where I interviewed Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana on stage at our StrictlyVC LA event.
The approval removes the last barrier for the Alphabet company to charge for rides in these expanded areas.
Yup, that’s right the Apple ended plans to build and sell an autonomous electric car.
Electric vehicles, batteries & chargingXiaomi showed off its first electric car, the SU7, at Mobile World Congress.
I’ve taken numerous rides in Waymo robotaxis, but never one in Los Angeles.
Apple is scuttling its secretive, long-running project to build an autonomous electric car, according to Bloomberg.
The company has already started laying off some people who worked on the project, TechCrunch has learned.
Many of the nearly 2,000 employees who were still working on the project will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects, Bloomberg reported.
The decision to kill the project comes at a time when major automakers are reevaluating their investments in electric vehicles, and amid increased scrutiny on autonomous vehicle projects.
Apple first started working on its car project, known internally as “Project Titan,” in 2014.
We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized.
Krystal Kauffman worked as an organizer on political and issue campaigns for a decade before pursuing a degree in geology.
For the next two years, I was able to support myself doing data work in which I completed tasks that helped program AI, build LLMs and so on.
What are some issues AI users should be aware of?
Similarly, the creation of AI legislation has to involve data workers.
Flexport, a logistics company with $2.7 billion in venture and debt funding, is reportedly planning additional layoffs.
Flexport, which provides freight forwarding and brokerage services, announced similar cuts in October, when founder Ryan Petersen returned as CEO and slashed the company’s workforce by 20% — affecting about 600 workers.
An additional round of layoffs at Flexport would cap a brutal January for tech workers, as giants and startups alike have eliminated a combined tens of thousands of jobs across the industry.
While San Francisco-based Flexport wouldn’t be an outlier for making cuts, the timing would be peculiar.
Just last week, Flexport said it’d raised an additional $260 million in funding from Shopify.
