Thu.Apr 06, 2023

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Level up with our partners at TC Early Stage

TechCrunch

Boston! Are you ready for some green on 4/20? No, not that green. It’s TechCrunch Early Stage 2023! Soon enough, we’ll be coming straight atcha with a host of speakers, workshops, roundtables, and networking opportunities that are sure to accelerate your dream. *Cut to Mark Wahlberg speeding down the Big Dig, accelerating toward a dream.* At this one-day founder summit, you’ll get actionable advice and takeaways from top experts, meet other entrepreneurs taking similar journeys, share your

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Strivacity Announces $20 Million in New Funding To Modernize Customer Sign-in Experiences and Security

American Entrepreneurship

SignalFire leads latest round for SaaS customer identity and access management (CIAM) vendor Herndon, Va. April 4, 2023 – Strivacity ® , the company making customer sign-in experiences unexpectedly simple and secure, today announced $20 million in new funding. SignalFire, based in San Francisco, led the Series A2 investment with additional participation from Ten Eleven Ventures.

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Without the Stripe and OpenAI deals, global VC results would have been even worse in Q1 2023

TechCrunch

Even as Y Combinator reveals the latest startups in its cohort for this winter , we have poor news for founders: the global venture capital market shrank in Q1 2023, and it would have been even worse if it were not for a few mega deals, according to Crunchbase (disclosure: my former employer) and PitchBook reports. And here in the United States, things are looking grim.

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Ecosapiens Secures $3.5 Million to Power Carbon-Backed NFT Community in Latest Seed Round 

American Entrepreneurship

The round was led by Collab+Currency and included gmoney as an advisor April 4, 2023 [San Francisco, CA] – Ecosapiens , an eco-conscious collective that defends the climate through creative tech, today announced $3.5 million of funding in its latest seed round. The round was led by consumer web3 fund Collab+Currency with prominent investor, builder, and influencer gmoney joining as an advisor.

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From Curiosity to Competitive Edge: How Mid-Market CEOs Are Using AI to Scale Smarter

Speaker: Lee Andrews, Founder at LJA New Media & Tony Karrer, Founder and CTO at Aggregage

This session will walk you through how one CEO used generative AI, workflow automation, and sales personalization to transform an entire security company—then built the Zero to Strategy framework that other mid-market leaders are now using to unlock 3.5x ROI. As a business executive, you’ll learn how to assess AI opportunities in your business, drive adoption across teams, and overcome internal resource constraints—without hiring a single data scientist.

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Funds offering ‘friends and family’ checks could bring the change underrepresented founders need

TechCrunch

Perhaps you’ve been there before: An investor shrugs and waves their hand. “Go raise a friends and family round,” they say before perfunctorily throwing out a number worth three times more than the average Black household. A new white paper by the venture fund Fifth Star put into context how incongruous such statements are: The average friends and family round is $23,000.

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More Trending

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Alternative seafood startup Aqua Cultured Foods reels in $5.5M

TechCrunch

Venture capital investors focused on food tech are calling 2023 the year when alternative seafood startups will make notable strides. Meanwhile, investors expect 40 investments to be made in this sector this year, up from 36 in 2022, according to the Good Food Institute’s annual investor report. Within the past year, TechCrunch reported on a number of those investments into startups producing alternatives to traditional seafood.

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Women of Color Entrepreneur Grant Applications Open until April 28th

American Entrepreneurship

Fearless Fund and the Tory Burch Foundation continue their partnership to boost women of color entrepreneurs by awarding grants ranging from $10,000 to $20,000. In mid-July 75 women of color-owned small businesses will learn of their grant awards and be given access to a “self-paced learning portal and peer-to-peer community networking.” Fearless Fund was founded in 2019 by with the mission of bridging the gap in venture capital funding for female founders of color building scalable, growth-aggr

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Pitch Deck Teardown: Smalls’ $19M Series B deck

TechCrunch

Smalls has raised a total of $34 million for its cat food subscription business. But in a competitive pet food market, how does the company set itself from its competition? The cat food industry is an extremely competitive market, with numerous brands and products vying for the attention of cat owners. The industry is characterized by constant innovation, but largely on the marketing side, rather than on product.

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A roundup of innovative submissions from Zapier's 2023 No-Code Day Contest

The Zapier Blog

Earlier this year, we launched our second annual No-Code Day Contest and asked you to submit your favorite no-code projects. After reviewing hundreds of submissions, we announced our official winners. From feeding the hungry to using AI to write the perfect cover letter, the innovation was beyond impressive. While we couldn't name everyone a winner, we wanted to highlight a few submissions that might inspire you to use no-code tools to help you, your team, and your business move forward at

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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Forme Financial launches out of beta as Earned to help physicians manage wealth

TechCrunch

Forme Financial, a wealth management platform for physicians, is emerging from beta with a new name and $12 million in Series A funding. Now called Earned , the New York-based company provides a “comprehensive wealth system” focused on the needs of physicians, which John Clendening, co-founder and CEO of Earned, said were unique and often complex, depending on the person’s career stage.

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5 Critical Questions to Devise Your Startup’s Strategy

Entrepreneur's Handbook

Even a scale-up needs a strategy. But it must be short and flexible.

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Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

TechCrunch

AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch. A pitch deck for Anthropic’s Series C fundraising round discloses these and other long-term goals for the company, which was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI researchers.

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How to get any app to work with Zapier

The Zapier Blog

Remember when Apple launched the App Store and the early novelty of app discovery? Oh, how naive we were. Now we roll our eyes whenever a product requires an app download because it just adds to the landscape of apps that don't talk to each other. Enter Zapier, a powerful tool designed to bridge this communication gap by automating tasks between your favorite apps—no coding skills required.

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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?

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Our favorite startups from YC’s Winter 2023 Demo Day — Part 2

TechCrunch

Over 20,000 applications flew into Y Combinator, which ended up plucking out 282 startups for its latest batch. And now we’re getting our first look at them through Demo Day. The first day’s demos included a healthy dose of artificial intelligence and open source, which is different from years past that were dominated by new fintech companies. That’s not entirely surprising; we were less than 10 minutes into Demo Day before we heard the phrase “Cerebral Valley.

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Aqua Cultured Foods raises $5.5M to bring its seafood alternatives to market

HPA

We’re excited to share that Aqua Cultured Foods , a food tech startup, is bringing its ultra-realistic seafood alternative s to market thanks to its $5.5M in Seed funding. HPA participated in the round , which was led by Stray Dog Capital, a VC fund specializing in alternative protein investments. The round included participation from H Venture Partners, Aztec Capital Management and Amplifica Capital, along with follow-on investment from current investors Supply Change Capital, Big Idea Ventu

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Honeycomb scores $50M investment as observability platform thrives

TechCrunch

Honeycomb was founded in 2016 by two former Facebook engineers to create a new way of looking at application monitoring based on the internal tooling they had seen at Facebook. At the time, they foresaw a changing IT landscape that was being transformed by microservices and containerization and they believed (correctly as it turned out) that the modern IT stack required a different approach to monitoring.

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The 4 Questions Startups Should Ask Themselves about Building with Generative AI

Tomasz Tunguz

There are 4 questions a startup should ask themselves about building a startup that uses generative AI. I presented those questions & my views on their answers at Saastr’s Workshop Wednesday. I had a blast putting this deck together. I started with a few sentences, uploaded them to gamma.app to outline the presentation, popped over to Midjourney to generate images along the story line, & published it in IA Presenter.

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The GTM Intelligence Era: ZoomInfo 2025 Customer Impact Report

ZoomInfo customers aren’t just selling — they’re winning. Revenue teams using our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform grew pipeline by 32%, increased deal sizes by 40%, and booked 55% more meetings. Download this report to see what 11,000+ customers say about our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform and how it impacts their bottom line. The data speaks for itself!

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Staytuned bags $34M in equity, debt to build ‘Salesforce suite for e-commerce’

TechCrunch

Staytuned Digital has $34 million in new equity and debt to continue developing a software suite for e-commerce brands with a goal of what co-founder Serge Kassardjian described as “the Salesforce suite for e-commerce stores.” “E-commerce has completely shifted and is moving to these emerging platforms, with Shopify being the biggest one,” he said. “In turn, we’re buying and building software that’s around the Shopify ecosystem.

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I Wasn’t a True Startup Founder Until I Became a Full-Time Problem Solver

Entrepreneur's Handbook

How to get better at firefighting on all fronts Continue reading on Entrepreneur's Handbook »

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SoftBank LatAm sees past recent losses, remains bullish on region

TechCrunch

When SoftBank announced in 2019 that it had allocated $5 billion to investing in Latin American startups, it felt like an inflection point for the region. And then when the Japanese investment conglomerate announced it had committed another $3 billion to startups there, it was only further validation that Latin America was home to a formidable startup system.

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10 Most and Least Expensive States to Start a Business

StartupNation

Many business owners are keeping a close eye on their expenses and trimming costs due to inflation and… The post 10 Most and Least Expensive States to Start a Business appeared first on StartupNation.

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How Top Tech CFOs Solve Annual Planning’s Biggest Challenges

Gearing up for 2025 annual planning? Our latest eBook from the Operators Guild is your ultimate guide. Discover real-world solutions and best practices shared by top CFOs, drawn directly from discussions within OG’s vibrant online community. Learn from senior executives at high-growth tech startups as they outline financial planning strategies, align CEO and board goals, and coordinate budgets across departments.

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Daily Crunch: New Twitter Blue feature will reportedly squelch 50% of ads for paid members

TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Well, hello there! Haje is getting a head start on the weekend, so it’s going to be me and you for the next two days. I’ve been among the group of TechCrunchers watching pitch after pitch at Y Combinator’s Demo Day. Here is part 1 of our favorites , with the second one coming later on today.

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Vertical Operating Systems: One System of Record to Rule Them All

Andreessen Horowitz

When computers were first built, each new application had to be programmed specifically for each chip. This was very complicated for developers and, as a result, the companies that created operating systems to simplify this complexity became some of the … The post Vertical Operating Systems: One System of Record to Rule Them All appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Alga Biosciences wants to help climate change, one bovine burp at a time

TechCrunch

Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The process is called “enteric fermentation,” and as these microbes work to digest the cellulose found in the cows’ diet, methane is produced as a byproduct.

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Why Are More Americans Skipping College?

StartupNation

Many Americans who graduated during the pandemic are skipping college and have turned instead to hourly jobs or… The post Why Are More Americans Skipping College? appeared first on StartupNation.

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5 Ways You Can Win Faster with Gen AI in Sales

Incorporating generative AI (gen AI) into your sales process can speed up your wins through improved efficiency, personalized customer interactions, and better informed decision- making. Gen AI is a game changer for busy salespeople and can reduce time-consuming tasks, such as customer research, note-taking, and writing emails, and provide insightful data analysis and recommendations.