Daily Crunch: Citing slow growth and desire to be ‘at the forefront of the AI era,’ Dropbox CEO lays off 500
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. Thursday is here — how in the world did that happen? Those days, they just keep on coming. If you’re still on the fence about whether you want to come along to […]
Clubhouse needs to fix things, and today it cut more than half of staff
Clubhouse, a once skyrocketing social audio app built by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, has laid off more than half of its staff. The startup’s co-founders made the decision in response to customer habits changing in a post-COVID world and remote work complexities, according to a blog post. Those who were impacted will receive severance […]
Chief, a professional network for women leaders, cuts staff amid restructuring effort
Chief, a professional network designed for women in leadership, has cut 14% of staff, or 43 jobs today, saying in an email seen by TechCrunch that the move is a response to the economy and that the outfit is restructuring to further focus on member experience. The layoff largely hit Chief’s U.S. employees as the […]
Pitch Deck Teardown: Careerist’s $8M Series A deck
Careerist claims it closed an $8 million round of funding with a tight 12-slide deck, and gave us a lot to learn from in the process. Not all in good ways, but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit […]
Replit, the web-based IDE developing a GitHub Copilot competitor, raises $100M
Investors continue to pump money into generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, an IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week raised nearly $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round — a Series B extension — with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV […]
Y Combinator-backed Luca aims to optimize retail prices at enterprise scale
Luca, a startup building price planning and prediction tools for retailers, today announced that it closed a $2.5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Y Combinator (Luca was in Y Combinator’s winter 2023 class), Soma Capital and angel investors. Luca was co-founded by Tanvi Surti and Yonah Mann, who worked together […]
Sometimes you need to cut your startup’s school ties
In her presentation at last week’s TechCrunch Early Stage event in Boston, SOSV general partner Pae Wu tossed out the tongue-in-cheek phrase “recovering academic” to describe founders in the firm’s IndieBio program. It’s a fitting label, given many founders in the program are academics, and their journey from academia to accelerator has its share of […]
What is this, revenue growth for ants?
It’s earnings season, that time of the quarter when we get to judge how well public tech firms are fulfilling all the lofty promises they’ve been making. So far this week, we’ve heard from Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook), among other names. While results from companies like Roku and Spotify hold interesting information […]
Pinecone drops $100M investment on $750M valuation, as vector database demand grows
When Pinecone launched a vector database aimed at data scientists in 2021, it was probably ahead of its time. But as the use cases began to take shape last year, the company began pushing AI-driven semantic search. With the rise of LLMs in the public consciousness, companies are beginning to see the value of vector […]
Chunk Foods close to opening factory to produce ‘millions’ of plant-based steaks
The global plant-based foods industry accounted for $8 billion in sales and received $1.2 billion in investment in 2022, according to new figures from the Good Food Institute. Those with recent funding include No Meat Factory, Planetarians, ISH Company and Chunk Foods, which is developing a plant-based alternative protein that mimics the texture and taste […]
