Rebecca Szkutak

When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be looking for one. She thought it was an anomaly until she talked to about nine other startups, Straub told TechCrunch. They were all looking to

The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills in 2022 alone, according to data from return logistics software company Optoro. New York-based (Re)vive wants to help companies find a better ending for their returned items. (Re)vive takes in products that retailers have deemed too damaged to

When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window. Now, as the CEO of OneScreen.ai, he’s helping startups like fintech Ramp and technical recruiter Karat advertise on billboards and beyond. “I think billboards are cool and help bring creativity back into marketing,” Ewing told TechCrunch. “They are like canvases for marketers in a way

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right is extremely difficult. That’s why the founders of WeatherXM have been looking to make weather forecasts more accurate for the past 12 years. In 2012, Manolis Nikiforakis, Stratos Theodorou and Nikos Tsiligaridis launched an app that allowed community members to provide grassroots weather updates. They

Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech IPOs, Reddit, Astera Labs, Ibotta and Rubrik, in March and April, which made it seem like this year could spur the momentum investors had hoped for in 2023. But secondary investors and IPO lawyers recently told TechCrunch that despite these four successes, macro conditions like

Some startups choose to bootstrap from the beginning while others find themselves forced into self funding by a lack of investor interest or a business model that doesn’t fit traditional VC. FarmboxRx decided to bootstrap because founder Ashley Tyrner didn’t like the advice she was getting from potential backers. Tyrner told TechCrunch’s Found podcast that when she went out to raise money for FarmboxRx, a direct-to-consumer produce box company meant to solve food deserts at

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying to sell their innovative tech through old-school methods like repeated cold emails and calls. Khanna, a former product marketer, and Hughes, a former sales manager, knew these methods weren’t effective to either sell software or help buyers get the solution they needed. They decided to

When Keith Rabois announced he was leaving Founders Fund to return to Khosla Ventures in January, it came as a shock to many in the venture capital ecosystem — and not just because Rabois is a big name in the industry. It was surprising because unlike in many other fields, venture capitalists don’t traditionally move around very much — especially those who reach the partner or general partner level as Rabois had. VC funds have

Kyle Kuzma is a lot of things. He’s a forward for the Washington Wizards NBA team and a 2020 NBA champion. He’s also a style icon — depending on who you ask — and an angel investor. Now he’s an adviser at a venture fund too. “I’m part of a new generation of the NBA,” Kuzma told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “For me, I’ve always been a hustler and somebody that is very interested

When Sonia García and Stas Sokolin decided to launch Amae Health to solve the broken care system for people with severe mental illness, they were already intimately familiar with the industry’s issues. “I started thinking about this problem a very long time ago,” said Sokolin, Amae’s CEO. “I grew up with a sister who had bipolar disorder for many, many years, and as a family we always struggled to find her care. It seemed like