Many of the world’s organizations shifted to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even as more people are vaccinated and offices are planning re-openings, it’s clear that for some organizations, remote work is here to stay.  Deel, a startup which provides payroll, compliance tools and other services to help businesses hire remotely, has ...

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive Natasha and Alex and Danny wanted to chat crypto. No, not cryptography, but cryptocurrency. The topic has been hot in recent months thanks to Coinbase, recent weeks thanks to the rapid price appreciation in the ...

Welcome Tech, which has built a digital platform aimed at immigrants and their families, has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round co-led by TTV Capital, Owl Ventures and SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Opportunity Fund. Crosscut Ventures, Mubadala Capital, Next Play Capital and Owl Capital also participated in the financing, which brings the ...

Misfits Market, a startup known for selling “****” fruits and vegetables at discount prices, announced this morning that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding. The company says this brings its total funding to $301.5 million and moves its valuation into unicorn territory (i.e., above $1 billion). It isn’t getting any more specific ...

Amazon is bringing its new biometric device, the Amazon One scanner, to Whole Foods store. The retail giant this past fall first introduced the Amazon One scanner, which allows shoppers to enter a store by having their palm scanned. The customer’s palm signature can be associated with their payment mechanism in a retail environment — ...

Companies like Ro and Hims have capitalized on the need for more seamless and discreet access to health and wellness products that are part of everyday life. For men. Stix is looking to do the same for women, and has today announced the raise of a $3.5 million seed round. The financing was co-led by ...

Our venture capital-focused podcast Equity made it to the finals of its category in the Webbys, a digital awards show for digital things. We were pretty stoked about it. Natasha, in fact, was both excited and ready to go to battle with editing tools so that we could share an image of sorts in an ...

Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling a few years back, but has largely been quiet on that front, aside from some stage time at CES back in January. Today the company announced that Upcycling at Home is being opened to beta today for users in the U.S., Korea and the U.K. It’s a pretty novel program, in ...

Excel and Google Sheets can only address pure ‘number crunching’ in a limited way. A new UK startup, Causal hopes to tackle this issue and has now raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel. Existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain and others, also participated. The raise brings Causal’s ...

The last five years have seen a plethora of fintech applications in Nigeria (and Africa, in general) grow at an astonishing rate. But most of these companies and developers find it difficult to access real-time banking data. This, in turn, creates a bottleneck when onboarding and verifying customers. Since 2019, Plaid-esque companies, but with different ...