TechCrunch Startup News

Index founders, Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet, have been friends since they were small children in the Dominican Republic. Both came to college in the U.S., and last year the two decided to launch a startup to help non-technical users build business intelligence dashboards without coding. Today they get to keep building on that dream […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer? Those applications from the 1990s used emphatic metaphors in their names to talk about a simple task — browsing the web. Today, nobody would say that Google Chrome is a web explorer. Browsing the web has become an effortless — and often mindless — task. You grab your phone or […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Open banking enables bank-to-bank payments, meaning that (in theory) merchants should be able to accept payments without having to hand over fees to Visa or Mastercard or other payment providers, such as Stripe. The challenge, however, isn’t just implementing open-banking based payments as a checkout option — there are are already a host of open […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

PearPop a new Los Angeles-based company, is on its way to racking up nearly 25,000 users in less than a month, and has already landed seed funding from the firm Rocket One Capital. The company’s premise is simple. Allow fans to bid for shared screen time with their favorite TikTok celebrities, and it’s one that’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Propseller, a Singapore-based real estate agency that combines a tech platform with in-house agents to close transactions more quickly, announced today it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. The round included investment from Iterative; Hustle Fund; XA Network; Rapzo Capital; Lazada co-founder Stein Jakabo; and Dot Property founder Ben Neve. Propseller also said “three […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was just a few weeks ago that Datto, what TechCrunch called a “backup and disaster recovery firm,” filed to go public. This week the firm set an initial range for its debut. The Vista Equity Partners -backed company was picked up by the private equity firm back in 2017. Vista is back in the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vivun’s co-founder and CEO, Matt Darrow used to run pre-sales at Zuora and he saw that pre-sales team members had a lot of insight into customers. He believed if he could capture that insight, it would turn into valuable data to be shared across the company. He launched Vivun to build upon that idea in […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s a difficult time for small businesses — to put it mildly. And Fivestars CEO Victor Ho said that many of the big digital platforms aren’t really helping. Ho argued that those platforms — whether they offer delivery services, user reviews or marketing tools — all have the same underlying model: “They seek to take over a small […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup WizVille is launching a new product called Local Monitor to help restaurant owners, haircut places, bakeries and all kinds of small shops track their Google Maps ratings and the ratings of their competitors. While there are plenty of ratings services to compare places around you, such as Foursquare, Yelp and Tripadvisor, Google Maps […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just months after it announced a $33 million Series B, Chicago-based M1 Finance today disclosed a $45 Series C. The new financing event was led by Left Lane Capital, the same investor that led M1’s Series B. Bear in mind that so-called inside rounds are now a bullish sign in 2020, as opposed to in prior […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices