U.K.-based limited partners Venrex and Samos Investments are this week backing the launch of a new VC primarily aimed at investing in startups led by Ukrainians inside and outside the war-torn country. The LPs are better known for being early institutional investors in the successful early stage startup funds Seedcamp and Entrepreneur First. 1991 Ventures is the … Read more
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Helloooo, startup nerds! I spent much of this week in San Jose hanging out in the world of AI startups and tech giants at GTC, and … Read more
On March 11, a fizzy startup announced that it had raised $67 million at a $1.4 billion valuation and reached $263 million in sales in 2023. Did you guess that this startup is Liquid Death, a canned water company? Liquid Death has now raised more than $267 million in venture funding despite sitting in a … Read more
Death Valley National Park on July 15, 2023, near Furnace Creek, California. David Mcnew | Getty Images Venture capital firm World Fund said Friday it’s closed a 300 million euro ($325 million) fund to back startups tackling climate change. World Fund, a European climate technology investor incubated by the environment-conscious search engine Ecosia, said … Read more
Aravind Srinivas credits Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat eggs. Srinivas remembers the moment seven years ago when an interview with Pichai popped up in his YouTube feed. His vegetarian upbringing in India had excluded eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early twenties, … Read more
The number of startups in India’s electric two-wheeler market has surged to over 150 from 54 in 2021, driven by government incentives to promote clean vehicles and cut oil imports, according to a new analysis. The influx has intensified competition in a segment expected to grow 15-20 times to annual sales of 15-20 million units … Read more
The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that December. In December of 2023, the company specified a figure only for “logged-in” US users, … Read more
When Michael Seibel lost his position at the startup incubator Y Combinator, he didn’t find out in typical tech industry fashion, which might entail an email calling him to a Zoom meeting where the bad news would be delivered. He did it to himself. Today Seibel is announcing that he’s stepping down as YC’s managing … Read more
Two of Blue Origin’s earliest employees, former president Rob Meyerson and chief architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here. The company has been operating in stealth since its founding in 2022, but it emerged on Wednesday … Read more
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday episode, in which we dig into critical startup news to stay abreast of what founders and venture capitalists are working on. Today … Read more