Best Tech News Site

W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here . Can startups help solve the U.S. housing crisis? BuildCasa thinks so. It raised a $3.5 million round of pre-seed funding to let California homeowners build new homes in their backyards. — Anna Leveraging new zoning laws There aren’t enough homes in the U.S., which would need another 3.8 million units of housing to fill the gap, Axios recently noted, citing data from Freddie Mac. And while causes and consequences are open to debate, it shouldn’t be too controversial to say that increasing housing supply is part of the solution. What does this have to do with startups, you may ask? Quite a bit, it turns out: New business models have emerged as a result of recent laws that aim to solve the housing shortage. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/yBszx5H via IFTTT

W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here . Can startups help solve the U.S. housing crisis? BuildCasa thinks so. It raised a $3.5 million round of pre-seed funding to let California homeowners build new homes in their backyards. — Anna Leveraging new zoning laws There aren’t enough homes in the U.S., which would need another 3.8 million units of housing to fill the gap, Axios recently noted, citing data from Freddie Mac. And while causes and consequences are open to debate, it shouldn’t be too controversial to say that increasing housing supply is part of the solution. What does this have to do with startups, you may ask? Quite a bit, it turns out: New business models have emerged as a result of recent laws that aim to solve the housing shortage. source https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/26/housing-supply-startups/

Listen here  or wherever you get your podcasts . Hello and welcome back to  Equity , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Welcome to an old-school Equity tradition: the bonus show! Despite getting through our regular episodes this week, we have one more for you. Why the extra edition? Because Battery Ventures dropped an interesting report on Gen-Z and I wanted to talk about it. So, I got Courtney Chow , a vice president at Battery and one of the report’s authors to chat with me about it. You can read the report itself here . This is what we got into: The fracturing of culture: Gen-Z is large, and very diverse. The trend away from monolithic cultural primacy that began years ago has accelerated with the generation, making culture itself more personal, and more distinct. For startups, this means branding will become a different challenge if they want to reach this demographic slice. Everything is short-fo...

Listen here  or wherever you get your podcasts . Hello and welcome back to  Equity , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Welcome to an old-school Equity tradition: the bonus show! Despite getting through our regular episodes this week, we have one more for you. Why the extra edition? Because Battery Ventures dropped an interesting report on Gen-Z and I wanted to talk about it. So, I got Courtney Chow , a vice president at Battery and one of the report’s authors to chat with me about it. You can read the report itself here . This is what we got into: The fracturing of culture: Gen-Z is large, and very diverse. The trend away from monolithic cultural primacy that began years ago has accelerated with the generation, making culture itself more personal, and more distinct. For startups, this means branding will become a different challenge if they want to reach this demographic slice. Everything is short-fo...

The instant grocery delivery startup Zepto has raised $200 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion at a time when most other firms in the category have either died or are struggling and has become the first Indian startup to attain the unicorn status this year. StepStone Group, an influential LP in many venture funds, led Zepto’s Series E funding in what is the U.S. firm’s first direct investment in India. Goodwater Capital and existing backers, including Nexus Venture Partners, Glade Brook Capital and Lachy Groom also participated in the round. Zepto was last valued at $900 million in a funding round it unveiled in May last year. The startup, which has raised about $560 million to date, has no secondary transaction in the new round, Zepto co-founder and chief executive Aadit Palicha said in an interview. The funding comes at a time when the vast majority of instant delivery startups globally – Gopuff, Jokr, Getir, Gorillas, Instacart and others that collectively raised over $10 bill...

Teamshares is a low-flying, Brooklyn-based startup with big ambitions to capitalize on an opportunity in plain sight: that of small businesses without a succession plan. It’s not a small market. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses represent 99.7% of U.S. employer firms and 64% of private-sector jobs. Meanwhile, just 15% or so of small business owners pass along their company to a family member, with many others simply closing up shop at some point. With an aging population in the U.S., Teamshares is betting this market will grow even bigger, which is why since 2018, it has snapped up 84 small businesses from retiring owners. These owners like its pitch. Though Teamshares says that it sometimes pays below market price for a company, it installs a new president that it trains, and grants 10% of the business’s stock to its employees. Moreover , it promises to increase those employees’ ownership to 80% within 20 years. It sounds almost valiant, like whe...

Teamshares is a low-flying, Brooklyn-based startup with big ambitions to capitalize on an opportunity in plain sight: that of small businesses without a succession plan. It’s not a small market. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses represent 99.7% of U.S. employer firms and 64% of private-sector jobs. Meanwhile, just 15% or so of small business owners pass along their company to a family member, with many others simply closing up shop at some point. With an aging population in the U.S., Teamshares is betting this market will grow even bigger, which is why since 2018, it has snapped up 84 small businesses from retiring owners. These owners like its pitch. Though Teamshares says that it sometimes pays below market price for a company, it installs a new president that it trains, and grants 10% of the business’s stock to its employees. Moreover , it promises to increase those employees’ ownership to 80% within 20 years. It sounds almost valiant, like whe...