Not a lot of thought goes into the average spreadsheet. Yet, increasingly, spreadsheets are becoming an essential tool for data teams. Entrepreneur David Kircos knows this well; he previously worked at Techstars, the accelerator program, where he built financial models for startups. “Building data models is best done in Python, but many of my team … Read more
A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building. Shimkus was of the belief that building skills in the corporate sector was a difficult, but not intractable, challenge — one that could perhaps be solved with the right technology. He brought it up to Yang, who … Read more
In 2023, higher egg prices provided an opportunity for alternative protein companies to show they could compete with traditional egg manufacturers. A year later, prices have calmed down, but the flurry of activity in creating more sustainable egg products continues to thrive. One place seeing a flurry of activity is Onego Bio, a Finland-based food-biotech … Read more
The current AI wave is a never-ending barrage of news items. To understand what I mean, ask yourself how long you spent considering the fact that Amazon put another $2.75 billion into Anthropic AI last week. Right? We’ve become inured to the capital influx that is now common in AI, even as the headline numbers … Read more
Tucked inside Canoo’s 2023 earnings report is a nugget regarding the use of CEO Tony Aquila’s private jet — just one of many expenses that illustrates the gap between spending and revenue at the EV startup. Canoo posted Monday its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings for 2023 in a regulatory filing that shows a company burning … Read more
Footage obtained by TechCrunch shows the catastrophic ending that Astra’s Rocket 3.0 suffered during prelaunch testing in March 2020. The explosion, which occurred at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex, was simply reported as an “anomaly” at the time, an industry term for pretty much any issue that deviates from the expected outcome. “I can confirm we … Read more
The modern world is dependent on a vast network for extracting, processing, transporting and ultimately consuming hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas. But these resources come with a cost: they’re finite, difficult to extract and take carbon dioxide out of the ground and release it into the air. Instead of reducing humanity’s dependence on … Read more
OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI accessible to everyone, even people who haven’t bothered making an account. It won’t be quite the same experience, however — and of course all your chats will still go into their training data unless you opt out. Starting today in a few markets and gradually rolling out to … Read more
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and take a peek at the week that is to come. We’ll talk more about Wednesday, but this is Y Combinator Demo … Read more
Ember’s first Indiegogo campaign drew sideways glances when it launched in 2015. Would anyone actually buy a $129 heated coffee mug? Nearly a decade later, however, it’s clear that the initial pitch was merely the tip of the startup’s heating/cooling iceberg. TechCrunch recently sat down with Clay Alexander, the firm’s founder and chairman, to take … Read more
