Alex Wilhelm

Neobanks are wagers that modern, digitally native services can supplant the traditional banking landscape. Founders flocked to the idea, investors wrote myriad checks, and despite how far along we are in the neobanking boom, startups are still being formed today to attack the problem space. Lately, we’ve seen neobanks...

Now comfortably into Q4 2022, TechCrunch is busy looking at a mountain of data from the third quarter, hoping to solidify our understanding of where the market for startup deal-making was, is right now and where it’s heading next. So far, we’ve seen stronger than anticipated American venture capital...

Hello and welcome back to The Exchange’s weekend missive. If you are reading this on TechCrunch and want to get the letter in your inbox, head here. Your regular host Anna Heim is off this week on a much-deserved vacation, so I’m stepping back into my old role as...

It’s a rote story by now that many populations around the world are facing rapid decline. Birth rates in many countries are falling, leading to concerns about graying populations engendering imbalanced economies. That’s true when we consider nation-level populations. It’s also true when we consider the rate at which new...

Naver buying Poshmark for $17.90 per share is a fascinating deal, featuring elements of cross-border M&A, a sector on its back foot, and stock-market dynamics making some formerly expensive companies perhaps cheaper to pick off than they may ever be again. TechCrunch+ asked yesterday why we weren’t seeing more...

Silly season is out in venture capital land. Today investors and founders alike will bore your ears off with notes about incremental cash flow positivity and their timeline to adjusted EBITDA profitability. Lame. Despite the general boringness of today’s venture capital landscape, replete with conservative valuations, falling deal sizes, and clucking investors sitting atop...

Services that help folks make, share and profit from creative works — Maven to Bounty to Substack to Patreon to Canva — have proliferated and grown in recent years. The rise of creator-focused startups was not an accident; instead, a secular trend of more accessible software for more diverse...

In the final days of the third quarter, it’s becoming clear that some areas of startup investment are losing luster. Declines are hardly surprising amid a more conservative venture capital market, a falling stock market, and global macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. And still, even with large caveats, the...

Happy Sunday, fellow startup nerds. Today we’re talking about risk in the gambling sense of the word. You see, there’s a way for unicorns to avoid painful dilution when they next raise capital, and it appears that a good number of the world’s billion-dollar startups are taking the wager....

Instacart’s willingness to go public this year is now slightly better understood after The Wall Street Journal reported that the grocery delivery giant isn’t planning on a mega-fundraise when it does list. While the mechanics of a company’s public debut have only so much variation — direct listings and...