Alex Wilhelm

Startups are once again considering layoffs as a way to control cash consumption and attract new capital. News that Fast, a one-click checkout software provider targeting the e-commerce market, is offering sharp staff cuts to investors in hopes of securing new capital is notable, but a single data point....

As the private fundraising market becomes increasingly parsimonious, startups raising capital previously valued purely on growth with no care for operating burn will have to endure the market’s sentiment shift in their proximate funding round. Startups that lack impressive growth and have high levels of burn? They’re likely...

Airhouse, a startup in the e-commerce infrastructure market, announced this morning that it closed an $11 million Series A round of funding. The capital event was led by DNX Ventures, with participation from a number of other investors and angels. Crunchbase data indicates that Airhouse previously raised $5.5 million. The...

Welcome 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.  Welcome to the weekend! We have a lot of ground to cover today, so pour some coffee, settle in, and roll with me. The...

Bias alert: I am writing to you from my home office Firstbase announced a Series B round of funding today, led by Kleiner Perkins. TechCrunch covered the company’s Series A one year ago, when the world’s remote work shift was fully underway. Now in a more hybrid world, with corporations...

Few companies caught as much of a COVID tailwind as U.S. grocery-delivery giant Instacart. Reporting indicates Instacart’s 2020 revenues roughly tripled to around $1.5 billion. That epic pace of growth helped the company raise a series of large, high-priced financing rounds. In June 2020, Instacart raised $225 million at...

Land, they are making lots of it The Yuga Labs investor deck from February is a fascinating document, bringing together gaming, a new currency, and an ever-growing pool of digital assets that can be bought and sold by fans of Yuga’s well-known NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club. I ran...

Back in 2020, Ashwin Ramasamy, a founder at PipeCandy, asked on TechCrunch if the “e-commerce shift” the world was seeing as COVID-19 shook up the global economy would last. The answer was yes. But that doesn’t mean that the same pace of online commerce growth that the world...

Webflow's fascinating new round is a great time to discuss 2022 venture capital valuation dynamics Webflow, a well-funded no-code startup that helps customers build websites, raised a new round of capital this week. Per Forbes reporting, Webflow landed $120 million in fresh funds at a $4 billion valuation. Forbes also...

Another day, another 52-week low for the value of modern software stocks. Once a key indicator of the market’s effervescent enthusiasm for the value of cloud companies, the Bessemer Cloud Index has become a barometer of the opposite in recent months. After a dizzying ascent, the basket of public...