Author: TechBrunch

Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park, co-founders of consumer cryptocurrency trading app Fomo, have taken an unconventional approach to raising capital, and it's paying off. Their app launched in May and just announced a $17 million benchmark-led Series A round (an unusual crypto bet for a top VC firm), bringing total funding to $19 million. Instead of a classic seed round, the founders created a list of 200 people they dreamed of having as angel investors. “We knew that in this business, every person is valuable to us,” Erlanger told TechCrunch. They then tapped into their network for a warm…

Lagos-based Ventures Platform, one of Africa's most active early-stage investors, has raised $64 million so far for its second fund and is targeting a final close of $75 million, founding partner Kola Aina told TechCrunch. Investors include the Nigerian government through its Investing in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE) programme, marking the first time the government has invested in a VC fund. This is important because Nigeria's fast-growing startup community is home to the highest number of startup unicorns on the African continent. Other limited partners in Ventures Platform's second fund include IFC, British International Investment (BII), Proparco, Standard Bank,…

The University of Pennsylvania acknowledged Tuesday that hackers stole the university's data as part of last week's data breach, during which alumni and other officials received suspicious emails from official university email addresses. The message from the hacker read, “We have been hacked.” “We love breaking federal laws like FERPA (all your data will be leaked),” the message added. “Please stop giving me money.” Penn initially told TechCrunch that the email was “fraudulent,” but the university has now acknowledged the hackers' claims that the data was stolen during the breach. “On October 31, Penn discovered that a select group of…

Google's $32 billion acquisition of cloud security company Wiz is one step closer to the finish line. Wiz CEO Assaf Rapaport said at a Wall Street Journal event on Tuesday that the acquisition had cleared antitrust review by the U.S. Department of Justice, Reuters reported. Rappaport added that while the deal is a milestone, there is still a way to go before it is officially completed. TechCrunch reached out to Wiz for more information on the timeline for closure. Google initially offered to acquire Wiz in 2024 for $23 billion. Wiz declined the offer, and Rappaport said at the time…

Cybersecurity is a huge field, but startups in this space are more likely to be acquired than to go public. Even Wiz, which once held the title of fastest-growing startup, abandoned its IPO ambitions when it agreed to sell to Google earlier this year. In recent years, there have been very few major cybersecurity companies going public. SentinelOne went public in 2021, Rubrik went public last year, and Netscope went public in September. Armis, a nine-year-old cybersecurity startup based in San Francisco, plans to follow in the footsteps of these companies. The company announced Wednesday that it has raised $435…

NVIDIA and Qualcomm Ventures join a growing coalition of US and Indian investors backing deep tech startups in India. The group launched in September with more than $1 billion in funding, timed to coincide with India's new 1 trillion rupee (about $12 billion) research and development initiative. NVIDIA joined the coalition as a strategic technology advisor without funding, while Qualcomm Ventures joined along with six Indian venture companies and provided additional capital totaling more than $850 million. India is home to over 180,000 startups and over 120 unicorns. In the early years, much of the ecosystem closely mirrored Western business…

Just over three years after taking over Sequoia Capital's top leadership position, Roelof Botha is stepping down from his senior management role at the storied venture capital firm. The company announced Tuesday that partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady will replace him as co-stewards. Lin joined the storied company in 2010 and has led major investments in category-defining companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash, and Kalshi. Meanwhile, Pat Grady has been a partner for nearly 19 years and has led Sequoia's growth-stage investments since 2015, supporting iconic companies such as ServiceNow, OpenAI, and legal AI platform Harvey. Botha assumed the role…

Journalists in Europe have found it “easy” to spy on senior European Union officials using commercially obtained location histories sold by data brokers, despite the continent having some of the strongest data protection laws in the world. Netzpolitik reports that EU officials are “concerned” about the trade in cell phone location data of citizens and officials and have issued new guidance to staff to combat tracking. Reporters obtained the data set provided as a free sample by a data broker. The dataset includes 278 million location data points from millions of mobile phones across Belgium. Much of the location data…

Andreessen Horowitz is suspending its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including several of the program's founders. In 2020, the company announced TxO to support founders who don't have access to traditional venture networks. Many of TxO's participants are women and minorities, and overall they receive very little venture capital funding. The fund's announcement comes amid a wave of support that underrepresented founders received after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. TechCrunch previously reported that the fund was launched with an initial contribution of $2.2 million, with a16z co-founder Ben…

Elad Gil, a prominent individual investor, said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that AI is one of the most unpredictable technology booms he's ever seen. Gill has been on the cap tables of virtually every hit company of the past decade, including many of today's leading AI companies. Still, he believes that over the past year, certain AI markets appear to have been largely filled by market leaders. Even beyond these areas, the vast scope of AI still applies to everyone. “I started investing in generative AI in 2021, and at the time there weren’t that many people paying that…