Short-term rental firm Sonder Holdings said it will wind down its US operations after hotel chain Marriott abruptly ended their partnership. In a Monday press release, the San Francisco company said it plans to file "a Chapter 7 liquidation of its US business," and "initiate insolvency proceedings" in other countries where it operates. "We are devastated to reach a point where a liquidation is the only viable path forward," said Janice Sears, Sonder's interim CEO.
Rad is nothing without its people and wants to ensure that all employees are taken care of and provided for to the fullest extent feasible. Executive leaders are hopeful that a viable solution will be found to ensure that Rad team members remain gainfully employed for the foreseeable future. However, to be fully transparent, despite our collective efforts, it is possible that this may not happen, and Rad may be forced to cease operations.
That's a crowded market where even her previous firm, 6Sense, offers agents. "I'm not playing in outbound," Kahlow tells TechCrunch. Mindy is intended to handle inbound sales, going all the way to "closing the deal," Kahlow says. This agent is used to augment self-service websites and, Kahlow says, to replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. It can also be the onboarding specialist, setting up new customers.
In the fast-emerging market for AI legal tools, a two-horse race is taking shape. Harvey, the OpenAI-backed startup that has become the industry's breakout success, is now facing an ambitious challenger: Stockholm-based Legora, which is pitching law firms a new way to protect and monetize their intellectual property. Harvey has sprinted to $100 million in annual recurring revenue and an $8 billion valuation, turning the AI-for-law market into a serious money sport.
On November 6, Sweetgreen announced that it was selling Spyce, its division that developed and made its Infinite Kitchen technology to automate the assembly of its bowls and salads. The acquirer is Wonder, the " restaurant and mealtime superapp," as Fast Company dubbed it earlier this year. With that, it's time to eulogize Sweetgreen's star-crossed life as a tech company. No more dreams of AI, blockchain, or robots.
Yes, cofounders can bring their own perspectives, along with "access to wider networks, greater capacity, and access to funding," says Monique Boddington, a management practice associate professor at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School, whose research includes early-stage venture formation and startup strategy development. And yet: "An increasing number of individuals have been setting up businesses with no intention of taking on employees," she explains.
Maybe there's an extension to that dream where you sell it for millions, or where you build a company that allows you to retire. But the core of the dream is this: you have a thing that you think needs to be built, you build it, and then people come and give you money for it because they actually need it.
Many entrepreneurs launch beauty startups because they see a glaring gap in the market. It's only after they've formulated their products and launched them that they learn how incredibly difficult it is to turn a profit as a beauty business. That wasn't the case for Tisha Thompson, founder of LYS (short for Love Yourself), a clean cosmetics brand that is inclusive to all skin tones.
Thanks to the cornucopia of SaaS products and B2B services offered by companies on this year's Inc. Power Partners list, you don't have to. After all, the more administrative work you offload to your software stack, the more time you can spend on the things that actually made you want to be a founder in the first place.
I worked in tech sales for about four years, mainly selling software and AI solutions to restaurant companies. I did well and consistently hit my quotas, but I didn't have control over my future. Even after a strong quarter, management would suddenly announce changes, and I never had a say in the matter. That's just how big companies work. Eventually, I knew I had to go out on my own if I wanted to shape my own future.
Mom, these are made just for me. At first, the mom didn't understand. She asked her daughter if she wanted to try on a pair. She started crying: You don't understand. These are made for girls like me. Moments like these are the most fulfilling for White, the founder and CEO of Moolah Kicks the company that engineered the first basketball shoe made specifically for women.
My entrepreneurial ambitions led me to major in computer science, which opened the door to internships at companies like Meta, Slack, and Robinhood. My desire for more agency and autonomy over my work drove me to intern at progressively smaller companies. My first internship was with Facebook, which at that time had about 12,000 employees. When I joined Slack, it was a 1,200-person company. And finally, when I got to Robinhood, it was a 300-person company.
As the fintech sector comes roaring back, companies like Ramp and Stripe have dominated headlines with eye-popping funding rounds and rapid growth. But the Singapore-based Airwallex is not far behind, crossing $1 billion in annualized revenue as of October with a year-over-year growth rate of 90%, according to cofounder and CEO Jack Zhang.
Twenty startup finalists will pitch their food and agriculture businesses - and their potential to impact upstate New York - for up to $1 million at the Grow-NY Summit , Nov. 12-13 at the Hotel Canandaigua. For the first time since the competition launched in 2019, finalists had the opportunity to work with a Cornell expert to estimate how their ventures could drive regional job creation and economic growth.
Are you thinking about investing in AI for your small company? The buzz about AI seems to be everywhere, but is there real value, especially for small businesses? For me, the answer is a definite yes, as long as you're careful about how you approach it. Over the past nearly three years, I have found AI to be a force multiplier for my small business.
"We're addressing a very acute problem that consumers face, which is that electricity has gotten more expensive and less reliable," Zach Dell, 29, told Fortune. "It's totally crazy if you think of all the things that have gotten better over the last decade, and our power has gotten noticeably worse. Batteries, paired with software and a unique business model, can make your power more reliable and less expensive."
In a nascent industry projected to hit $29 billion by 2030 - and between $1 trillion and $5 trillion a decade later - direction trumps dollars. Joby's update could highlight its edge in FAA testing, potentially lifting shares if it reaffirms 2026 launches in the UAE and U.S. Archer, with deeper pockets and manufacturing scale, might impress on production ramps, but delays in certification could weigh it down.
We initially started remote. My cofounder is based in the UK and is planning on relocating to New York. We have a sales guy in France, and we have someone running customer success in Illinois. Our goal has always been: How do we actually get people in the same office? You just work faster. I'm getting absolutely roasted by most of the remote tech worker community for my post in favor of the office.
Tech hopefuls are associating themselves with San Francisco online; some say for social media clout or to attract investors. Eight rising tech workers told Business Insider that they've noticed an influx of San Francisco love online. One changed his location to San Francisco as a "manifestation." Another said they thought of it as a "heavenly land." 18-year-old Lance Yan recently made his location on X to "Waterloo | SF."
Today I'm joined by Paul Gu, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Upstart. Paul's journey reads like a modern Silicon Valley story-from Chinese immigrant to Yale dropout, he became part of the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows before co-founding Upstart in 2012. Under his leadership, Upstart has gone from zero model training data points in 2013 to processing 91 million data points today. Their AI predicts both default and prepayment likelihood for every month of a loan's term.
"It was all the same data. It was all about the same physical object," he told TechCrunch. "I was like, this is nuts ... Why shouldn't I be able to have some sort of unified interface, or some sort of unified data model, that actually represents this thing correctly to whoever's looking at it?"
India's appetite for instant convenience - once confined to food and grocery delivery - is expanding into house help. That shift has helped Snabbit, an on-demand home-help startup, secure $30 million in new funding and lift its valuation to $180 million, up from $80 million five months ago. The all-equity Series C round - Snabbit's third fundraise in nine months - was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with participation from existing backers Lightspeed, Elevation Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.
Vinod Khosla, telling attendees he doesn't buy the argument that powering AI will doom climate efforts. Geothermal energy is nearly here, he said, while fusion remains further out. He also touched on his alignment with President Donald Trump (deregulation) and his disagreement (immigration): "The only thing I will say is this administration won't last forever," he said with a grin.
"When we started out, the problem we were trying to solve was, 'How can we make underwriting smarter, faster, so that these entrepreneurs get access to capital?'" Gammage, CEO, said. "We wanted a world where money moved freely like it did in other verticals. We came in with a borrower-centric experience, whereas a lot of companies were focused on 'how do we make this work for lenders.'"
