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It’s been nearly a year since satellite Internet-of-Things connectivity provider Swarm was acquired by SpaceX, and Swarm co-founder and CEO Sara Spangelo (now senior director of Satellite Engineering at SpaceX) is ready to talk about what Swarm’s been up to in that time. SpaceX is not known to be a super acquisitive company, so I was curious to hear about what it’s been like for Spangelo and for Swarm. Mostly, it’s been 10 months of rapid acceleration, she says. One of Swarm’s biggest blockers in terms of speed of deployment and growing its network was the ability to actually launch its satellites, which themselves are tiny — the company says they’re “the smallest operational satellites in space,” at little more than the size of your average sandwich. Spangelo said that unlocking launch availability has been one of the biggest benefits of operating under the SpaceX umbrella so far. “Access to basically free launch is pretty exciting,” she told me in an interview. “We actually have la...

Like a groundhog and its shadow, many venture capitalists see a shrinking economy and burrow away, resting their check-signing hand for better days. But climate-focused VCs are on a tear  lately, pumping well over a billion dollars per quarter into startups that strive to mitigate emissions as the Earth bakes . Buoyant Ventures is one such firm building momentum for the sector. Based in Chicago, the investor told regulators this week via an SEC filing that it has locked down just over $50 million for a new fund. Buoyant declined to comment when emailed by TechCrunch, but the filing shows the firm has been raising cash for the fund since at least May 2021. So far, 75 (unnamed) limited partners have chipped in, and Buoyant is fishing for just shy of $50 million more.  Led by Electronic Arts and Energize Ventures alum Amy Francetic and former Accenture executive Allison Myers, Buoyant’s first deal dates back to the summer of 2020. That’s when it backed Raptor Maps , which...

How healthy is the market for technology products today? The question is too broad. Large markets can have varying internal results that contrast with top-line numbers. An example of this from recent history is disparate results in venture capital activity we’ve noted around the world. While the aggregate venture market is slowing , we’ve also seen pockets of strength in certain regions.  Are tech sales similar? Some secular trends are powering technology growth. The movement off of on-prem solutions to public cloud providers, for example, among enterprise customers. As we learned when COVID-19 was driving lockdowns around the world a few years back, economic downturns don’t necessarily impact most of the tech world as much as they do other parts of the global economy. (This is perhaps why software valuations have stopped losing ground, despite a worsening global macroeconomic profile.)   The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCr...

Equal Ventures , a venture firm that debuted in 2020 with a $56 million first fund, has raised a pair of new investment vehicles, SEC filings show. The New York City-based firm has closed a $94.8 million second fund and its first opportunity fund, worth $75 million. The investment firm is led by two investors, Richard Kerby and Rick Zullo, equal partners in the firm. Kerby declined to comment about the funds over email. Equal Ventures looks to be the first institutional investor in a startup, a level of conviction that means that it is more focused on a concentrated portfolio than small checks in a widespread group of startups. The firm’s portfolio includes Ghost, a marketplace that connects brands with extra inventory to retailers, Block Renovation, a platform that productizes the home renovation experience for consumers, and Smarthop, which helps truckers optimize their work. Zullo formerly invested on behalf of Lightbank, a Chicago-based venture operation, while Kerby spent year...

Yousuf Khan Contributor Share on Twitter Yousuf Khan is a partner at Ridge Ventures . Prior to joining Ridge, he was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, CIO and vice president of Customer Success at cloud-based AI platform Moveworks, as well as CIO of Pure Storage, Qualys and Hult International Business School. More posts by this contributor 10 tips for running effective board meetings To achieve enterprise sales success, tailor your approach to CIOs A few weeks ago,  I wrote a piece on TechCrunch about how to run a successful board meeting. Since then, I’ve been asked one question over and over: What does a good board update actually look like? It’s a perfectly reasonable question. In the early days of a startup, most founders have very little data to work with. It can be quite difficult to structure a productive and actionable board deck if you don’t have any customer or product information to anchor the update. It’s important to balance two key areas: pr...

Google has pulled the popular battle royale game Battlegrounds Mobile India, more popularly known as BGMI, from its Play Store in India after a government order, a year after developer Krafton launched the app following a ban on its other similar title PUBG in the South Asian market. The BGMI game has also been delisted from Apple’s App Store in the country. The Android-maker confirmed the development shortly after publication of the story. “On receipt of the order, following established process, we have notified the affected developer and have blocked access to the app that remained available on the Play Store in India,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. The app was delisted by Google from the Play Store on Thursday evening, and Krafton itself delisted the app from the Apple App Store shortly afterwards, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told TechCrunch. The iPhone-maker didn’t respond to a request for comment. A Krafton spokesperson acknowledged the delis...

Snapchat’s recent move into premium subscriptions has gained a bit of traction in its first weeks on the market. Though the social app maker just last week reported a disappointing second quarter with an earnings miss amid a weak advertising landscape, its brand-new subscription Snapchat+ has already helped the app rake in over $5 million in revenue in its first month, according to new estimates. The figure is a massive jump over the five-figure in-app purchase revenue number Snapchat had seen before the subscription’s arrival. In addition, the number is already larger than Twitter’s in-app revenue, which totals nearly $4 million since Twitter Blue’s June 2021 launch, per data from app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The Snapchat+ paid consumer subscription launched on June 29, 2022 offering users access to various premium features, while also importantly giving the company a means of diversifying its revenue streams beyond advertising. This is critical for the social app g...