Author: Editor-in-Chief

U.K.-based fintech Tide has entered the unicorn club with a fresh funding of $120 million led by TPG, as the startup now serves over 1.6 million micro and small enterprises globally — with more than half of them based in India, the company’s largest and fastest-growing market. The new round — a mix of primary and secondary investment, though the startup declined to confirm the exact split — values the eight-year-old startup at $1.5 billion. It includes share sales by employees, early angels, and a few minority investors. TPG backed the round through its multi-sector impact vehicle, The Rise Fund,…

The MBA-to-VC pipeline remains a very real thing. But that path is a little shakier than it once was, according to PitchBook reporting and new academic research. Harvard placed 50 of its 1,004 MBA graduates into VC roles in 2024, with a median starting salary of $177,500. Stanford placed around 30 from its smaller class. More than 10,000 Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton MBA alumni currently hold senior positions at U.S. VC firms, PitchBook data shows. The MBA’s grip on venture capital is loosening, however, according to Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev, who found that 44% of mid-career venture professionals held MBAs…

Time’s ticking. Register by September 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT to lock in Regular-Bird pricing and save up to $668 on your pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening in San Francisco’s Moscone West on October 27-29. Join 10,000+ startup and VC leaders in San Francisco for: Real talk with 250+ founders like Elad Gil, Aaron Levie, Jason Citron, Anton Osika, and Brynn Putham. Explore the speaker lineup. 200+ Sessions on building AI-native startups, vibe coding, funding strategy, and more across five industry stages, roundtables, and breakouts. Discover the growing agenda. IMAGE CREDITS:KIMBERLY WHITE / GETTY IMAGES Get an exclusive look…

Travelers at major European airports including Heathrow, Brussels, and Berlin faced significant delays this weekend following what Collins Aerospace described as a “cyber-related incident.” Collins Aerospace makes technology for airline check-in desks, so after the apparent cyberattack, airlines were forced to revert to manual check-ins, according to the Guardian. According to data from Flightradar24, more than 130 Heathrow flights had been delayed by 20 minutes or more as of 11am on Sunday morning, with 13 flights canceled on Saturday. A post on th Hsocial media account said, “Work continues to resolve and recover from Friday’s outage of a Collins…

For years, Big Tech CEOs have touted visions of AI agents that can autonomously use software applications to complete tasks for people. But take today’s consumer AI agents out for a spin, whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent or Perplexity’s Comet, and you’ll quickly realize how limited the technology still is. Making AI agents more robust may take a new set of techniques that the industry is still discovering. One of those techniques is carefully simulating workspaces where agents can be trained on multi-step tasks — known as reinforcement learning (RL) environments. Similarly to how labeled datasets powered the last…

Calgary’s Energy Transition Centre (ETC) Foundation is significantly expanding its entrepreneurial resources and facilities thanks to an investment from economic development agencies at all levels of government. “This investment … marks a pivotal step in strengthening the local energy innovation ecosystem.” Nannette Ho-Covernton, ETC Foundation The expansion project is valued at over $10 million and supports a 17,000-square-foot workspace in downtown Calgary that is meant to facilitate collaboration between low-emission energy startups, ecosystem partners, and investors. Located at the Ampersand Building in Calgary, the ETC’s expanded programming will include structured educational courses, industry workshops, and hands-on training to bolster skills…

Canadian tech and business groups plan to weigh in on a forthcoming Competition Bureau consultation on the competitive landscape of debt financing options for small businesses, including startups. This week, Canada’s Competition Bureau launched consultations on how to best conduct a 12-month study on competition for small and medium-sized business loans. The agency said the research will explore how Canada can improve the lending landscape for small- to mid-size enterprises (SMEs), which is dominated by big banks. At the same time, it plans to look at how non-traditional financial lenders—such as FinTech companies—could benefit from increased competition. The Competition Bureau…

Québec Premier François Legault has overhauled his cabinet, shuffling Minister Christopher Skeete away from the province’s innovation portfolio. The move leaves Minister Christine Fréchette to lead the innovation file with two junior ministers. Skeete was appointed a junior minister to the Ministry of Economy, Innovation, and Energy (MEIE) in 2022. After “super-minister” Pierre Fitzgibbon abruptly resigned from the ministry a year ago, Christine Fréchette was appointed to lead it. Skeete was asked to handle innovation, regional economic development, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Now, Skeete is taking on the duties of international relations and the French language, in addition…

With markets currently in a state of flux, you might think that Canada would double down on financial innovation. Instead, decision makers continue to stall on implementing the very thing that would make our economy more competitive and much more stable: open banking. Dubbed “consumer-driven banking” by Canadian regulators and policymakers, the immediate positive economic benefits that an open system would bring is fundamentally underestimated. This mismatch of priorities is slowing down action, and costing Canadians in the process. Considering the fact that Canada’s GDP has dropped for three consecutive months and we have an ongoing productivity problem, there’s no…

Toronto-based Wittington Ventures has hired former MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF) leader Zeeshan Ali as partner as it gears up to invest in more early-stage cleantech and healthtech startups. According to his LinkedIn profile, Ali joined Wittington Ventures this month, after serving as interim managing director of fellow Toronto-based venture capital (VC) firm MaRS IAF. Zeeshan was previously a senior investment director at IAF. He spent his three years with the firm investing in early-stage Canadian tech startups. Before that, Ali worked for three years as head of business development at MaRS Discovery District. “Our mission is to provide catalytic…