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As they near the end of a blockbuster year for NFTs that saw more than $10 billion in transaction volume, today’s NFT project developers are finding themselves facing an impasse — whether to chase today’s dollars or tomorrow’s users.Dapper Labs, maker of one of the year’s more mainstream...

Manish Maheshwari, the former head of Twitter India who recently moved to San Francisco to work at a different division within the company, is leaving the firm to launch an edtech startup, according to nine people familiar with the matter.Maheshwari and Twitter didn’t respond to a request for...

E-commerce in Africa is growing fast and its potential remains enormous as more people get connected to the internet. Across sub-Saharan Africa 303 million people, about 28% of the population, are connected to the mobile internet, according to the 2021 GSMA mobile economy report, and this number...

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Celigo, whose integration platform allows companies to automate business processes, raises a $48M Series C led by OMERS Growth, bringing total raised to $80M+ — Companies continue to add apps to their technology stacks as the pandemic drives digital transformations.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 9, 2021! Yes, we’re one day closer to the Christmas holiday for all those who celebrate, so we published part two...

Alex Heath / The Verge: Meta opens its VR social platform Horizon Worlds to all adult users in the US and Canada, after announcing a private beta in September 2019 — Facebook's first stab at the metaverse is Roblox meets the OASIS — More than two years and a company rebrand later, Meta is...

As I wrote earlier this year, Deed‘s mission is a clearcut one: take the employee giving/charity/volunteer program that many big companies have, and make it better. Give it a proper home — one with a modern UI, built-in community management tools, and that hooks into your workflow (read: Slack)...

Tradeshift — the late-stage startup tackling supply chain financing — has announced a $200 million funding round in equity and debt from a combination of existing and new investors, including Koch Industries, the giant industrial conglomerate. Also participating were IDC Ventures, LUN Partners...

The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a new chapter for virtual learning, giving a boost of attention to existing tools and spurring the creation of new services and use cases as students of all ages were ordered to stay home and stay out of classrooms. Today, one of the startups that’s been a strong...

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is making a big bet on the blockchain, announcing plans to create an open source protocol “that will essentially create a decentralized version of Kickstarter’s core functionality.” The company says the goal is for multiple platforms to embrace the protocol...

Twitter posted today that its testing a feature that would turn its in-app explore page into a TikTok-like video feed, complete with even a “For You” tab. This feature is testing on both Android and iOS for users in certain countries who use Twitter in English.Twitter is the latest social app...

With the Samsara IPO heading toward pricing, it’s a good moment to spend a little more time digging into the IoT market. There’s a lot more going on than merely the liquidity point of one of its players, it turns out.Afero, for example, closed a $50 million Series C today, led by Crosspoint...

Minly, a MENA-based media and entertainment startup, announced today that it has acquired Oulo, a Dubai-based celebrity shoutout platform, for an undisclosed fee.The acquisition is coming six months after Minly raised a $3.6 million seed round and off the back of an impressive year of growth...

The gradual return of tourism and travel in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic continues to see a wave of startups raising rounds of funding to meet new opportunities in the market. In the latest development, Easol, which has built event and experiences software that third-party companies can use...

Bento, Nigeria’s digital payroll and human resource management platform is expanding to Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda with plans to set up operations in six other markets in Africa over the next one year.In its next phase of expansion, Bento is eyeing Egypt, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Angola...

SendOwl, a platform used to sell and deliver digital products, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from Defy.vc, with participation from Stripe and other investors. SendOwl enables creators and businesses to sell digital goods such as ebooks, podcasts, online courses, memberships, coaching...

Torq, a Portland, Oregon-based no-code security automation startup formerly known as StackPulse, today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series B round led by Insight Partners. New investor SentinelOne, the publicly traded endpoint security platform, also participated in this round, as...

Twitter is trying out some changes to the way that users report tweets that they believe might break Twitter’s rules.Like most social media companies, Twitter has long relied on user reporting to flag potentially policy-violating tweets. But in its new imagining of that system those reports...

Christine Hall / TechCrunch: Circle, a community platform where creators can manage content and memberships, raises a $24.7M Series A led by Tiger Global at a $200M post-money valuation — Having a thriving community is the backbone for creators, but when the global pandemic hit, brands also...

Grip Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps enterprises protect their data in SaaS applications, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Intel Capital. YL Ventures, which led the company’s $6 million seed round earlier this year, also participated in...