Natasha Mascarenhas
TechCrunch
San Francisco, CA, United States
Contact Natasha
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Recent articles by Natasha:
Employees detail rising tensions at Ro as healthcare unicorn struggles to grow beyond first win –
Ro, one of the most valuable privately owned health tech startups, isn’t subtle about its mission to deliver vertically integrated, affordable healthcare with consumers in mind. And while a patient-centric healthcare system is undoubtedly overdue, Ro is first dealing with a massive challenge: its own inability to monetize meaningfully outside of Roman, its erectile dysfunction […] → Read More
Tasseled wants to help college students get their lives, and credits, together –
When Vipul Patel lost half of his college credits while transferring from Florida Institute of Technology to Boston University, he began digging for answers. Patel soon stumbled upon equivalency tables, where universities track which courses from other institutions can be counted for credit during a transfer process. While seemingly innocuous, the tables gave him key […] → Read More
The return of text is inevitable –
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. On Equity this week, we discussed the value of the written word. You can imagine that the resulting argument is inherently biased, considering we are three journalists who have bet our livelihoods […] → Read More
Another month, another billion dollars in value appreciation –
Hello, and welcome to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. And have a good time. This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a bevy of topics from around the world of startups and technology more […] → Read More
PayPal picking Pinterest puts us in a parsing pickle –
Look, we don’t get it either. Taking some time as a group to sit around and chat through the possibly impending PayPal-Pinterest deal, Natasha and Alex didn’t wind up cracking the story. Which makes some sense, as investors sent PayPal stock down 5% on the news, implying that they didn’t really get it either. Recall that […] → Read More
Udemy targets valuation of $4B in major edtech IPO –
Udemy's slowing revenue growth is not bullish for edtech valuations more broadly; the company's modest resulting revenue multiple is also somewhat beige. → Read More
Vibe Capital is a new venture firm built for scrappy international founders –
Entrepreneur Ankur Nagpal spent seven years building up Teachable, a marketplace for teachers to make their online courses into full-fledged businesses. He raised only $12.5 million in funding before selling to Hotmart, a deal reportedly worth a quarter-of-a-billion dollars. Now, Nagpal wants to use his experience as a founder to help other founders scale their […] → Read More
Coinbase, Clubhouse and the inevitable conflict of competition –
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. This week, cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase announced that it is launching its own NFT platform to take on OpenSea, an existing NFT platform. Some techies aptly pointed out that both Coinbase and […] → Read More
Coinbase goes fishing for Opensea’s catch –
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was one of our strongest shows yet, with a wide diversity of news items that were genuinely fun (and complicated) to chew through. And even though we started off kind of grumpy, we laughed […] → Read More
Newsela breaks into interactive educational video with first acquisition –
YouTube is the third-most-used website within schools, according to Matthew Gross, CEO and co-founder of Newsela. “That is incredible, considering how difficult it is to find videos, how unfiltered it is and how inaccessible it is for many students who have different learning abilities and learning levels,” said Gross. “Video has to evolve.” To that […] → Read More
Outschool’s after-school enrichment marketplace is now valued at $3 billion –
In the last 12 months, Outschool, a marketplace for kid-friendly enrichment classes, has raised its Series B, Series C and, now, it’s Series D. The startup announced today that its latest round, a $110 million tranche of capital, brings its valuation to $3 billion just four months after hitting unicorn status. The fast infusion of […] → Read More
ScienceIO leaves stealth with millions to structure health data –
Years before he co-launched a stealthy business to fix the messy world of health data, Gaurav Kaushik was slowly connecting the dots on how better visualization could impact health outcomes. In 2018, the budding entrepreneur was working with a Boston-based cancer research company and FlatIron Health to see how cancer patients, mutations in their cancer […] → Read More
How to sell clothes online and actually make money –
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Fashion. Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the world of fashion resale and rental. It’s no small […] → Read More
SoWork just convinced investors (and Tinder) that virtual coworking is here to stay –
Vishal Punwani, the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, is building a business based off of a feeling that he stumbled upon by accident. SoWork, a virtual coworking startup, began after Punwani and his co-founders decided to build a machine learning edtech company. While building, Punwani’s team, who ironically met while playing World of Warcraft just […] → Read More
ResQ cooks up a $39 million Series A for restaurant repair industry –
ResQ, which does end-to-end equipment repairs for over 4,000 restaurant groups — from Taco Bell to Tim Hortons — has raised a $39 million Series A co-led by Tiger Global and Canvas Ventures. The capital, which includes investments from Homebrew, Inovia Capital and Golden Ventures, comes just months after the startup announced its $7.5 million […] → Read More
There’s always a startup angle (even with ‘Squid Game’) –
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. This week on Equity, we chatted about why the metaverse is inevitably coming for “Squid Game.” More specifically, we explored how the world of gaming is changing through the lens of startups […] → Read More
Community is the new AI –
Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week with Grace on the dials, which meant that we had a flat lovely time recording Equity for you. Of course, Equity is TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we dig into the most critical funding rounds, and natter about the key news items impacting startups. Before we hop into […] → Read More
The metaverse is coming for Squid Game –
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Gaming. Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to discuss the gaming world from a few perspectives, […] → Read More
Contrary Capital’s $20M Fund II is all about community-first investments –
When Eric Tarczynski was first building Contrary Capital, he noticed that there was an absence of venture capital firms focused on entrepreneurs within universities. So, he launched a $2.2 million debut fund to exclusively back the world’s top talent, or the student entrepreneurs that are spinning out ambitious ideas out of their universities. Years later, […] → Read More
The full-stack approach, but this time sans status quo –
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Emerging founders and investors in tech must be exuding extreme main character energy, because this week in tech was all about making their lives easier. AngelList announced AngelList Stack, a new suite […] → Read More