bootstrapped

Software asset management — an area of enterprise IT designed, in part, to help companies save money — continues to draw a lot of money itself. In the latest development, Xensam — a startup out of Stockholm that provides AI-based tools to help businesses understand and track where and how software is being used — has raised $40 million, its first outside funding since being founded eight years ago. The funding is coming from a single investor, Expedition Growth Capital out of London. Oskar Fösker, Xensam’s CEO who…

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Investors these days want to see not only growth, but also a path to profitability — and it isn’t always easy for venture-backed startups to suddenly correct course. But their bootstrapped peers have a leg up, a recent report shows. Let’s explore. — Anna Cheaper growth In 2021, Alex and I wondered…

Some of the best companies only come about because they found a problem worth solving. For Mike Salguero, CEO and co-founder at ButcherBox, the problem and opportunity in the extraordinarily broken space of meat production and distribution simply could not be ignored. Armed with an idea for how to do things differently, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign back in 2015, which drew the attention of its first thousand customers. From there, the company has continued to grow. At the recent Creative Technologist…

"Software-as-a-service is all about the long tail," says Bailey, meaning, you can just keep adding more customers to it, and economically so, if you can really nail down the most efficient use of the public cloud. "There's just the economies of scale that come from being able to even offer that solution to some of the enterprise customers that maybe, you know, wouldn't require that dedicated instance." Stack Overflow"The big thing, my perspective on StackOverflow is, it's really shifted over the past couple of…

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. Bootstrapped startups, or companies that use their own revenue or existing cash flow to fund growth instead of relying on external capital sources, sit in a very separate box than venture-backed startups. By nature of asset class, bootstrapped startups prioritize revenue to keep alive, while venture-backed startups prioritize growth to keep investor buy-in for future runway needs.…