CaaStle, a startup that launched in 2011 as a plus-sized clothing subscription service and later became an inventory monetization platform for clothing retailers, is facing financial difficulties, the company confirmed to TechCrunch following a report by Axios.
Citing a letter from the board, Axios reported that the company is almost out of money, CEO Christine Hunsicker resigned from her CEO role and the board, and the company has involved law enforcement to investigate alleged financial misconduct.
The company also confirmed to TechCrunch that it furloughed all of its employees.
“The Board is deeply disappointed by the conduct that has led to this moment. Our immediate focus is on addressing the company’s challenges, supporting our employees, and preserving the value of our technology and business operations. We regret having to temporarily furlough our employees, but we believe this will best position the company to successfully recover from our current situation,” the company said in an emailed statement after TechCrunch inquired about the company’s status.
CaaStle raised over $530 million total, with its last round raised in 2019 at $43 million, PitchBook estimates.
In that letter, also cited by Puck, the board is alleging that Hunsicker misled at least some of the company’s investors about financial performance, and about the company’s capital and outstanding shares, including two “falsified” audit opinions.
Both Axios and Puck have reported that days before Hunsicker exited the company, she was out fundraising, and making claims about the company’s healthy finances.
Axios has noted that if the board’s allegations lead to a case of fraud made against the founder, this would be one of the largest such cases ever.
Last week, Charlie Javice, the founder of student loan application startup Frank, which was purchased by JPMorgan for $175 million, was found guilty of defrauding the bank. The bank claimed Javice inflated the customer count. But the investment numbers for CaaStle are three times as large.
While this might not be a typical startup shutdown experience, experts have told TechCrunch that 2025 is on track to be another brutal year for failed startups.
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Skylight, a startup taking on TikTok with a more open alternative, is launching its mobile app to the public on Tuesday after just 10 weeks of active development. The app, which is backed by Mark Cuban and others, is now one of many to build on top of the AT Protocol — the same technology that underpins the social network Bluesky and a growing number of other apps.
Developed by co-founders Tori White (CEO) and Reed Hermeyer (CTO), Skylight offers a short-form video app experience with many familiar features, including an in-app video editor; the ability to comment, like, and share videos; set up your own user profile; and follow others.
Because it’s also built on the AT Protocol (or “ATProto” for short), users will immediately be tapped into Bluesky’s network of over 33.8 million users. That means videos posted on Skylight can be seen and engaged with by users on Bluesky and other ATProto-based apps, like the more photo-centric app Flashes, for example.
The company is funded by a pre-seed round from Cuban, who said earlier this year that he wanted to fund a TikTok alternative built on the AT Protocol. Leslie Feinzaig’s Graham & Walker Venture Fund also invested.
White, who used to be a travel influencer and is now a self-taught software developer living in Seattle, says she and co-founder Hermeyer were inspired to create Skylight when they first heard that TikTok was getting banned in the U.S.
In preparation for the ban, which is currently on pause, White had backed up her TikTok videos. But she still worried about losing access to her community and comments. She and Hermeyer had already been playing around with ATProto and saw the potential.
“The first thing that interested us about ATProto was that Bluesky was not failing,” Hermeyer told TechCrunch at the ATmosphere Conference in Seattle in March. “We didn’t see the ‘fail whale,’” he said, a reference to the graphic that appeared in Twitter’s early days when the app was constantly crashing. “That made us feel comfortable about the underlying technology.”
Hermeyer and White soon realized this was an ideal time to build a new social app on the protocol that could be “ban-proof.”
Tapping into her influencer background, White began documenting Skylight’s development on TikTok, which helped bring exposure to the product and build a following of potentially interested users.
“We started with distribution,” White explained. “I actually made a video before we ever wrote a line of code for this … [so] everyone can follow our journey as we build,” she told TechCrunch at the conference. “We were like, oh my gosh, we are building this thing that we think is so cool, but no one cares yet. So we have to build a way to tell people about it so that they would care, because we know people need it,” she said.
Today, White’s @buildwithtori TikTok profile has nearly 50,000 followers, many of which turned into early testers.
Like Bluesky, Skylight supports video uploads of up to three minutes in length, a recent increase from the one-minute-long videos supported previously. But White sees Skylight becoming more than just a decentralized TikTok clone.
She hints that Skylight in the future will allow users to customize their feed, including by utilizing new gestures beyond swiping and scrolling.
Other features in the works include support for sounds, duets, stitching, bookmarks, and playlists.
The app is in beta on the Google Play Store and is now available publicly on Apple’s App Store after initial testing.
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While working on their MBAs at Harvard Business School, Colombian immigrants Stephanie Murra and Lorenza Vélez noticed that most of the workers in the cafeteria were Hispanic. In conversations with them, a common theme kept coming up: how difficult it was for people who legally moved to the U.S. from Spanish-speaking countries to find their first jobs in the United States. Not speaking English well or at all, unsurprisingly, was the biggest challenge.
“But then we’re looking at the news and seeing that the U.S. is actually facing an unprecedented labor shortage, especially for these types of positions where you would usually see low-skilled immigrant workers,” Murra told TechCrunch in an interview. “So we were like, ‘Ok, there’s definitely an issue here.’”
The roommates began doing research and realized that many potential employers would use traditional job boards like Indeed, which is “not meant for Hispanic immigrants,” Murra said.
“These workers, many of whom don’t speak English and are not really good with technology, are used to finding jobs through friends,” she explained. Further, they are often confused by online applications and get intimidated by the idea of someone interviewing them in English.
The idea for Ponte Labor was born. The duo — who had previously worked together for two years at Colombian fintech Addi — founded the Miami-based company in April 2023, during their final semester at Harvard.
“Employers in hospitality, construction, retail, and other blue-collar industries really struggle to fill hourly roles while millions of work-authorized Hispanic immigrants struggle to find stable jobs due to language and cultural barriers,” said Vélez.
“We know where to find the workers, speak their language and communicate with them via their preferred channel, WhatsApp. So we built Ponte to bridge this gap,” Vélez added.
The founders claim that their hiring platform pre-vets, matches, and onboards legally authorized hourly workers “faster and more efficiently than traditional methods.”
Workers are hired directly by employers rather than through staffing agencies, which they say not only saves employers money, but gives them a larger pool of potential employees to choose from. On the flip side, “workers gain access to incredible job opportunities that are difficult for them to access otherwise,” Vélez added.
Ponte only works with documented immigrants: every candidate is pre-vetted for legal work authorization before reaching an employer.
The startup has built an in-house AI recruiter which pre-vets candidates through WhatsApp and voice-based AI interviews. For now, it is only focused on the hospitality industry but plans to expand into other sectors such as construction or elder care in the future.
Ponte has been steadily growing since Murra and Vélez formally launched the platform in November 2023, onboarding over 60,000 candidates and placing nearly 800 workers in hospitality roles. Its annualized net revenue has grown from $70,000 in February of 2024 to $550,000 today. It is not yet profitable, but the pair say they operate with high contribution margins, so their model is more scalable. To date, they say they’ve burned less than $1 million.
Today, Ponte is working with 14 employers using its platform to hire workers, like Omni Hotels & Resorts, as well as large hotel management companies such as Pyramid Global, Peachtree Hotel Group, and Atrium Hospitality.
The startup recently raised a $3 million seed round led by Harlem Capital at a $15 million valuation, it told TechCrunch exclusively. Better Tomorrow Ventures, The 81 Collection, and Wischoff Ventures also participated in the financing. Ponte previously raised another $1.5 million combined from Better Tomorrow Ventures’ The Mint accelerator, NFX’s FAST Competition and The 81 Collection.
The company’s revenue model is success-based. Ponte charges a monthly fee equivalent to 10% of a worker’s monthly salary for up to 12 months. Because it’s a high turnover industry, if the worker leaves within the first month, the hotel pays nothing.
Presently, the startup has 15 full-time employees.
Because Ponte’s social media and recruiting channels are in Spanish, over 95% of its candidates are Hispanic immigrants, noted Murra. Besides using WhatsApp, it also places ads on Facebook and Instagram.
“That focus has helped us build deep trust with the community and tailor our approach to their specific needs,” she said. “But we’re building tools that are language-agnostic and could easily be adapted to serve other immigrant communities, including Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, in the future.”
And, she added, the startup has even supported native English speakers who found Ponte, which was named after the word in Portuguese meaning “bridge.”
Looking ahead, the founders say Ponte’s goal is to “create a place to help Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. achieve their professional goals.”
“So that’s not just helping them find an entry level job. We also want to help them grow within those jobs,” Vélez said. “We see one of the biggest opportunities in helping the candidates learn English, because that’s where they get stuck between where they are right now and getting a promotion for their next job.”
Henri Pierre-Jacques, managing partner of Harlem Capital, said he’d been tracking the founders from Ponte’s pre-seed days.
“I loved that Lorenza and Stephanie were former colleagues at Addi…and then roommates at HBS together before starting Ponte,” he told TechCrunch. “We received very positive references from customers who raved about their product. They have managed to see strong traction in little time. It was obvious that Stephanie and Lorenza could do a lot with very little.”
Pierre-Jacques also believes that Ponte’s focus on Hispanic hospitality workers is “a huge differentiator.”
Indeed, Hispanics accounted for nearly one-half, or 47.6%, of the foreign-born labor force in 2023 in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
“With talent marketplaces we are always thinking about how our founders manage the supply side,” he said. “We have seen the power of WhatsApp within this community and Stephanie and Lorenza understood integrating the recruiting workflow through WhatsApp was the best channel to find their workers.”
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CaaStle, a startup that launched in 2011 as a plus-sized clothing subscription service and in 2018 became an inventory monetization platform for clothing retailers, is facing financial difficulties, reports Axios.
The company is almost out of money, CEO Christine Hunsicker has resigned, and law enforcement is investigating alleged financial misconduct, Axios reported, citing a leaked letter from the board.
CaaStle did not immediately respond to a request for comment. TechCrunch noticed CaaStle’s job board says it currently has no open roles, often a negative sign for a startup.
The startup raised more than $530 million total, though it last raised $43 million in 2019, PitchBook estimates. While this could be a more involved explosion than most startups ever endure, experts told TechCrunch that 2025 is on track to be another brutal year for failed startups.
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Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform to orchestrate the messy business of building and operating integrations and updates across disparate services and apps in the cloud. But the AI boom has come at the company fast. Now, Temporal has raised a growth round of $146 million to build what it believes the next chapter will be in its space: AI, and specifically building microservices to support newer areas like agentic AI.
A chunk of the investment will be going into R&D. At the end of 2024, the company launched a new feature called Nexus in its Temporal Cloud platform to improve security, fault isolation and modularity, and it says it’s going to continue developing that, alongside public cloud availability for Azure, enabling more cross-cloud work, and “R&D for AI use cases.” Temporal will also be using some of the funds to invest in sales and marketing.
Tiger Global is leading the round, with participation from previous backers that include Index Ventures (who led the Series B) and Sequoia Capital (who led the Series A ). With this Series C, Temporal has now raised $350 million.
The round is sizeable, but the devil is in the details. TechCrunch understands that the company’s valuation with this round is $1.72 billion post-money — “a little bit up — a very little bit,” in the words of CEO and co-founder Samar Abbas said.
The company’s previous funding — a $75 million Series B extension announced February 2023 — was made at a flat valuation of $1.5 billion. And ahead of that, there was a report in Prime Unicorn Index that the valuation had dipped as low as $880 million, a figure the company has not confirmed.
Abbas and his co-founder Maxim Fateev (CTO) started Temporal after the pair worked together at Uber, where they jointly developed Cadence, Uber’s open source orchestration engine designed to route requests and mediate interactions between different microservices.
Knowing that the need for better microservices management extended to many organizations, the pair saw an opportunity to strike out on their own, and Temporal was born.
Temporal’s microservices orchestration platform predates the hype around AI. Customers have been using it since 2019 to help manage functions and actions that bring together data from numerous, disparate apps — payment processing, customer onboarding, order management, ID verification, and infrastructure management among them.
More recently, though, services built on AI, and specifically to fill out the promise of agentic AI — which bring together language models to work with and across data from a number of other services in AI ‘agents’ tailored for specific use cases — have emerged as a prime use case for microservices.
The company’s current client list speaks not only to which companies are using Temporal’s platform to manage any microservice, legacy or otherwise, but also which ones are already using it for AI specifically. The list includes Box, Instacart, Snap and Stripe, as well as Nvidia.
Nvidia is a notable name in that big-name list. A year ago, the GPU giant announced a microservices software platform called NIM to streamline the deployment of AI models (both custom and pre-trained) in production environments. One of the latest developments in that microservices platform has included helping its customers develop AI agents to address trust and safety.
Temporal is still growing, albeit not at the pace it used to in the past. The company told TechCrunch that revenues are up 4.4x in the past 18 months; that’s compared to more than 20x growth the company claimed in the 12 months to Feburary 2023. Meanwhile, the company says that its Temporal.io open source platform now has 183,000 active users; and its enterprise managed service Temporal Cloud now claims 2,500 customers.
There’s no debate that “durable execution,” the category that Abbas and Fateev pioneered, is less buzzy than Ghibli-style AI image generators. But the need to execute long workflows reliably is real, and other teams have entered the field since then, such as workflows-as-code startup Restate and Orkes.
Abbas has been Temporal’s CEO since he and Fateev swapped their roles in April of last year. With “zero reports,” Fateev is now in charge of technology and setting the long term vision. “I am the one who is figuring out what steps we need to take to deliver on that mission,” Abbas said.
These steps include growing headcount from some 250 employees to over 300 in the coming months, as well as “doing a big push in EMEA and [Asia-Pacific & Japan],” he said.
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