For years YouTube’s video-recommending algorithm has stood accused of fuelling a grab-bag of societal ills by feeding users an AI-amplified diet of hate speech, political extremism and/or conspiracy junk/disinformation for the profiteering motive of trying to keep billions of eyeballs stuck to its ad inventory. And while YouTube’s tech giant parent Google has, sporadically, responded […]
Just a Spotify used VC and PE backing to acquire the assets of the music industry so that we must now all rent our music via subscription, rather than own it for life, so a PropTech startup plans to follow a similar strategy for single-family homes. Casafari, a real estate data platform in Europe based […]
A startup founder, who hasn’t had much sleep all week, woke up on a recent Sunday to a phone call from his co-founder. A senior engineer was feeling burnt out and was contemplating leaving. For the founder, who had several calls scheduled with many high-profile Silicon Valley investors later in the day, talking this developer […]
Renegade Partners — a Bay Area-based venture firm cofounded by veteran VCs Renata Quintini and Roseanne Wincek — is taking the wraps off a $100 million debut venture fund that’s been capturing the imagination of the business press since almost its conception in late 2019. The effort is interesting for a number of reasons, not […]
E-commerce in Europe is expected to grow 30% this year to $465 billion, and that’s giving rise to a new ecosystem of services built to cater to e-commerce merchants. In the latest development, Juni, a neobank that is built specifically for companies selling online, has closed a Series A of $21.5 million, only 12 weeks […]
The numbers don’t lie. According to DocSend, the average pitch deck is reviewed for just three minutes. And if you think a senior VC is studying the presentation your team crafted for months as if it were a Fabergé egg — well, you might be disappointed. Even if you are lucky enough to land a […]
Well, that was fast. Just days after a Twitter clone from former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller launched, the new social network is already beset by problems. For one, hackers quickly leveraged Gettr’s API to scrape the email addresses of more than 85,000 of its users. Usernames, names and birthdays were also part of the scraped […]
While SaaS has become the default way to deliver software in 2021, it still takes a keen eye to find the companies that will grow into successful businesses, maybe even more so with so much competition. That’s why we’re bringing together three investors to discuss what they look for when they invest in SaaS startups. […]
How do you stay ahead of your competition when you know it's only a matter of time before they copy your best features? The solution is messaging, says conversion optimization expert Peep Laja.
Yandex Self-Driving Group, a unit of Yandex, the publicly-traded Russian tech giant, has announced a partnership with food delivery service GrubHub to be its multi-year robotic delivery provider across American college campuses. Yandex hopes to reach over 250 campuses over the course of this partnership, beginning with dozens of robots in the fall, according to […]
The company kicks off with a note that it has 27 million weekly active users and claims users in around one in three U.S. households. The argument, then, is that Nextdoor has scale.
This Thursday and Friday, TechCrunch will host Early Stage – a virtual bootcamp for early stage founders. After the success of the spring event, on Friday, TC will feature 10 phenomenal early-stage startups to on the virtual stage. Hailing form around the States and the globe, founders will pitch on live, for five minutes, followed […]
The increasingly intense heats bearing down feverishly across the globe are accelerating the number, scale, and complexity of disasters worldwide. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen record heat in the United States Pacific Northwest that has led to hundreds of deaths — with more heat on the way. Heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, […]
Twitter today has shared a few more ideas it’s thinking about in terms of new features around conversation health and privacy. This includes a one-stop “privacy check-in” feature that would introduce Twitter’s newer conversation controls options to users, and others that would allow people to be more private on the service, or to more easily […]
After several years of fighting and jockeying for position by the biggest cloud infrastructure companies in the world, the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on the controversial winner-take-all, $10 billion JEDI contract today. In the end, nobody won. “With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI cloud contract, which has long […]
Part of the complex process that turns raw materials into finished products like detergents, cosmetics and flavors relies on enzymes, which facilitate chemical transformations. But finding the right enzyme for a new or proposed drug or additive is a drawn out and almost random process — which Allozymes aims to change with a remarkable new […]
Here’s the theory: Instead of linking carbon and biodiversity credits to the sale of raw materials such as forests, which cause CO2, what if you linked them to crypto tokens, and thus kept these CO2-producing materials in the ground? That’s the theory behind Single.Earth, which has now raised a $7.9 million seed funding round led […]
Max Q is a weekly newsletter from TechCrunch all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Mondays in your inbox. It’s a space race of the most indulgent kind, plus there’s a new commercial launch enterprise in the games and another is prepping for production at a massive scale. Also, Starlink aims […]
