Tesla has installed its 200,000th Powerwall, the company’s home battery storage product, the company said in a tweet on Wednesday. Tesla’s CFO Zachary Kirkhorn told investors during a first-quarter earnings call in April that Tesla is continuing to work through a “multi-quarter backlog on Powerwall,” suggesting that the volume of installations will continue to soar […]
"The deck has to show that you're solving an important problem, that you've got the path to an important solution, that there is a big market opportunity, and that your team is positioned to execute."
If Instagram’s photo tagging feature was spun out into its own app, you’d have the viral sensation Poparazzi, now the No. 1 app on the App Store. The new social networking app, from the same folks behind TTYL and others, lets you create a social profile that only your friends can post photos to — […]
To help weigh the benefits of relocating to Florida, here are some FAQs I’ve encountered. And if the Sunshine State isn’t on your shortlist, don’t hesitate to apply this advice to another destination.
OpenAI is launching a $100 million startup fund, which it calls the OpenAI Startup Fund, through which it and its partners will invest in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems (and productivity). Among those partners and investors in the fund is Microsoft, at whose Build conference OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced the news. In a […]
I do recruitment for tech startups. With a surge of VC investing, many startups are urgently hiring. Which visas offer the quickest options for international talent?
TechCrunch Disrupt has always been opportunity central, but that’s never been truer than this year at Disrupt 2021 (September 21-23) — especially for early-stage founders who exhibit in Startup Alley. Here’s why. Using Hopin — our virtual platform — Startup Alley exhibitors can schedule and host interactive product demos via livestream. Every exhibiting startup receives […]
The European Union plans to beef up its response to online disinformation, with the Commission saying today it will step up efforts to combat harmful but not illegal content — including by pushing for smaller digital services and adtech companies to sign up to voluntary rules aimed at tackling the spread of this type of manipulative […]
Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech platform OPay is in talks to raise up to $400 million, The Information reported today. The fundraising is coming two years after OPay announced two funding rounds in 2019 — $50 million in June and a $120 million Series B in November. The $170 million raised so far came from mainly […]
“Headless” commerce — a set of tools that companies can use with their own customized front ends to build apps for selling goods and services — have become a huge business, not just because companies are seeing a bigger demand than ever before for people buying online, but because those companies are generally more focused […]
The last time humans visited the moon, in 1972, they got around on a relatively simple battery-powered vehicle. As NASA prepares for the next crewed mission to the moon, it’s looking to give the lunar rover an upgrade. Lockheed Martin and General Motors said Wednesday they’re working together to develop a next-generation lunar vehicle designed […]
Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the full potential of its headless CMS by iterating more quickly on its product. Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo are co-leading today’s funding round. Headless content management […]
When Merlin Labs founder Matt George was learning to fly in Vermont, he had a close call with a JetBlue aircraft that was coming into Burlington airport. It was “an unsettling experience,” he told TechCrunch, but one that stuck with him. A few years later, after the transportation company he founded (Bridj) was acquired by […]
Security researchers say at-home exercise giant Peloton and its closest rival Echelon were not stripping user-uploaded profile photos of their metadata, in some cases exposing users’ real-world location data. Almost every file, photo or document contains metadata, which is data about the file itself, such as how big it is, when it was created and […]
This morning Datacy, a startup with its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, announced that it has closed $2.4 million in new funding to continue building its consumer-friendly data collection and monetization service. The company is effectively an argument that the preceding sentence is possible. Datacy is a tool that allows individuals to collect their browsing data, […]
Databricks launched its fifth open-source project today, a new tool called Delta Sharing designed to be a vendor-neutral way to share data with any cloud infrastructure or SaaS product, so long as you have the appropriate connector. It’s part of the broader Databricks open-source Delta Lake project. As CEO Ali Ghodsi points out, data is […]
Another day, another mobility SPAC deal. This time, it’s Tritium, a Brisbane-based developer and producer of direct current fast EV chargers that is taking the SPAC path to the public market in a deal valuing the company at $1.2 billion. Tritium said Wednesday it will be heading to the Nasdaq via a merger with special […]
Rock picking is probably not the first thing you think about when you think agricultural robotics. Understandably so. There are a number of companies out there looking to automate aspects like fruit and vegetable picking, weeding and field tending, but rocks are still a major issue for many farmers. They’re big, they’re heavy and they […]
Certain industries were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than others, especially in its early days. Small businesses, including retailers and restaurants, were negatively impacted by lockdowns and the resulting closures. They had to adapt quickly to survive. If they didn’t use much technology before, they were suddenly being forced to, as so many things […]
Edtech has realized it needs to build for the TikTok generation. It’s part of the reason we’re seeing a rise in supplemental, aspirational companies such as Outschool and MasterClass, which both lean on snappy editing, engaging content and, most of all, on-demand learning. But a nut that is yet to be cracked is how to […]
