Dat Bike, a Vietnamese startup with ambitions to become the top electric motorbike company in Southeast Asia, has raised $2.6 million in pre-Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures. Made in Vietnam with mostly domestic parts, Dat Bike’s selling point is its ability to compete with gas motorbikes in terms of pricing and performance. Its […]
Decentralized finance startup MOUND, known for its yield farming aggregator Pancake Bunny, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding led by Binance Labs. Other participants included IDEO CoLab, SparkLabs Korea and Handshake co-founder Andrew Lee. Built on Binance Smart Chain, a blockchain for developing high-performance DeFi apps, MOUND says Pancake Bunny now has more than […]
As a greater share of the transportation market becomes electrified, companies have started to grapple with how to dispose of the thousands of tons of used electric vehicle batteries that are expected to come off the roads by the end of the decade. Battery Resourcers proposes a seemingly simple solution: recycle them. But the company […]
Microsoft makes a big healthcare tech acquisition, Twitter is building a presence in Africa and Apple may be cooking up some new smart home products. This is your Daily Crunch for April 12, 2021. The big story: Microsoft acquires Nuance for $19.7B Microsoft announced this morning that it’s acquiring speech-to-text company Nuance Communications for $19.7 […]
Northrop Grumman hit a new milestone in extending the life of active spacecraft as a purpose-built spacecraft, MEV-2, docked with Intelsat’s IS-10-02 satellite to give it another five years of life. It’s a strong demonstration of the possibilities in a growing field of orbital servicing operations. MEV-2 launched in August and matched the orbit of […]
Coupang early investor Ben Sun shares an inside look into the growth of the Korean e-commerce giant and explains how founder Bom Kim led a pivot when the company was already an established business.
Blue Origin is making progress toward its goal of flying human astronauts aboard its spacecraft, with a plan to run an “astronaut rehearsal” during a launch it has planned for Wednesday, April 14. The launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital, reusable rocket will be a key step in verifying the vehicle for paying human […]
Tiger Global has invested in DealShare, a startup in India that has built an e-commerce platform for middle- and lower-income groups of consumers, just three months after the Indian firm concluded its previous $21 million Series C funding round. The New York-headquartered firm has led the $100 million Series D round in three-year-old social commerce […]
WeRide, the Chinese autonomous vehicle startup that recently raised $310 million, has received a permit to test driverless vehicles on public roads in San Jose, California. WeRide is the seventh company, following AutoX, Baidu, Cruise, Nuro Waymo and Zoox, to receive a driverless testing permit. In the early days of autonomous vehicle development, testing permits […]
A collection of tech and auto industry executives met with the White House to discuss solutions for the worldwide chip shortage Monday. CEOs from Google, Intel, HP, Dell, Ford and General Motors attended the virtual summit on semiconductors and resilience in supply chains. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and National […]
After it looked like Apple might no-show, the company has committed to sending a representative to a Senate antitrust hearing on app store competition later this month. Last week, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) put public pressure on the company to attend the hearing, which will be held by the Senate Judiciary […]
There are still a number of surefire measures any early-stage company can and should put in place to achieve "people ops" success as they begin scaling.
You hear so much about data these days that you might forget that a huge amount of the world runs on documents: a veritable menagerie of heterogeneous files and formats holding enormous value yet incompatible with the new era of clean, structured databases. Docugami plans to change that with a system that intuitively understands any […]
Industry-specific AI models are only going to boom in popularity over the next few years and businesses from across sectors will realize their power in delivering accurate and powerful insights.
One of the best parts of TechCrunch Disrupt is the Startup Battlefield competition, and one of the most important pieces of the Startup Battlefield is our lineup of expert judges — they’re the ones the founders are trying to impress. Once the demos and presentations are done, the judges need to think quickly and ask […]
A few months back, robotic process automation (RPA) unicorn UiPath raised a huge $750 million round at a valuation of around $35 billion. The capital came ahead of the company’s expected IPO, so its then-new valuation helped provide a measuring stick for where its eventual flotation could price. UiPath then filed to go public. But […]
President Biden has named two former National Security Agency veterans to senior government cybersecurity positions, including the first national cyber director. The appointments, announced Monday, land after the discovery of two cyberattacks linked to foreign governments earlier this year — the Russian espionage campaign that planted backdoors in U.S. technology giant SolarWinds’ technology to hack […]
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, via a tweet, announced that the company would be setting up a presence in Africa. “Twitter is now present on the continent. Thank you, Ghana and Nana Akufo-Addo,” he said. 🇬🇭 Twitter is now present on the continent. Thank you Ghana and @NAkufoAddo. #TwitterGhana https://t.co/tt7KR3kvDg — jack (@jack) April 12, 2021 […]
Cybersecurity training startup Hack The Box, which emerged originally from Greece, has raised a Series A investment round of $10.6 million, led by Paladin Capital Group and joined by Osage University Partners, Brighteye Ventures and existing investors Marathon Venture Capital. It will use the funding to expand. Most recently it launched Hack The Box Academy. […]
Out the window, a fire is raging — and it’s moving ever closer. Confusion. Fear. A run for the car. Roads open and then suddenly closed by authorities. Traffic jams. A fire break that stalls the flames and then suddenly the flames jump, changing direction. Everyone has a plan for what to do — a […]
