Popular, highly-scrutinized trading app Robinhood has raised $2.4 billion to its balance sheet from shareholders, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed by the company. The private startup raised $1 billion on Friday, meaning that it has raised $3.4 billion in a handful of days as it seeks to support a […]
Millions of Ford and Lincoln-branded vehicles will be powered by Android operating system beginning in 2023 as part of a six-year partnership announced Monday that will bring embedded Google apps and services to drivers. Ford and Google said as part of the partnership they will establish a new collaborative group called Team Upshift that will […]
Google and Ford today announced a new partnership around bringing Android Automotive to Ford’s Ford and Lincoln-branded cars, starting in 2023. But at the same time, the two companies also announced that Ford has chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider. “With Google Cloud, Ford will digitally transform from the front office to the […]
Weights & Biases, a startup building tools for machine learning practitioners, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series B funding. The company was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis — Biewald and Van Pelt previously founded CrowdFlower/Figure Eight (acquired by Appen). Weights & Biases says it now has […]
Apple has introduced an iCloud Passwords Chrome extension that will make life easier for those who use both Windows computers and other Apple devices, like a MacBook or an iPhone. The new browser extension lets you access on your other Apple devices the passwords you saved in Safari, then use them within Chrome when you’re on […]
New transparency figures released by Amazon show the company responded to a record number of government data demands in the last six months of 2020. The new figures land in the company’s bi-annual transparency report published to Amazon’s website over the weekend. Amazon said it processed 27,664 government demands for user data in the last […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. […]
Last fall, Amazon introduced a new biometric device, Amazon One, that allowed customers to pay at Amazon Go stores using their palm. Today, the company says the device is being rolled out to additional Amazon stores in Seattle — an expansion that will make the system available across eight total Amazon physical retail stores, including […]
The GameStop debacle has been hailed by many as a first of its kind form of digital activism, with the ‘crowd’ coming together to stick it to Wall Street, and specifically hedge funds that are in the business of short selling. However, what if you’re a startup or scale-up caught in the middle of such […]
Rapid7, the Boston-based security operations company, has been making moves into the cloud recently and this morning it announced that it has acquired Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50 million. As the world shifts to cloud native using Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads, it’s tricky ensuring that the containers are configured correctly to keep them […]
DesignCrowd announced today it has raised $10 million AUD (about $7.6 billion USD) in pre-IPO funding. The capital will be used on hiring and product development, with the goal of accelerating the growth of BrandCrowd, its DIY platform. The new funding comes as DesignCrowd gets ready for a potential initial public offering on the Australian […]
In 2018, Carbon, a Nigerian fintech startup, made its financials public for the first time. Although typical for foreign private startups, it’s almost an anomaly in Africa. There have been rare cases in the past, for instance, when Rocket Internet had to include Jumia’s financials in its yearly reports after going public. At the time, […]
New space startup bluShift wants to bring a new kind of propellant to the small satellite launching market, with rockets powered by bio-derived rocket fuels. These differ from traditional fuels in that they offer safety advantages during handling, and ecological advantages during production and use. The startup has been working on its solid rocket biofuel […]
Twitter blocked access to dozens of accounts in India on Monday, including some that belonged to high-profile individuals, to comply with a “legal demand,” prompting confusion and anger among users who are seeking an explanation for this action. Among those whose accounts have been withheld in India include Caravan (a news outlet that conducts investigative […]
India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed a handful of benefits for the startup ecosystem and to accelerate the growth of digital services in the annual budget Monday as the South Asian nation looks to revive the economy that was severely-hit amid the coronavirus pandemic. Sitharaman said the nation has earmarked 1,500 crore Indian rupees ($205.3 […]
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and many other companies, has mastered the art of using Twitter to harness fans and promote himself and his interests across as wide an audience as possible. Using some of that momentum, last night he made a vocal debut on a newer platform — Silicon Valley’s hottest startup […]
Speaking is one of the hardest parts of learning a new language, especially if you don’t have someone to practice with regularly. ELSA is an app that helps by using speech recognition technology to correct pronunciation. Based in San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City, ELSA announced today it has raised a $15 million Series […]
Ben, a London-based employee benefits and rewards platform, has raised $2.5 million in funding. The seed round is led by Cherry Ventures, and Seedcamp. A number of angel investors with backgrounds in fintech and HR tech also participated. They include Paul Forster (founder of Indeed), Taavet Hinrikus (founder of TransferWise), Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (previously an exec […]
Despite China’s history of stringent media control, an industry of uninstitutionalized, individual publishers has managed to flourish on social media platforms like Tencent’s WeChat and ByteDance’s Toutiao. These self-publishers are called “We Media” in the Chinese internet lexicon, denoting the independent power of citizen journalists and content creators. Meanwhile, self-publishers have always had to tread […]
