Aeva, a Mountain View, California-based lidar company started by two former Apple engineers and backed by Porsche SE, is merging with special purpose acquisition company InterPrivate Acquisition Corp., with a post-deal market valuation of $2.1 billion. The deal with InterPrivate, which is led by private equity investor Ahmed Fattouh, is expected to close by early […]
Offline-messaging app Bridgefy — which innovatively uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi — became known as the go-to app by thousands of protesters around the world to keep communications going even when oppressive regimes blocked or shut down the internet. Recently, activists in Nigeria and Thailand have urged supporters to download the app, as last year, when […]
Getting to space isn’t as difficult as it used to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Relativity Space aims to vastly simplify the incredibly complex machine that is a launch vehicle by 3D-printing it from tip to tail fins. Co-founder and CEO Tim Ellis will be joining us at TC Sessions: Space on December […]
TVision is building what its team hopes will become the standard for measuring streaming viewership — and to accelerate those efforts, it’s raised $16 million in new funding. The New York City startup started by measuring traditional TV viewing, using webcams to determine whether viewers were actually paying attention to the ads. More recently, it’s […]
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. It was a […]
The last few quarters did not play out as as expected for venture capitalists or entrepreneurs; instead of a pandemic-fueled recession that cauterized the flow of private investment into startups, the economic shifts brought on by COVID-19 have given many companies a tailwind. Venture capitalists ramped up their spend in Q2 and Q3, pushing private investment […]
It was barely a month ago we began hearing rumors that Twilio was interested in acquiring Segment. The $3.2 billion deal was officially announced three weeks ago, and this morning the communications API company announced that the deal had closed, astonishingly fast for an acquisition of this size. While we can’t know for sure, the […]
Ad-supported streaming news platform Haystack News is announcing a significant expansion ahead of U.S. Election Day. The company this morning introduced 16 24/7 live-streaming news channels, including ABC News Live, CBSN, Al Jazeera, Euronews, Newsmax, Yahoo Finance and several more live local news broadcast stations across the U.S. These are the first live news channels […]
As ever, launch title choices are likely to be a concern for gamers plunking down cash on a next-gen console. They can, however, take solace in the fact that the immensely popular battle royale title Fortnite will be available for both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S when those systems arrive a couple of […]
MIT has developed a new navigation system designed for use underwater that could do for underwater wayfinding what GPS has done for travel on and above the surface. GPS doesn’t really penetrate underwater, because radio waves aren’t really water-friendly. It’s why you commonly see things like sonar employed on submarines, which emit sound waves and […]
Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding. When the company raised its $7 million Series A two years ago, founder and CEO Noah Dinkin told me about how it spun out of his previous startup, FanBridge. And while there are many products focused […]
When we covered Leena AI as a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 cohort, the young startup was firmly focused on building HR chatbots, but in the intervening years it has expanded the vision to a broader HR policy platform. Today, the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Greycroft with help […]
Twitter recently updated its policies in advance of the U.S. elections to include specific rules that detailed how it would handle tweets making claims about election results before they were official. Today, the company offered more information about how it plans to prioritize the enforcement of its rules and how it will label any tweets […]
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 big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can […]
New research looking into how UK VC has been invested over the past decade according to race, gender and educational background makes for grim reading — with all-ethnic teams and female entrepreneurs receiving just a fraction of available funding vs all-white teams and male founders. The finding of baked in bias holds true across all […]
When it comes to using algorithms and other formulae to determine what kinds of services you might offer to specific customers and at what price, the insurance industry is one of the oldest in the book. But that legacy position masks the fact that some of its determinations might leave a lot to be desired, […]
Penguin Business describes Starling Bank founder Anne Boden’s “Banking On It” as the “first-hand account of one woman’s quest to rebuild Britain’s broken banking system.” Written with the help of a ghost writer, Boden relates how she came up with the idea to found a challenger bank and the many obstacles she faced along the […]
UPI, a four-year-old payments infrastructure built by India’s largest banks, surpassed 2 billion transactions last month, exactly a year after hitting the 1 billion monthly transactions milestone. Driving the transactions for UPI — which has become the most popular digital payments method in India thanks to its open architecture that allows interoperability among all participating […]
This is the Atari 400 Raspberry Pi 400. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is launching a new product today — and it’s a brand new device. As you can see in the photo, the Raspberry Pi 400 is a computer integrated in a compact keyboard that costs $70. And it is the easiest way to get […]
Started as a side project by its founders, Warren is now helping regional cloud infrastructure service providers compete against Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and other tech giants. Based in Tallinn, Estonia, Warren’s self-service distributed cloud platform is gaining traction in Southeast Asia, one of the world’s fastest-growing cloud service markets, and Europe. It recently closed […]
