Target Global is backing a €1 million support fund for tech talent in Spain laid off or furloughed as a result of the coronavirus crisis. The aim is to provide pre-seed financing to help crisis-hit tech workers switch gears and build out a startup concept over the next four to six months, covering living expenses […]
Even amid a pandemic, there’s a race on to create a powerful, global private securities marketplace where private shares are traded as freely as public company shares on the Nasdaq . In one lane is Carta, an eight-year-old maker of cap table management software with big ambitions to create a kind of private company stock […]
The retirement wars are heating up. As millions of baby boomers leave their jobs in the coming years and transition into retirement, there is a huge competition for who will manage their savings. On one hand are traditional wealth managers, firms like Edward Jones, who either employ full-time human financial advisors or empower independent contractors […]
The developer of a machine learning enhanced baby monitor, Nanit, has managed to nab $21 million in financing even amid the teeth of an epidemic that has slowed venture financing across the board. The round came from existing investors including: Jerusalem Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Rho Capital Partners, and brings the company’s total capital […]
Yubico, a maker of security keys, has launched a new service that lets enterprise customers ship its YubiKey security keys directly to their employees, partners and customers — even to their homes. The service, dubbed YubiEnterprise Delivery, is a cloud-based dashboard that is available from anywhere. IT staff can log in, check their inventory levels […]
The current state of our COVID-19 world has underscored more than ever the need for reliable delivery and e-commerce services: consumers sheltering in place are shopping at unprecedented levels online and getting items brought directly to their homes; and retailers urgently need web-based platforms that can help them manage, sell and bring their goods to […]
PlayPlay, the Paris-based startup behind a video creation tool that enables comms, marketing and social media teams to produce high-quality video content “in minutes”, has raised €10 million in funding. Leading the Series A round is Balderton Capital, with participation from Point Nine, and Kerala Ventures. Founded in 2017 by ex-Eurosport social media director Thibaut […]
Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons has secured a heavyweight partner to further its China expansion. The company announced on its social media account (in Chinese) on Tuesday that it has landed funding from Tencent, the Chinese social networking and gaming giant, without disclosing the size of the proceeds. Tim Hortons did not immediately respond to […]
Construyo, a Berlin-based startup that offers a “holistic” project management service that connects the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, has raised €2 million in seed funding. The round is led by Talis Capital, and follows €300,000 of previous backing from Florian Swoboda, founder of Liberty Ventures; Florian Leibert, founder of D2iQ, and Jan Kanieß, […]
Listeners of podcasts, audiobooks and other audio shows are estimated to number 542 million in China this year, according to a third-party survey by marketing firm iiMedia. It’s a healthy jump from the 489 million users recorded in 2019, and it no doubt has attracted new players to the game. That includes Tencent Music Entertainment […]
Small- to medium-sized businesses are one of the most important parts of Southeast Asia’s economy, but many have trouble securing growth capital from traditional financial institutions. Validus wants to fix the financing gap with its peer-to-peer lending platform, which connects accredited lenders with SMEs. The Singapore-based startup announced today that it has raised $20 million […]
On the same day that Elon Musk defied local regulations and reopened Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, the CEO put a new person in charge of production. Musk named Richard Miller, who was director of paint operations at Tesla, to head of production at the factory, according to an internal email sent to employees Monday […]
Soft robots have been a booming category for research and manufacturing in recent years, due to a number of beneficial characteristics. The field has become increasingly important to things like robotic graspers, which rely on their compliance to pick up fragile objects like fruit. Speed, on the other hand, doesn’t tend to be a word […]
Haje Jan Kamps is a founder, photographer and journalist who logged time as a TechCrunch writer years ago and who has since launched a platform for virtual conferences called Konf. In a recent catch-up with him about work and life during COVID-19, we wound up talking at some length about Facebook, which is seeing record […]
Enterprise search has always been a tough nut to crack. The Holy Grail has always been to operate like Google, but in-house. You enter a few keywords and you get back that nearly perfect response at the top of the list of the results. The irony of trying to do search locally has been a […]
When Zach Sims first started pitching his coding startup, Codecademy, he framed it to investors as a corporate tutoring company. That was intentional, despite the fact that edtech is a $5 trillion business. “It was much easier for investors to understand instead of an education company,” he said, noting that the industry has long been […]
Instagram Lite, the two-year-old version of the Instagram app aimed at emerging markets, has quietly disappeared. The previously highly ranked app vanished from the Google Play charts on April 13 in the countries where it was active, including Kenya, Mexico, Peru and the Philippines. Existing Instagram Lite users have been directed to the main Instagram […]
Self-driving vehicle startup Voyage said Monday that it has inked a deal with Fiat Chrysler to supply purpose-built vehicles, a partnership that will help accelerate its plan to launch a fully driverless ride-hailing service. Voyage, a three-year-old startup that tests and operates a self-driving vehicle service (with human safety operators) in retirement communities in California […]
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Monday that the company’s factory in Fremont, California is open and has restarted production despite a stay-at-home order issued by Alameda County. Musk said in tweet Monday afternoon that he will “be on the line,” a reference to the assembly line at the factory where Tesla makes the Model X, […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a lot of otherwise traditional industries to become creative and flexible in ways that might have seemed entirely out of the realm of possibility only a few months ago. With most of the country at home, social distancing, a number of networks have turned to consumer technologies in order to […]
