The tech industry experienced turmoil before during the dot-com bust and again during the 2008 economic downturn. But this time it’s a bit different, according to Kapor Capital founding partners Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor. “What’s different this time is that it is society-wide,” Kapor Klein said during an Extra Crunch Live appearance this […]
Material Bank, a logistics platform for the architectural and design industry, has announced the close of a $28 million Series B financing today, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Bain’s Merritt Hummer led the round on behalf of the firm and will join the board of directors at Material Bank, along with Jeff Sine, cofounder and […]
Medical startup Nines, which has developed an AI-based triage tool that has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is making that tool available for free to all until June 30 to help address the growing burden on radiology diagnostics departments as COVID-19 continues to reshape the healthcare landscape in the U.S. […]
Okta released a special COVID-19 edition of its app usage report today, and you don’t need a Ph. D. in statistics to guess what they found. Indeed, Zoom surged 110% on the Okta network, leading the way in usage growth just as you would expect, but another whole class of tools besides collaboration also saw […]
Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, venture funding rounds and total deal volume of VC funding for esports were down noticeably from the year prior. The space received a lot of attention in 2017 and 2018 as leagues formed, teams raised money and surging popularity fostered a whole ecosystem of new companies. Last year featured some […]
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re taking our final look back at Q1 venture capital through the lens of AI-focused startups. New data out this week paints a mixed picture of the AI startup landscape. Venture dollar volume in […]
In just a few hours, the TechCrunch crew is chatting with investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Kicking off at 8 am PT, 11 am ET and 3 PM GMT, Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm will talk startups and the economy with Cuban as part of TechCrunch’s new Extra Crunch Live series (you can join here). […]
Amazon workers across the world are formalizing their activism with the creation of the Amazon Workers International. Its first action is a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon Director of UK Customer Fulfillment Stefano Perego in which the group demands the company makes permanent certain steps Amazon has implemented amid the COVID-19 pandemic. […]
Microsoft today announced a slew of updates to various parts of its Microsoft 365 ecosystem. A lot of these aren’t all that exciting (though that obviously depends on your level of enthusiasm for products like Microsoft Endpoint Manager), but the overall thrust behind this update is to make life easier for the IT admins that […]
In the first decade of the twentieth century two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, invented fertilizer — the nitrogen compound which ushered in modern agriculture and saved the world from potential starvation. Now, over a century later, a new group of scientists backed by government-owned international investment funds and some of the world’s […]
Despite traffic for many online properties being at an all-time high, advertising has fallen off a cliff because of the downturn in consumer activity outside the home and the wider economic pressures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. And today, Twitter reported quarterly earnings that bore this trend out. The ad-based social networking and media company said that […]
Google announced today it is providing $2.3 million in funding to 18 news organizations in the Asia Pacific region, the latest in its ongoing effort to support publishers globally. News organizations from 11 nations, including Australia, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan are receiving the grant as part of Thursday’s announcement, the company said, […]
Just as challenger banks have appeared in the B2C space, so to have B2B startup banks aimed small businesses, among them startups like Qonto (Fr), Tide (UK), Penta (GER) and CountingUp (UK). Today another such firm, Finom, has closed a €6.5m ($7M) seed funding round led by Target Global, with participation from General Catalyst. Further […]
Meet Biloba, a French startup that wants to leverage tech to make it easier to keep your children healthy. The company recently launched a new mobile app that lets you chat with a doctor whenever you want between 8 AM and 8 PM. This way, if you have questions about your kids, you can get […]
San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup Flutterwave has launched Flutterwave Store, a portal for African merchants to create digital shops to sell online. The product is less Amazon and more eBay — with no inventory or warehouse requirements. Flutterwave insists the move doesn’t represent any shift away from its core payments business. The company accelerated the development […]
Prague based Resistant AI has nabbed a $2.75M seed round. The security startup’s machine learning technology is designed to be deployed on top of AI systems used for financial decision making to protect customers in markets such as financial services and ecommerce from attacks such as targeted manipulation, adversarial machine learning and advanced fraud. The […]
Security researchers are sounding the alarm over a newly discovered Android malware that targets banking apps and cryptocurrency wallets. The malware, which researchers at security firm Cybereason recently discovered and called EventBot, masquerades as a legitimate Android app — like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Word for Android — which abuses Android’s in-built accessibility features to […]
Tesla said it will reduce the price of its standard range Model 3 vehicle in China to meet the government’s new eligibility requirements for subsidies. This marks the second time this year that the automaker has reduced the price. Several months ago, the base version of China-made Model 3 was lowered by 9%. Tesla has […]
Tesla is pushing back plans to produce and deliver its all-electric Class 8 truck until 2021, the company said in its quarter earnings report Wednesday. The move puts the Tesla Semi two years behind the automaker’s previous target. “We are shifting our first Tesla Semi deliveries to 2021,” the company said without providing any more […]
Researchers at NYU have identified hundreds of groups of Instagram users, some with thousands of members, that systematically exchange likes and comments in order to game the service’s algorithms and boost visibility. In the process, they also trained machine learning agents to identify whether a post has been juiced in this way. “Pods,” as they’ve […]
