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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. You […]

The startup has big plans: It is moving into the cryptocurrency market, it announced this morning, and partnering with Plaid to make money transfer easier for investors.

Poppi is on a mission to lead in the new category of “functional soda” by offering a better-for-you product that also tastes good.

Ragnarok, a ransomware gang operational since 2019 that gained notoriety after launching attacks against unpatched Citrix ADC servers, has shut down and released a free decryption key for its victims. The gang, sometimes referred to as Asnarok, last week replaced all 12 of the victims listed on its dark web portal with a short instruction […]

Flip mixes a live commerce mobile app with real customer reviews to improve the buying experience and opportunity for the creator economy.

The mobile app provides tools for travel creators to build their own travel-based businesses in order to curate, share and soon sell interactive travel guides and planning services.

Berlin-based Xayn, which as we reported last year is doing ad-free, personalized, privacy-safe search as an alternative to tracking and profiling adtech giants like Google, has expanded its product offering — launching a desktop version (in beta for now). The desktop Xayn WebBeta is described as a “light web version” of the product with similar functionality […]

China’s National Press and Publication Administration has released a notice imposing limits on online gaming for minors. On September 1st, video game companies will have to restrict gaming time to three hours a week — from 8 PM to 9 PM on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. With this new set of restrictions, Chinese authorities want […]

HAAS Alert says it will use the funding to scale sales and outreach efforts and prioritize R&D with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) technology partnerships.

Astra, now a public company, ran into a problem during its first commercial launch (the mission carried a test payload contracted by the U.S. Space Force as part of its Space Test Program) that meant the rocket never made it to orbit. On Saturday, the rocket ignited all its engines at liftoff time on the […]

Ola Electric is in advanced talks to raise between $250 million to $500 million in a new financing round as the Indian firm looks to scale its electric vehicle manufacturing business in the South Asian market, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Falcon Edge Capital is in advanced talks to the lead the […]

Ho Chi Minh City-based Vietcetera, a digital medial network originally created for millennials and Gen-Z, will broaden its target demographic after getting $2.7 million in pre-Series A funding. The capital was raised over two rounds this year, led by media-focused venture firm North Base Media. Other investors included Go-Ventures, Gojek’s corporate venture arm; East Ventures; […]

It’s been a busy summer for Clubhouse. The hit social audio app rolled out new messaging features and an Android app over the last few months and now the company is turning its attention to enhancing its core audio experience. Clubhouse announced Sunday that its rooms will now be infused with spatial audio to give […]

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The biggest news of the week again comes from Beijing’s ongoing effort to dampen the influence of the country’s tech giants. Regulators are now going after […]

For so long, Mark Zuckerberg has told us all to move fast and break things. It’s time for him to break Facebook.

Yifat Aran Contributor Share on Twitter Dr. Yifat Aran is a visiting scholar at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and an Assistant Professor in Haifa University Faculty of Law. She earned her JSD from Stanford Law School where her dissertation focused on equity-based compensation in Silicon Valley startups. More posts by this contributor The […]

Jennifer Fan Contributor Jennifer Fan is an assistant professor of law and director of the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law. Startups have a seemingly intractable problem: a lack of diversity. Despite research showing that diverse founding teams have a higher rate of return than white founding teams, one characteristic […]

When Salesforce announced its streaming platform Salesforce+, the CRM Playaz’ Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary interviewed Colin Fleming, SVP of Global Brand Experiences at the CRM company (disclosure: I work at Salesforce). Later, I asked Brent about his show on this episode of the Gang. Brent: With all the things going on with data privacy […]

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week we dove into Bezos’s Blue Origin suing NASA. This week, I’m writing about the unlikely and triumphant resurgence of the NFT market. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my […]

When Headspace merged with on-demand mental healthcare platform Ginger, I was surprised. After all, Ginger raised $100 million in Series E funding just a few months ago — and last time I spoke to CEO Russell Glass, he stressed the importance of integrating into employer-paid health plans. To me, Headspace’s meditation app is about as […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.

Fifteen years ago this week on August 25, 2006, AWS turned on the very first beta instance of EC2, its cloud-based virtual computers. Today cloud computing, and more specifically infrastructure as a service, is a staple of how businesses use computing, but at that moment it wasn’t a well known or widely understood concept. The […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Happy Saturday! After news broke that meditation app Headspace and on-demand mental health care platform Ginger were merging, we couldn’t resist hopping on the mics to do a bonus episode. And, because we were in the mood for […]

Space may be the endless frontier, but here on Earth, we define space in the modern sense as something enclosed. Walls, fences and barriers enclose space, define it and make it legible. In fact, the sense of limits is so strong these days with place that we often have to add qualifiers like “open space” […]

When did indoor air become cold and clean? Air conditioning is one of those inventions that have become so ubiquitous, that many in the developed world don’t even realize that less than a century ago, it didn’t exist. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that the air inside our buildings and the air outside of […]

One of the most unfortunate fault lines in climate change politics today is the lack of cooperation between environmentalists and the national security community. Left-wing climate activists don’t exactly hang out with more right-leaning military strategists, the former often seeing the latter as destructive anti-ecological marauders, while the latter often assume the former are unrealistic […]

When it comes to climate change, it might seem that a book entitled “How to Do Nothing” would not only be irrelevant, but also downright obscene and even dangerous. Not to mention that after more than a year of pandemic living, many people are understandably fatigued at the prospect of continuing to keep their lives […]

Bill Gates has solved many problems in his (professional) life, and in recent decades, he’s been dedicated to the plight of the world’s poor and particularly their health. Through his foundation work and charitable giving, he’s roamed the world solving problems from malaria and neglected tropical diseases to maternal health, always with an eye toward […]

Books on climate change, as diverse as the library is, tend to fall into a couple of categories. There are the field guides and observational accounts that chronicle the destruction of our world and make it legible for readers worldwide. There are the policy and tech analyses that splay out options for the future, deliberating […]

The climate is finally hitting a climax. Decades of discussions and reports by scientists have yielded pathbreaking works by writers like Elizabeth Kolbert, and today, climate fiction and non-fiction are even becoming global bestselling works. Everyone wants to read about collapse, dystopia, the aftermath — it’s in the very air we breathe after all, what […]

While there has been an uptick in fully remote jobs thanks to the pandemic, extending the scope of your job search will provide more opportunities that match your interest.

What does a company have to do to differentiate wireless earbuds in 2021? The near ubiquity of good hardware has made this an increasingly difficult question to answer. I’ve probably tested around 10 different sets of buds over the last year or so, and honestly, they were all pretty good. Companies like Nura and Nothing […]

“There are three common blunders that most SaaS marketers make time and again when it comes to clarity and high-converting content,” says Konrad Sanders, founder and CEO of The Creative Copywriter, “1. Not differentiating from competitors. 2. Not humanizing ‘tech talk.’ 3. Not tuning their messaging to prospects’ stage of awareness at the appropriate stage […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

TikTok has banned the popular “milk crate challenge” from its platform due to concerns that users participating in the trend could be seriously injured. The challenge saw TikTok users stacking milk crates into a pyramid and then attempting to climb across the unstable structure. A spokesperson from the company told TechCrunch in an email that […]

Forget what you've heard: There are *many* shortcuts to success.

Linux is set for a big release this Sunday August 29, setting the stage for enterprise and cloud applications for months to come. The 5.14 kernel update will include security and performance improvements. A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help […]

Building relationships with potential investors requires you to think less like a founder and more like a marketer — much of the legwork comes long before it's time to ask for a commitment.

Since 2017, Microsoft has offered its Office suite to Chromebook users via the Google Play store, but that is set to come to an end in a few short weeks. As of September 18, Microsoft is discontinuing support for Office (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook) on Chromebook. Microsoft is not, however, abandoning […]

With more than 270,000 stickers, Stipop’s library of colorful, character-driven expressions has a little something for everyone. The company offers keyboard and social app stickers through ad-supported mobile apps on iOS and Android, but it’s recently focused more on providing stickers to developers, creators and other online businesses. “We were able to gather so many […]

The seismic shift in how we work requires a reassessment of how we manage, even for — or especially for — seasoned leaders.

The design space has undergone major changes in the last decade. What once was dominated by a single player in Adobe has now become a burgeoning software landscape, with a handful of major players answering the needs of designers across every industry. One such player is Canva, the startup valued at over $15 billion. The […]

We’ve seen non-venture funds flow into the later stages of startup land, pushing VCs toward earlier-stage and more venture-y deals. Why would CVCs be immune to the same trend?

Elon Musk’s Tesla is looking beyond electric vehicles, solar panels and energy storage and wants to now supply electricity directly to customers, according to an application filed with Texas electricity regulators earlier this month. Energy Choice Matters first reported on the application. The application, filed with the Public Utilities Commission of Texas on August 16, […]

On Tuesday, Peloton announced the upcoming release of its entry-level Tread device. The news came ahead of a disappointing earnings report and after recalls of both of its treadmill products. Today, the connected fitness company noted in a filing with the SEC that it has been subpoenaed by both the U.S. Department of Justice and […]

Rivian, the electric vehicle startup backed by a host of institutional and strategic investors, including Ford and Amazon, has confidentially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. The size and price range for the proposed offering have yet to be determined. The initial public offering is expected to take place […]

With so much startup activity in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space it can be a challenge for businesses to figure out which of these SaaS (SaaSes?) are actually useful and worth continuing to shell out for. Well, Cologne-based startup Sastrify is here to help — offering what it describes as a “highly automated” platform (covering some […]

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place September 21-23, and we’re here to call out just some of the awesome content we have scheduled over three very busy days. The Disrupt agenda so far features more than 80 interviews, panel discussions, events and breakout sessions that span the startup tech spectrum… with more to come! You gotta […]