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Electric aviation startup Wisk Aero’s request for a preliminary injunction against rival Archer Aviation was denied by a federal judge Thursday, the latest in an ongoing legal battle over whether Archer stole trade secrets in developing its flagship Maker aircraft. A full written opinion has not yet been published. In a tentative ruling filed earlier […]

Devindra Hardawar Contributor Devindra Hardawar is a Senior Editor at Engadget. GM is issuing a second recall for 2017 to 2019 Bolt EVs over potential fire issues. The company says it plans to replace defective batteries, but until it can do so it’s advising Bolt customers to limit their charging up to 90 percent, and […]

If you’ve started using Snapchat more regularly this year, you’re not alone. At yesterday’s Q2 earnings call, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced that the platform grew both revenue and daily active users at the highest rates it has achieved in the last four years. Snapchat now has 293 million daily active users, growing 23% since […]

Monarch, a subscription-based platform that aims to help consumers “plan and manage” their financial lives, has raised $4.8 million in seed funding. Accel led the round, which also included participation from SignalFire, and brings the Mountain View-based yet fully distributed startup’s total funding since its 2019 inception to $5.5 million. Co-founder and CEO Val Agostino […]

When it comes to control, the Chinese government doesn't mind wiping out a few dozen billion dollars in market cap here and there. That's not a great system.

Checkout is a platform play, not a payments play, and now is the time to build the category in B2B. Business buyer behavior is changing, and the stars are aligning on the fintech infrastructure front.

Shareholders approved Friday EV startup Lucid Motors’ merger with special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital IV, after the companies extended the deadline by one day because not enough retail investors showed up to cast their vote. The issue is unusual but could become more common as more companies eschew the traditional IPO path to public […]

Alphabet’s public-facing history with robotics has, thus far, been a spotty one. Most notably, Google X’s big acquisition push culminated in its selling Boston Dynamics to SoftBank (who eventually flipped it to Hyundai). Alphabet/Google’s subsequent approach has been less flashy and focused on more immediate robotic tasks. Unveiled today through the X blog, Intrinsic certainly […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We were a smaller team this week, with Natasha and Alex together with Chris to sort through yet another summer frenzy of a week. This time around we actually recorded live on Twitter Spaces, which was a first for the […]

'At each layer of your growth model, you don't want to just be relying on ads or just be relying on SEO or just be relying on email marketing … you really want to have your eggs in multiple baskets.'

Paystone provides electronic payments and customer engagement technology to businesses, particularly those that provide services.

Open-source framework startup Serverless Stack announced Friday that it raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Greylock Partners, SV Angel and Y Combinator. The company was founded in 2017 by Jay V and Frank Wang in San Francisco, and they were part of Y Combinator’s 2021 winter batch. Serverless […]

It’s pretty easy for individuals to send money back and forth, and there are lots of cash apps from which to choose. On the commercial side, however, one business trying to send $100,000 the same way is not as easy. Paystand wants to change that. The Scotts Valley, California-based company is using cloud technology and […]

Taboola, the company that operates a popular grid-based advertising and content recommendation network across media properties, today announced an acquisition to expand its reach further into e-commerce, its first big move since going public in June by way of a SPAC: it is paying $800 million in a combination of cash and stock to buy […]

Shares in Zomato, a Gurgaon-based food delivery company and first of India’s consumer tech startups to go public, closed up 65% in its debut day of trading in Mumbai, delivering a key insight into the appetite investors have for the world’s second largest internet market’s burgeoning startup ecosystem. Zomato’s shares traded all day above the […]

Meet Kitchenful, a new German startup backed by Y Combinator that wants to make it easier to cook at home by taking care of menu ideas and grocery shopping. The service is currently available in early access in Germany with a focus on Berlin and Munich. When you sign up to Kitchenful, you first have […]

GM is rolling out three major upgrades including automatic lanes changes and towing support to its hands-free driver assistance system Super Cruise and making it available in six vehicles, including the 2022 all-new GMC Hummer EV pickup truck. While GM has steadily improved Super Cruise since its introduction in 2017, for years it has been […]

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed to investors that bitcoin will be a “big part” of the company’s future, as he sees opportunities to integrate the cryptocurrency into existing Twitter products and services, including commerce, subscriptions and other new additions like the Twitter Tip Jar and Super Follows. Dorsey has been a staunch bitcoin advocate for […]

Arrival, the commercial electric vehicle company that is shaking up the traditional auto production line with AI-run microfactories, has been chosen to build electric buses for the City of Anaheim, California. The Federal Transportation Administration awarded Anaheim a $2 million grant in 2019, and on Thursday the city’s transportation network announced the plan to partner […]

The Tumblr community often refers to itself as the Wild West of the internet, and they’re not wrong. A text post with over 70,000 notes puts it best: “Tumblr is my favorite social media site because this place is literally uninhabitable for celebrities. No verification system, no algorithm that boosts their posts, it’s a completely […]

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Even, a healthcare membership company, aims to make going to a primary care doctor as easy and accessible in India as it is in other countries.

'I think you want insight from people who understand how human beings listen and learn and grow.'

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, the world’s original and most epic conference dedicated to tech startups, takes place September 21-23. Are you ready to take full advantage of this opportunity-packed event? Start right now and buy a Disrupt pass for less than $100. But don’t wait — the early-bird prices disappear on July 30 at 11:59 pm […]

VOCHI, a Belarus-based startup behind a clever computer vision-based video editing app used by online creators, has raised an additional $2.4 million in a “late-seed” round that follows the company’s initial $1.5 million round led by Ukraine-based Genesis Investments last year. The new funds follow a period of significant growth for the mobile tool, which […]

Extra Crunch Live has taught us a lot. From how Retail Zipline’s Series A pitch deck ticked every box for Emergence Capital to how Coda perfected the growth fly wheel, much to the delight of Madrona’s S. Somasegar to Toast’s ongoing obsession with its customers, and why its investors are obsessed with Toast. And that’s […]

Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would strip away the liability shield that social media platforms hold dear when those companies boost anti-vaccine conspiracies and other kinds of health misinformation. The Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), would create a new carveout in Section 230 […]

Venture capitalists have been investing heavily in last-mile delivery over the past five years on a global scale, but Latin America has lagged behind.

Waymo, Google’s former self-driving car project that’s now an independent business unit under Alphabet, is expanding its presence in the eastern U.S. The company said Thursday it would be opening offices in Pittsburgh, joining a growing suite of companies developing and testing autonomous vehicle technology in the Steel City. The company will start by hiring […]

Absci Corp., a Vancouver company behind a multifaceted drug development platform, went public on Thursday. It’s another sign of snowballing interest in new approaches to drug development — a traditionally risky business. Absci focuses on speeding drug development in the preclinical stages. The company has developed and acquired a handful of tools that can predict […]

Instagram head Adam Mosseri confirmed the company is testing a new feature called “Limits,” which would give users the ability to temporary lock down their accounts when they’re being targeted by a flood of harassment. The announcement of the new feature was made today during a video where Mosseri condemned the recent racism that took […]

We need to ask if the technology we create is beneficial not just to the user, but to society. One way to build tech that better serves humanity is to ensure that it protects users and their values

Playdate, the adorable whimsy-and-nostalgia-box/handheld game system built by Panic (with some help from Teenage Engineering), has taken one more big step toward reality: it has an official pre-order date. And it’s soon! The company announced this morning that pre-orders for the handheld will go live on July 29th at 10 a.m pacific. Looking to get […]

Rivian, the Amazon-backed electric automaker that aims to be the first to bring an EV pickup truck to market, plans to open a second U.S. manufacturing factory, sources told TechCrunch, confirming an earlier report from Reuters. Rivian wouldn’t elaborate on when it planned to build the factory, but did confirm it was in the process […]

'I think successful growth folks tend to be voracious learners; they're resourceful and have that sort of get-shit-done mindset; they're ultimately simplifiers and actually generalists.'

Tesla will secure nickel from the commodity production giant BHP, the automaker’s latest move to secure direct sources of raw materials that are projected to surge in demand before the decade is out. BHP’s Nickel West division will supply an undisclosed amount of the mineral from its mines in Western Australia. The two companies also […]

A large chunk of the internet dropped offline on Thursday. Some of the most popular sites, apps and services on the internet were down, including UPS and FedEx (which have since come back online), Airbnb, Fidelity, and others are reporting Steam, LastPass, and the PlayStation Network are all experiencing downtime. Many other websites around the […]

India’s central bank is considering launching a digital currency, according to a top executive, giving a clear indication of its intentions for the first time after previously stating that it was studying the idea. T Rabi Sankar, the deputy governor of Reserve Bank of India, said at a conference today that the central bank is […]

Gopuff, the “instant” grocery delivery startup that has been on an acquisition and expansion tear in the last several months to scale its business, is also racing to raise money to fuel those efforts. Documents uncovered by Prime Unicorn Index and shared with TechCrunch show that the startup has filed papers in Delaware to raise […]

Imagine a world where no one’s privacy is breached, no faces are scanned into a gargantuan database, and no privacy laws are broken. This is a world that is fast approaching. Could companies simply dump the need for real-world CCTV footage, and switch to synthetic humans, acting out potential scenarios a million times over? That’s […]

The co-founders set out to build an email marketing automation platform for customers that wanted to do more than email campaigns and newsletters.

The myriad emerging and longer-term transportation technologies promise to change how people and packages move about the world or within their own neighborhoods. They also present myriad regulatory and policy hurdles that lawmakers, advocates and even investors and industry executives are attempting to navigate. At the center — at least in the United States — […]

Canada’s startup industry seems to be benefiting from both domestic and international trends, a wide genre focus and more than one hub. Let’s talk aboot it.

I did a bit of a double-take on this one: $100 million is a big number at any point, but two-and-a-half months after a $56 million round is pretty wild. At the very least, we know Path Robotics is ready to put its money where its mouth is — and that Tiger Global likes what […]

Mercedes-Benz laid out Thursday a 40 billion-euro ($47B) plan to become an electric-only automaker by the end of the decade, a target that will push the company to become more vertically integrated, train its workforce and secure the batteries needed to power its products. Mercedes has provide some wiggle room in that ambitious goal, noting […]

DeepMind and several research partners have released a database containing the 3D structures of nearly every protein in the human body, as computationally determined by the breakthrough protein folding system demonstrated last year, AlphaFold. The freely available database represents an enormous advance and convenience for scientists across hundreds of disciplines and domains, and may very […]

"You may think that the message is boring because you've said it once. But repetition never spoils the prayer."

With a couple of generations of wireless earbuds under its belt, OnePlus finally has the AirPods Pro — and the rest of the premium market — in its sights. As part of an event today that also includes the launch of its budget Nord 2, the company officially announced the OnePlus Buds Pro. The top-line […]

Thoma Bravo-owned Sophos has announced it’s acquiring Braintrace, a cybersecurity startup that provides organizations visibility into suspicious network traffic patterns. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Braintrace, which was founded in 2016 and has raised $10 million in funding, has developed a network detection and response (NDR) solution that helps organizations to easily inspect […]

Spotify announced this morning a new partnership with online GIF database GIPHY to enable discovery of new music through GIFs. No, the GIFs themselves won’t play song clips, if that’s what you’re thinking. Instead, through a series of new Spotify-linked GIFs, there will be an option to click a button to be taken to Spotify […]