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Jul 31, 2021
The digitization of your haircut may not have been on your 2020 bucket list, but 2021 has an even more surprising line item: Tech-powered barbershops are now a business proposition valued at nearly a billion dollars. Squire is a back-end barbershop management tool for independent businesses. I first covered it in the early months of […]
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Jul 31, 2021
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.
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Jul 31, 2021
Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business' stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range, and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo's IPO proves that public market investors can […]
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Jul 31, 2021
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 tech industry in China has had quite a turbulent week. The government is upending its $100 billion private education sector, wiping billions from the […]
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Jul 31, 2021
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. […]
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Jul 31, 2021
A few years from now, the organizations that succeed will be the ones that resisted the urge to race everyone back to the office and instead rethought how their workforce operates.
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Jul 30, 2021
TuSimple, the self-driving truck company that went public earlier this year, has partnered with Ryder as part of its plan to build out a freight network that will support its autonomous trucking operations. Under the deal announced this week, Ryder's fleet maintenance facilities will act as terminals for TuSimple's freight network. TuSimple's so-called AFN, or […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Nearly two years ago, contractors for Google's Pittsburgh operations voted to join the United Steelworkers union in a bid to secure more labor rights representation. It was an early example of a building union movement for tech workers across the spectrum. But as other hard-fought battles have been waged among blue and white collar workers […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
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Jul 30, 2021
Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle technology startup backed by Ford and VW, has landed a permit in California that will allow the company to give people free rides in its self-driving vehicles on the state's public roads. The California Public Utilities Commission issued the so-called Drivered AV pilot permit earlier this month, according to the […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Deliveroo said it is considering leaving the Spanish market, citing limited market share and a long road of investment with 'highly uncertain long-term potential returns' on the horizon.
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Jul 30, 2021
A change of command is one of the most delicate moments in the life cycle of any organization. If mishandled, the transition from one CEO to the next can result in massive downsides.
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Jul 30, 2021
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; have a great weekend.
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Jul 30, 2021
"We will need to raise more money, as you pointed out, that's certainly no secret, but I think that we have multiple options to do that."
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Jul 30, 2021
"The best thing a startup can do, and I'm seeing it happen more and more, is investing in community early on," growth marketing expert Max van den Ingh of Unmuted tells us. "When I was leading growth at MisterGreen, we created a community for the first thousand Tesla Model 3 owners in the Netherlands. Everyone […]
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Jul 30, 2021
I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an "internet identity" for $425,000. "I hate the universe," she texted. Sure, the universe would be better if people with a spare $425,000 spent it on mutual aid or something, […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Early Bird Tickets to Disrupt end today, Friday, July 30. Book your tickets now!
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Jul 30, 2021
What happens after a developer or engineer lands that sweet gig? Are they able to harness their skills and grow in interesting and challenging new directions?
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Jul 30, 2021
A 13-tonne Tesla Megapack caught fire on Friday morning at a battery storage facility in south-east Australia. The blaze occurred during testing at 10 - 10.15am local time.
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Jul 30, 2021
Elon Musk is siding with Epic Games in the App Store monopoly case, with the Tesla CEO firing off a tweet Friday morning that called Apple's Store fees "a de facto global tax on the Internet," also adding that "Epic is right." Epic Games legal battle with Apple is sure to last years and the […]
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Jul 30, 2021
The Government Accountability Office said that it was denying both Blue Origin's protest and a separate challenge filed by Dynetics.
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Jul 30, 2021
At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong walked us through some of the ways founders should think about design, what design means and the steps that come before focusing on the pixels.
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Jul 30, 2021
Robinhood says it went public because it was ready. And our read of the markets is that it's an appealing time for high-growth tech companies with a history of losses to do so. Yet it's underwater.
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Jul 30, 2021
Don't miss your chance to experience TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 — the startup world's must-attend event of the season — for less than $100. Why not get the best ROI of your time while simultaneously learning about the latest industry trends and mining for opportunities that can take your startup to new levels of success? Disrupt […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Don't miss your chance to experience TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 — the startup world's must-attend event of the season — for less than $100. Why not get the best ROI of your time while simultaneously learning about the latest industry trends and mining for opportunities that can take your startup to new levels of success? Disrupt […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Outvio, an Estonian startup that provides a white-label SaaS fulfillment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers in Spain and Estonia, has closed a $3 million early-stage financing round led by Change Ventures. Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco), and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn). Several angels also joined the round including James […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Fear is back with the deadly combination of pandemic politics and a vicious variant. The good news is that if enough people took the shots we could cut the damage to something manageable. The other good news is progress on the twin issues of Trump and social media. In both cases some semblance of balanced […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Luxembourg's National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) has hit Amazon with a record-breaking €746 million ($887m) GDPR fine over the way it uses customer data for targeted advertising purposes. Amazon disclosed the ruling in an SEC filing on Friday in which it slammed the decision as baseless and added that it intended to defend itself […]
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Jul 30, 2021
Xepelin is built on a SaaS model designed to give SMEs a way to organize their financial information in real time.
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Jul 30, 2021
Since the UK's spying headquarters of GCHQ was established in the city in the 1950's, Cheltenham has attracted large firms like IBM, Raytheon, Microsoft, BAE Systems to the region. However, startups like Truststamp, Bamboo Technologies, Ripjar, Hub8, CYNAM, have emerged out of the city, which draws on the talent that naturally gravitates to such a […]
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Jul 30, 2021
The week brought together both this quarter's earnings cycle and the Q3 IPO rush. So, it was just a little busy!
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Jul 30, 2021
Any DevOps team can use Porter to manage applications in the cloud, delivering the full flexibility of Kubernetes through a Heroku-like experience.
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Jul 30, 2021
Gopuff said it plans to use the funding to continue expanding in North America, the U.K. and Europe, among other things.
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Jul 30, 2021
Catch is working to make sure that every gig worker has the health and retirement benefits they need.
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Jul 30, 2021
Three months ago, Mastercard invested $100 million in Airtel Mobile Commerce BV (AMC BV) — the mobile money business of telecom Airtel Africa. This was two weeks after it also received $200 million from TPG's Rise Fund. Today, the African telecoms operator has announced that it has secured another investment for its mobile money arm. […]
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Jul 29, 2021
If this coalition gets all the relationships right, doesn't get greedy and understands that there is a social good component here, this could be as impactful as the SAFE was.
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Jul 29, 2021
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
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Jul 29, 2021
Last quarter, Chromebooks saw 275% year-over-year growth up to 12 million units. The figure isn't quite as unwieldy for Q2, but a 75% year-over-year growth is still extremely respectable, with the category hitting 11.9 million shipments, per the latest figures from research firm, Canalys. Chromebooks joined the rest of the PC market in getting an […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Varda Space Industries has raised a $42 million Series A to bring to manufacturing a key capability that can only be found off-world: microgravity. The eight-month-old startup is looking to establish its first manufacturing facility in space as early as 2023, and by doing so, bring back to Earth advanced products that can only be […]
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Jul 29, 2021
As companies grow, their security and reliability needs evolve. When working with large customers, having empathy for these needs will go a long way.
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Jul 29, 2021
Pinterest's shares had popped last week when Snap posted its best quarter in four years, as investors were betting Pinterest's image-based social app would also see a return in advertiser spending. Those expectations now appear to be correct, as Pinterest beat on earnings with second-quarter revenue of $613.2 million and earnings per share of 25 […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Pinterest's shares had popped last week when Snap posted its best quarter in four years, as investors were betting Pinterest's image-based social app would also see a return in advertiser spending. Those expectations now appear to be correct, as Pinterest beat on earnings with second-quarter revenue of $613.2 million and earnings per share of 25 […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Once the U.S. consumer investing and trading app began to allow investors to trade its shares, they went down sharply, off more than 10% in the first hours of its life as a floating stock.
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Jul 29, 2021
Horizon Blockchain Games is — as the name implies — a company building games on the blockchain, along with tools to help others do the same. The company announced today that it has raised another $4.5M, bringing its total raised to a little over $13M. Horizon's first game is Skyweaver, a competitive digital trading card […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the founder of Boston-based Biofourmis, is imagining a future where heart failure patients go home with a prescription, a wearable sensor and an app. Today, a new FDA designation gets the company one step closer to that goal. Founded in 2015, Biofourmis is a digital therapeutics company that develops software to "augment" […]
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Jul 29, 2021
The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) has awarded Zum, a startup that wants to upgrade student transportation, a five-year $150 million contract to modernize its transport service throughout the district. Zum, which already operates its rideshare-meets-bus service in Oakland, much of Southern California, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas, will be responsible for handling day-to-day operations, […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Indian budget hotel chain Oyo may have lost a significant portion of its business amid the pandemic, but it is inching closer to finding a new investor: Microsoft. Microsoft is in advanced stages of talks to invest in Oyo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The size of the investment and the valuation are […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Livestreaming is a new pillar that brands must consider when building omnichannel marketing strategies, joining the trinity of in-store experiences, traditional e-commerce and social media.
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Jul 29, 2021
With Scarlett Johansson's time as an Avenger seemingly in the rearview, the "Black Widow" star has filed a breach of contract suit against Marvel-owner Disney. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court this week, alleges that the studio breached its agreement with the star when it released the film on Disney alongside its theatrical […]
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Jul 29, 2021
As we've known for about a week, today was the day Panic's charming/whacky/curious/all-of-the-above Playdate gaming device (and its crank!) went up for pre-order. The buzz around the little retro-inspired handheld seemed strong — but would that translate into actual sales? The answer, it seems, is a hard yes. Panic committed to making 20,000 units for […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Epic Games is teasing the biggest in-game event since Travis Scott psychedelically stomped through Fortnite's virtual meadows. The mysterious new event, which Fortnite-maker Epic is calling the "Rift Tour," will kick off on Friday, August 6 and run through Sunday, August 8. In the teaser announcement, Epic invites players to "take a musical journey into […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Epic Games is teasing the biggest in-game event since Travis Scott psychedelically stomped through Fortnite's virtual meadows. The mysterious new event, which Fortnite-maker Epic is calling the "Rift Tour," will kick off on Friday, August 6 and run through Sunday, August 8. In the teaser announcement, Epic invites players to "take a musical journey into […]
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Jul 29, 2021
The union of talent and money is what startup markets need to thrive. But there are other reasons why LatAm startups are often in the news: strong digital penetration and quick e-commerce growth.
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Jul 29, 2021
Blockchain infrastructure startups are heating up as industry fervor brings more developers and users to a space that still feels extremely young despite a heavy institutional embrace of the crypto space in 2021. The latest crypto startup to court the attention of venture capitalists is Tenderly, which builds a developer platform for Ethereum devs to […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Merqueo offers more than 8,000 products, including fresh foods, packaged goods, home essentials, beverages and frozen products. It currently operates in more than 25 cities and has over 600,000 users.
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Jul 29, 2021
Uber wants to overcome the language barriers you'll sometimes encounter when hailing a ride. The Verge says Uber has partnered with Rosetta Stone to offer free language lessons through its Driver app.
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Jul 29, 2021
DevOps is fundamentally about collaboration and agility. Unfortunately, when we add security and compliance to the picture, the message gets distorted.
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Jul 29, 2021
If you have an older Amazon Kindle with 3G internet, take note that you may not be able to wirelessly access and download new content anymore starting in December.
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Jul 29, 2021
Late last year, Amazon launched support for two-way calling that worked with its Fire TV Cube devices. The feature allowed consumers to make and receive calls from their connected TV to any other Alexa device with a screen. Today, the company is expanding this system to enable support for two-way calling with Zoom. Starting today, […]
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Jul 29, 2021
If you're an early-stage founder, you'd be wise to make TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 (September 21-23) your must-attend virtual destination. It's the OG of tech startup conferences, draws more than 10,000 attendees from around the world and features some of the most gifted, visionary minds and makers across the entire tech spectrum. Cash-strapped founders in the […]
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Jul 29, 2021
La Haus, which has developed an online real estate marketplace operating in Mexico and Colombia, has secured $100 million in additional funding, including $50 million in equity and $50 million in debt financing. The new capital was obtained as an extension to the company's Series B, the first tranche of which closed in January. With […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Facebook's booming business is dominated by digital ads, but it also has hardware ambitions beyond VR. During the company's latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said its next product release would be a pair of smart glasses from Ray-Ban. "The glasses have their iconic form factor, and they let you do some pretty neat things," the Facebook […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Industrial robotics are big and heavy — and in some cases, legitimately dangerous. They're also extremely difficult to train — particularly if you plan to implement them for tasks outside of their purpose-built intentions. There's huge opportunity for the right AI/software company to come along and help make the bulky systems intended for things like […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Air taxis may still be pie in the sky, but there's more than one way to move the air travel industry forward. Craft Aerospace aims to do so with a totally new vertical-takeoff and landing aircraft that it believes could make city-to-city hops simpler, faster, cheaper, and greener. The aircraft — which to be clear […]
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Jul 29, 2021
PayPal's plan to morph itself into a "super app" have been given a go for launch. According to PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, speaking to investors during this week's second-quarter earnings, the initial version of PayPal's new consumer digital wallet app is now "code complete" and the company is preparing to slowly ramp up. Over the […]
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Jul 29, 2021
CEO Dan Schulman revealed the superapp would include high-yield savings, early access to direct deposit funds and messaging functionality outside of peer-to-peer payments.
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Jul 29, 2021
Trevor Milton, the fast-talking showman founder of Nikola and the electric truck startup's former CEO and executive chairman, has been charged with three counts of fraud. Milton "engaged in a fraudulent scheme to deceive retail investors" for his own personal benefit, according to the federal indictment unsealed by U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan on Thursday. […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Talkiatry raised a $20 million Series A to scale a strategy simple in theory yet potentially challenging in execution: bring psychiatry services in-network with insurance providers.
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Jul 29, 2021
Developer marketing came up in our conversation with strategic marketing firm MKT1, so we called on content marketing production company Draft.dev's CEO Karl Hughes to learn more.
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Jul 29, 2021
The kit is an all-in-one product that includes a Swarm Tile, the company's flagship modem device, a VHF antenna, a small solar panel, a tripod, a Feather S2 development board and an OLED.
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Jul 29, 2021
Divorce is messy and stressful, made even messier and stressful when a couple is unable to go through the legal process because of the cost.
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Jul 29, 2021
One year after voice-based AI technology company ConverseNow raised a $3.3 million seed round, the company is back with a cash infusion of $15 million in Series A funding.
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Jul 29, 2021
It's always exciting to see a new company enter the consumer hardware space — and deliver a solid first product out of the game.
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Jul 29, 2021
The startup runs a marketplace that links college-age talent to companies in need of their services. Social media and web developer work are popular on the Pangea platform.
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Jul 29, 2021
Open source has become a major force in the world of IT, and today a startup that has built a profitable operation by developing business management software on the priniciple is announcing a sizable secondary investment on the back of that growth. Odoo — a Belgium-based provider of open-source-based business software that ranges from inventory […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Odoo is the first unicorn out of Wallonia, the region in Belgium where it is based.
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Jul 29, 2021
Realm, which aims to help homeowners maximize the value of their property with its data platform, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by GGV Capital. Existing backers Primary Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures also participated in the round, bringing the New York-based startup's total raised to $15 million. […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Rocket Lab is back in business launching rockets, after an issue during its last launch in May caused a total loss of the payloads on board. The company was quick to investigate the issue, and announced just over a week ago that it had completed that work, identified the problem and implemented corrective action to […]
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Jul 29, 2021
The launch, which took off from the company's Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, was an important one to get right: It delivered a satellite for the U.S. Space Force to low Earth orbit.
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Jul 29, 2021
Culture Amp was founded in 2009 to let companies conduct anonymous employee surveys, but since then, its focus has expanded to helping employers turn the data they collect into action. The company announced today it has raised $100 million in Series F funding, led by returning investors Sequoia Capital China and TDM Growth Partners. The […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Exo, pronounced "echo," is commercializing its handheld ultrasound device and point-of-care workflow platform, Exo Works.
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Jul 29, 2021
Small and medium enterprises have become a big opportunity in the world of B2B technology in the last several years, and today a startup that's building tools aimed at helping them manage their teams of workers is announcing some funding that underscores the state of that market. Homebase, which provides a platform that helps SMBs […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Small and medium enterprises have become a big opportunity in the world of B2B technology in the last several years, and today a startup that's building tools aimed at helping them manage their teams of workers is announcing some funding that underscores the state of that market. Homebase, which provides a platform that helps SMBs […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Despite their rich engineering talent, Blockchain entrepreneurs in the EU often struggle to find backing due to the dearth of large funds and investment expertise in the space. But a big move takes place at an EU level today, as the European Investment Fund makes a significant investment into a blockchain and digital assets venture […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Despite their rich engineering talent, Blockchain entrepreneurs in the EU often struggle to find backing due to the dearth of large funds and investment expertise in the space. But a big move takes place at an EU level today, as the European Investment Fund makes a significant investment into a blockchain and digital assets venture […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Data may be the new oil, but it's only valuable if you make good use of it. Today, a startup that has built a new kind of production analytics platform for developers, security engineers and data scientists to track and better understand how data is moving around their networks is announcing a round of funding […]
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Jul 29, 2021
Cast your mind back to that scene in Minority Report where all those autonomous cars are whizzing through the city. The more practically-minded of you may well have gone: "Yeah, but what about the insurance…?". Among the startups building the on-demand, connected insurance world for the vehicles of tomorrow right now are UK-based Zego which […]
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Jul 29, 2021
"You have to understand that working at a startup often feels like you're standing on the edge of a cliff. And that's also the moment you're at your most creative."
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Jul 28, 2021
Just half a year after leading SODA's Series B, SoftBank Ventures Asia is raising its bet on the Tokyo-based sneaker resell platform. The early-stage venture capital arm of SoftBank Group announced today it has returned to lead SODA's Series C, which currently totals $56.4 million. Other investors include South Korean sneaker reselling platform KREAM (another […]
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Jul 28, 2021
Just half a year after leading SODA's Series B, SoftBank Ventures Asia is raising its bet on the Tokyo-based sneaker resell platform. The early-stage venture capital arm of SoftBank Group announced today it has returned to lead SODA's Series C, which currently totals $56.4 million. Other investors include South Korean sneaker reselling platform KREAM (another […]
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Jul 28, 2021
Just two weeks after reopening its New York and San Francisco offices, social media giant Twitter said Wednesday that it will be closing those offices "immediately." The decision came "after careful consideration of the CDC's updated guidelines, and in light of current conditions," a spokesperson said. "Twitter has made the decision to close our opened […]
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Jul 28, 2021
Following the quarterly release of Facebook's earnings numbers where the company's CFO takes time to walk analysts through the nitty gritty of the company's financials, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a moment to zoom out and wax on the company's future goals, specifically calling out his ambitions to turn Facebook into "a metaverse company." "I wanted […]
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Jul 28, 2021
INKR is a digital comics platform that crosses cultural and language divides, enabling creators to reach global audiences with its proprietary localization technology. Previously bootstrapped, the company announced today that it has raised $3.1 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk's Hill Ventures, with participation from manga distributor TokyoPop founder and chief executive Stu […]
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Jul 28, 2021
A new trend is emerging in the world of startups and, to many, it couldn't have come too soon. Why are there so few women in senior roles? Women going through menopause are commonly known to drop out of leadership roles, for instance. In the UK, menopause is responsible for about 14 million lost working […]
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Jul 28, 2021
Spotify's recently launched live audio app and Clubhouse rival, Spotify Greenroom, has a long road ahead of it if it wants to take on top social audio platforms like Clubhouse, Airtime, Spoon and others, not to mention those from top social networks, like Twitter and Facebook. To date, the new Greenroom app has only been […]
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Jul 28, 2021
Despite semiconductor shortages peaking during the second quarter of 2021, Ford says it delivered better-than-expected operating results by leveraging strong demand for new vehicles, like its Bronco SUV, according to its most recent earnings report. In April, Ford had expected to lose about 50% of its planned Q2 production, resulting in a profit loss for […]
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Jul 28, 2021
Ford and its F-150 pickup, the automaker's best-selling vehicle, have consistently inspired brand loyalty from pickup truck owners. According to the J.D. Power 2020 U.S. Automotive Brand Loyalty Study, Ford has a 54.3% loyalty rate. Now as the automaker moves to electrify its fleet, it seems to be bringing in fresh buyers. Ford released Wednesday […]
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Jul 28, 2021
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
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Jul 28, 2021
"My startup is desperately recruiting, and we see a lot of engineering candidates on H-1Bs. They're looking for H-1B transfers and green cards. What should we do?"
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Jul 28, 2021
Earlier today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company will require employees to be vaccinated before returning to work on-site. It was part of a larger letter sent to Google/Alphabet staff that also noted the company will be extending its work-from-home policy through October 18, as the COVID-19 delta variant continues to sweep through […]
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