Month: September 2021

As more enterprises migrate to cloud-based architectures, they are also taking on more applications (because they can) and, as a result of that, more complex workloads and storage needs. Machine learning and other artificial intelligence applications add even more complexity. Now a startup that has built technology to make that process move faster and more
0 Comments
The UK’s competition watchdog has cleared Facebook’s acquisition of Kustomer, a maker of CRM tools. The purchase was announced last November — with a price-tag we reported as $1BN — but is pending closing after facing regulatory scrutiny. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an inquiry on the proposed merger this summer, at
0 Comments
When businesses can connect more personally with their customers, those customers in turn are more loyal. However, as consumer behavior changes, especially as it did over the past 18 months, it is more difficult to establish that connection amid all of the messages put in front of them. Optimove, specializing in customer relationship management marketing,
0 Comments
The meteoric rise of collaborative design startup Canva — now valued at $40 billion — and conversely, the viral interest we’ve been seeing in the market for NFTs where you can “buy” a share of a limited-edition digital asset, are two examples of how the tech world today revolves around — and values — catchy
0 Comments
Ninja Van, a Singapore-based logistics startup, has closed a $578 million Series E round to support its operations infrastructure and technology systems growth. Investors include China’s Alibaba Group as well as existing investors DPDgroup’s GeoPost, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Savering’s B Capital Group, Monk’s Hill Ventures, and Zamrud, a sovereign wealth fund controlled by Brunei, based on its
0 Comments
Intuit, the business and financial tools company best known for its TurboTax software, made news last week for its acquisition of Mailchimp, and is now announcing a corporate venture capital arm, Intuit Ventures, to identify growth opportunities and trends beneficial for its key customers — small businesses and consumers. The company is the latest to
0 Comments
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.
0 Comments
Priyanka Srinivas Contributor Priyanka Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Live Green Co, a Chilean food tech startup that uses artificial intelligence to suggest plant-based alternatives for meat and artificial additives in food. When it comes to gender equality in the business world, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg hit the nail on the head: “Knowing
0 Comments
Just two months after securing $2 million in pre-seed funding, plant-based pudding startup Noops is announcing an additional $2 million round led by Lerer Hippeau. The Long Island-based company was founded in 2019 by Hungryroot co-founder Gregory Harry Struck after he adopted a plant-based diet while battling cancer. “It was born out of a need
0 Comments
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce COO Bret Taylor discussed their $28 billion merger, announced last December, a deal the Department of Justice signed off on this summer but that shareholders still seem to be second-guessing. At least, they aren’t convinced of the value that Slack brings to Salesforce
0 Comments
The UK government has announced a national AI strategy — its first dedicated package aimed at boosting the country’s capabilities in and around machine learning technologies over the longer term. It says it hopes the strategy will lead to an increase in the number and types of AIs being developed and commercialized in the UK
0 Comments
Jul.01 — Epyllionco Managing Partner Matthew Ball discusses how people can now invest in the “metaverse,” the convergence of online gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality, user generating content, and social networking. He explains how the Metaverse ETF works with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
0 Comments
Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, along with TechCrunch’s Neesha Tambe. Neesha is one of our best and is the leading light of the Startup Battlefield event at our yearly Disrupt conference. That made her the perfect guest — that’s precisely what we discussed on the show today. From a tight
0 Comments
The boom in venture capital fundraising that the technology startup market has enjoyed since the back half of 2020 has been eye-popping. Record sums have been disbursed around the world as more firms entered the fray to invest in startups, and the late-stage capital flowed like water. But while the venture capital game seemed to
0 Comments
The UK published its first ever national AI strategy this week. The decade-long commitment by the government to levelling up domestic artificial intelligence capabilities — by directing resource and attention toward skills, talent, compute power and data access — has been broadly welcomed by the country’s tech ecosystem, as you’d expect. But there is a
0 Comments