Many brands are using the messaging app Discord to forge a sense of community among their fans. If the fast-food chain Wendy’s can have a Discord with over 60,000 members, why not a viral platform like TikTok? TikTok teased on Twitter that it was making a Discord server, but then confirmed the news on its
Month: December 2021
Indian edtech giant Byju’s, the nation’s most valuable startup, is in talks to go public in the U.S. by merging with a blank check company led by Churchill Capital, a person familiar with the matter said. Byju’s, currently valued at about $21 billion, is seeking a valuation of over $45 billion and looking to raise
Working together at Uber’s risk team, Yifu Diao and Ming Fang came to realize that with the hypergrowth the company was seeing came fraud challenges. Diao’s first project at the company after starting in 2014 was building a rules engine called Mastermind to fight fraud. That engine, he says, allowed risk analysts to build and
Instagram is rolling out a new “Profile Embed” feature that allows users to embed a miniature version of their profile into a website. The new feature will allow users to further integrate their Instagram profiles into websites such as blogs and portfolios. The social media giant says the feature is currently only available in the
Supply chains are made up of a web of carbon-intensive activities, and trying to nail down which company is contributing pollution along the way has been difficult to parse. CarbonChain, an early-stage startup based in London from some supply chain veterans, wants to make it easier to account for carbon every step of the way.
Climate change is affecting the way farmers grow their crops, and Phytoform, which knows all about the harsh United Kingdom growing conditions, is out to make crops more impervious. The biotechnology company with headquarters in London and Boston announced $5.7 million in funding, led by Eniac Ventures, to scale its artificial intelligence genome editing technology
French startup Voodoo has announced that it plans to make a significant investment in blockchain-powered mobile games. The company estimates that it represents a $200 million investment over the coming years. 2021 has been an important year for crypto gaming, with Axie Infinity popularizing the play-to-earn model. Some companies, such as Mythical Games, raised massive
TikTok announced this morning it’s taking a new approach to its “For You” feed — the short-form video app’s main feed, powered by its algorithmic recommendations. The company already detailed how its algorithm works to suggest videos based on users’ engagement patterns within its app, but admits that too much of a particular content category
When it comes to online payments, the front end of the system has seen a massive amount of disruption in the last several years, with companies like Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Square and others building APIs that make it very simple for online merchants to integrate easy payment services into their checkout flows. But when it comes
French startup La Belle Vie announced that it has raised a $28.2 million (€25 million) Series B round led by Left Lane and Quadrille Capital, with existing investor Capagro also participating. The company operates an online grocery store in the Paris area. Online grocery delivery services and so-called quick-commerce startups are quite trendy. In fact,
Snap announced today that it paid over $250 million to more than 12,000 creators this year on Spotlight, its TikTok clone. Unlike Snapchat’s friend-to-friend, ephemeral messaging, Spotlight allows users to reach a wide audience. Since last year when Spotlight launched, Snap says that creators are posting three times as often now. It’s no secret that
Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, has been raking in money this year. It started the year with a $160 million Series E on a $2 billion valuation and ended it with a $278 million Series F on a $5 billion valuation, more than doubling the company value in less than 12 months. Greenoaks led the
Controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of some 10 billion images by scraping selfies off the Internet so it can sell an identity-matching service to law enforcement, has been hit with another order to delete people’s data. France’s privacy watchdog said today that Clearview has breached Europe’s General Data Protection
Disney+ is the latest streaming app to add support for Apple’s SharePlay, the iOS 15 feature that offers a co-viewing experience over FaceTime video calls on iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV devices. First announced during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June, SharePlay rolled out with the iOS 15.1 update, soon offering co-viewing experiences
After months of NFT mania and Facebook’s recent name change to Meta, it’s fair to say that “metaverse” chatter has reached a fever pitch. And while crypto investors are buying up avatars and digital swaths of land in hopes that a digital universe will spring up around these projects, it’s unclear which projects — if
Kalendar AI, a San Francisco-based startup that’s been building on top of GPT-3‘s language model — developing a SaaS for automating lead generation and sales outreach to make it easier for companies to get initial meetings with prospective customers — has raised $3.2 million in pre-seed funding from 500 Startups; The Lean Startup author, Eric
Most people have experienced the internet only through Web 2.0. Online applications, the social web and software as a service form the fabric of our lives. Lately, many have championed web3 as the internet’s next phase, but the term encompasses so much territory, conversations can be diffuse and there are valid concerns that its complexity
The List joins the social commerce movement with a new app connecting consumers with global luxury brands and retailers to offer a personalized discovery and shopping experience. Focused on sourcing hard-to-find items, the app launch is buoyed by $3.5 million in seed funding backed by a group including American Designer and Rachel Zoe, who is
UBQ Materials, which claims it has developed a plastic-like material made from 100% unsorted household waste, has raised a $170 million funding round led by TPG Rise, TPG’s global impact investing platform, made through TPG Rise Climate, the firm’s dedicated climate investing fund, and The Rise Funds, its multisector impact investing fund. The financing round
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Check back from now until the end of December for more! Less than two weeks left until Christmas! Got your shopping done? No? Yeaaaah me neither. Want to buy someone a great gadget but don’t want to break
South Korean startup Kakao Entertainment announced today it has acquired Wuxiaworld, an Asia fantasy fiction platform, via its serialized fiction app subsidiary Radish to bolster the mobile storytelling business. The transaction size is $37.5 million. Wuxiaworld, which has grown through word-of-mouth, claims it is now the largest English-language Asia fantasy platform in the U.S. in terms of
Apple’s carrier partners for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch are not paying out promised rebate discounts, frustrating customers. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman breaks it down on Power On. ——– Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Technology on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrM7B7SL_g1edFOnmj-SDKg Watch the latest full episodes of “Bloomberg Technology” with Emily Chang here: Get the latest in
Olist, a Brazilian e-commerce marketplace integrator, confirmed it is now valued at $1.5 billion after securing $186 million in Series E funding, led by Wellington Management. The new round follows quickly behind a $23 million Series D extension the company announced in April, led by new investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management to bring its total
Wonder Dynamics aims to make “blockbuster-level” visual effects achievable by living-room-level creators using AI and cloud services, though it has kept its product closely under wraps. The secretive company, which boasts a star-studded set of advisors, has raised a $10M A round ahead of a planned launch later in 2022. The company was founded by
Grindr, a hook-up app for gay, bi, trans and queer people, has been fined around $7.1 million (65M NOK) by Norway’s data protection authority for passing user data to advertisers without consent — including highly sensitive information related to users’ sexual orientation. Specifically, the DPA found that Grindr breached Articles 6(1) and 9(1) of Europe’s
The odds are against San Francisco-based electric vehicle battery swapping company Ample. Other companies have tried to build a business on exchanging dead batteries for fresh ones to solve the problem of long EV charge times: Fourteen years ago, Better Place raised nearly a billion dollars to do what Ample’s doing, and it ended up
SQream, a well-funded Israel-based data analytics platform, today announced that it has acquired no-code data platform Panoply in an effort to expand its cloud services. At the core of SQream’s service is its GPU-centric “data acceleration platform,” which promises to speed up SQL queries and enable users to run their queries on more data. Panoply, on
In its latest move to placate European competition regulators, Google has offered a set of commitments to France’s antitrust watchdog — in the hopes of settling a costly (for it) intervention over legally mandated payments for displaying snippets of news publishers’ content. Back in July, France’s Autorité de la Concurrence slapped the tech giant with
The US government will place eight Chinese companies including drone manufacturer DJI on an investment blocklist for alleged involvement in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims, the Financial Times has reported. The firms will reportedly be put on the Treasure department’s “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” list on Tuesday, meaning US citizens will be barred from making any
The crease, it seems, is unavoidable. It’s right there, smack in the middle of the those big, expensive folding displays. And it’s invariably (and perhaps understandably) the first comment on nearly every story I post about a foldable phone. The alternative isn’t ideal, either — a gap between two distinct displays à la Microsoft’s Surface
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