In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to strip federal abortion rights in the U.S., many people are questioning how the apps they use every day might suddenly be turned against them. As concerns mount over the endless well of data that tech companies built an entire industry around, Google is taking at least
Month: July 2022
June brought another wave of layoffs in tech, with cuts impacting roughly the same number of employees as May: 16,000 employees, according to tracker layoffs.fyi. Another layoff aggregator from TrueUp paints a more dire picture, counting 26,000 impacted employees this month, up from about 20,000 last month. Either way, the data is grim. The end
Venture capital investments may be slower, but that seems to be giving venture capital firms some time to go out and raise funds of their own. Sequoia Capital is the latest to reportedly be raising two new U.S.-focused funds, valued at up to $2.25 billion, The Information reported earlier this week. The publication reported that
Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX is taking advantage of rampant instability in the crypto lending market to assert itself while propping up major institutions. The company’s U.S.-based arm has a deal in place with troubled crypto lender BlockFi that gives them the option to buy the startup, recently valued at $2 billion, for up to $240 million
Reddit announced Friday that it’s acquiring MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company, for an undisclosed amount. The MeaningCloud team has joined Reddit and will support machine learning projects across its product, safety and ads teams. The acquisition marks Reddit’s first office in Spain. MeaningCloud was founded in 2015 and specializes in extracting meaning from unstructured
Amazon has agreed to simplify the process required for cancelling its Prime membership subscription service across its sites in the European Union, both on desktop and mobile interfaces, following a series of complaints from regional consumer protection groups. The coordinated complaints about Amazon’s confusing and convoluted cancellation process for Prime were announced back in April
What’s a poor, freshly minted developer to do when they’re out of coding boot camp but don’t have any real-life experience? You step into the world of simulation. That’s the basic premise of what Wilco offers. Last week, I covered the company’s $7 million seed funding round, and the company’s CEO, On Freund, was gracious
Queenly, a startup building a garment marketplace aimed at dressing women for formal events, announced this morning that it has purchased Mi Padrino, a company built to serve the quinceañera market. The two companies’ overlap is obvious: Quinceañeras, events where girls celebrate their 15th birthday with a large event and ornate garb, is an event
It’s a big week for startups developing technology for e-commerce marketplaces. We saw companies like Nautical Commerce bag $30 million in Series A funding to help any sized business create their own marketplace. Meanwhile, Shop Circle made its public debut with $65 million under its belt with apps so that Shopify merchants can quickly set
The U.S commodities regulator, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has filed civil charges against a South African company and its CEO for running a fraudulent commodity pool worth over $1.7 billion in bitcoin, and over registration violations. The regulator stated that the fraud scheme by Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited (MTI), the South African bitcoin
European Union lawmakers have agreed a way forward on regulating the traceability of crypto assets being traded in the bloc. The rules are intended to curb the use of crypto for money laundering and terrorism financing by bringing in compliance requirements for crypto service providers, such as trading platforms. The provisional agreement on a new
Google said Thursday it will pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit with US developers that accused Google of abusing its power of app distribution and charging an unfair fee of 30% for app purchases and in-app purchases made through the Play Store. The company noted that US developers who made less than $2 million each
Khaby Lame is quite literally on top of the world (if TikTok follower counts are the world). After attending his first VidCon and surpassing Charli D’Amelio as the most-followed TikToker, the Italian Senegalese comedian signed on as an ambassador for Binance, the world’s largest platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. Just last week, Binance snagged
Somehow June is over in just a few hours, meaning that we are trotting toward the third quarter’s starting line. Leaving aside the uncomfortably rapid pace at which time is flying past us, entering a new financial reporting period is an excellent moment to pause, reflect and work out the key questions for the upcoming
Medical diagnostics company Visby Medical raised $100 million in a Series E round earlier this year. Today, the company told me it extended that round by an additional $35 million at the same valuation as the rest of the round. This financing will enable Visby Medical to scale production capacity from tens to hundreds of
Stacks of teeny lenses that look like inverted pyramids could juice up solar panels, helping them capture more light from any angle on both sunny and overcast days. Solar panels perform best in direct sunlight, which is why some solar systems track the big fireball across the sky, turning to face it for maximum light.
The future of non-fungible tokens is getting more clarity in China as the country’s tech giants come together to formulate standards for the nascent industry. The China Cultural Industry Association, along with Tencent, Ant Group, Baidu, and others, jointly issued a “self-disciplined development proposal” for the “digital collectible industry,” a rebranded term for NFT in
Fleetzero has an ambitious goal: to compete with global shipping companies with its own boats, powered entirely by electricity. The company just secured $15.5 million in new funding and is looking for the first ship to convert to run on its shipping container-shaped batteries. The company’s plan, described in detail here, is to convert existing
TaskHuman, a professional development platform focused on coaching, today announced that it raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Madrona with participation from Impact Venture Capital, RingCentral Ventures, Sure Ventures, USVP, Gaingels, PeopleTech Angels, Propel(x) and Zoom Ventures. The latest infusion brings the company’s total raised to $35 million, which CEO Ravi Swaminathan