Rhys Spence Contributor Rhys Spence is head of research at Brighteye Ventures, a European edtech-focused fund, where he works with portfolio companies to help address priorities, with a focus on internationalization and HR. More posts by this contributor European, North American edtech startups see funding triple in 2021 The unbundling of professional learning and entrepreneurship
Month: July 2022
Can a smartphone still be cool? They were, once upon a time, in those days when they were more luxury than ubiquity. But what happens when everyone has one — and, more to the point, we all pretty much have the same one? Phones aren’t fashion. They’re not clothes or shoes or even cars. Chances
Dec.02 — The U.S. proposed tariffs on roughly $2.4 billion in French products, in response to a tax on digital revenues that hits large American tech companies including Google, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Bloomberg’s Laura Davison reports on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia.”
After the 2008 financial crisis, a new slate of regulations aimed at protecting consumers and businesses opened the floodgates for a surge of fintech companies to develop into household names over the last decade. Now, it might be healthcare’s turn. Part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Consumer Reform and Protection Act, passed in 2010, stated
While credit cards are ubiquitous in the U.S., they are far less so across Latin America, where people — especially lower-income members of the population — have historically relied on cash for payments. But the market in LatAm has shifted in recent years, and with increased digital adoption, more people are opening their minds to
We’re fired up and ready to connect with the global robotics and AI community at TC Sessions: Robotics on July 21. The agenda for this online event is packed with presentations, interviews and robot demos, and our speaker lineup features the brightest minds and makers in the business. If for some reason you haven’t yet
For much of her career, hacker Runa Sandvik has worked to protect journalists and newsrooms from powerful adversaries who want to keep wrongdoing and corruption out of the public eye. Journalists and activists are increasingly targeted by the wealthy and resourceful who seek to keep the truth hidden, from nation-state aligned hackers hacking into journalist’s
Amazon has offered to limit its use of marketplace seller data and make changes to ‘Buy Box’ rankings in a bid to settle antitrust concerns in the European Union, the Commission confirmed today. It has also offered to revise how sellers can quality for inclusion to Prime; and allow them to choose their own delivery
South Korean messaging giant Kakao confirmed today it will remove an external payment option after Google blocked the South Korean company behind KakaoTalk from issuing updates. The South Korean company continued using an external payment link in its Android app against Google’s new in-app payment rules. While the app’s updates were suspended on June 30,
Stripe is the latest high-profile fintech company to take a massive valuation cut as the market downturn begins to hit the sector especially hard. Last valued at $95 billion, the payments processor has cut the internal value of its shares by 28%, sources told the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that the valuation cut
No merchant likes a bad customer review and Okendo, a customer marketing platform, announced $26 million in Series A funding today to continue developing its customer review tools for e-commerce brands. Base10 Partners led the funding round and was joined by Craft Ventures and existing investor Index Ventures. It gives the company $33.5 million in
Hyundai said Thursday it will begin building electric vehicles under its high-performance N brand created to compete with luxury sports cars from Mercedes-Benz and BMW. The automaker said the Ioniq 5 N, high-performance version of its battery-electric SUV, will launch in 2023. Hyundai also premiered Thursday two high-performance concepts — RN22e and N Vision 74
General Motors is teaming up with Pilot Flying J to build a national fast-charge network for EVs. The partnership between GM and Pilot will help accelerate EV sales by filling in gaps along the charging infrastructure. Access to charging stations remains American drivers’ top concern over buying or leasing an EV, according to a July
There’s no shortage of headlines about the onset of “crypto winter.” Amid a growing pile of bankruptcies, one of the buzziest startups in the business, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, announced a major layoff just today. Behind the scenes, however, plenty of founders and VCs are doubling down on the promise of largely decentralized, blockchain-based outfits,
Italy’s competition watchdog has opened an investigation into Google over concerns it has abused a dominant position by hindering data portability rights which are afforded to individuals under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The procedure follows a complaint made to the authority by the operator of a direct marketing platform called Weople.
Thanks to the pandemic, teams are more distributed than ever. For some companies, that’s led to a disconnect between lower-level employees and leadership, the latter of whom are generally skeptical of remote work. According to a survey from GoodHire, 75% of managers want workers in the office, citing the potential lack of focus and loss
Nuro, the autonomous vehicle delivery startup that is valued at more than $8.6 billion, is closing its Phoenix facility as it shifts its commercial strategy away from the desert metropolis and toward the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston. Nuro told employees that the Phoenix Depot location would be closed by October 1, according to
You might think given the chatter in the startup world that venture capitalists are short on funds — after all, we’re hearing about young tech companies finding themselves marooned between stages, hitting up investors with smaller capital pools than prior backers and turning to equity crowdfunding to keep their cash balances healthy. And yet new data
Meta today released its first annual human rights report, which — in the company’s words — includes “insights and actions from [Meta’s] human rights due diligence on products, countries, and responses to emerging crises.” The 83-page report, covering the years 2020 and 2021, strikes a largely self-congratulatory tone, defending Meta’s misinformation strategy while failing to
Lithium-ion batteries are one of the driving forces behind the transition away from fossil fuels, but the rechargeable battery that started it all — lead-acid — has received very little attention. Invented over 160 years ago, lead-acid batteries have been upgraded a few times, but today’s cells are largely unchanged from those sold in the
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Systemiq Capital, a backer of early-stage climate tech startups, says it has secured $70 million to kick off its second fund. The London-based VC aims to raise as much as $130 million more; that would mark quite a step up for the firm, which says it has funneled $30 million into 19 startups since 2018.
India has proposed to introduce a right to repair law, aiming to provide consumers the ability to have their devices repaired by third parties to fight the growing “culture of planned obsolescence” in a move that follows similar deliberations in the U.S. and the UK. The Indian Department of Consumer Affairs said Wednesday that it
A major shift in the U.S. app economy has just taken place. In the second quarter of this year, U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps surpassed spending in mobile games for the first time in May 2022 and the trend continued in June. This drove the total revenue generated by non-game apps higher for
Sep.26 — Tesla Inc. shares climbed the most since July after Elon Musk said in an email to employees that the carmaker has a chance to top the vehicle-delivery record it set in the second quarter. Bloomberg’s Craig Trudell has more on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
When Andrew Hines started Canvas Medical in 2015 he couldn’t have predicted that telehealth would go from niche to norm or that a pandemic would inspire entrepreneurs to launch a new fleet of digital health startups that needed fresh infrastructure. He just knew he wanted to build software for physicians like his wife, who wasted
Hivery, a startup that bills itself as an “optimization platform” for retailers, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global, the embattled private equity firm, with participation from Blackbird Ventures, AS1 Growth Partners and OneVentures. CEO Jason Hosking told TechCrunch via email that the proceeds will fuel
Large-scale machine learning models are at the heart of headline-grabbing technologies like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Google’s LaMDA. They’re impressive, to be sure, capable of generating images and text convincing enough to pass for a human’s work. But developing the models took an enormous amount of time and compute power — not to mention cash.
Powin, an energy storage technology developer, said today it has raised $135 million in funding led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, with participation from existing investors Trilantic Energy Partners North America and Energy Impact Partners (EIP). The investment comes on the back of the recent funding from Samsung Venture Investment and a strategic partnership
In an apparent effort to compete with creator subscription services like Patreon, Instagram began an alpha test of a subscriber feature in January. Today, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced an expansion of the test features, along with some updates around how the last six months of development have gone. When the feature began testing
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