India’s anti-smuggling agency said that phone-vendor Vivo’s local unit had evaded customs duty of over $280 million, roughly a month after the country’s anti-money laundering agency raided the domestic offices of the Chinese company. The finance ministry said on Wednesday that its Directorate of Revenue Intelligence recovered “incriminating evidence indicating wilful misdeclaration in the description
Month: August 2022
Jason Richelson Contributor Until recently, tech startups traditionally enjoyed relative freedom from financial oversight from the venture capitalists who funded them. As long as these firms could report progress in developing their products and generating some level of earnings from sales and software subscriptions, they could burn through their millions without having to endure close
Databricks, an enterprise software company focused on data and analytics, announced this morning that it has surpassed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate. The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the financial result. The milestone comes after the company raised a mammoth $1.6 billion round last August at a $38 billion valuation. At the
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Friday, y’all! Start your weekend off right with some delicious podcast morsels from Equity, Found and Chain Reaction. Also, time is ticking away on a $1,300 savings for TechCrunch Disrupt, so
Project Solar doesn’t make solar panels, nor does it employ crews to plop them on roofs, but the startup argues it can shake up the residential solar business by steering clear of sales reps and automating parts of the ordering, design and installation process. Backed by $23 million in fresh Series A funding led by
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, said on Friday it doesn’t own India-based platform WazirX despite disclosing the acquisition two and a half years ago. Changpeng Zhao, founder and chief executive of Binance, said in a series of tweets that the company has been “trying to conclude the deal for the past
A year ago, Club Feast, a subscription-based service aiming to disrupt the food delivery industry, emerged from stealth with $3.5 million in seed funding and the backing of prominent investors, including General Catalyst and Pika Capital. Co-founders Atallah Atallah, Ghazi Atallah and Chris Miao claimed that, by working with hundreds of restaurants to create low-priced
Sahil Mansuri Contributor My first month with a sales quota was September 2008 — not the best month for a 21-year-old to start his career by cold calling strangers and convincing them to buy a $10,000 piece of software. The economy was in free fall, companies were slashing workforces nationwide and all budgets were frozen.
Most startups don’t have a clean run from their pre-seed round through an IPO when it comes to fundraising. Quickly growing tech companies sometimes pause at certain stages, raising a little extra cash against their prior round’s terms, for example. This becomes especially true when the economy changes for the worse and startups are incentivized
Users on Twitter have been receiving messages purporting to be from “Twitter Support” urging them to act quickly to avoid suspension, often even from users with a blue check. But these are almost certainly scams — here’s what to look out for, and what it would look like if Twitter actually needed to contact you.
Astra CEO Chris Kemp told investors Thursday that the company will be no longer launch payloads with its current lightweight vehicle, Rocket 3, and will instead remanifest all launches on a considerably larger rocket that’s still under development. It’s a big change for the company, which has operated on the hunch that customers are willing
Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the economy is “in a period of transition,” on the grounds that “we have a very strong labor market. When you are creating almost 400,000 jobs a month, that is not a recession.” Today, we learned that the U.S. added 528,000 new jobs last month and the
The number of emoji subscription purchases on the South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk has dropped by a third over the year, parent firm Kakao said in quarterly earnings call Thursday, blaming Google’s new in-app payment policy, which forces apps to use Android-maker’s own billing system. KakaoTalk’s Emoticon Plus subscription service, which costs approximately $3.8 per
Sub-Saharan Africa’s share of the global population without access to electricity stood at 77% in 2020, according to reports. Also, the average daily electricity supply in some of Africa’s largest cities is less than 12 hours. As a result, individuals and businesses find other options and substitutes, such as generators, to deal with their power
Yair Snir Contributor Yair Snir is vice president and managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, leading venture investment activity in Europe and Israel. What does an an acquisition process look like? There are two kinds of acquisition processes: planned and opportunistic. A planned process is where a company looks for a suitable buyer for their
A few months on from a tracking controversy hitting privacy-centric search veteran, DuckDuckGo, the company has announced it’s been able to amend terms with Microsoft, its search syndication partner, that had previously meant its mobile browsers and browser extensions were prevented from blocking advertising requests made by Microsoft scripts on third party sites. In a
Amazon this morning announced plans to acquire iRobot for an all-cash deal valued at $1.7 billion. The home robotics firm, best known for pioneering the robotic vacuum, was founded in 1990 by MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab members Colin Angle, Rodney Brooks and Helen Greiner. Twelve years after its founding, the company introduced the Roomba, a brand
When it comes to geospatial and mapping data and how they are leveraged by organizations, satellites continue to play a critical role when it comes to sourcing raw information. Getting that raw data into a state that can be usable by enterprises, however, is a different story. Today, a Berlin-based startup called LiveEO, which has
A new app for iPhone users can help you browse the web without being constantly bothered by pop-up panels that beg you to use the company’s app instead. The app, called Banish, is an Safari extension that helps remove the “open in app” banners from various websites and other popups that block content across a
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Haje and I are swapping places for the next two days while he gets some much-needed rest. While he’s away, please enjoy his latest Pitch Deck Teardown on Glambook. In the meantime,
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate-focused VC firm linked to some of Earth’s wealthiest individuals, has joined a $44 million bet on solar startup Terabase Energy. Terabase aims to rapidly build new solar farms “at the terawatt scale,” CEO Matt Campbell said in a statement. The startup claims its automated, on-site factory can already speed up
Swathy Prithivi started Found with the goal of improving the journey of weight loss. The company quickly discovered a huge demand and rapidly scaled its operations and expanded throughout the United States. The company’s story started in an Atomic incubator. On this episode of TechCrunch Live, we hear from Found’s co-founder and COO Swathy Prithivi
The world needs a company willing to force governments to take action on climate change. So far, climate tech has been the polite corner of the startup world. All pleases and thank yous, triple bottom lines and shared upsides, plenty of virtue and virtue signaling. That’s great and all. Saving the world from probable calamity
Tesla held its annual shareholder meeting, which the company now refers to as its Cyber Roundup, Thursday at the Tesla Gigafactory Texas. The Cyber Roundup comes just a couple of weeks after Tesla reported its Q2 earnings, which showed quarterly revenue declines caused by production challenges, even as the company grew year-over-year. The agenda had 13 shareholder
A popular anonymous social app that was misleading its users with fake messages has been forced to change. The top-ranked app NGL, which became the No. 1 app on the U.S. App Store in June, quietly rolled out an update yesterday that sees it now informing users when they receive messages that aren’t from their
Who will fare better in the current venture downturn? Will it be the legacy investors with years of experience amassed through multiple market cycles — but who also have a sizable portfolio to worry about — or the emerging managers who are looking at the market with fresh eyes and a clean slate? We’re about
The Middle East has long been thought of as an oil region, but the United Arab Emirates aims to change this with an intense focus on growing the country’s technology and startup scene. For the first half of 2022, the Middle East region brought in $1.73 billion in investments across 354 deals, up from more
Before he was the founder and CEO of Patreon, Jack Conte was a musician, mostly posting videos of his songs on YouTube (which he still does). Now, running a company that helps creators earn predictable monthly income from fan memberships, Conte is pissed off at Meta. As both Facebook and Instagram make changes to emphasize
Marjella Lecourt-Alma Contributor Tech companies have historically been viewed more positively than other sectors when it comes to ESG issues, but over the past 24 months, impending climate-related regulations, and the rapid move toward greater accountability has meant that many tech companies are left exposed. Issues such as energy consumption, workforce diversity, human capital, security,
Clubhouse, the social audio app that rose in popularity amid the pandemic, is looking to shake up its platform with the launch of private communities called “Houses.” The company’s new offering allows any person or group to create their own curated “House” within Clubhouse. Users can sign up to create Houses starting today, but Clubhouse says