Lightyear, a Dutch startup developing a long-range hybrid solar-powered car, today announced that it has raised €81 million ($81 million) as it prepares to begin production of its first vehicle in the coming months. While recent history is littered with examples of prototype solar-powered vehicles, the burgeoning electric car movement has so far been mostly
Month: September 2022
The vegan food market was pegged as a $27 billion industry last year, a figure that’s expected to more than double within a decade. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the major food and beverage incumbents such as Nestlé, which launched a plant-based dairy line under the Wunda brand last year, while rival Unilever has been
Binance, the issuer of the world’s third-largest stablecoin, said on Monday it will convert customers’ holdings in three rival stablecoins USD Coin (USDC), Pax Dollar (USDP) and True USD (TUSD) into its own stablecoin (BUSD) on September 29 to “enhance liquidity and capital-efficiency for users” in a move that has baffled many enthusiasts. As a
As well as the traditional carbon offset resellers and exchanges such as Climate Partner or Climate Impact X the tech space has also produced a few, including Patch (US-based, raised $26.5M) and Lune (UK-based, raised $4M). Now, Ceezer, a B2B marketplace for carbon credits, has closed a €4.2M round, led by Carbon Removal Partners with
It’s a long weekend here in the United States, meaning office workers, at least, get a three-day break from the dreaded meeting. We wanted to take this time to offer up an impassioned defense of … email. Hear us out. It’s conventional wisdom that meetings are killers of productivity and morale and happy work environments.
Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Happy Labor Day! Due to the scheduling of the newsletter, I’ll have finished writing this by the time NASA makes the second launch attempt of the Artemis I mission. By now, you probably already know how it all went down anyway! In this issue: SpaceX lands more astronaut
Tailor, a Japan-based back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, said today it has raised $4.3 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and Global Brain. Founded in 2021 by Yo Shibata and Misato Takahashi, Tailor provides a headless ERP platform, meaning an ERP without a front end, instead delivering data from back-office systems like finance
Fermentation has a long, rich history in food production, from beer and wine to yogurt and cheese, leavened bread and coffee, miso and tempeh, sauerkraut and kimchi, to name just a few of the tasty things we can consume thanks to a chemical process thought to date back to the Neolithic period. But if this
This February, Africa and emerging market-focused Nestcoin raised a pre-seed round to build, operate and invest in its web3 applications, including crypto content platform Breach Club and gaming guild Metaverse Magna (MVM). Nine months after its launch last December, the latter has completed a seed sale token round of $3.2 million at a $30M fully
To mark down your portfolio or not mark down your portfolio? That is a question many venture capitalists are grappling with right now. But first, what does that mean? VCs keep a running tab of the value of each fund and entire portfolio based on the prior valuations each company raised at. The value of
A call between doctors can save lives. That’s what Docquity co-founder Indranil Roychowdhury learned when his father was hospitalized with a life-threatening condition in India. An emergency room doctor initially told him that there was no chance of survival, but then another doctor called one of his peers in the United States, and they came
Indonesia’s credit bureaus currently have about 92 million credit records, but the founders of SkorLife say many people have trouble accessing their own data. That’s why they built the app, which not only lets people see their credit histories for free, but also gives personalized advice on how to improve data. The Jakarta-based startup announced
If you have a strong traction slide, nothing else about your pitch deck matters Haje Jan Kamps 13 hours It’s a commonly accepted wisdom that you need between 10 and 20 slides to tell the story of your startup. A lot of founders don’t seem to realize that not all slides are the same, however.
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of
What’s better than saving some coin in your wallet? Saving coin AND getting something for free! Book your TC Sessions: Crypto general admission Launch pass today and get a second pass for free! One general admission Launch pass typically costs $199, but our Labor Day sale gets you two Launch passes for the price of one
Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain by market cap, is about to undergo a massive transformation known to the crypto community as “the Merge.” It’s a long-awaited systemwide upgrade that experts say will reduce the blockchain’s energy consumption by about 99% by switching its transaction verification system away from “proof-of-work,” which relies on crypto “miners” using massive
When it comes to touchscreens and in-car entertainment, Aston Martin has not only lagged behind ultra-luxury rivals such as Lamborghini and Bentley, it has trailed lower priced tech-forward models as well. Now, the automaker is preparing to catch up with a modern infotainment system that will be rolled out across its portfolio, starting this spring
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. YC had its biggest news in years this week: Garry Tan will be the new president and CEO of the organization, starting January 2023. Tan co-founded and helped scale Initialized Capital to
When I was an early-stage founder, I bristled at the idea of making a five- or even three-year financial projection of my business. I can promise you one thing: It will be dramatically wrong. But as part of your fundraising, you need to make them anyway, and there are a couple of great reasons for
Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. In recent weeks, several companies tweaked the free tiers of their products, from Slack and Otter.ai to Google Meet and Heroku. This ties back
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. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by
Hello again! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the last week’s worth of TechCrunch’s most read posts. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here. Ready? Let’s just dive right in. most read What to expect from Apple’s iPhone event: Apple events tend to suck all
Jag Lamba Contributor Jag Lamba is the CEO and founder of Certa, a no-code supplier lifecycle management platform. It’s not just a feeling: risk across the geopolitical spectrum has been higher than usual in recent years. For businesses with supply chain operations across the world, these risks are hard to avoid. Issues of resiliency and
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has given lenders until the end of November to implement adequate systems and processes to ensure that new and existing loans comply with its digital loan rules issued last month. The RBI’s move follows several reports highlighting issues of customers facing torture and abuse from agents of digital loan
As the new school year starts, a fresh cohort of students will soon be hard at work finding ways to avoid writing papers and watching lectures they slept through, and just generally finding ways to waste the hours as effectively as possible. Fortunately the Switch is currently an absolute treasure trove of time sinks of
India’s financial crime fighting agency searched the offices of fintech unicorns Paytm and Razorpay as well as Cashfree on Friday as part of an ongoing investigation into fraudulent Chinese loan apps, it said Saturday, the latest in a series of probes in recent months. The Enforcement Directorate said its searches at high profile Indian firms
Ever traveled on a cruise ship? Pre-COVID, most journeys started with a shipwide safety drill where passengers assembled, donned life vests and learned what to do in an emergency. The ocean has an average depth of 2.3 miles, yet these rehearsals were always a calm affair. You’re starting a vacation; what could possibly go wrong?
My phone buzzes as I get a text from a friend who’s a partner at a VC firm. It’s a screenshot of a Venmo notification that just came in. “My 2 cents on why you should invest in my company,” reads the message she received, along with a $0.02 transfer. I tracked down and emailed
The chief executive of autonomous vehicle developer Aurora Innovation presented a swath of cost-cutting and cash-generating options to its board, ranging from a hiring freeze and spinning out assets to a small capital raise, going private and even selling itself to high-profile tech companies Apple and Microsoft. The ideas, all aimed at shoring up its
Truth Social isn’t allowed in Google’s app store yet, but another ostensibly anything-goes social network in the same orbit just made a comeback there. Parler, a social app designed to appeal to pro-Trump social media users turned off of mainstream platforms, has returned to the Google Play Store more than a year after getting the