According to Atomico’s new State of European Tech 2022 report, France has taken the UK’s title as the third largest listed tech nation, with Britain moving down to fourth. Nothing to do with Brexit, of course… Meanwhile, Sista, the Paris-based organisation which campaigns for more finds for female founders recently closed €30m of an intended
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Uolo, an Indian edtech platform that works with private K-12 schools to offer online learning programs to middle and low-income families, has raised $22.5 million in a funding round led by UAE-headquartered VC fund Winter Capital. The vast majority of edtech startups operate in a business-to-consumer model and spend on ads to reach the parents
If you thought that the recent venture capital market was tough, let me tell you about 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. With the first week of December under our belts, we’re not too far away from the end of the year. That means that 2022’s venture capital story has largely been written. It’s not
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. Hello, and welcome to Hump Day! If you haven’t gotten your fill yet of tech egos, you’ll want to tune into today’s Equity podcast, where Natasha M and Alex talk about how
To help electric planes take off, German battery company Customcells says it landed about $63 million (€60 million) in Series A funding from Porsche and several climate-tech investors. World Fund, a one-year-old venture firm that backs European climate startups, led the deal. Abacon Capital and Vsquared Ventures also chipped in. Customcells develops and recycles high-performance
Startups across Europe are on track to raise $85 billion in funding this year — a drop of $15 billion on 2021 when funding passed $100 billion, according to a new report published today. The figures come from London VC firm Atomico’s annual State of European Tech, which has become a bellwether for the tech
Winamp version 5.9.1 is here, rejoice! The venerable — nay, aged — but reliable media player has been receiving sporadic updates over the last couple decades, but little truly new functionality has appeared (and that’s just fine by us users). But this new version brings an unexpected and thankfully optional feature: NFT playback. No, this
French startup Pickme has raised a $3.7 million (€3.5 million) funding round to build a new network of pick-up and drop-off points for e-commerce retailers and logistics companies. With Pickme, a customer can order something and let their neighbor receive the package directly. It’s something that many people already do but with a more formal
Setpoint, a startup that has built software to help other companies close loan transactions faster, has raised $43 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The raise comes just six months after Austin, Texas-based Setpoint closed a $5.5 million seed round and $150 million in securitization. Serial entrepreneurs Ben Rubenstein, Stuart
Electric leisure boat startup Navier has managed to bring its concept hydrofoiling watercraft into reality, and has opened pre-orders — if you happen to have a few hundred grand laying around. It may not be affordable, but it’s not like the other 30-foot boats you can order are a bargain either. At least this one
More bad news for Meta in Europe: The tech giant has lost an attempt to annul a binding decision on its messaging app, WhatsApp, taken by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) last summer — under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which factored into a final decision (and hefty fine) issued by
I like the internet. There, I said it. I spend my entire day writing about the internet, and then in my leisure time, I read books about how the internet shapes our lives. I might have a work-life balance problem, but I can’t help it. I mean, music journalists still listen to music, right? Chefs
Former FDIC Chair and Senior Fellow at the Center for Financial Stability Sheila Bair joins Bloomberg TV to discuss the growing need to regulate crypto.
When a ship goes into a commercial port, there are lots of port call-related costs. These are called things like ‘disbursements’ and ‘port call expenses’. They can include, port dues, towage and pilotage fees, which, added together can represent are large swathe of operating costs, after fuel, for a ship operator. Most of the time,
Most M&A deals involve a lot of activity from the buyer to the financiers and a myriad interested parties. The typical way of describing this is to write dense text in a contract explaining the relationships, an approach that quickly becomes difficult to follow, even for the most experienced legal minds. StructureFlow’s founder and CEO,
It’s all good and well to sell a carbon credit, but if you chop down the tree representing that credit as soon as the money hits the bank account, it’s not exactly a win for the planet. Gaia AI is building a tool that can be used for that, and other aspects of forest management,
Einride today announced a $500 million tranche of financing as it looks to expand its autonomous and electric trucks into new markets globally. The cash injection constitutes an equity-based $200 million Series C portion from backers including Northzone, EQT Ventures, Temasek, Swedish pension fund AMF, Polar Structure, and Norrsken VC. Additionally, the Swedish company said
In 2018, appliance conglomerate Bosch created a startup, Security and Safety Things (or “SAST” for short), whose stated mission was to develop a platform to help developers create software for AI-equipped cameras. SAST was to host a moderated, vetted “app store” for internet-connected cameras that would allow developers to build software on an open standard
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. Why, hello there, and welcome to your Tuesday Daily Crunch. I’ll be your host this week while Haje works from an undisclosed location where day is night and night is day. If
American Battery Factory’s big plan to build a bunch of, erm, American battery factories got a jolt Tuesday when Tucson, Arizona, gave the company the go-ahead to locate its first plant near the city’s airport. Over the course of a decade, ABF says it will pump around $1.2 billion into the facility, claiming it will be
Fintech was hot in 2021, but looking back on it … maybe too hot? The sector exploded last year, seeing record investment — $132 billion globally, according to CB Insights — with many startups reaching lofty valuations, including Stripe at $95 billion, Klarna at $45 billion and Plaid at $13 billion. While these companies have
Ready for a holiday sing-along? Apple today announced it’s launching a new Apple Music feature that will turn tens of millions of its top songs into karaoke tracks of sorts, enabled by a tap of a button. With Apple Sing, as the new addition is called, users will be able to tap on a slider
It would be nice to say that we’ll miss SPACs. But as blank-check companies fade from our view, we have to say we really won’t. Many companies that went public via a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, have seen their valuations implode post-combination. The resulting public-market mess meant that regular investors, not merely the
If you ask three different people whether we’re in a recession, you could easily get three different answers. As often as the “R” word is bandied about in tech, a survey of 450 early-stage founders found that only 12% plan to hire fewer workers and 6% have laid people off. “The data is proving that
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week the show kicks off a new season and welcomes a new co-host. In this episode, Darrell is joined by Becca Szkutak to chat with Valentina Milanova, the founder of Daye, a gynecological health company creating CBD infused tampons. Valentina talks about
Today, Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon announced that HBO Max is back on Prime Video Channels in the United States after it left as an Amazon offering in 2021. Prime subscribers can sign up for HBO Max for $14.99 per month via the Prime Video app or at amazon.com/channels/hbomax. The channel can be canceled at any
Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow recaps the latest news from the global world of venture capital, with a focus on the acquisition of Asian crypto exchange Zipmex, Light Street Capital laying off staff, and Anduril raising new funds.
The growing demand for AI, particularly generative AI (i.e., AI that generates images, text and more), is supercharging the AI inferencing chip market. Inferencing chips accelerate the AI inferencing process, which is where AI systems generate outputs (e.g., text, images, audio) based on what they learned while “training” on a specific set of data. AI
Rezonate, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based startup that offers an agent-less cloud identity protection platform that aims to help DevOps teams minimize attackers’ opportunities to breach cloud identity and access, is coming out of stealth today and announcing an $8.7 million seed funding round, led by State of Mind Ventures and Flybridge, with participation from
There’s a prevailing logic (or you might say hope) in tech that says there is no better time to invent and invest than when the market appears to be in a bad place. With companies like Google and Apple born out of fallow periods, that way of thinking may be understandable — and it is