French startup Homa has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. Quadrille Capital and Headline are leading the round. Homa partners with indie mobile game studios so that their games are perfectly optimized to become a hit game on the App Store and Google Play. In other words, Homa builds tools that help third-party
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Tiger Global’s latest investment in India is Vecmocon, a startup building solutions to bring safety and reliability alongside intelligence and health monitoring to light electric vehicles (EVs), addressing concerns that are curtailing the sales of electric scooters in the South Asian market. Unlike traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles that have existed for more than
Spherics, a UK-based carbon accounting platform for SMEs to understand and reduce their environmental impact, has been acquired by accounting giant Sage. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but it’s understood Spherics had raised £1.25m in equity financing from angel investors and £300,000 in grants. Spherics was a smaller startup playing in a similar
Mark Zuckerberg will make his impassioned pleas that the metaverse is a real thing and a valid Next Big Business for Meta (neé The Facebook) on Tuesday. The annual Meta Connect developer conference kicks off with a keynote starting at 10 AM PDT / 1 PM EDT, which is followed immediately by a more technical
Tech giants and news organizations sparring over news reporting isn’t new. Companies often complain to journalists about getting nuances wrong and usually air their dismay “off the record.” Journalists usually agree to include the rebuttals provided the companies can offer the same assertions on-record. The companies don’t follow through and the conversation typically ends there
Sep.30 — Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw discusses the viral South Korean show “Squid Game” and its mass appeal in our post-pandemic world. He speaks to Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Neobanks are wagers that modern, digitally native services can supplant the traditional banking landscape. Founders flocked to the idea, investors wrote myriad checks, and despite how far along we are in the neobanking boom, startups are still being formed today to attack the problem space. Lately, we’ve seen neobanks focused on targeted niches, often segmented
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Stellantis on Tuesday launched a plan for its business unit dedicated to circular economics, which, to cut through the jargon, is a segment of the company dedicated to sustainability and recycling. The parent company to brands like Jeep, Dodge, Maserati and Peugeot estimates that the new unit will bring in more than €2 billion in
Meta keeps saying VR is the future, but everything it shows us is an inferior rehash of the things we already have. Its event today was, between assurances that everything is great in the Metaverse, a collection of tacit admissions that the best they can hope to do is ape a reality we are all
At Meta Connect 2022, the company’s annual developer conference for its VR efforts and Oculus hardware platform, the company announced a lot of stuff — but what it communicated more effectively than anything else was just how incredibly thirsty — one might even say desperate — Mark Zuckerberg is for his metaverse bet to pay
Foxglove, a startup building an infrastructure stack for robotics, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Eclipse with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors including Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. The proceeds bring Foxglove’s total raised to $18.7 million, which CEO Adrian Macneil says is being put
Elenas estimates that 11 million women in Latin America sell consumer items via catalogs and door-to-door sales methods. It is digitizing that process so they can more easily sell from home. Founder and CEO Zach Oschin started the Colombia-based social commerce company in 2018 (and participated in our Latin American Startup Battlefield that year) to
Shortly after the COVID pandemic hit, inspiration struck Ryan Abernathey and Joe Hamman. The pair had been watching the “mass mobilization” of the epidemiology research community, Abernathey said. “Joe and I were both thinking at the time, ‘We wanted to be part of something with that level of intensity and urgency around climate change.’” Abernathey
Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft startup Joby Aviation is partnering with Delta Airlines to deliver “home-to-airport” transportation services to Delta customers starting in New York and Los Angeles — although it might be more accurate to call it a “neighborhood-to-airport” service, one that will rely on a network of local vertiports to fly
It’s been barely a few weeks since Google announced that it is shutting down its cloud gaming service Stadia next year. And now, the company has a new cloud gaming announcement: it is launching Chromebooks tuned for cloud gaming made by different manufacturers. The search giant has also partnered with cloud gaming services like Nvidia
Companies like Instagram are getting heavily fined (and dragged through the publicity coals) over how they have mishandled children’s privacy on their platforms. But if a recent report from Ofcom is accurate, maybe they are getting off lightly. The U.K. media watchdog is publishing research today that found that one-third of all children between the
Workmate, a Singapore-based on-demand staffing platform, has been acquired by Persol Asia Pacific, one of the region’s largest HR service providers. Workmate focuses on frontline and essential workers, and the acquisition will allow it to expand its HR solutions throughout the Asia Pacific. Workmate currently operates in Thailand and Indonesia and is expanding operations into
Founded 10 years ago, Konvy is now Thailand’s top beauty e-commerce platform. It plans to accelerate its omnichannel and international distribution with a new Series A of $10 million from Insignia Ventures Partners. Konvy was launched in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur QingGui Huang, who previously managed fashion e-commerce platforms in China. It now works with
While studying at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford, a group of graduates noticed how difficult it was to get data and information on Africa’s largest economy and their home country, Nigeria. Each had different yet complementary skills — Michael Famoroti, an economist; Bode Ogunlana, a software engineer; Abdul Abdulrahim, a
Jul.17 — Elon Musk has had a lot to show off over the past 25 years, including an early online bank, solar roof tiles, a tunnel-digging machine, an electric car, a reusable rocket, and even the occasional electric car riding a rocket. He may have just topped them all with the help of a tubby brown-and-white
We’re on the home stretch, startup fans. TechCrunch Disrupt kicks off in less than 10 days and runs from October 18–20. This message goes out to all the last-minute decision-makers. It’s the final week you can save serious cheddar on a Disrupt pass. It’s go time. Buy your pass before October 14 at 11:59 p.m.
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. Beep boop, here we go again with another exciting week in tech. Next week is Disrupt, so the TechCrunch Slack watercooler is full of sartorial advice, much to our surprise and confusion.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over whether the world will get its act together enough to prevent catastrophic warming. There’s certainly a case to be made there — we’ve spent the last several decades kicking the can down the road at every opportunity. Well, here we are again, with the can again before us
AgriWebb is on a mission to help livestock producers feed the world efficiently, profitably and sustainably by providing its comprehensive, ground-truth database for beef production worldwide. The Australian startup, which builds a livestock management platform for ranchers and farmers, wants to digitize farm records and the meat production process from the cow to the consumer
YouTube is making it easier for creators to direct viewers to their channels. The company today announced “handles,” a new way for creators to identify their channel with an @username format in order to interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. These handles will be made
An increasing percentage of the code that companies use to develop software is open source. In a 2018 survey by Tidelift, a software supply chain management platform, 92% of professional software developers said that their apps contained open source libraries. While that’s a positive trend — open source confers a wealth of benefits, not least
Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor Why growth activation matters To optimize for growth, study your down-funnel metrics Who knew that “growth hacking,” a term coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis,
Clerkenwell Health, a psychedelic-specialist clinical research organisation, has raised £2.1m in seed funding, bringing the total to date up to £2.5m, which will be used to get the London startup-based fully operational. Investors include Lionheart Ventures, Convergence Partners, and Exceptional Ventures, which was co-founded by Paolo Pio (former MD Europe at Joyance Partners) and Matt
Samsung has confirmed the first third-party smart TV makers to ship with its Tizen operating system (OS), with several manufacturers preparing to launch Tizen-powered TVs this year across Europe and Australasia. Tizen, for the uninitiated, is a Linux-based OS hosted by the Linux Foundation for more than a decade, though Samsung has been the primary