When Florida-based Chetu hired a telemarketer in the Netherlands, the company demanded the employee turn on his webcam. The employee wasn’t happy with being monitored “for 9 hours per day,” in a program that included screen-sharing and streaming his webcam. When he refused, he was fired, according to public court documents (in Dutch), for what
admin
Automation Anywhere, one of the best-funded RPA providers with over $1 billion capital raised to date, went the debt route this week, securing a $200 million loan from Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Capital and Hercules Capital. Debt raises aren’t necessarily a bad thing — they’re a useful tool, particularly for companies with high annual recurring
In February, I received a letter from Chrysler saying that our 2017 Pacifica Hybrid was subject to a new recall. Several of the minivans had inexplicably caught fire and, given the evidence, the automaker suspected it might have to do with the high-voltage battery pack. The recall notice told us not to recharge the vehicle
Square Off charmed us at CES 2019, when the startup showed off its robotic chess board at our Hardware Battlefield event. Watching the pieces move on their own, courtesy of underlying AI, grabbed the attention of a jaded crowd of showgoers. This morning, it takes the next step in the startup lifecycle, as Bay Area-based
Cloudflare last week announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups that build on its software, Cloudflare Workers. But this isn’t a corporate venture fund and that sum is not company money. Rather, it’s an initiative in which the cloud infrastructure company curates a group of its startup customers and presents them to venture capitalists,
Hello and welcome back to The Exchange’s weekend missive. If you are reading this on TechCrunch and want to get the letter in your inbox, head here. Your regular host Anna Heim is off this week on a much-deserved vacation, so I’m stepping back into my old role as newsletter scribe. It’s good fun to
Google gets into the smartwatch game for real with the $350 Wear OS device Brian Heater @bheater / 3 days 2021 was the Pixel’s year. The Pixel 6 saw Google finally getting its act together and introducing a flagship that could rival the likes of Samsung and Apple. But while the line is getting a
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. I think it took maybe three days after I roasted our rather dry M&A season for the news cycle to prove me wrong. This week we saw Naver acquire Poshmark, Duolingo buy
Hi all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up some of the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. The goal? Even when you’re swamped, a quick skim of WiR on Saturday morning should give you a pretty good understanding of what happened in tech this week. Want
The Pixel 6 represented a rebirth for Google. After several generations of trying — and mostly failing — to distinguish itself as a late-comer to the smartphone game, the device finally had a breakout season. Under a new guard, Google’s longstanding attempts to cut corners were out, and the company had finally delivered a premium
In the early days of a startup, everyone is on the same page. But there’s no way to know how well a founding team will get along by the time a company reaches maturity. Set aside the romantic notion that startup teams consist of visionary mavericks who are building the future in real time; they’re
Eric L. Sophir Contributor Matthew Horton Contributor Matthew Horton is a senior counsel and IP lawyer at law firm Foley & Lardner LLP where he focuses his practice on patent law and IP protections in cybersecurity, AI, machine learning and more. Early-stage companies are innovating new artificial intelligence-based solutions, but they often face questions as
Form Energy closed a $450 million Series E fundraising round yesterday to continue its work turning iron into rust. The round was led by TPG Rise Climate and joined by new investors GIC and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Existing investors ArcelorMittal, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Capricorn Investment Group, Coatue, Energy Impact Partners, The Engine, NGP
We’ve known that the Pixel Tablet has been coming since I/O. It was one of a trio of upcoming hardware devices the company previewed. The other two — Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch — are arriving soon. Those who have been holding out for the company’s next swing at a tablet, on the other hand,
Premiering on October 8, entertainment studio BlackBox TV is releasing a short-form series exclusive to Meta Quest TV and in Meta Horizon Worlds with the Meta Quest 2 headset. The 360° VR experience “Scream Park” takes users on a virtual reality horror rollercoaster ride just in time for spooky season. Meta Quest TV is the
Fintor, a fintech startup making it easier for non-accredited investors to invest in real estate properties, has just launched its mobile app for both iOS and Android. It also just raised a $6.2 million extension funding round from its existing investors, including Public.com, Hustle Fund, 500 Global, VU Ventures, Graphene Ventures and angel investors such
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. Friday! How’s that for brevity in newsletter introductions? Let’s get to it so we can crack open a Liquid Death and let the week sag off into the murky distance of memory
FlyFeed claims it signed more than $10 million worth of contracts and closed a $3 million round of investment to launch its first insect farm in Vietnam, in its push to produce low-cost, high-nutrient protein for human consumption. The company was founded less than a year ago and is targeting the three billion people who
When Russia invaded her home country of Ukraine, U.K.-based tech entrepreneur Irra Ariella Khi, co-founder of Zamna, set up a fundraising page to directly support people inside Ukraine. Khi’s father (aged 70) and godmother (aged 82) are both in Ukraine, as are her stepsister and her children. Khi then temporarily stepped back from her day
What constitutes a big phone in 2022? It’s been a moving target for a number of years now — albeit a target that has been steadily moving in a single direction. It’s tough to determine the exact average display size, but most flagship smartphone screens generally fall somewhere between six and seven inches. In 2010,
It was only five years ago that electronic punk band YACHT entered the recording studio with a daunting task: They would train an AI on 14 years of their music, then synthesize the results into the album “Chain Tripping.” “I’m not interested in being a reactionary,” YACHT member and tech writer Claire L. Evans said
This week on The TechCrunch Podcast we talked with Dom about how conservative VCs are using their dollars to shape the world, and we spoke with Taylor about how the Musk train just keeps on rumbling along. On the topic of billionaires… “A big chunk of the conversation that is missing is just that it’s
It’s a rote story by now that many populations around the world are facing rapid decline. Birth rates in many countries are falling, leading to concerns about graying populations engendering imbalanced economies. That’s true when we consider nation-level populations. It’s also true when we consider the rate at which new unicorns are born, measured by the
To state the (painfully) obvious: The fates of agriculture and climate change are inextricably linked. The weather dictates what grows where and when, but as the Earth warms beneath a wool blanket of excess carbon, agriculture is especially vulnerable in ways you might not expect. Record-setting heat and droughts fry grasses that farmers depend on
U.S. president Joe Biden has signed an executive order attached to reupping a flagship data transfer agreement with the European Union — with the goal of making life easier for businesses that need to export EU user-data to the U.S. for processing. The White House announced the development in a statement today — saying that
Google today announced its new Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro smartphones at a hardware event in Brooklyn. While the company focused a lot on the security, voice and camera features of the phone, it also briefly showed a new health feature in a slide: coughing and snoring detection. On a daily bedtime summary
For the first time, a Netflix movie is getting a one-week theatrical sneak preview event across 600 AMC, Regal and Cinemark theaters in the U.S. The historic deal marks the first time all three major theater chains have agreed to show a big-budget Netflix movie. Viewers will get a chance to watch “Glass Onion: A
Basketball isn’t the only heat you’ll find in Miami, a city rapidly becoming known for its emerging tech development and investment in the hot crypto sector. It’s why we chose it as the destination for our first TC Sessions: Crypto on November 17. We have an outstanding agenda lined up with leading movers and shakers
A Kenya-based venture studio with a focus on tourism, Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV), has raised $1 million pre-seed funding to build the next generation of startups that use technology to modernize the tourism sector. Investors participating in this round include Klister Credit Corp., a Canadian investment firm, The Untours Foundation, and a number of angel
Wildfires have become an ever-increasing threat as houses are built closer together and the growing impacts of climate change wreak havoc on natural landscapes. Entrepreneurs, in response, have started to develop tech meant to minimize the scale and damage of these natural disasters. Convective Capital is a new VC firm looking to back them. Bill