An antitrust win for Amazon and Apple in Italy where an appeals court has cancelled a multimillion dollar penalty the pair were hit with last year for alleged collusion following an investigation into the reselling of Apple and (Apple-owned) Beats kit on Amazon’s Italian e-commerce marketplace. The original €203M (total) penalty had already been reduced
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Entertainment platform Fandom announced today its acquisition of seven entertainment and gaming brands from media company Red Ventures, including online publications Comic Vine, Cord Cutters News, GameFAQs, GameSpot, Giant Bomb, Metacritic, and TV Guide. While the financials of the deal were not disclosed in the official announcement, Fandom told TechCrunch that the deal cost somewhere
Prosus Ventures has called off the $4.7 billion acquisition of BillDesk it announced last year, the European technology giant’s largest acquisition, saying “certain conditions precedent” were unfulfilled in a surprising move a month after the proposed acquisition received approval from the local antitrust watchdog. “Certain conditions precedent were not fulfilled by the 30 September 2022
New York-based insurance giant Lemonade is officially launching in the U.K., its fourth market in Europe and fifth overall, with a little help from one of the oldest and largest insurance providers in the U.K. Lemonade, for the uninitiated, emerged into the trillion-dollar insurance space back in 2015, with a new take on how consumers
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 the previous
It takes a veritable army to make TechCrunch Disrupt — which takes place October 18–20 in San Francisco — the well-oiled experience that savvy startuppers have come to know and love. And we couldn’t do it nearly as well without our incredible volunteers. If you’re looking for a no-budget way to experience Disrupt up close
For decades, the answer to when fusion power would arrive was like the punchline to an oft-repeated joke — it was always 10 or 20 years away. Now, it might actually be on the cusp of commercialization. No, really. If that refrain sounds all too familiar, it’s because, well, something like that was written 10
As companies aim to cut costs and reel in spending amid uncertain macroeconomic conditions, Form Bio thinks it is actually the perfect time to launch its platform. The software company was developed at Colossal Biosciences — known for its goal to bring extinct critters like the wooly mammoth back to life — and is now
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. More companies are adopting product-led growth (PLG), in which the product itself does most of the selling, and usage-based pricing (UBP) — meaning users
Venture capital has been on a roller coaster this year. It came into 2022 riding the wave of the strongest year for venture deployment on record, just before the stock market plummeted and dragged venture down with it. As the third quarter comes to a close, things have started to get really interesting — again.
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. A multibillion dollar acquisition, IPO projections and some good ol’ VC and billionaire drama? It would be unfair to say that this week in tech and startups felt like 2021’s boom cycle; especially
So-called “stakeholder capitalism” has not had the most illustrious of histories. Yes, there have been “Walmart Associates” who were able to own stock in the company, or “John Lewis Associates” (in the U.K.), but it’s hardly made the average person well off. At least they got something? In tech startups, however, tech founders are helped
There’s been a standing question surrounding how seriously we should ultimately take Astro. The product was launched exactly one year ago, in limited quantities as a Day One offering for $999 a pop. My interaction with the robot was (at the time) limited to a few pre-launch demos. I came away from the experience thinking
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.
Jason Schoettler Contributor Raising a Series B for any startup is challenging right now, with many VCs pulling back on investments — funding for Series B rounds across all sectors fell 55% in August compared to a year earlier, for example. But raising a Series B for a hardware startup can be even tougher. It
Juno, a startup that provides checking accounts to crypto enthusiasts and allows them to take their paychecks in digital tokens, has raised a new funding round as it expands its offerings to include a tokenized loyalty program. The one-and-a-half-year old startup has amassed over 75,000 customers in the U.S. who take their salaries (some in
Aiven, which provides fully managed and hosted services for major open source projects including Kafka, Cassandra and Grafana, has announced its first-ever acquisition — the Finnish company has snapped up Kafkawize, a self-service open source data governance tool for Apache Kafka. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition comes amid a renewed focus
Amazon released Wednesday the second-generation version of Echo Auto, a smaller and slicker device aimed to broaden the e-commerce giant’s reach by bringing its Alexa voice assistant into more vehicles. Echo Auto, which first came to market in 2018, connects to a vehicle’s infotainment system to bring the Alexa assistant into the vehicle. A driver
Movie and TV reviews site Rotten Tomatoes is releasing a card game in early 2023 called “Rotten Tomatoes: The Card Game,” a fast-paced party game that challenges cinephiles by making them guess what rating a movie has — a.k.a the Tomatometer score, which reflects the percentage of positive professional critic reviews for a movie. This
India’s market regulator has tightened disclosure norms for firms looking to file for an initial public offering after lackluster performance of more than half a dozen tech startups in the past year and a half. Firms looking to raise funds from public offers will now be required by law to disclose their key performance indicators
Everyone knows membership has its privileges. And that adage holds true at TechCrunch Disrupt, which takes place on October 18–20 in San Francisco. How so? Disrupt attendees who hold one- or two-year subscriptions to TC+ receive exclusive access to the TC+ Lounge at the show. Let’s back up a moment. If you’re not familiar with
Meet Reflect, a new analytics tool that has been specifically designed for HR teams. While many teams now rely on sophisticated data visualization and business planning tools, HR teams can’t easily measure different metrics and see how they evolve over time. And yet, human resources have become a key component for tech startups and innovative
Amazon is launching two new designs for its Echo Dot Kids devices, the company announced at its virtual event today. The Echo Dot Kids devices now come in new Owl and Dragon designs. The two new designs join Amazon’s current Echo Dot Kids devices: the Tiger and the Panda. The new designs will be available
When ByteDance bought the Chinese VR headset maker Pico a year ago, the message it sent was clear: it was betting that the immersive device would be where future generations spend most of their time consuming digital content. It’s a marriage reminiscent of Meta’s acquisition of Oculus back in 2014, except the world is now
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Embedded insurance — selling coverage at the same time as another product or service — is on the rise. According to data platform Dealroom, it accounts for a growing share of all policies sold, and startups in this space raised nearly $800 million in 2021 alone. Having recently polled investors on all things insurtech, we
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! We don’t know about you, but we are both ready for some R&R after ploughing through a wall of deep-cringe texts from the Musk/Twitter trial. We hope you get some,
HSBC Asset Management, the investment arm of Britain’s HSBC Group, has led a seed round of $4 million in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup Bizbaz, the two said Friday. Founded in June 2019, Bizbaz offers its proprietary customer intelligence and risk management solutions to banks, insurance companies and fintech startups. The startup has
You already know whether you’re an Amazon Echo type person. If so, you’re probably looking at one right now, thinking “should I upgrade that thing or is it pointless?” Probably the latter — unless you also have Amazon’s Eero mesh Wi-Fi product, in which case: it’s probably still pointless, unless it’s pretty old. In which
The digital ads market is robust, with Statista predicting that worldwide spend will reach nearly $900 billion by 2026. But fake and fraudulent ad traffic remains a major problem in the space. Global losses from ad fraud totaled $35 billion in 2020 alone. And beyond the wasted spend, invalid traffic can inflate metrics, leading brands