“Blade Runner” is getting its own limited series on Prime Video. Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch that the streaming service announced today it greenlit “Blade Runner 2099,” the first time the sci-fi franchise is getting a live-action TV show. Last year, Adult Swim made an anime series called “Blade Runner: Black Lotus.” The Hollywood Reporter initially
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Last month, Varo Bank celebrated the two-year anniversary of obtaining its national bank charter. The move made Varo the first-ever all-digital nationally chartered U.S. consumer bank. The startup launched its banking services aimed at younger consumers comfortable doing all their banking online in 2017. It has raised nearly $1 billion since its 2015 inception and
In a town hall with some members of their community, Launch House addressed the harassment and assault allegations surfaced by a Vox Investigation earlier this week. The startup, backed by A16z and Flybridge as well as a bevy of top investors, said that an independent investigation is underway. “We’ll let the investigation speak for itself,
The voluntary carbon market remains a Wild West. There are few standards, a myriad of approaches, while buyers and sellers are crying out for clarity. And there are lots of different approaches. In tokenization there are startups like Single.Earth and Flow Carbon. In marketplaces there is CarbonXchange, Aircarbon. In afforestation there is Land Life Company
SpaceX and T-Mobile may have hogged the headlines with their flashy pre-announcement about Starlink connectivity last month, and Apple last week, but Lynk has been putting in the work and may very well steal their lunch with a satellite-to-phone connection that already works — with any device out there. In fact, they just got FCC
Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp is stepping into the film business. Earlier this week, WhatsApp announced its first original short film “Naija Odyssey,” which tells the story of NBA player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was born in Athens, Greece to Nigerian parents. “Naija Odyssey” will premiere on Prime Video on September 21, 2022. The short film signifies
Will Ross and William Steenbergen were AI researchers at Stanford working on climate and atmospheric modeling and reinforcement learning, respectively, when they began to collaborate on wildfire modeling and hurricane modeling initiatives for the insurance industry. They were surprised to learn how big of a difference there was between what the data told insurers to
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann jumped on the mic, with Theresa on backup, to talk through the biggest headlines. We started with a look at the Figma-Adobe deal, worth some $20 billion. TechCrunch’s news coverage is here,
NeoCarbon, a Berlin-based climate tech startup that’s taking a retrofitting approach to scaling direct air capture (DAC) devices for uptake of CO2 emissions has nabbed pre-seed funding. Its focus is on developing DAC kits that can be installed (retrofitted) inside working cooling towers in the industrial sector — thereby, its pitch runs, slashing the cost
Autonomous and electric truck maker Einride is rolling into Germany, representing its first new market in Europe outside its native Sweden. Founded out of Stockholm in 2016, Einride has raised some $150 million in funding to commercialize a cab-less autonomous cargo truck, one that can be controlled remotely if required by human operators. It’s a
It may surprise the casual reader to learn that I don’t run a trillion-dollar multinational corporation. Like any decent tech writer, however, I’m more than happy to offer all my opinions on the matter in a very public forum. Having most closely followed hardware makers over the years, I’m often struck by one specific subject
Rephrase.ai, a self-described synthetic media production platform, today announced that it raised $10.6 million in a Series A round led by Red Ventures with participation from Silver Lake and 8VC. CEO Ashray Malhotra says that the plan is to put the new cash toward expanding headcount with a particular focus on Rephrase’s engineering, data science,
You know what’s a huge pain where the =sum()don’t shine? Financial reporting, planning and analysis. I often go on and on (and on and on) about startups not getting their financials and operating plans right in their startup pitch decks, so … not gonna lie, I picked Austrian startup Helu.io, which completed a €9.8 million
Stop trying to make Polywork happen. It’s already happening. You may even be polyworking as you read this. Polywork is a venture-backed startup that is building a professional network to help people express their multihyphenated work lives. In other words, if you’re a reporter, who also podcasts, wants to write a book and would love
EV charging company Monta has been building out EV charging solutions to make it easier to charge electric vehicles everywhere. It started in Europe, but it just raised an additional $30 million from Energize Ventures, at a $155 million valuation, to expand into the U.S. market. The company tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks to
HICX, a supplier experience management platform designed to give companies visibility into their supply chain, has raised $30 million in a round of funding led by U.S. private equity firm Wavecrest Growth Partners and Canada’s Espresso Capital. The funding constituted a mixture of $22 million equity and $8 million in debt. Founded in 2004, London-based HICX
Unagi is perhaps best known for its Model One and its (now cancelled) Model Eleven scooter. Today, the company announced it has a new micromobility transportation tool in the works, the Voyager. It packs significantly more range, power, acceleration and smart mobile app features while keeping the lightweight and portable design of its predecessor. The
This year marks the beginning of Amazon’s multibillion dollar 11-year deal with the National Football League, making Prime Video the first streamer to have exclusive rights to an NFL package. Previously, Amazon shared the games with Fox and the NFL Network. Tonight, September 15, 2022, is Prime Video’s first exclusive “Thursday Night Football” game, and
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345 backers dug into their pockets to the tune of more than $700,000, but the scooter they backed – the Model Eleven – will never see the light of day. The company is offering its backers three options to make up for it, including a full refund, or a different model electric scooter. Hardware can
In a shot across the bow to the buy now, pay later (BNPL) industry, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today issued a report suggesting that companies like Klarna and Afterpay, which allow customers to pay for products and services in installments, must be subjected to stricter oversight. The CFPB — in a step
The sneaker world has a dirty secret — the carbon footprint of just about every shoe out there weighs more than the shoe itself. Then there’s the extensive use of plastics and polyesters, foam and rubber, nearly all of which is derived from fossil fuels. Those clean kicks might not be so clean after all.
U.K.-based fintech Lightyear is extending its stock-trading offering to include a wide selection of U.K. and European stocks, as well as exchange traded funds (ETF). The news comes just a couple of months after Lightyear launched outside the U.K. for the first time, arriving in 19 European markets, with the support of $25 million in
Like a number of attendees, I was taken with ClicBot when I first saw it a few CESes ago. We’re all up to our ears in “educational” robotics kits. STEM learning is important, of course, but the last several years have seen a veritable explosion in these sorts of toys, and your mileage is going
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 Thursday! Has everyone recovered from Zoom going down this morning? Don’t worry, Zoom is back up, but if anything, we hope it helped you have a quieter day…for a while at
Fintech startup Ratio secured $411 million in equity and debt funding to continue developing what it calls “a new flavor” of buy now, pay later that combines payments, predictive pricing, financing and a quote-to-cash process. Co-founder and CEO Ashish Srimal founded Ratio in 2021 with CTO Mason Blake, and they have been heads down ever
Welcome back to Found, the podcast that brings you the stories behind the startups. We talk to a lot of health tech founders on this show because there are countless ways the healthcare system, particularly in the U.S., needs to be disrupted. This week, we talked to Kelsey Mellard, who founded Sitka with the goal
The burgeoning food tech revolution continues apace with news that French startup Standing Ovation has raised €12 million ($12 million) in a series A round of funding to develop an animal-free casein for use in cheese. Casein, for the uninitiated, is a protein found in dairy products, and which constitutes around 80% of cow milk —
European Union lawmakers have proposed a new set of product rules to apply to smart devices that’s intended to compel makers of Internet-connected hardware — such as ‘smart’ washing machines or connected toys — to pay fulsome attention to device security. The proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act will introduce mandatory cybersecurity requirements for products that
Samsung announced Thursday it will invest more than $5 billion (7 trillion KRW) in its carbon-neutral projects and environmental technologies through 2030, aiming to make its global operations and products net zero carbon emission by 2050 in an effort to tackle the climate crisis. The company says the strategy includes reducing emissions from the production