Cruise, the General Motors subsidiary dedicated to commercializing autonomous vehicles, saw a jump in expenses during the second quarter as the company launched its first commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco. Cruise’s expenses hit around $550 million compared to $332 million during the same quarter of last year. Operating losses in the second quarter topped
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Applying for mortgages is often a time-consuming and disorganized process, with reams of manual paperwork required. Based in Jakarta, IDEAL simplifies the process with a platform that lets users compare mortgage products and apply for them from multiple banks at the same time. The startup announced today it has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding
Infobip, a cloud communications startup which – like Twillio – handles things like SMS, email, voice and WhatsApp messenger for customer engagement, has completed its acquisition of VoIP provider Peerless Network. Although the deal was announced last November, TechCrunch can exclusively reveal that it was worth north of $200 million. Last year info big raised
Butlr, an MIT Media Lab spinout developing sensors that use body heat to estimate office occupancy, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round with participation from Carrier Global Corporation (a strategic investor), Tiger Global, Primetime Partners, E14, Unionlabs, Hyperplane and Tectonic Ventures. Co-founder and CEO Honghao Deng said that the
It seems everything is doom and gloom in the U.S. venture market, between startup layoffs and declining venture deal counts to an essentially moribund exit environment. But there are bright spots, one of which being the Southeast region, which is on track for its best year yet. The Southeast region had its best quarter for
There are many companies bringing one-click checkout to the direct-to-consumer marketplace, but few are developing similar tools for the business-to-business marketplace. B2B payment volume is five times the size of business-to-consumer retail payments, yet much of those payments are not being done online. That’s where Balance comes in. The company, co-founded by former PayPal employees
Inflation is up and consumer confidence is down, which is why e-commerce startups that hope to weather the ongoing downturn should expand their product offerings. Does that sound counterintuitive? “The more complementary and additive a product is to your catalog, the larger your cart size and the more likely a customer is to return,” says
The parent company to Pokémon Go, Niantic has been very clear over the years that it wants us to take a “stupid walk for our stupid mental health,” as the meme goes. This week, Pokémon Go is rolling out a “daily adventure incense,” which brings “rare” Pokémon to you, so long as you’re in motion. This
Sono Motors unveiled this week the final production design of the Sion EV, a solar electric vehicle that’s been in the making since the Munich-based startup launched in 2016. It’s been a long and bumpy road for Sono Motors, a journey that involved a couple of crowdfunding campaigns, a near insolvency and a debut on
Datch, a company that develops AI-powered voice assistants for industrial customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Blackhorn Ventures. The proceeds will be used to expand operations, CEO Mark Fosdike said, as well as develop new software support, tools and capabilities. Datch started when Fosdike, who has
Neon, a startup providing developers with a serverless option for Postgres databases, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series A-1 round led by GGV with participation from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Founders Fund and angel investors. In an email interview with TechCrunch, CEO Nikita Shamgunov, who described the tranche as “oversubscribed,” said
Holey Grail Donuts started selling its hand-fried, made-to-order taro donuts on Sunday mornings out of a little red burger trailer in Kauai in 2018. Four years and hundreds of long lines later, the truck is still there, but the company is taking on what co-founder Nile Dreiling calls “a stale $40 billion donut industry” by
Boston Micro Fabrication — BMF among friends — is one of the biggest names in 3D-printing teeny-tiny things. The company just announced a Series C to continue its journey, as it announces it doubled its install base over the past year. “Our business has scaled strongly, and we plan to use the new capital to
Best Buy is opening a new digital-first 5,000 square feet small store in Monroe, North Carolina on July 26. This store will have selected tech products like home theater and audio, computing, headphones, wearables, fitness, cell phones, cameras, smart home, and small appliances that shoppers can experience and purchase. This is a departure from the
Amazon has announced that it’s increasing the prices for its Prime subscription service in Europe, with fees rising by as much as 43% in some markets. The announcement comes some six months after the ecommerce giant announced a similar price increase in the U.S., where the annual price jumped 17% from $119 to $139. The
Cordial, a cross-channel marketing and data management platform, today announced that it closed a $50 million Series C funding round led by NewSpring, with participation from new investor ABS Capital. Jeremy Swift, Cordial’s CEO and co-founder, said that the fresh capital will be used to expand the company’s global footprint, launch new platform features and
Bennett Carroccio Contributor Bennett Carroccio is the co-founder and CEO of Canal, the connected commerce platform transforming the way products are sold online. The biggest startups in the world are laying employees off. The yield curve has become inverted, inflation is at 8.6%, and economic pessimism is the highest it’s been since 2009. For e-commerce
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. Sitting as we are on the precipice of a huge data dump, we had lots to chat through!
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 new week! Christine went on a well-deserved break, so you’ll have to deal with a double dose of my awful puns and worse headline shenanigans for a bit. Oh! And we
Jaka Robotics, a Chinese startup that makes collaborative robots, has just pulled in a hefty Series D funding round of over $150 million from a lineup of heavyweight investors to help it expand globally. The round is led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, TrueLight Capital, Softbank Vision Fund II, and Prosperity7 Ventures, a growth
Tuned, Meta’s social app for couples, is winding down a little over two years after it launched. Users, including this reporter, began receiving a notification about the impending shutdown last week, advising them to download their data before September 19 when the app will cease to work. Tuned was a project under Meta’s New Product
Chartbeat, a website that tells publishers about their readers, is getting the private equity treatment. Launched out of Betaworks in 2009, the service offered real-time analytics back when Google Analytics made you wait 24 hours to see who was clicking around your site. Eons later, private equity firm Cuadrilla Capital has swooped in to buy
Tons of capital has been raised across the crypto industry in recent months, but there has been a noticeable pause in deployment. That might change in the coming months. As it’s taken longer to close crypto VC deals, valuations across the industry have dropped, according to David Nage, venture capital portfolio manager at Arca. Some
This wasn’t a story you were expecting to read today, nor was it one I was expecting to write. Heck, judging from their interviews on the subject, it’s probably fair to say the team of mechanical engineers at Rice University weren’t expecting for their work to take them down this path, either. And yet, here
Traditionally, U.S. private market investors who adopted environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) frameworks — the very few thus far — did so to evaluate a potential company or investment on how it approached areas like sustainability or diversity. But now, in the post-Roe era, as controversial conservative legislation sweeps the nation, some VC investors
When Charles Onu’ cousin was both born with birth asphyxia and later developed a hearing condition, the seed for Ubenwa, an audio biometric company geared at identifying neurological disorders in infants, was also planted. Onu, CEO and co-founder, said he hopes Ubenwa will change the way physicians provide care to infants. “We’re trying to bring
Startups that solve the supply-chain and operational challenges of players in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry–by helping buyers access products from sellers on a single platform–keep attracting venture capital from investors. Cartona, one of the major players digitizing the traditional trade market, including mom-and-pop stores, FMCG producers, wholesalers, and distributors in Egypt, has raised
Seedstars’ portfolio founders Since its launch nine years ago, Seedstars has invested in 81 companies in over 30 emerging countries. Now it’s set a goal of investing in 100 more startups with the launch of its second emerging market seed-stage fund, called Seedstars International Ventures II (SIV), with a first close of $20 million. The
There are plenty of autonomous driving vehicles testing on the roads of Shenzhen today: Pony.ai, Baidu, DeepRoute, AutoX, you name it. But these vehicles are not really the unmanned vehicles tech upstarts envision for the future, as they have been required to operate with a safety driver behind the wheel. A set of provisions introduced
Netflix’s app on iOS now has a signup button that will redirect you to its site so you can subscribe to one of its plans with the company paying no App Store fees. This change comes after Apple said in March that “reader” apps — ones that provide digital content like books and videos —