Facebook parent Meta’s been putting up a strong fight appealing the UK antitrust decision investigating and ultimately ordering Meta to sell Giphy, the GIF marketplace that it acquired back in May 2020 for around $315 million; and now it has gotten a small stay of execution: the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal has sent the case
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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. Presumably you’ve been in the nightclubs (or at least your living room with the music turned to 11) doing the Robot and other amazing dance moves all weekend. Continue the 🤖 fun
HireArt, which TechCrunch previously described as a “resume-killing” jobs marketplace, today announced that it raised $26.25 million in a Series B financing round led by Three Fish Capital with participation from over a “half dozen” angel investors. CEO Nick Sedlet said that the cash will be put toward product development and more than doubling HireArt’s
Robotic learning has quickly become of automation’s most vibrant categories — and understandably so. Programming a robot has traditionally required a lot of technical know-how, but what if there was a simpler way for non-programmers/roboticists to teach these systems to do what we want? Imitation and reinforcement learning are two of the most popular methods
Gbike, a South Korea-based micromobility Gcooter operator, is acquiring Hyundai Motor’s shared micromobility sharing platform ZET as it wants to increase its market share and create technological synergies via ZET’s fleet management system. Gbike CEO Walter Yoon told TechCrunch that the deal, which is its first acquisition, will be completed in early August. The financial terms of
Much has been made of how European countries are, on the one hand, supporting Ukraine in its fight against the heinous and illegal invasion by Russia but at the same time remaining heavily dependent on Russian energy sources. Many countries in the EU — currently experiencing a heatwave — have scrambled to switch to alternatives,
Matt Cohen Contributor Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures, was the founding investor of Turnstyle Solutions, which was acquired by Yelp in 2017. More posts by this contributor VCs and university endowments should partner to make venture more diverse Founders must learn how to build and maintain circles of trust with investors
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. Today was a fun day in that we didn’t start off with just bad news — what a
Denmark is effectively banning Google’s services in schools, after officials in the municipality of Helsingør were last year ordered to carry out a risk assessment around the processing of personal data by Google. In a verdict published last week, Denmark’s data protection agency, Datatilsynet, revealed that data processing involving students using Google’s cloud-based Workspace software
On August 23, the price of ESPN+ will jump from $6.99 to $9.99 per month, and the annual plan is going up from $69.99 to $99.99. The steep 43% increase is the second subscription price hike in a little more than a year. The company confirmed the news to TechCrunch and said that subscribers will
Household cleaning chemicals in the form of a tablet that can be dissolved in water appear to have given rise to a number of startups. As well as Munich-based startup everdrop, there is also Atmo Home out of Berlin, as well as Grove Collaborative, Blueland, Smol, Spruce, Ocean Saver… the list goes on. Few, however,
Bad news about smartphone shipments has become the norm, rather than the exception, in recent years. The trend pre-dates the pandemic, but has only accelerated during the pandemic, thanks to various economic and supply chain impacts. Even so, a high single-digit drop warrants examination and some difficult questions around the industry’s health. New figures out
Complicated supply chains mean that consumers in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Indonesian cities often end up paying more for goods than their peers in large cities, like Jakarta. KitaBeli is on a mission to change that, with its own distribution network and a direct-to-consumer social commerce app. Today the startup announced that it has
India’s central bank wants to ban cryptocurrencies, the government told the parliament on Monday, raising more uncertainty about the future of the nascent virtual digital asset in the world’s second largest internet market. Nirmala Sitharaman, the minister of finance in India, said Monday that the Reserve Bank of India has expressed concerns about the “destabilising
In late June, Modsy, on online interior design services startup, abruptly ceased offering design services, laid off its designers, and left customers with unfinished renovations and project orders in process. The company returned some service order charges and promised to refund furniture deliveries to those who completed a form. But more than two weeks later,
As NFTs work to retain mainstream attention, one founder predicts the digital asset sector will pivot in a new direction. “I think NFT collections will evolve as media companies [into something] like Disney,” Alex Salnikov, co-founder and head of product at NFT marketplace Rarible, said to TechCrunch. In recent months, major “blue-chip” NFT projects like Bored
Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we looked at web3 without web2’s winners. This week, we’re looking at a crossover episode for meme investing. You can get this in your inbox every Thursday afternoon by subscribing on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. power to the pumpers A weekly dispatch from the desk of TechCrunch crypto editor
Dan Dolev, senior fintech analyst at Mizuho Securities, discusses why he cut his price target for Coinbase Global Inc. to $220 from $300 on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
If solving the problems of autonomous driving were a question of money, it’d have been solved long before now. That’s the primary argument of Don Burnette, co-founder and CEO of autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics, which has expanded its business and hit milestones with a fraction of the funds that bigger players like Waymo have.
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
You’d be hard pressed to find a game that doesn’t include some form of microtransactions these days, especially in mobile games. It just makes sense for gaming companies — an immensely lucrative source of revenue, the microtransactions market was worth at $60 billion in 2021, and projected to hit $106 billion by 2026. Typically offered
Founders are keener to get cash than VCs to deploy capital, DocSend data shows Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 1 day Today’s venture capital market feels strange because it isn’t uniform. While some companies are still able to raise mega-rounds, reach unicorn status, and even attract lots of new capital in sectors that have seen their
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. Spotting new trends is one of my favorite parts of my job. But I like it even more when several trends converge into 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. At this point, it’s clear that no one agrees on anything. Half my sources say that early-stage venture completely is uncorrelated to the public stock market, while the other half say that
Advocates and organizers had been preparing for Roe v. Wade to be overturned since the U.S. Supreme Court draft decision leaked in early May. But Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of period care company August, still felt heartbroken when the decision became official in late June. “One of the things that always made me passionate about policy
Hello and welcome to a special edition of Equity! Today, Alex sat down Brian Heater, a long-tenured TechCrunch denizen, our hardware editor, podcast extraordinaire, and genial chap. He also put together a really neat robotics-focused event that we’re hosting next week. The event is online, and free, which means that everyone can come and hang
Hey, everyone! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap the most read TechCrunch stories from the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here! The most read story on the site this week was, once again, unfortunately, about layoffs — this time at Microsoft. While the company plans
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by
Nov.18 — Ford has unveiled the Mustang Mach E, an all-electric SUV and next generation of the iconic mustang brand. Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow reports from Los Angeles
Money doesn’t need to be protected from sudden vibrations or direct sunlight, so the term “dry powder” strikes me as a poor metaphor for the mounds of cash investors were dropping on startups just a few months ago. “What’s crazy to me is that some of these companies are still in the seed-stage backed by