Netflix plans to offer a cheaper and ad-supported plan to consumers within a year or two, the world’s largest streaming service said, as it pushes to tap a wider set of potential customers. The firm, which reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers in Q1, will introduce the ad-supported plan to give customers more choice, company’s
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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. PT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to this 109th day of 2022 – April 19 – which celebrates, among other things, National Garlic Day (nice try, Big Allium) and Bicycle Day, the anniversary of the
Local IPO pays off for merged entity of Indonesian trailblazers Gojek and Tokopedia Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 17 hours GoTo, the combined entity resulting from the merger of Gojek (an Indonesian ride-hailing player) and Tokopedia (an Indonesian e-commerce company), raised around $1.1 billion (IDR15.8 trillion, per the company) in its public-market debut on the Indonesia
Instagram is adding the ability for users to create and donate to fundraisers directly from Instagram Reels, the app’s short-form video feature and TikTok rival. The feature was announced alongside a series of updates across Meta’s platform and services designed to celebrate Earth Day, including custom stickers for Instagram and Messenger, profile frames for Facebook, conservation-focused
Farmers don’t get embarrassed when the price of corn drops; similarly, there’s no reason for startup founders to lose their joy because publicly traded tech stocks are undercutting their valuations. If making as much money as you can is your primary goal, however, prepare to be disappointed. Accepting a down round or a smaller seed
U.K. food delivery gig platform Deliveroo has lost a court challenge in France over the “freelancer” status of riders. Reuters reports that the company has been fined the maximum penalty of €375,000 by a Paris court. Two former execs have also been fined €30,000 and given one-year suspended jail sentences for abusing the country’s labor
Are you looking to buy a folding smart phone? Do you want it to be Pokémon-themed? And do you live in South Korea? If all those stars are aligned just right, do we have some good news for you: Samsung is making a Pokémon Edition of the Galaxy Z Flip 3. They somehow decided to
Demostack, a San Francisco, California-based startup creating a “demo experience” platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales teams, today announced that it raised $34 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Amiti Ventures, GTMfund, Operator Collective, and StepStone. CEO Jonathan Friedman says that the proceeds will be
Silicon Valley has gotten fantastically efficient at funding apps, SaaS and developer tools. It turns out, though, that climate change cares a lot less about bits, bytes, and stored procedures — it’s a lot more analog than that. Along come Evok Innovations and its cleantech fund, aiming to plow money into companies that are working
Instagram is removing the ‘Recent’ tab on hashtag pages for some users as part of a small test, the company announced on Tuesday. Currently, when you select a hashtag, you’re taken to a page where you can parse through the content that has been posted using that hashtag via three categories: Top, Recent and Reels.
Help us win a Webby by voting for us here. This week on Found we talk to Anthony DiMare, the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock, a company that has developed autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to survey and map the seafloor in a much more efficient and affordable way than the traditional “big ship with a
Watching Elon Musk and others attempt to buy Twitter got me thinking about the time Salesforce wanted to purchase the social media platform. Back in 2016, around the time of Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco, rumors ran rampant that the company was ready to spend $20 billion to purchase Twitter. It would eventually back off when investors
Last year, SEON, which has an anti-fraud platform designed to fight accounts raised a $12 million Series A. It does this by looking at a customer’s ‘digital footprint’ – especially their social media – in order to weed out false accounts and thus prevent fraudulent transactions. Clients included Patreon, AirFrance, Rivalry and Ladbrokes. The London-based
Only 21% of the 12 million registered vehicles on Nigerian roads have genuine motor insurance, as the rest either have fake certificates (owners are mostly unaware) or are not covered at all. This report also states that a number of car owners holding genuine insurance policies also fail to renew them when they expire, a
The digital transformation of banking and payments services is a red-hot trend that’s shown no signs of slowing down. Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) products like Synapse, Unit, and Bond have helped fuel the shift by allowing companies to quickly spin up new financial services using APIs. NovoPayment is a global BaaS startup based in Miami that has largely been focused
Tokio Marine, a Tokyo-headquartered insurance corporation, said Tuesday it has launched its $42 million corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, dubbed Tokio Marine Future Fund, to invest in early-stage startups around the world. The Palo Alto-based CVC fund will write checks worth between $500K and $3 million into seed, Series A rounds across sectors including
CoinDCX has doubled its valuation to $2.15 billion (post-money) in eight months following a fresh $135 million funding, it said today, as the Indian cryptocurrency exchange looks to aggressively expand its product offerings and talent base, including some to double down on compliances in the world’s second largest internet market. Steadview and existing backer Pantera
Square Peg Capital, one of Australia’s largest venture capital firms with current assets under management of about $3 billion USD, is digging deeper into Southeast Asia. The firm is currently raising $550 million in new funding, and if its recent investment history is anything to go by, a good chunk of that will be invested
Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat shares her favorite family rituals and travel destinations with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Studio 1.0.” Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
If 2020 and 2021 were the years of the SPAC, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the reprimand. Nearly all of the electric vehicle manufacturers that took a shortcut to an IPO by merging with a special purpose acquisition company over the last two years are being investigated by the Securities and
The value of later-stage startups is in decline, data indicate. This particular market movement isn’t a surprise, but the scale of the contraction is worth noting. Forge Global, a secondary market for private-company shares, “said the prices of companies on its platform had fallen 19.9 per cent in February and March compared with the fourth
This month, Twitter announced the ground-shaking news that it was actually going to offer users a way to edit tweets — a longtime user request. And it would have been the biggest Twitter story in years, if it weren’t for the Elon Musk takeover attempt. Now, it appears work on Twitter’s Edit button has already
Clipboard Health, an app-based marketplace that matches nurses with open shifts at nearby healthcare facilities, today announced that it raised $80 million over two unannounced rounds, a $50 million Series B round in 2021 and a $30 million Series C round this year, at a $1.3 billion valuation post-money. CEO Wei Deng says that the
Everyone thought it was a little bonkers when Panic announced that they would be making a monochrome handheld gaming machine with a sort of subscription model where you can’t choose the games you get. DOA, right? Well, the preorders sold out so perhaps not. And fortunately, Playdate is a fun, weird and promising device that’s
As part of its continued investment into expanding its mobile gaming business, Netflix today announced it will, for the first time, launch a mobile game alongside a TV series from the same franchise. The game and show will be based on the popular Exploding Kittens card game. The mobile game will launch in May exclusively
Zambian card issuing fintech Union54 has raised $12 million in a seed extension round led by Tiger Global. Other participating investors in this financing include existing ones such as Vibe VC and new investors Earl Grey Capital and Packy Mccormick’s Not Boring Capital. It’s been only six months since Union54, whose API allows African software
Sequoia Capital India, one of the most prolific and successful investors in India and Southeast Asia, addressed the fraudulent practices allegations levelled against some of its portfolio startups and pledged to take proactive steps to do more to drive increased compliance. In a blog post published Sunday afternoon, the storied venture fund said it’s still a “work-in-progress”
Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter on May 1, sign
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. The move by Elon Musk to try and buy Twitter has proved polarizing. Not that we should be surprised; mega-deals are always clarifying moments. But the Musk-Twitter saga
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. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the