Thanks to the machinations of a certain billionaire, the phrase “hostile takeover” has been liberally bandied about the media sphere recently. But while it long ago entered the mainstream lexicon, “hostile takeover” carries with it an air of vagueness — and legalese opaqueness. At a high level, a hostile takeover occurs when a company —
admin
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny has called on tech giants Google and Meta/Facebook to help circumvent Putin’s grip on the media and get information out to ordinary Russians about what’s actually going on in the war in Ukraine by allowing their ad targeting tools and platforms to be selective repurposed to run a nationwide ad
Deel’s timeline is impressive: Founded in 2018, entered YC and raised its seed round in 2019. In 2020, the company raised a Series A and Series B. In 2021, Deel raised its Series C and Series D for a total amount raised of $629 million since its founding. And on April 20, co-founder and CEO
Consumers want their packages faster, but not every business has the kind of supply chain technology as Amazon or Walmart. This is, until now. Shipium was founded in 2019 by a group of former Amazon Prime and Zulily supply chain builders. In particular, Jason Murray, co-founder and CEO, was with Amazon for nearly 20 years,
Good morning from the West Coast! Today is TechCrunch: Early Stage, which means that I should be doing last-minute prep for my sessions. But instead, we’re going to talk about Elon Musk, who made an unsolicited bid for Twitter that is naturally taking the technology and business media by storm. Our own Romain Dillet has
The founders of Speckle, an early-stage startup based in London, are both trained architects and engineers, probably a rare combination. It enabled them to see and understand firsthand the issues associated with exchanging large proprietary 3D files from vendors like Autodesk and Trimble. They wanted to make it easier by building an open source platform
As we found during the pandemic, food and beverage distribution is critical, but most food wholesalers’ sales remain manually operated. Post-covid, food wholesalers are fast digitizing their operations, but many still rely on legacy backend systems. Addressing this, Cerve, a Sweden-based food-tech startup, has raised a $2 million seed round for its infrastructure platform that
Meta is throwing billions of dollars into building out the metaverse as the future of social networking but in the near term, the tech giant is looking toward the power of messaging to connect users in a more personal way. On that front, the company today introduced its plans for a significant update to its
Shared micromobility company Luup has raised $8 million (1 billion yen) in debt and asset financing to meet the growing demands of Japan’s micromobility market, which according to a recent report, is projected to reach $11.6 billion in 2030, up from $39.4 million in 2020. Luup will use the proceeds to expand its service
The blank-check boom that made real many electric vehicle manufacturers’ dreams of going public may be nearing a close. One such company, Faraday Future, is even in danger of being delisted, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week. Faraday Future, Lordstown Motors, Lucid Motors, Nikola, and Canoo — nearly
Last August, TechCrunch noted TikTok was working to build its own augmented reality (AR) development platform called Effect House, which would allow creators to build AR effects for use in TikTok’s video app. Today, Effect House has officially gone live. The platform has been operating in a close beta since last fall, where it’s so
The scary headlines scream from publications about extreme weather, droughts, fires, lack of clean water and an increasingly tight timeline to do something about it. A new survey by Google Cloud that was conducted by The Harris Poll found that a vast majority of executives see sustainability as a key goal for their business. It
Germany’s government created quite a buzz when it announced that recreational cannabis would be legalized during the current term. Does this mean that we’ll see recreational use of cannabis for adults becoming a common policy in Europe? It’s too soon to say. After interviewing several active investors in cannabis-related startups, we learned that the regulatory
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. Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Wednesday, April 13, 2022! Tomorrow, we are giddy with excitement to be attending Early Stage (if you’re coming, don’t forget to submit your pitch deck!). If
Also: Why edtech is a historically weak investment compared to other sectors Alex Wilhelm 9 hours Good morning! I am writing to you in the minutes before I have to pack up my writing and podcasting setups so that I can catch a few planes to San Francisco for Early Stage. (I’m moderating two sessions,
TikTok announced today that it has started testing a way for users to identify comments that they think are irrelevant or inappropriate. Following the announcement, the company confirmed to TechCrunch that users who are part of the test will be able to flag these sorts of comments via a private dislike button. The new feature
The medium is the message more than ever these days, and brands are faced with a challenge — but also opportunity — to capture what consumers think about them and their products if they can harness and better understand those messages, via whichever medium is being used to deliver them. Today, a company called BlueOcean
When the European Commission presented its Digital Services Act (DSA) proposal in December 2020, it listed beefed up consumer protections as a headline goal for the flagship update to the bloc’s rules for digital services. But now, as negotiations over the draft law are in the final stretch, where EU co-legislators hash out the detail
Last year, reports began circulating that Google was developing a “Switch to Android” app for iOS users looking to make the jump from iPhone to a smartphone running Google’s Android OS. Now that app has arrived. On Monday, Google quietly launched the Switch to Android app on the App Store in a number of global
There’s no shortage of digital banks in Nigeria and, in general, in Africa. As the region continues to experience rapid growth in mobile usage and the corresponding growing young population, these fintechs think this is the right time to provide financial services to every market category, from the banked to the unbanked. We’ve covered a
Global, local factors paint contrasted picture for LatAm startups in H1 2022 Anna Heim 7 hours That global venture capital slowed down in Q1 2022 might no longer be news to you. But global numbers can hide diverging realities around the world, and a closer look at regional data shows us that it is indeed
Snapchat is introducing a new “Dynamic Stories” feature that will allow publishers to automatically create Stories on the app based on news stories they publish online, the company announced on Tuesday. Early partners include CNN, Bloomberg, ESPN and more. The new feature uses a publisher’s RSS Feed to automatically create and post Stories on a
Today during its second Work Transformation Summit this week, Zoom announced Zoom IQ for Sales, a product that uses AI to analyze sales meetings and deals to provide insights. It’s the company’s first explicit foray into sales automation software, a market that — according to Verified Market Research — could grow to $7.3 billion in
With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram banned by the Kremlin, TikTok is the last global social media platform still operating in Russia. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it announced it had banned new uploads on March 6 to protect users from Russian “fake news” law. But a new report has found that the
Nursing shortages were a problem well before our hospitals were rocked by a pandemic. Two years in and overloaded systems have further contributed to burnout, stress and other factors plaguing the people we rely on for our own well-being. We’ve seen robotics applied to just about every other field of late, so why not nursing
Back in March 2021, online payment processing giant Stripe announced that it had raised $600 million at a $95 billion valuation. The numbers made a splash when they were made public months after the deal leaked. That Stripe raised in early 2021 is notable. Some private companies that raised large sums of capital last year have
TikTok issued an update Tuesday on its efforts to stem the flow of misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the company doesn’t appear to be effectively implementing its existing policies around the war. The social network cut off new content originating in Russia in early March in response to a harsh new law in
Data — it’s the lifeblood of every company, and as our data culture transforms, so too must your business. An emerging, innovative data ecosystem promises to integrate disparate data sources, provide a more complete picture of business, both present and future, and improve enterprise collaboration at every level. Understanding the rapidly changing trends in data
The European Commission continues to eschew pronouncing a firm timeline for finalizing a new EU-U.S. data transfers deal after the two sides reached a political agreement on a way forward last month. But today justice commissioner, Didier Reynders, put out a slightly strengthened suggestion that a replacement for the defunct Privacy Shield could be adopted
As an earlier report had suggested, Spotify today announced it will integrate the live audio capabilities from its companion app, Spotify Greenroom, within the main Spotify streaming app. Greenroom will also rebrand as “Spotify Live” as part of these changes. At launch, Spotify’s main app will only feature live content from select original programming, while