Over 30 civil society organizations, pro-privacy tech businesses and European startups are making a last ditch pitch to try to convince EU lawmakers to put stricter limits on surveillance advertising as a major vote looms on an update to the bloc’s digital rules. The European Parliament will vote shortly to confirm its negotiating position on
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A congruence of factors in India — notably, climate change policies, fuel costs and skyrocketing demand for e-commerce — has set up ideal conditions for startups like all-electric commercial vehicle startup EVage. The startup, which has already supplied five EV trucks to Amazon India’s Delivery Service Partner and plans to provide “in the thousands” more
That the venture capital market is incredibly exuberant at the moment is not news. Data from 2021 paints the picture of a startup fundraising game at peak velocity, with more capital, unicorns and nine-figure deals than ever. And let me tell you, some venture capitalists are tired of it. PitchBook has a post up detailing
A competition legal expert, backed by a powerful litigation fund, is set to mount a multibillion-dollar class action suit against Facebook/Meta for breach of competition law on the basis that it abused its dominance of social networking in the U.K. for several years. If successful, the action would see Facebook having to pay $3.1 billion
Many of us are moving around these days a lot less than we used to — because of Covid, we’re working from home instead of an office; and we are traveling and going out less. Now, as we shift back into more “normal” behavior, a startup that’s helping to better understand where and how we
As we’ve learned in the last few years, ‘human error’-led cyber security breaches are the ones companies often find it hardest to guard against. Surveys suggest some 85% of attacks can be traced back to the human factor. Thus startups built to alleviate this gap — such as the UK’s Cybsafe which raises $7-9m last
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein speaks with Emily Chang about post-pandemic trends in e-commerce, how the company can be a way for merchants to work around the supply chain crunch, and what the future of shopping online – and in the metaverse – might look like. ——– Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Technology on YouTube:
In a tight labor market, so-called vertical labor marketplaces that zoom in on one industry, like nursing or hospitality, are drawing funding. Trusted Health, a healthcare staffing platform, raised $149 million in funding in November, for example. Seasoned, a hiring platform for restaurant workers, closed on nearly $19 million at roughly the same time. Investors
Quick blog here to update you on some pretty important movements in the market. Today, in a nasty day for stocks generally, shares of software and cloud companies took a pounding. In numerical terms, the Nasdaq Composite lost 2.51%, per CNBC data. That’s a very bad day for a huge, critical category of publicly traded
The House committee leading the investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas to four major tech companies Thursday. Jan. 6 select committee chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) sent letters to YouTube parent company Alphabet, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, Reddit and Twitter demanding for those companies to provide additional
Starting an e-commerce business on one of the large marketplaces, for example, Shopify, can be an easy process, but what the team at Swell began to notice was that the model could only take a business so far. Swell is working in “headless” commerce, which means it is disconnecting the front end of a website,
Meet Stoïk, a new French startup that wants to protect small and medium companies against cybersecurity incidents. The company offers an insurance product as well as a service that monitors your attack surface. The startup recently raised a $4.3 million (€3.8 million) seed round from Alven Capital, Anthemis Group, Kima Ventures as well as several
Leica’s a strange one. It only puts out a handful of cameras every year, and most of them are remixes or minor iterations on previous models. Since 2017 its flagship has been the solid but still somewhat archaic M10, but now the company has revealed its successor: the even more solid and also still somewhat
As competition amid digital banks heats up, U.S. fintech Current is rolling out a new product designed to make its banking service more appealing. The company announced this morning it’s launching a new high-yield offering called “Interest” that allows any Current account holder to earn a 4.00% Annual Percentage Yield (APY) — a rate that’s
There’s financial technology (fintech) companies out there targeting all sorts of different segments of the population, as well as companies at various stages of growth. A new company recently emerged that is targeting a popular startup niche, wanting to exclusively help early-stage SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies with their financial needs. Coming out of stealth today with
Y Combinator’s newly announced plan to invest more capital into startups that take part in its accelerator program is more controversial than many first assumed. By raising its so-called “standard deal” to include an additional $375,000, the U.S. program and investing group with hundreds of companies in each of its accelerator classes may have materially
Retailers often build their own “orchestration” platforms for payment processing and routing, but these can be complex to maintain. Spreedly and modo play in this space, and, last year, new startup Gr4vy launched in the US to do this in an even more fleet-of-foot manner, it claimed. It raised in a $11.1M Series A last
The success of Roblox and other user-created gaming experiences like Overwolf have democratized the concept of making games and have taken it into the mainstream. Now, a startup founded by veterans from Unity, Microsoft and EA that is building a new platform for creators to build immersive games, and related communities around like-minded people, is
Perhaps 2022 will be the year consumer health tracking moves beyond the wrist. We’ve seen Oura’s rise over the past few years and a CES that brought with it a couple of ring fitness trackers. Following Google’s addition to vital and sleep tracking on the Nest Home, Sengled is adding the feature to a smart
Krafton, the developer behind PlayUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” and the maker of PUBG MOBILE, last year’s No. 6 top-grossing mobile game on a global basis, is suing the app stores and a rival game maker, Garena, over copyright infringement involving Garena Online’s Free Fire games. The lawsuit alleges Garena’s games copy numerous aspects of its own, including
Fintech Farm, a newly launched fintech startup based in the U.K. that creates digital banks in emerging markets, confirmed to TechCrunch today that it has raised $7.4 million in seed funding. The seed round was led by Flyer One Ventures and Solid. TA Ventures, Jiji, u.ventures and AVentures Capital also participated. The company said it
SeekOut, which aims to help enterprises hire from a more diverse talent pool, announced it has raised $115 million in a Series C round of funding led by Tiger Global Management. The financing values the Seattle-based startup at over $1.2 billion and brings its total raised to $189 million since its 2017 inception. It follows
A group of more than 80 prominent fact checking organizations around the world is pressing YouTube to take action against Covid misinformation, which still prevails on the platform now two years into the pandemic. “As an international network of fact-checking organizations, we monitor how lies spread online — and every day, we see that YouTube
MycoWorks, a company making a fungal-based biomaterial that can replace leather, brought in a fresh round of funding — $125 million in Series C financing — to fund a production plant for scaling the manufacture of its flagship product Reishi. CEO Matt Scullin says what his company is doing in terms of fabrics is different
A decision by Austria’s data protection watchdog upholding a complaint against a website related to its use of Google Analytics does not bode well for use of US cloud services in Europe. The decision raises a big red flag over routine use of tools that require transferring Europeans’ personal data to the US for processing
Aleksandra Korczynska Contributor Aleksandra Korczynska, the CMO of GetResponse, guides global SaaS marketing and growth. Driven by data analytics and growth hacking, she has crafted go-to-market strategies for global brands (ex-Uber) and tech startups alike. Sales stand and fall on leads, but attracting prospects and optimally converting them into buyers is an art that many
Justworks, a venture-backed software startup focused on the HR market for small and medium-sized businesses, announced earlier today that it would delay its IPO. In a statement to TechCrunch, Justworks said that it “decided to delay its IPO due to market conditions at this time.” An IPO delay is just that, a public debut pushed
The Nigerian government has lifted the suspension of Twitter operations more than six months after it first declared a crackdown on the social media giant in the country. Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, the director-general of Nigeria’s tech agency, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), made this announcement via a statement today. He was put in charge,
Eureka, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides enterprises with tools to manage security risks across their various data stores, today announced that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by YL Ventures. The company was founded by Liat Hayun (CEO), a former VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, and Asaf Weiss
While last year’s WhatsApp outage is still sending shivers down the spine of its 2 billion users, the same is also true for the millions of businesses now using it to connect with their customers. As we now know, messaging across all platforms is a new area from which many startups are emerging. One of