The List joins the social commerce movement with a new app connecting consumers with global luxury brands and retailers to offer a personalized discovery and shopping experience. Focused on sourcing hard-to-find items, the app launch is buoyed by $3.5 million in seed funding backed by a group including American Designer and Rachel Zoe, who is
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UBQ Materials, which claims it has developed a plastic-like material made from 100% unsorted household waste, has raised a $170 million funding round led by TPG Rise, TPG’s global impact investing platform, made through TPG Rise Climate, the firm’s dedicated climate investing fund, and The Rise Funds, its multisector impact investing fund. The financing round
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Check back from now until the end of December for more! Less than two weeks left until Christmas! Got your shopping done? No? Yeaaaah me neither. Want to buy someone a great gadget but don’t want to break
South Korean startup Kakao Entertainment announced today it has acquired Wuxiaworld, an Asia fantasy fiction platform, via its serialized fiction app subsidiary Radish to bolster the mobile storytelling business. The transaction size is $37.5 million. Wuxiaworld, which has grown through word-of-mouth, claims it is now the largest English-language Asia fantasy platform in the U.S. in terms of
Apple’s carrier partners for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch are not paying out promised rebate discounts, frustrating customers. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman breaks it down on Power On. ——– Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Technology on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrM7B7SL_g1edFOnmj-SDKg Watch the latest full episodes of “Bloomberg Technology” with Emily Chang here: Get the latest in
Olist, a Brazilian e-commerce marketplace integrator, confirmed it is now valued at $1.5 billion after securing $186 million in Series E funding, led by Wellington Management. The new round follows quickly behind a $23 million Series D extension the company announced in April, led by new investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management to bring its total
Wonder Dynamics aims to make “blockbuster-level” visual effects achievable by living-room-level creators using AI and cloud services, though it has kept its product closely under wraps. The secretive company, which boasts a star-studded set of advisors, has raised a $10M A round ahead of a planned launch later in 2022. The company was founded by
Grindr, a hook-up app for gay, bi, trans and queer people, has been fined around $7.1 million (65M NOK) by Norway’s data protection authority for passing user data to advertisers without consent — including highly sensitive information related to users’ sexual orientation. Specifically, the DPA found that Grindr breached Articles 6(1) and 9(1) of Europe’s
The odds are against San Francisco-based electric vehicle battery swapping company Ample. Other companies have tried to build a business on exchanging dead batteries for fresh ones to solve the problem of long EV charge times: Fourteen years ago, Better Place raised nearly a billion dollars to do what Ample’s doing, and it ended up
SQream, a well-funded Israel-based data analytics platform, today announced that it has acquired no-code data platform Panoply in an effort to expand its cloud services. At the core of SQream’s service is its GPU-centric “data acceleration platform,” which promises to speed up SQL queries and enable users to run their queries on more data. Panoply, on
In its latest move to placate European competition regulators, Google has offered a set of commitments to France’s antitrust watchdog — in the hopes of settling a costly (for it) intervention over legally mandated payments for displaying snippets of news publishers’ content. Back in July, France’s Autorité de la Concurrence slapped the tech giant with
The US government will place eight Chinese companies including drone manufacturer DJI on an investment blocklist for alleged involvement in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims, the Financial Times has reported. The firms will reportedly be put on the Treasure department’s “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” list on Tuesday, meaning US citizens will be barred from making any
The crease, it seems, is unavoidable. It’s right there, smack in the middle of the those big, expensive folding displays. And it’s invariably (and perhaps understandably) the first comment on nearly every story I post about a foldable phone. The alternative isn’t ideal, either — a gap between two distinct displays à la Microsoft’s Surface
If you think of Pabio as “Stitchfix for furniture, in Europe,” you’re probably pretty close to the mark. The company started in Switzerland a couple of years ago with a mission to stop people from buying disposable Ikea stuff for a two-year stint in an apartment, replacing it with well-styled, well-thought-out interior design suggestions and
Less than a year after raising an $80 million Series C round, Anchorage is announcing that it has raised a $350 million Series D round. With today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of more than $3 billion. Anchorage offers a custody solution for big institutions, such as publicly traded companies or funds.
The Oversight Board, a group Facebook created to review its policy decisions, weighed in on a case of misinformation in war-torn Ethiopia Tuesday, warning the company about the risks of allowing hate speech and unverified information to spread freely in conflict zones. The Oversight Board reviewed a post in Amharic from an Ethiopia-based Facebook user
Thirdweb, a software startup for web3 projects, closed on $5 million in funding from a group of high-profile business leaders, entrepreneurs and creators, including Gary Vaynerchuk and Mark Cuban. The company launched its free tools three months ago for developers to build, launch and manage their web3 projects without writing any lines of code. Thirdweb
Signal AI, an artificial intelligence startup that trawls the vast sea of internet and other publicly available data to provide organizations with sentiment insights and other information to make better business decisions, has raised $50 million. It plans to use the funds to continue building out its AI platform to bring in more diversified data
Kenyan startup Wowzi has secured new funding to expand the reach of its platform, which turns social media users into brand influencers, to West and Southern Africa — as it taps the increasing usage of social sites across the continent driven by the proliferation of smartphones and a deepening internet penetration. Wowzi, which connects social
I’ve visited Brinc’s headquarters the last few times I’ve been to Hong Kong, and been impressed with the range of different startups the accelerator works with. I knew the organization primary through its consumer hardware companies — a primary focus when it was founded, back in 2014. Brinc has expanded its scope a fair bit
Purchasing new glasses used to be about finding the right pair that would go with everything until you needed the next set. Pair Eyewear turned that on its head with magnetic frames, called Top Frames, that enable glasses-wearers to change their style with any outfit or any occasion for as little as $25. Between 2020
Jaime Bosch Contributor Jaime Bosch is the co-founder and CEO of Voicemod. In the many conversations around “the metaverse” sparked by the Facebook corporate name transition to Meta, much has focused on the visual elements. What’s hardly mentioned is audio. Yet voice really matters when making a virtual environment come to life. Sometimes, it’s everything.
Spatial analysis platform Carto has raised a $61 million Series C round. Many companies collect a ton of data with some location element tied to it. Carto lets you display that data on interactive maps so that you can more easily compare, optimize, balance and take decisions. Insight Partners is leading today’s round. The European
Sophie Dembinski Contributor Sophie Dembinski is head of Public Policy and U.K. lead at Ecosia, which uses advertising revenues from its search engine to fund tree-planting projects across the world. To date, Ecosia has planted more than 139 million trees in countries such as Brazil, Australia, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Spain and the U.K. Europe has
Apple is now rolling out access to its new, lower-cost Apple Music Voice plan, first introduced this fall at the company’s hardware event. The new service, designed largely for use with HomePod speakers or AirPods, limits consumers to accessing Apple Music using Siri commands. Due to its stripped-down nature, the voice-only service is offered at
Most people have experienced the internet only through Web 2.0: online applications, the social web and software as a service form the fabric of our lives. But even as other technology rapidly evolves, basic web infrastructure has remained largely unchanged since the turn of the millennium. Lately, many have championed web3 as the internet’s next
If you’ve ever had to apply for a mortgage, you know that it can be a time-consuming, expensive and often painful process — both in terms of just filling out the application and then waiting for the transaction to close. In recent years, a number of digital lenders have emerged to bring more technology to
Rotten Tomatoes announced today that it’s partnering with TikTok to launch a TikTok Jump that will allow users to link to movies and TV trailers, ratings, reviews, information on where to watch, clips, cast information and more. TikTok Jump is the short-form video app’s third-party integration tool that aims to deepen its relationships with third-party
Buoyed by a new cash infusion of $5.5 million in Series A funding, GlobalWonks emerged Tuesday as Enquire AI. The Washington, D.C.-based company leverages artificial intelligence in a tool for businesses to find global subject-matter expertise in real time, from both internal and external resources. Uzabase led the oversubscribed funding round and was joined by
The UK’s antitrust watchdog has given the clearest signal yet that interventions under an upcoming reform of the country’s competition rules will target tech giants Apple and Google — including their duopolistic command of the mobile market, via iOS and Android; their respective app stores; and the browsers and services bundled with mobile devices running