Looking for the soundtrack from your favorite Netflix show? Now, it will be easier to find thanks to an expanded partnership between Netflix and Spotify. The streaming music service today introduced a new “Netflix Hub” on its app, which will offer a centralized place for finding the official soundtracks, playlists, and podcasts for top shows
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The venture arm of Volvo Cars, an automaker long synonymous with safety, has invested in an optics and imaging startup developing technology that can be integrated into a car’s windshield or windows to deliver images to drivers and passengers. Volvo Cars Tech Fund invested $2 million into optics and imaging developer Spectralics, funds it will
What is a startup? It’s a question so picked over at this point that it feels like the only answer is it depends. That’s fair. In the past, we might have said that once a private-market company earns a $1 billion valuation, it is no longer a startup. But with venture capitalists and crossover investors
Ira Belsky Contributor Ira Belsky is the co-founder and co-CEO at Artlist. You’ve likely heard of the “creator economy” already — it’s no longer a new concept, although some people are more acquainted with what it entails than others. But the creator economy needs creators. It says so right there on the label. Essentially, what
StepZen stepped onto the scene at the end of last year with an $8 million seed round and a vision for unifying APIs. Today that vision came into clearer focus as the company announced two new free GraphQL tools to help simplify API management. StepZen CEO and co-founder Anant Jhingran sees the graph as part
Less than six months after raising a $157 million Series D round, AI-powered transcription and captioning platform Verbit announced today it has closed $250 million in a Series E round that values the company at $2 billion. The latest funding brings its total raised to over $550 million. The new capital was led by Third Point
Earlier this month, Netflix’s new gaming service became globally available across both iOS and Android with a debut lineup that included two “Stranger Things”-themed games and a few more casual gaming titles. In the days since its launch, Netflix has expanded its lineup with two more games, including another casual game “Bowling Ballers,” and now,
If you’ve followed corporate card and spend management startups in the U.S., you might be familiar with Brex and Ramp. Payhawk is also offering an all-in-one financial management solution for businesses, but with a focus on European customers. And the company just raised a $112 million Series B round at a $570 million valuation. Greenoaks
Berlin-based Yababa only started its same-day grocery delivery business this summer, selling products geared towards the tastes of the capital’s sizeable Turkish and Arabic communities shortly afterwards, but in a few short months it’s closed a $15.5 million seed round of funding to fuel planned rapid expansion — both within Germany and across Europe. “Paris,
Facebook’s problems with European privacy law could be about to get a whole lot worse. But ahead of what may soon be a major (and long overdue) regulatory showdown over the legality of its surveillance-based business model, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) is facing a Facebook-shaped problem of its own: It’s now the subject of
Alice Deng and Lawrence Murata were working at artificial intelligence companies when they found inspiration from their respective family’s businesses to create Slope, which enables businesses an easy way to offer buy now, pay later services. Prior to the global pandemic, suppliers were extending net terms of 30 days to pay, but at that scale,
French startup Leocare has raised a big Series B funding round led by Eight Roads. Overall, the company has raised $116 million. It’s an equity and debt round, which means that part of this amount is a cash-for-equity transaction, while the rest is a credit line. The company is raising today’s Series B less than
Liz Kofman-Burns Contributor Liz Kofman-Burns, Ph.D., is a recovering academic and co-CEO of Peoplism, a DEIB consulting firm that has helped startups like Betterment, ClassPass and Grammarly achieve measurable results. As a startup founder, you’re likely laser-focused on growth. We get it: You can’t do anything at all if the lights aren’t on. But if
AutoCloud announced a $4 million seed round this morning. The cloud-focused startup’s investment was led by Animo Ventures, with participating checks from Uncorrelated Ventures, B Capital Group and Moxxie Ventures. AutoCloud is the commercial side of the CloudGraph open source project. The hybrid open source (OSS) and commercial combination is an increasingly popular startup method
Most people in Africa wish to utilize various insurance products but are often deterred by the associated high premiums. It is, therefore, not surprising that insurance penetration across the continent remains marginal, with reported premiums per capita being 11 times lower than the world average, according to a McKinsey study. But the market might soon
The dollar is mostly green, but in the hands of Kompas, so are kroner, euros and shekels. The firm has an Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Tel Aviv presence, and now has a $160 million sack of funds to deploy across its focus areas: sustainability and technological innovation in the construction, real estate and manufacturing industries. The
Schwarz Group, an EU-based retail company, announced today that it has acquired Israeli security startup XM Cyber for $700 million. It may seem like a strange partnership, as Schwarz is best known as the owners of the Lidl and Kaufland supermarkets, but the company believes that extending into security will ultimately help benefit its retail
Twitter’s e-commerce initiatives now include livestream shopping and Walmart will be the first retailer to test the new platform. Over the past year, Walmart has invested in live shopping by hosting events across social platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and soon it will debut Twitter’s first-ever shoppable livestream. On November 28, Walmart will kick off
Renee Fry Contributor When you’re wearing multiple hats while managing your startup’s operations, there’s hardly any time to stop and think about what would happen if things were to go catastrophically wrong. You probably don’t consider the consequences if you were to die suddenly, leaving the venture you spent so much blood, sweat and tears
If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have expected a different result from Paytm’s IPO. After all, the company is incredibly well-funded by investors that you know by name, and the Indian fintech giant has sufficiently scaled into a global brand. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+
There have been countless studies about the damaging effects of social media on mental health, particularly on teens. And yet, most of us just can’t quit social networking. Even if it makes us feel bad about ourselves. The constant comparisons of our lives to the highlight reels that people post on Facebook and Instagram is
As companies increasingly move to take advantage of machine learning to run their business more efficiently, the fact is that it takes an abundance of energy to build, test and run models in production. Neu.ro, an early stage full-stack MLOps solution is building a greener approach. Today, the company announced a zero emissions AI cloud
Ericsson, an international networking company, decided it needed a dose of modernization and this morning announced its intent to acquire cloud communications company Vonage in a $6.2 billion deal. With Vonage, Ericsson is getting a more modern approach to communications that includes a cloud contact center, communications APIs (like Twilio’s) and a voice over internet
The company formerly known as Facebook is delaying a rollout of end-to-end encryption across all its services until “sometime in 2023”, according to Meta’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, penning an op-ed in the British newspaper, the Telegraph this weekend. While Facebook-owned WhatsApp has had E2EE everywhere since 2016, most of the tech giant’s services
ConsenSys Founder & Ethereum Co-Founder Joe Lubin joins Emily Chang to talk about Bitcoin briefly dipping below $60,000 and Ether touching its lowest level this month. He also talks about his company securing $200 million in new funding, and shares his thoughts on web3 and the metaverse powered by blockchain.
French startup Lydia is entering a whole new category by adding trading to its financial super app later this year. The company is partnering with Bitpanda for this feature. Lydia users will be able to buy, hold and sell American and European shares, precious metals, cryptocurrencies and ETFs. Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app
The skyline of the city is a mass of brightly lit office buildings, industrial factories and skyscrapers, the endless hash of lights and shadows making the night seem as if it is teeming with life. Within that urban jungle, we find Amit Gupta, our dastardly hero. He smelled of fresh laundry, hair gel and a
John Story Contributor John Story is general counsel and chief data ethics officer at Acoustic. Previously, he served as a senior member of the legal team at Pax Labs and GoPro. Did you know your company’s data privacy practices can be a competitive differentiator? Usually, we think of competitive differentiators around the level of service
Qualcomm Inc., the biggest maker of chips that run smartphones, gave an upbeat sales forecast, fueled by growth in new markets. The shares jumped 7.9% to a record high. Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon is on Bloomberg.
This is a fantastic time to found a startup, but unless you plan to bootstrap it, you will still need to go through the laborious exercise of crafting a pitch deck. With so much riding on the outcome, this can be an extremely stressful process — a convincing deck requires you to come up with