Instagram’s standalone messaging app Threads is shutting down. The app will no longer be supported by the end of December 2021, the company confirmed to TechCrunch after reports began circulating via social media of its impending closure. Instagram is planning to alert its existing Threads users with an in-app notice beginning on November 23, which
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Hydrogen is at the center of many industrial processes and potentially part of major future energy ecosystems, but the process of isolating and storing it is wasteful and expensive. DiviGas, armed with a $3.6M seed round, hopes to clean up the hydrogen production industry with a new tech that leapfrogs existing methods, potentially supercharging this
Google Cloud announced a multiyear partnership with Cohere, an early-stage startup that is building a natural language processing platform to make it easier for developers to build natural language processing models into applications. The solution requires a fair amount of infrastructure resources to pull off, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is going to provide them
Overwolf, a platform that enables creators to build, share, and monetize items inside games, has raised a $75 million Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Previous investors including Griffin Gaming Partners, Insight Partners, Intel Capital, Liberty Technology Venture Capital, and Marker also participated. The funding will be pumped into Overwolf’s CurseForge Core,
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. We’re just starting to roll out this year’s gift guides, so check back from now until the end of December for more! For this year’s STEM toy gift guide we’ve split out our recommendations by age for easier
Waldo, a photo-sharing platform that has historically targeted businesses, schools, camps, sports leagues, and other organizations, is capitalizing on the growing anti-Facebook sentiment to promote its newly launched consumer product. The company today is introducing a service aimed at private photo-sharing among family and friends which it’s promoting as an “ad-free, non-toxic” and private alternative
This morning Plug Pagamentos (Plug) announced a $2.7 million seed round, led by Costanoa Ventures‘ latest partner, Amy Cheetham. Other investors in the round included Verve Capital and Norte Ventures, among others. Plug, based in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, wants to make its home-market more amenable to online commerce. In an interview,
Many real estate technology companies are developing technology that is in competition with, or could potentially replace, real estate agents. One startup that aims to help agents succeed and flourish with its technology and “bundled business services,” Place, has raised $100 million in a Series A round at a valuation north of $1 billion. Goldman
TikTok has developed a bad reputation for hosting dangerous viral “challenges” on its app, which at their worst, have led to serious injury or death — as in the case of the blackout challenge that prompted Italian regulators to take action against the social network this year to remove underage users. More recently, the app
Slack has always differentiated itself as a communications tool by its ability to run applications inside of Slack and avoid dreaded context switching. At the Frontiers Conference today, the company is announcing a twist on app integrations with new building blocks — components that developers can build and string together into pre-packaged kinds of workflows.
The cloud may be the direction that much of enterprise IT is moving today, but it still remains a major source of security issues, with some 98% of all enterprises in a recent survey reporting that they have contended with a cloud-related security breach in the last 18 months. Today, a startup called Laminar is
Sky Mavis Co-Founder Jef Zirlin joins Emily Chang to discuss the rise of their Axie Infinity game and the play-to-earn model, a growing trend that’s helped the tech-focused game studio reach a $3 billion dollar valuation. Also: the future of crypto in gaming and work, and what’s next for Sky Mavis. ——– Like this video?
Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor 5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make In growth marketing, signal determines success You’ve launched a few paid acquisition channels and are now starting to
Singapore-based Deskimo, the on-demand app that lets people find co-working spaces and pay by the minute, announced today it has raised a $3 million seed round. It is also soft launching in Jakarta, bringing its total markets to three, along with Singapore and Hong Kong. Participants in the round included Y Combinator (Deskimo was part
Nader Al-Naji, a crypto entrepreneur who today lives in L.A., has been on a roller coaster in recent years — and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. In 2018, roughly 16 months after raising $140 million from investors for a cryptocurrency startup that aimed to develop a stablecoin, Al-Naji and his Princeton classmates returned $130 million when
Luxury Presence, a startup selling marketing software to real estate brokerages, announced today it has raised $25.9 million for its Series B round. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round alongside fellow existing investors Toba Capital and Switch Ventures. Dallas Mavericks basketball player Dirk Nowitzki also participated in the round along with other angel investors, making
Funding for European startups is at a record-high so far for this year, with €73.7 billion raised in the first three quarters, and the full year on track for more than 8,000 deals, according to research from PitchBook. To keep up with the pace, London firm Balderton is today announcing its latest fund, a $600
Cognixion, a startup designing an intuitive brain-monitoring headset and interface for people with physical disabilities, has raised a $12M A round to pursue its accessibility ambitions. Armed with this funding, it should be able to complete the long list of requirements necessary for any medical or assistive device to be made widely available. The company,
Gift-giving is not always easy, but Goody wants to make it as easy as sending a text. The Miami-based company launched in December 2020 with a curated list of gifts from robes to cookies to succulents to spa treatments. You can choose a gift without having to know what size is needed, and the recipient
Rahul Vohra Contributor Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of email app Superhuman. In the first half of 2021, global venture funding shattered the previous six-month record — set in the second half of 2020 — by more than $100 billion. The market was flooded with new startups, and one after another made headlines
Facily, a São Paulo-based social commerce marketplace, has quietly raised over $366 million in funding across four different rounds over the last year. Most recently, Facily closed on a $250 million Series D that was led by DX Ventures and Berlin-based Delivery Hero, with Citius as co-anchor investor. That investment values the startup at $850
If it seems like everyone is listening to the same podcasts, that’s probably not a coincidence. Audio-based entertainment and social media is more popular than ever right now, but the medium is still plagued by discovery issues. While hit podcasts soar in popularity, expand their media empires and secure major brand deals, it’s difficult for
No-code continues to permeate the many layers of enterprise IT, where traditionally non-technical workers have had to rely on technical experts to get things done, and startups building these tools are raising a lot of money as they see a surge of business. In the latest development, EasySend — a Tel Aviv startup that has
Remote and hybrid working are the order of the day, and now a startup called AnyDesk that helps enable that to be pulled off smoothly — regardless of the architecture of a company’s network, or where a person happens to be working — is announcing a round of $70 million to fuel its growth. The
Audio processing startup Mimi promises to make a personalized hearing profile for you, meaning that you can hear well without having to crank the volume up too loudly. This both helps prevent hearing loss, and it helps people who’ve already suffered some hearing loss to be able to hear their content better without having to
Runway, a startup that emerged from the challenges that faced Rent the Runway’s first iOS team, is now exiting beta and launching its service that simplifies the mobile app release cycle — or, as the team describes it, offers “air traffic control” for mobile releases. The company has additionally raised a $2 million round of
Pistil Data, a cannabis market intelligence platform, has closed a $6.5 million seed round led by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde. The funding round included participation from JW Partners and other entrepreneurs. Pistil Data makes market intelligence accessible to cannabis brands and organizes billions of data points to provide customized sales opportunities for cannabis brands. The
Justt, a Tel Aviv-based chargeback mitigation startup, is emerging out of stealth today with $70 million in total funding. Founded in February 2020 by Roenen Ben-Ami and Ofir Tahor, Justt says it fully automates chargeback disputes on behalf of online merchants. The startup recently raised $50 million a Series B round of funding led by
This week, a handful of academic researcher teams will gain access to a new tool from Facebook designed to aggregate near-universal real-time data on the world’s biggest social network. When it comes to who gets access to Facebook data and how, the company now known as Meta is still feeling reverberations from 2018’s Cambridge Analytica
Four months after securing a $5.25 million seed round, Mexican buy now, pay later startup Aplazo is back with an even bigger round to expand adoption of the payment plan approach across that country. Angel Peña and Alex Wieland co-founded the company in 2020. Prior to Aplazo, Peña lived in New York and worked at