It seems like every website has a chatbot of some kind to help answer simple questions without having to wait for a customer service representative. However, sometimes in the course of connecting it may take awhile, and as your attention shifts to something else, your time expires and you have to start all over again.
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Make way for yet another ‘quick-commerce’ player in Europe’s heavily heating on-demand grocery space: Pop Market is a Greek startup which launched last week in Athens — taking orders via and app and touting 15min delivery times and a curated selection of “thousands” of items (including fresh fruit and vegetables). The seed round, which Pop
Berlin-based e-scooter rentals company Tier Mobility has announced what it’s billing as the “first close” of a $200 million Series D, as investors continue to plough money into urban micromobility. Today’s announcement follows a $60M debt raise this summer, and a $250M Series C last November (led by SoftBank). It’s not clear from its PR
Justos, a startup that says it will be the first insurance company in Brazil to use data when determining rates, has raised a $35.8 million Series A round of funding led by Ribbit Capital. SoftBank’s Latin American Fund and GGV participated as new investors, in addition to existing backers Kaszek, BigBets, Nubank CEO David Velez
Meet Wefight, a French startup that has developed more than a dozen apps to help people suffering from chronic illness. Using a basic chatbot interface, people can ask questions and get answers about their illness. The startup recently raised a $11.6 million (€10 million) funding round from Digital Health Ventures, Impact Partners, as well as
Meet Hera, a new calendar app that wants to turn the calendar into the main work interface. Hera helps you schedule meetings more easily with natural language processing and lets you share availabilities in an email or any messaging app. The startup is also going to build integrations with your other work tools so that
Tony Fadell, Future Shape principal, iPod inventor and iPhone co-inventor, sits down with Emily Chang to talk about how far Apple has come over the past two decades, where it’s headed next and why tech and sustainability are the next big challenges. (Source: Bloomberg)
Adonica Shaw Contributor Adonica Shaw is founder of Wingwomen, a health-and-wellness-focused social media platform for professional women. More posts by this contributor 10 ways founders can manage their mental health while fundraising As social-audio apps like Clubhouse, Beams, Pludo, Racket and Quest have gained popularity in the last year, more marketers, product teams and up-and-coming
With the pandemic turning us into delivery experts, consumers have also switched on to meal-kits on droves, given that it combines both delivery and home cooking. But many meal kits can be inflexible. The Kitchenful startup in Germany realized this and so it allows users to browse recipes from food bloggers and have personalized meal
FlixMobility, the $3 billion-German transportation startup that has doubled down on long distance buses and slowly and quietly gobbled up transit lines and operations across Europe, today announced a big move to raise its game in the U.S. The company announced that it is acquiring Greyhound Lines, the iconic U.S. bus network, from UK-based owner
Ark Invest���s Tasha Keeney talks with Emily Chang about Tesla���s earnings and its global shift to lithium iron-phosphate batteries, why Tesla is better set up to adapt to the current chip shortage than other automakers and how Tesla is leading the EV market. (Source: Bloomberg)
In less than seven days, Lunchclub co-founder Vlad Novakovski had a sizable term sheet in hand from Lightspeed Ventures, despite his startup not looking to raise at the time. How did that happen? A sticky product experience with the customer feedback and growth to back it up made the startup an investment opportunity Lightspeed’s Nicole
Hello, and welcome to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. And have a good time. This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a bevy of topics from around the world of startups and technology more
Station F, the big startup campus located in Paris, is launching an online component called Launch by Station F. With this new program, entrepreneurs from anywhere can get started and learn all the basics to start a company. Launched in 2017, Station F is a massive building that used to be a rail freight depot.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.
Co-founded in 2007 by Yasser Bashir, Arbisoft falls on the larger end of the spectrum of software development partners that our readers have recommended in our ongoing survey. Today, the company has a few hundred employees distributed across Pakistan, Australia, Texas and Malaysia, but it continues to service startups of all sizes, says Bashir. Omri
When you file to go public, you want folks to like the numbers. You do not want people to mock the numbers. The most extreme version of this obvious truism was WeWork’s first run at the public markets. It filed, everyone found its results to be ridiculous, and the IPO eventually got yanked. A more
Now out of office, news regarding former President Donald Trump has been rather lacking from TechCrunch’s pages. He’s back. News broke yesterday that Trump Media & Technology Group, a concern formed to take on a host of major technology and media companies, plans to go public via a merger with a SPAC. The blank-check company
Matt Rogers Contributor Matt Rogers built the first machine-learning thermostat as the co-founder of Nest. He was previously an engineer at Apple, where he helped build ten generations of the iPhone and the first iPad. He currently splits his time between Incite.org and a new company that he is developing. The best way to drive
Marginalized communities, survivors of abuse, politicians, law enforcement – they all use encrypted communications to keep their information safe. But the encryption of the kinds of services you and I use every day – from messaging to confidential internal company communications – is increasingly under threat by governments globally. The reasons are sometimes understandable, such
When Zillow announced that it was hitting pause on its iBuying operations earlier this week, the news sent shockwaves through the real estate industry. Zillow blamed the pause on labor and supply constraints that were hampering its ability to quickly renovate and efficiently turn over its housing inventory. The announcement sent Zillow’s stock plummeting 10%
When news broke that former U.S. President Donald Trump had conceived of a media and technology company and intended to take it public via a blank-check company, you would have been forgiven if you immediately began to wonder how quickly you could short the stock. Pick a reason: Right-leaning social networks have largely flopped; the
Facebook Messenger is rolling out new augmented reality (AR) experiences to video calls and Messenger Rooms, the platform’s videoconferencing feature. The company notes that the new “group effects” feature will be coming to Instagram soon. Groups effects work for everyone on the video call, as Facebook says it’s aiming to make AR effects a shared experience.
Socratic, an early-stage startup that wants to bring data to bear on a developer-focused task management system, announced a $3 million seed investment today from Unusual Ventures, Overtime.vc and a couple of industry angels. The company is also opening up public beta of the software starting today. It’s worth noting that Socratic received the investment
Portuguese VC Faber is launching a new fund, Faber Blue Pioneers I, to invest in early-stage startups – primarily from Portugal and Southern Europe – developing innovative “deep tech solutions” around ocean sustainability and climate action, The fund will have an initial target of €30 million, including funding from Portugal Blue as well as impact-driven
Randy Abrams, managing director and head of Taiwan equity research at Credit Suisse, discusses supply chain constraints on computer chips, demand for the components and if government involvement is helping. He speaks on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia.” ——– 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”
Early-stage entrepreneurs who are eager to ship usually spend more time calculating their startup’s monthly burn rate than selecting an optimal development environment. As a result, technical debt starts to accumulate. And accumulate. TechCrunch Senior Writer Romain Dillet interviewed Jill Wetzler, VP of Engineering at Pilot, and Preeti Somal, EVP of Engineering at HashiCorp, to
Shares of Snap are off just over 20% this morning, a huge cut to the valuation of the social networking company. In one sense, the post-earnings drop is an indictment of the company’s business. On the other, Snap’s stock has merely retreated to midyear levels and remains far above the historical price range it found
Instagram is testing new tools for creators to earn commissions and form partnerships with brands on its platform. The Facebook-owned company is expanding its existing native affiliate tool, which launched in June and allows creators to discover products, share them with followers and earn commissions for sales driven by their posts. With this latest launch,
Financial statement audits are an essential part of doing business, but often are complex and can require documentation gathering, most times requiring email correspondence back and forth between the auditor and the company for files and information to complete the task. T.C. Whittaker, co-founder and CEO of Audit Sight, says companies can spend millions of