The UK’s antitrust watchdog will take a close look at the music streaming market. Today the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it will be conducting a market study of music streaming as soon as possible, as its latest piece of work aimed at expanding competition in digital markets. It uses market studies to
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Gloucester, Massachusetts-based Cometeer has been around for nine years. In that time, the company has built up a mad scientist’s lair worth of coffee scientists, equipment and processes to jolt some fresh life into the industry. Based out of a former frozen seafood facility, the company has created a multimillion-dollar proprietary production line to turn
Not content with setting your feet a-tapping with its intuitive music sequencer aimed at amateur music makers, Artiphon today announced an app that adds video-making prowess to the Orba’s already impressive feature set. Appealing to your inner Video Jockey, the Orbacam demo video makes it look easy, adding video filters and effects to your visual
Aiven, a Finnish startup that helps companies combine various open source technologies with public cloud infrastructure resources, announced a $60 million investment on a $2 billion valuation today. The news follows a $100 million investment in March at an $800 million valuation, a hefty increase in such a short time. World Innovation Labs and IVP
The people who work on shipping vessels are vital to world trade, but they still experience a lot of arcane hiring processes. Many lack transparency about important things like pay or even the working conditions of they ships they will spend months on. Maritime recruitment platform Seafair was created to solve these problems. It vets
Facebook already allows users to cross-post their Instagram Stories and Reels to Facebook. Now it’s testing a new feature that would see posts flowing in the other direction, too. The company recently rolled out an option that allows users to cross-post their Facebook updates that include photos or videos over to their Instagram. For people
Expensify filed to go public late last Friday, adding its name to the growing roster of technology companies looking to list during this period of hot valuations and strong recent debuts. GitLab, for example, went public last week. The devops giant raised its price range, priced above that interval, and then shot higher once shares
Another big infusion of cash from a major investor is making its way to a fintech out of the UK on the heels of strong growth. Today Zopa — a neobank with some 500,000 users in the UK where it provides peer-to-peer lending, savings accounts, credit cards and other services — has raised $300 million,
Hello again, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s running series of posts discussing how the public markets rarely give even half of a spare fuck concerning what Apple announces at its events. Indeed, Apple’s stock seems to be far more labile to external events than from internally sourced announcements; rare is the case in which Apple’s
How to iterate on product has always been one of the top concerns at startups. But while they previously had to rely solely on customer feedback and instincts, they now also have a trove of data to balance. This dynamic creates new opportunities but also requires a new kind of arbitrage. We discussed this new
It’s been an active four quarters for technology IPOs. If you rewind the clock to Q4 2020, we’ve seen megawatt public debuts from tech shops of all sorts. Airbnb recovered from COVID-19-induced lows to list, while Roblox delayed its IPO and went out with a direct listing. DoorDash went public. C3.ai had an explosive offering
Google has today launched TaskMate in Kenya, a crowdsourcing app that lets people use smartphones to do tasks and get paid, tapping the growing gig economy. The tech giant said it has rolled out the beta version after a year-long experiment in the East African country, and is preparing to introduce it to other countries
Organizations that have made the leap into using big data to drive their business are increasingly looking for better, more efficient ways to share data with others without compromising privacy and data protection laws, and that is ushering in a rush of technologists building a number of new approaches to fill that need. In the
TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey founders and investors in cities across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in MENA cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put your city on the TechCrunch Map! This
The ocean economy is growing in importance, and with it grows the need to map, understand, and track the ocean itself. Saildrone has been doing just that with its fleet of autonomous science vessels, and the company has now raised a massive $100M round C to pursue its ro-boat aspirations further. Saildrone’s boats have been
In 2019, Amazon introduced a more affordable way to stream Amazon Music in their home with the launch of a free, ad-supported music service that streamed over its Echo speakers. Today, Apple is catching up with its debut of a new, lower-cost version of its Apple Music subscription it calls the “Voice plan.” Unlike Amazon’s
The necessity of animal testing is a sad one for the process of drug discovery, but there’s seemingly no good alternative to mice, even though they’re not particularly accurate human analogues. Quris claims to have the first real option in its combination of AI with data from a “patient on a chip” that provides remarkably
The decentralized reality of office work after the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drive plenty of startup activity. To wit: OfficeRnD, which makes workplace management software that’s increasingly geared toward helping businesses provide a ‘hybrid office’ model — meaning they’re offering flexible work spaces to staff who want to spend some of their time working out
Apple is set to announce new hardware today. The company is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live. [embedded content] Rumor has it that
Uber is testing Pool Chance, a feature that lets riders heading in the same direction share the cost of the journey, in Kenya, with plans to roll out the low-cost service to Ghana and Nigeria. TechCrunch discovered the option when booking a car in Nairobi, Kenya. An Uber spokesperson later confirmed it was part of
One of the gating factors for getting more homeowners to make the switch to solar energy has been that solar, as a business, is hard one to get right, with many a company failing when they’ve been unable to strike the right balance between the technology working as it should, provisioning services in a cost-effective
Tim Parilla Contributor More posts by this contributor How to make sure your legal team is M&A ready A recent Corporate Counsel article highlighted a growing trend: More senior legal leaders are migrating to startups to take on general counsel roles. For some, it’s an attempt to find a better work-life balance (whoops!), while others
January 2020 seems like a long time ago: Billie Eilish swept the Grammy Awards, Tesla’s market cap made it America’s most valuable car company, and Visa announced plans to purchase Plaid for $5.3 billion. A year later, the credit card giant balked at the deal after it attracted regulatory scrutiny, but Ryan Lawler reports that
We can’t check out every investing outfit’s demo day. But one event that we try to catch every year is that of Pear, which is held annually each fall and features (blessedly) just a dozen or so very nascent startups. Pear, a seed-stage venture firm founded in 2013, has an impressive track record when it
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Or, as in today’s episode, talk our way through some big breaking news from the technology world so that we can better understand just what is going on. Danny and Alex got together late Friday on a
Twitter has announced that paid Ticketed Spaces are coming to Android users in the U.S. over the next few days. Hosts on Spaces, Twitter’s live audio room feature, will now be able to sell access to Ticketed Spaces. The Android launch comes after the initial Ticketed Spaces roll out for iOS users in late August.
Advice is not a new concept, but Intro is putting its spin on access to in-demand experts through personalized one-on-one video calls. The Los Angeles company was founded in 2020 by entrepreneur Raad Mobrem, who previously founded Lettuce, an operating system for small businesses that was acquired by Intuit in 2014. Raad Mobrem, founder of
Analogue’s much-anticipated Pocket retro gaming machine will come with more than just sleek design and the ability to play tons of classic games. The device will be the first with AnalogueOS on it, an effort to make what founder Chris Taber calls the “Library of Alexandria of video games.” Actually, he called it the “great
Ximena Aleman Contributor Ximena Aleman is co-founder and chief business development officer at Prometeo, an open banking platform that serves Latin America. More posts by this contributor Startup fundraising is the most tangible gender gap. How can we overcome it? Fintech regulations in Latin America could fuel growth or freeze out startups We are only
Continuing our series of interviews with leading technology luminaries, The Exchange recently caught up with Visionary Founder/CEO at Large Unicorn as its IPO priced and began to trade this week. After a rapid-fire series of S-1 filings, Large Unicorn priced above its own expectations, raising more capital than it had likely anticipated during the lead-up