American technology giant Microsoft announced today that it will pull its professional social network LinkedIn from the Chinese market later this year. Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for more than $26 billion back in 2016. The news comes amidst a flurry of regulatory changes in the Asian nation, as well as rising tensions between the company and
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It’s difficult for startups on a small budget to attract executives with the knowledge base to propel them forward, but Continuum, a talent marketplace for fractional employees, doesn’t think it should be. The remote-first company, which launched today, has been quietly developing a tool that matches venture-backed companies with executives who have been-there-done-that, but don’t
Emerging out of Singapore as primarily a “company builder” in 2017, Antler made its name as a runner of a global startup generator program and investing from a very early, pre-seed stage. It tended to throw teams together, mix in a tech stack and spit out startups at a prodigious rate. But things have progressed
Jul.30 — Yakir Gola, CEO of startup delivery service Gopuff, explains how his company has raised $1 billion in funding and what sets them apart from competitors like Uber Eats and Doordash. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Ivan Baidin Contributor Ivan Baidin is head of Travelpayouts, a global integrated affiliate program focused exclusively on travel offers. During the pandemic, we realized that we were swamped with work and overloaded with information. So we came up with an idea to fix that. At Travelpayouts, we plan a strategy for a year, then each
There may be plenty of funding for some startups these days. But plenty of companies will tell you otherwise. VC Lab, an accelerator for venture capital firms, wants to create investors who will back the rest of the world. A basic hurdle to this goal is the standard paperwork you need to set up a
WhatsApp is beginning to roll out a new feature that will provide its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat history backup in iCloud or Google Drive, patching a major loophole that has been exploited by governments to obtain and review private communication between individuals. WhatsApp has long encrypted chats between users on
Clarifai wants to bring artificial intelligence into the lives of developers, business operators and data scientists so they can automate and accelerate their model development. Matt Zeiler founded the New York-based company in 2013 focused on computer vision. Since its $30 million Series B in 2016, Clarifai has been rolling out new capabilities and products
A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it’s possible to use Facebook’s targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook’s platform assigns them. The paper — entitled “Unique on Facebook: Formulation
Pagos, a payment intelligence infrastructure startup founded by former Braintree and PayPal execs, has raised $10 million in seed funding. Started earlier this year, the remote-first Pagos is building a data “platform” and API-driven micro-services that it says can integrate with any payment stack. The end goal is to drive better performance and “optimization” of
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was one of our strongest shows yet, with a wide diversity of news items that were genuinely fun (and complicated) to chew through. And even though we started off kind of grumpy, we laughed
Tinder announced on Thursday that it’s rolling out a new way for its users to find a plus one for the upcoming end-of-year wedding season. Starting today, users will be able to join the ‘Plus One’ option within the app to signal that they are either looking for a date to a wedding or are
Arvind Gupta Contributor Arvind co-leads Mayfield’s engineering biology practice and is founder and venture advisor at IndieBio. He was the first investor in breakout bio companies such as Geltor, Synthex, Prime Roots, NotCo, Prellis, New Culture, DNA Lite and Memphis Meats. Climate in the last decade has been unprecedented in many ways, none of them
Security cameras, for better or for worse, are part and parcel of how many businesses monitor spaces in the workplace for security or operational reasons. Now, a startup is coming out of stealth with funding for tech designed to make the video produced by those cameras more useful. Spot AI has built a software platform
The UK government’s post-Brexit appetite to ‘reform’ domestic privacy rules by reducing the level of protections wrapping people’s data is already having wider ramifications for the country’s tech ecosystem. Last month the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) announced a consultation on reducing privacy standards — claiming ‘simplified’ rules would be a boon
Canalys reported this morning that global smartphone sales are off 6% this quarter, and it’s not because of lack of demand. It’s due to the worldwide chip shortage. The pandemic has had a negative impact across supply chains, and chips have been particularly hard hit. Canalys principal analyst Ben Stanton says that manufacturers are trying to
The successful commercial launches of Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have officially ushered in a new era of space tourism. But unlike these companies, which are planning on taking people to space using rockets or spaceplanes, two-year-old startup Space Perspective is taking a different tack. Instead of going to space on a rocket, which
MagicCube, a mobile security startup, has raised $15 million in a round led by Mosaik Partners. Bold Capital, Epic Ventures, card-reader/POS hardware maker ID Tech and unnamed individual investors in the fintech space also participated in the financing, which brings the Santa Clara-based startup’s total funding raised to $30 million since its 2014 inception. Put
Clubhouse added a new “music mode” this week, doubling down its commitment to centering social audio in all its permutations. The new music mode will give musicians who play live on the social network their own special set of tools to optimize sound quality and will hit iOS first before rolling out to Android. Clubhouse
Dutchie, a four-year-old, Bend, Oregon company that charges cannabis dispensaries a monthly fee to create and run their websites and manage orders, is on a roll this year, raising its second large round of funding — this time a $350 million Series D at a $3.75 billion valuation. The new valuation is more than double
Berlin-based Mayd has spied an opportunity to build out a medicine delivery platform in Europe which partners with the small-scale pharmacies that tend to be the norm on the continent, capitializing on how the pandemic has generally accelerated demand for on-demand delivery. The startup, which was only founded at the beginning of this year, has
When flying cargo from one part of the world to another, you typically need a pilot for two parts: The take-off and the landing. As so elegantly outlined in the 1980 Jim Abrahams movie !Airplane — the rest of the time, you’re pretty much on instruments. Reliable Robotics is aiming to solve that pesky needing-to-have-a-pilot-in-the-plane
Andy Stinnes Contributor Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, leads early-stage investments in cloud businesses and serves as active board member and adviser, offering operational support for portfolio companies based on his 20+ years in executive roles in business software. More posts by this contributor Seed is not the new Series A
A self-described “endless arcade,” Core feels like a 90s cyberpunk fever dream come to life. Half playable game library, half no-code game creator, all neon lights, the new platform is a surprisingly well-realized vision of this metaverse thing everyone sure seems to be talking about lately. Billing itself as your “portal to the multiverse,” Core
Planet-positive venture capital firm At One Ventures closed on its Fund I, aimed at injecting $150 million into startups that are innovating in the technical hardware space and specializing in environmentally positive technology. The Bay Area firm was started in 2019 by GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi, Laurie Menoud, who co-led venture capital for North American
Evolution Equity Partners is targeting cybersecurity and enterprise software companies for its new Evolution Technology Fund II LP for which it announced Thursday a final closing totaling $400 million. The fund was oversubscribed and included new and returning institutional investors, corporates and family offices from the United States, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Richard Seewald,
Farming accounts for 24 percent of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is largely due to the intensive, ‘industrial’ farming methods employed in the last few decades, together with the rise in the consumption of meat. However, a new approach has been taking the farming world by storm. ‘Regenerative Farming’ practices hand unproductive land back
The new version of Nintendo’s hit Switch console is just different enough to justify itself, but hardly a must-buy for any of the millions who bought the launch version. With a bigger, brighter, and better screen, it’s a good choice for someone buying now who intends to use it mostly as a handheld — but
Spotify’s in-car entertainment system known as just “Car Thing,” launched this spring on an invite-only basis, is now becoming more broadly available. The company announced today Car Thing will become available to U.S. users who want to purchase the $79.99 device. Previously, Spotify had distributed the product for just the cost of shipping during its
Tom Zick Contributor Tom Zick is a researcher in AI ethics at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where she is also a J.D. candidate. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and was previously a fellow at Bloomberg Beta and the City of Boston. Founders tend to think responsible