As the Apple v. Epic Games lawsuit goes under appeal, Google on Monday afternoon filed an answer and counterclaim in the Epic Games’ antitrust litigation against the company. The tech giant and Android maker denies Epic’s allegations of antitrust behavior and instead says that it’s owed relief, as Epic Games breached the Google Play Developer
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Vertical farms usually look up. Aerofarms, Plenty, Gotham Greens — these companies are trying to revolutionize agriculture by looking toward the sky, with tall warehouses full of growing equipment extending upward. But Philippe Labrie is looking down. Labrie is the CEO and founder of the pre-seed startup GreenForges, an underground farming company founded in 2019
The Exchange is digging into the Chinese venture capital market this week, but getting folks to chat about business and China on the record is turning out to be slightly harder than we anticipated. More on that later this week. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or
Twitter is deepening its investment in Spaces, the Clubhouse-like audio rooms the social network launched this year. The company announced the launch of a new creator program for Spaces on Tuesday. The Spark program is a three-month-long accelerator that aims to “discover and reward great Spaces on Twitter with financial, technical, and marketing support.” Twitter
The startup myth goes something like this: You launch a startup in your dorm room, get into Y Combinator, find product-market fit, experience hockey-stick growth, raise some funding and expand the platform. Somehow your revenue hurtles toward $100 million and the company valuation flies to $1 billion. All’s right with the world. In reality, though,
Paris-based cryptocurrency broker SheeldMarket has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Atomico. As a EU-registered broker, the company wants to help institutional investors buy and sell crypto assets in a regulated way. Most cryptocurrency products designed for institutional investors focus on American or Asian investors. SheeldMarket thinks it can convince institutional
E-bike manufacturer VanMoof recently raised a $128 million funding round. And the company is already using some of that cash to develop a brand new product — the VanMoof V. This is a new product in the VanMoof lineup, a high-speed bike. The VanMoof V isn’t available just yet. Instead, the company teased the new
Fintech startup Atomic announced this morning that it has closed a $22 million Series A. Core Innovation Capital led the round, which saw participation from preceding investors. The company has raised just under $39 million to date. The company’s API-delivered product, which focuses on payroll data, helps power a number of fintech startups that we
ResQ, which does end-to-end equipment repairs for over 4,000 restaurant groups — from Taco Bell to Tim Hortons — has raised a $39 million Series A co-led by Tiger Global and Canvas Ventures. The capital, which includes investments from Homebrew, Inovia Capital and Golden Ventures, comes just months after the startup announced its $7.5 million
Carving out 45 minutes or an hour for a workout can be difficult between work, home and daily life. Digital fitness and wellness company FitOn was created to provide 15- or 20-minute workouts aimed at getting people moving in whatever time they can make. The company closed on an $18 million Series B round of
Facebook is expanding its investment in audio initiatives with the launch of a new “Audio” destination in its mobile app in the U.S., where users will be able to discover all the audio formats Facebook now hosts in one place, including podcasts, Live Audio Rooms, and short-form audio. The company says it’s also making its
Alviere, an embedded finance startup that aims to help any brand deliver financial products and services to its customers and employees, announced today it has closed $70 million of new funding. In April, New York-based Alviere closed a $20 million Series A led by Viola Ventures and Viola Fintech, with the participation of CommerzVentures, Mitsubishi
Nearly a year after Dott originally announced plans to launch a bike-sharing service, the new offering is going live in Paris. Dott is better known for its scooter-sharing service across dozens of European cities. It is adding electric bikes to complement its service. In addition to Dott, Lime and Tier also have scooters currently available
When the Trump administration announced it would ban TikTok in the U.S., a number of alternative short-form video apps began to flourish, as users hedged their bets on a potential TikTok exit. Among these was Byte, an app co-created by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, which topped 1.3 million downloads in its first week alone. But
Fount, a robo-advisor startup in South Korea, has raised a $33.4 million Series C round to beef up its machine learning-based platform development and hire staff. The latest round was led by Hana Financial Investment, along with Nice Investment. Returning backers Smilegate Investment, KT Investment, Shinhan Capital and Korea Development Bank also participated. The
As last week came to a close, NerdWallet filed to go public. Given the late hour, our S-1 dive had to wait until today. The NerdWallet IPO comes at an interesting time. The company provides financial product recommendations to both consumers and SMBs, meaning that it dabbles in the same market that fintech startups play
Facebook’s external policy review board will meet with Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who went public with her concerns about the company last week. Facebook’s Oversight Board announced Monday that it would meet with Haugen “in the coming weeks” after the whistleblower accepted the board’s invitation to speak. “Board members appreciate the chance to
Climate change has been the deepest, most challenging cognitive puzzle for humans to untangle these past years. It’s systems on top of systems, with emergent properties that can easily turn intuitive notions into catastrophic dead ends. Every action has a reaction or ten, and improving one part of the system almost invariably leads to weaknesses
HR technology has been thrown into the spotlight in the last 20 months: Covid-19 has changed the way we work, and so how we manage people in the world of work has had to change, too. Today, a Munich-based startup called Personio, which has built a big business out of how to address that issue
Marnix Broer Contributor Marnix Broer is the co-founder and CEO of StuDocu. Have you ever sat in a shared college dorm kitchen space with your roommate and decided to start a business? I should be clear here: We didn’t really decide to start a business; it was more of a project to create a tool
The potential for telehealth across Africa is vast and promising as mobile connectivity deepens, and innovations that could potentially bridge the doctor-patient ratio gap increase according to a Deloitte report. One company that is planning to drive the wave of telemedicine across the continent, as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, is mPharma, a Ghanaian health
South Africa’s telecommunication provider Telkom SA SOC Ltd has since October discontinued Netflix Inc. from its phone and internet set-top box, said a Bloomberg report. Telkom’s Content Executive Wanda Mkhize said in a statement that the partnership between the two firms would not be renewed and declined to provide further details, Bloomberg reported. We have
Roughly two hours pass between my initial email and our first Zoom chat — on a Sunday, no less. I skip the post-gym shower and pop on a baseball cap, because I’m not sure when the opportunity will present itself again. After more than two decades of espousing the benefits of vertical farming around the
Jennifer Smith Contributor Jennifer Smith is CEO and co-founder of Scribe, a Princeton and Harvard Business School alum and is a technology investor and adviser formerly at McKinsey and Greylock Partners. When building a startup, you’re making what feels like a million decisions on timing — when to launch to time the market, when to
In the latest sign that that the tech industry is pivoting towards climate and sustainability, Atlantic Food Labs – an offshoot of the Berlin fund Atlantic Labs headed by long-time tech investor Christophe F. Maire – is relaunching as FoodLabs, with a dedicated €100m FoodTech fund to invest in food, health, and sustainability startups. Founded
Ahead of its launch on October 19, it seems as if retailers and Google are playing a game of chicken about who can leak the most information about its two upcoming flagship phones; the Google Pixel 6 and Google Pixel 6 Pro. Google’s Pixel line of smartphones has traditionally been the flagship of the Android armada
Disney’s newest digital service, Disney Genie, is launching on October 19 at Walt Disney World Resort. The service, first unveiled in August, is an update to the company’s earlier line reservation tools for Disney’s parks, allowing guests to plan and update their itineraries, book time slots for the most popular attractions, and optionally purchase paid
Mono, an African startup that helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, has raised a $15 million Series A round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. The round, led by Tiger Global — the VC firm’s third major investment in Africa this year after Flutterwave and FairMoney — also had participation from new investors
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson isn’t a book that lauds ecoterrorists. In fact, it mostly manages to avoid the subject across its many pages. Yet, at the center of its speculative account about the eponymous ministry and its leadership over the next few decades, the dark side is the linchpin for
French startup Swile has raised a $200 million Series D funding round led by SoftBank International Group. With this funding round, the startup has now reached unicorn status, meaning that Swile has a valuation of $1 billion or more. Swile provides a payment card for employee benefits, such as meal vouchers, gift cards and sustainable