The UK’s digital businesses can breathe a sign of relief today as the European Commission has officially signed off on data adequacy for the (now) third country, post-Brexit. It’s a big deal for UK businesses as it means the country will be treated by Brussels as having essentially equivalent data protection rules as markets within
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The pandemic has spurred interest in saving and investment apps around the world, especially ones geared toward newer investors. In Southeast Asia, startups in this space that have raised funding over the past few months include Ajaib, Bibit and Stashaway—and that’s just a (very) partial list. Now Infina, which calls itself the “Robinhood of Vietnam,”
Indian online learning platform Unacademy is in advanced talks to acquire Rheo TV, a less than two-year-old startup founded by two former Unacademy employees, according to three sources familiar with the matter. The current deal values Rheo TV, a startup that has built a platform to help professional game streamers live stream their gameplays and
Like other financial sectors in Latin America, the retail investing space is getting a facelift by local tech startups that are cashing in on the untapped potential for democratizing asset management in the region. One of those startups is Chilean-based Fintual, which today announced a $15 million round led by Kaszek Ventures, the largest fund
In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a growing trend of creators adopting digital and social media, not just as a supplement to their media presence but also as a cornerstone of their personal brand. The pandemic has surely accelerated creator economy trends. Many popular artists and figures have had to postpone concerts and
API Holdings, which operates the giant healthcare startup PharmEasy, said on Friday it has reached an agreement to acquire a 66.1% stake in Thyrocare, which runs a diagnostic lab chain, for about $613 million in what is the first ever acquisition of a publicly listed firm by an unicorn startup in the world’s second most
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we did something fun and different and good: a live show! A good number of people came, and asked questions, and altogether, it was a blast. Danny, Natasha, and Alex had a lovely time with the
Hey Equity fam, we have a small clip of extra for you today. After our live show — listen to the recording here, it was good fun — we got to take a few questions from the audience, audio that was not included in the main episode as we didn’t have the time. But we’ve
It’s been a tough year for business. From ransomware attacks and power outages to cloud downtime and supply-chain disruptions, it’s never been more important to communicate to customers and stakeholders about what’s going wrong and why. Yet, with partial data and misinformation often spreading faster than official word, it’s also never been harder to deliver
US/Israeli startup, Sorbet – which helps companies de-risk themselves against accrued paid time off (PTO) by employees — has raised another $15M, in a round led By Dovi Frances’ Group 11, not long after a $6 million seed round only last April. Sorbet says it removes the burden of PTO from employers, allowing employees to
Mark Spera Contributor What do all companies, regardless of industry, say they want? Growth. Lighting-fast, continuous growth. The good news is you can quickly learn which growth marketing strategies work by studying other companies’ success and adapting it to your own business. Most technophiles remember Dropbox’s referral program — the one that helped it grow
Earlier this week, The Exchange wrote about the early-stage venture capital market, with the goal of understanding how some startups are raising more seed capital before they work on their Series A, while other startups are seemingly raising their first lettered round while in the nascent stages of scaling. The expedition was rooted in commentary
The U.K. is gaining in popularity as a great place to start a tech firm. The country is quickly catching up to China on the tech investment front, with VC investments reaching a record of $15 billion in 2020, according to TechNation. A global health crisis notwithstanding, London remained a favorite for investors. U.K. cities
Meetings should have a clear purpose, but instead, they’ve become a way to measure status and reinforce what is colloquially referred to as CYA culture. There’s a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, “This meeting could have been an email!” you can bet that some small part of them meant it
Years ago, U.S. ride-hailing giant Uber and its Chinese rival Didi were locked in an expensive rivalry in the Asian nation. After a financially bruising competition, Uber sold its China-based business to Didi, focusing instead on other markets. The two companies are coming head-to-head again, however, as Didi looks to list in the United States.
There’s a new Megan Thee Stallion music video out in time for triple digit temperatures. But instead of launching a fresh viral TikTok dance for summer, the single inspired an informal protest among Black creators tired of thanklessly launching trends into the social media stratosphere. With the release of the video for “Thot Shit,” some
The UK’s competition watchdog, the CMA, has opened another investigation into Big Tech — this one targeted at Amazon and Google over how well they handle (or, well, don’t) fake reviews. The Competition and Markets Authority has taken an interest in online reviews for several years, as far back as 2015. It also went after
As the pandemic unevenly roars on, Emily Melton, founder and managing partner of Threshold VC, is reflecting on a previous public health crisis: the Spanish Flu. She says the response just over a century ago prompted the rise of interventional medicine — treating illness through surgery or medicine only after symptoms manifest. Today, interventional medicine
Mercuryo, a startup that has built a cross-border payments network, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding. The London-based company describes itself as “a crypto infrastructure company” that aims to make blockchain useful for businesses via its “digital asset payment gateway.” Specifically, it aggregates various payment solutions and provides fiat and
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has committed to doing more to quickly purge illegal hate speech from its platform in the European Union by formally signing up to a self-regulatory initiative that seeks to tackle the issue through a voluntary Code of Conduct. In statement today, the European Commission announced that the professional social network has joined the
Seattle-based Edge Delta, a startup that is building a modern distributed monitoring stack that is competing directly with industry heavyweights like Splunk, New Relic and Datadog, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures and Tim Tully, the former CTO of Splunk. Previous investors MaC Venture
The EU for all its lethargy, faults and fetishization of bureaucracy, is, ultimately, a good idea. It might be 64 years from the formation of the European Common Market, but it is 29 years since the EU’s formation in the Maastricht Treaty, and this international entity is definitely still acting like an indecisive millennial, happy
Electric propulsion developer Orbion Space Technology has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round, which it says it will use to scale production capacity of its Aurora propulsion system. The Michigan-based startup manufactures Hall effect plasma thrusters for use in small and cube satellites. Thrusters are used throughout the lifespan of a satellite
Stock in many American companies, like Amazon, Alphabet or Tesla, can host hundreds or thousands of dollars per share. Fractional trading, or buying part of a single share through a brokerage, makes them more accessible—at least to people within the United States. Investors in other countries, however, often have to pay high fees through interactive
Deliveroo has had another win in the UK courts, beating back an appeal by the IWGB union which has sought for years to challenge the gig platform over couriers’ rights but has continued to fail to overturn the company’s classification of riders as self-employed. The latest appeals court ruling is the fourth judgment in the
As companies deliver code ever faster, they need tooling to provide some semblance of control and governance over the cloud resources being used to deliver it. Env0, a startup that is helping companies do just that, announced a $17 million Series A today. M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, led the round with participation from previous investors
Visa has announced plans to acquire Tink for €1.8 billion, or $2.15 billion at today’s exchange rate. Tink has been a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interface (API). Today’s move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned
After years of solely focusing on its mobile product, Instagram is at long last thinking about letting users post from their computers. A number of Twitter uses noticed that the test feature had gone live Thursday, and Instagram confirmed the test to TechCrunch. “We know that many people access Instagram from their computer,” an Instagram
Content is king, as the saying goes. But in actual fact, a lot of what companies do today with content, and thus the power of that content, is relatively limited by the tools that exist to present it. That is slowly changing, and now a startup called Sanity, which has built a system to make
Regularly testing waterways and reservoirs is a never-ending responsibility for utility companies and municipal safety authorities, and generally — as you might expect — involves either a boat or at least a pair of waders. Nixie does the job with a drone instead, making the process faster, cheaper, and a lot less wet. The most