Eight months after former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer quit in the midst of a full-court press from the Trump administration against the Chinese-owned social media giant, TikTok finally has a new permanent leader. ByteDance’s recently hired CFO Shouzi Chew will be assuming the role as TikTok CEO while still holding the CFO role at its
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Tapping the geothermal energy stored beneath the Earth’s surface as a way to generate renewable power is one of the new visions for the future that’s captured the attention of environmentalists and oil and gas engineers alike. That’s because it’s not only a way to generate power that doesn’t rely on greenhouse gas emitting hydrocarbons,
Joey Lei Contributor Joey Lei is director of service management at Synoptek. With more than 14 years of experience in engineering and product management, Lei is responsible for the development and growth of the Synoptek service portfolio and solution development with strategic technology alliance partners. More posts by this contributor How startups can leverage elastic
Blade, the French startup behind cloud gaming service Shadow, has been acquired by Octave Klaba’s fund following a commercial court order. Klaba is better known as the founder of OVHcloud, a French cloud hosting company. He’s acquiring Blade (and Shadow) through his investment fund Jezby Ventures — not OVHcloud. Shadow is a cloud computing service for
Restoring and preserving the world’s forests has long been considered one of the easiest, lowest-cost and simplest ways to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s by far the most popular method for corporations looking to take an easy first step on the long road to decarbonizing or offsetting their industrial operations.
Ariel Katz Contributor Ariel Katz is the founder and CEO of H1, a global healthcare platform that helps life sciences companies, hospitals, academic medical centers and health systems connect with providers, find clinical research, locate industry experts and benchmark their organization. In the early 2000s, Jeff Bezos gave a seminal TED Talk titled “The Electricity
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. First and foremost, Equity was nominated for a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate it. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we’ll keep doing our thing and making each
Machine learning is capable of doing all sorts of things as long as you have the data to teach it how. That’s not always easy, and researchers are always looking for a way to add a bit of “common sense” to AI so you don’t have to show it 500 pictures of a cat before
Conventional wisdom over the last year has suggested that the pandemic has driven companies to the cloud much faster than they ever would have gone without that forcing event with some suggesting it has compressed years of transformation into months. This quarter’s cloud infrastructure revenue numbers appear to be proving that thesis correct. With The
A US/Israeli startup, Sorbet — which is tackling what companies do with the financial risks as employees accrue Paid Time Off (PTO) — has raised $6 million in a Seed funding round led by Viola Ventures, with participation by Global Founders Capital, Meron Capital. The economics of Paid Time Off is relatively hidden in the
German startup Vivid Money has raised a new $73 million Series B funding round (€60 million) led by Greenoaks with existing investor Ribbit Capital also participating. Following today’s funding round, Vivid Money has reached a valuation of $436 million (€360 million). Vivid Money could be considered as a Revolut competitor designed specifically for the Eurozone.
Apr.27 — Ripple co-founder and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen says the lack of regulatory clarity has impeded the U.S. cryptocurrency market. He speaks during an interview with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller and Amanda Lang on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Phil Edmondson-Jones Contributor Phil Edmondson-Jones is a principal at Oxx, the specialist SaaS VC backing Europe and Israel’s most promising B2B SaaS businesses at the scale-up stage. Once the uncool sibling of a flourishing fintech sector, insurtech is now one of the hottest areas of a buoyant venture market. Zego’s $150 million round at unicorn
While waiting for full first-quarter venture capital results for fintech startups to drop, we knew that they were going to be outsized. The Exchange previously explored the pace at which huge venture rounds were invested into the startup niche, noting that by mid-March the fintech market had already recorded a record number of $100 million
Cybersecurity nightmares like the SolarWinds hack highlight how malicious hackers continue to exploit vulnerabilities in software and apps to do their dirty work. Today a startup that’s built a platform to help organizations protect themselves from this by running threat detection and response at the network level is announcing a big round of funding to
Gr4vy, (pronounced ‘gravy’) is a cloud-native payments company with a “payment orchestration platform (POP)” that merges a Cloud platform with payments infrastructure. It’s also announcing a Series A funding round of $11.1M, led by Nyca Partners (a VC with a bench of partners who are ex-Visa ), with participation from Activant Capital (a fintech investor),
More good news from a smartphone market currently rebounding from the far reaching impacts of the pandemic. New numbers from Canalys put global shipments for Q1 2021 at 27% above where they were the same time last year. The industry was hit early and hit hard by Covid-19. The first quarter saw company running into
TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put Delft, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Utrecht on the Techcrunch
IBM today made another acquisition to deepen its reach into providing enterprises with AI-based services to manage their networks and workloads. It announced that it is acquiring Turbonomic, a company that provides tools to manage application performance (specifically resource management), along with Kubernetes and network performance, part of its bigger strategy to bring more AI
In addition to Facebook’s Clubhouse competitor built within Messenger Rooms and its experiments with a Clubhouse-like Q&A platform on the web, the company is now leveraging yet another of its largest products to take on the Clubhouse threat: Instagram Live. Today, Instagram announced it’s adding new features that will allow users to mute their microphones
David Jegen Contributor Carl Byers Contributor Why can we see all our bank, credit card and brokerage data on our phones instantaneously in one app, yet walk into a doctor’s office blind to our healthcare records, diagnoses and prescriptions? Our health status should be as accessible as our checking account balance. The liberation of financial
Gaming and streamed video have been two of the biggest pastime winners during the last year+ of pandemic living. Today a startup that has created an app that brings those two entertainment formats together is announcing a notable seed round of funding as it prepares to come out of closed beta. PortalOne, a hybrid gaming
R.I.P. Madefire, a startup that recruited high-profile artists to reinvent comics for new formats and platforms. An announcement on the Madefire website states the company entered into “an assignment of benefit for creditors” (explained as “a state-level insolvency proceeding similar to bankruptcy”) earlier this month, which was then reported this morning in The Beat. As
Every developer relies on environments like testing, staging and production as they build software, but building them can be a time-consuming operation. ReleaseHub, an early stage startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, wants to change that by providing a service to make environments available on demand. Today, the company announced
The chance that I am ever willing to commute on a regular basis again in the future is zero. It’s too inefficient. And while workers and employers are somewhat split on where they stand on the question of remote toil, the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently shaken up the working world; we’re not going back to
The European Parliament approved a new law on terrorist content takedowns yesterday, paving the way for one-hour removals to become the legal standard across the EU. The regulation “addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online” will come into force shortly after publication in the EU’s Official Journal — and start applying 12 months after that.
Taking on Amazon S3 in the cloud storage game would seem to be a fool-hearty proposition, but Wasabi has found a way to build storage cheaply and pass the savings onto customers. Today the Boston-based startup announced a $112 million Series C investment on a $700 million valuation. Fidelity Management & Research Company led the
Erase All Kittens (EAK) is an EdTech startup that created a ‘Mario-style’ web-based game designed for kids aged 8-12. However, the game has a twist: it places an emphasis on inspiring girls to code (since let’s face it, most coding tools are created by men). After reaching 160,000 players in over 100 countries, it’s now
PreShow Interactive is giving gamers a new way to earn in-game currency in exchange for watching ads — a concept that’s become familiar in mobile games but hasn’t really made much headway on PCs or consoles. The startup is led by MoviePass’ founding CEO Stacy Spikes. When I spoke to Spikes about PreShow two years
Before Precursor Ventures hired Sydney Thomas, the firm was running its operations out of founder Charles Hudson’s inbox, the investor recently recalled. Thomas was hired specifically to do the operational work of bringing a solo GP fund, with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place — and that’s exactly what