BMW has been equipping its cars with in-air gesture control for several years and I never paid attention to it. It seemed redundant. Why wave your hand in the air when there’s dials, buttons, and touchscreens to do the same? Until this week, that is, when took delivery of a BMW 850i loaner equipped with
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Gradeup, an edtech startup in India that operates an exam preparation platform for undergraduate and postgraduate level courses, has raised $7 million from Times Internet as it looks to expand its business in the country. Times Internet, a conglomerate in India, invested $7 million in Series A and $3 million in Seed financing rounds of
WeWork’s efforts to cut costs following the ouster of its chief executive officer and a delayed initial public offering looks to be impacting its subsidiaries. Meetup, which WeWork acquired for a reported $200 million in 2017, announced a round of layoffs this morning, TechCrunch has learned. The company, which helps people foster in-person connections by
Workday announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540 million. The company raised over $60 million on a post valuation of $184.5 million, according to Pitchbook data. The acquisition builds on top of Workday’s existing procurement solutions, Workday Procurement and Workday Inventory, but Workday
Sila Technologies, the battery materials company that has partnered with BMW and Daimler, landed $45 million in new funding and hired two high-profile executives, including Kurt Kelty, who led the battery cell team at Tesla for more than a decade. Kelty, who was on Sila Nano’s advisory board, has been appointed vice president of automotive,
There’s too much hype about mythical “10X developers”. Everyone’s desperate to hire these ‘ninja rockstars’. In reality, it’s smarter to find ways of deleting annoying chores for the coders you already have. That’s where CTO.ai comes in. Emerging from stealth today, CTO.ai lets developers build and borrow DevOps shortcuts. These automate long series of steps
Babbel, the popular Berlin-based language learning service, today announced that its founder and current co-CEO Markus Witte is stepping down from his CEO role but that he will remain the executive chairman of the company’s board. The company’s current co-CEO Arne Schepker will become Babbel’s sole CEO. In addition to these leadership changes, the company
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Adobe Photoshop arrives on the iPad Adobe has released Photoshop for the iPad, making good on an announcement that it made
Facebook wants more people to know it owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus while still maintaining a distinct identity for its main app. So today Facebook launched a new capitalization and typography format for its company name, using all capital letters and a shifting color scheme that highlights Instagram’s purple gradient and WhatsApp’s green tint. “Over
Volterra is an early stage startup that has been quietly working on a comprehensive solution to help companies manage applications in hybrid environments. The company emerged from stealth today with a $50 million investment and a set of products. Investors include Khosla Ventures and Mayfield along with strategic investors M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), Itochu Technology
Heads up, startuppers. We’ve entered the final week of early bird pricing on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019. Place your procrastination on hold, because the deadline to save as much as €500 comes to an abrupt halt on 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Do yourself a saver-favor and buy your early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin today.
Curve, the London-based “over-the-top banking platform,” has added support for Samsung Pay in the U.K., making it easy for Samsung smartphone owners to pay using their mobile phone, regardless of who they bank with. The new feature is enabled by Curve’s ability to consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card. This
Welcome back to Max Q, our weekly look at what’s happening in space and space startup news. This week was a bit more quiet than usual coming off of the amazingly over-packed International Astronautical Congress, but there were still some big moves that promise a lot more action to come before they year’s over –
Chinese autonomous air mobility company EHang has filed with the SEC the paperwork required to go public in the U.S. on the NASDAQ exchange, with a $100 million initial public offering. The company, which has been flying demonstration flights with passengers on board for a while now, is gearing up to launch its first commercial
Europe’s competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, set for a dual role in the next Commission, faced three hours of questions from members of four committees in the European Parliament this afternoon, as MEPs got their chance to interrogate her priorities for a broader legislative role that will shape pan-EU digital strategy for the next five years.
After inking what sources said was a nine-figure deal with the world’s leading supplier of collagen proteins, Gelita, the cell-based collagen maker Geltor is in the market for at least $50 million in new funding, TechCrunch has learned. According to people with knowledge of the company’s plans, the new funding could range from $50 million
The husband and wife co-founders behind the direct-to-consumer cookware and dinnerware startup retailer OurPlace are big believers in the notion that the doorway to inclusive communities opens through the kitchen. Amir Tehrani, the company’s co-founder and chief executive spent, his life in the cookware and kitchen business, while his wife, Shiza Tehrani, is the co-founder of
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about how SoftBank is screwing up. Before that, I noted All Raise’s expansion, Uber the TV show and the
Nintendo has a long history when it comes to exercise-driven games. I’m dating myself, but I can say I remember playing Track & Field on NES with the Power Pad. How far we’ve come! Ring Fit Adventure is a full-body workout for grown-ups, but fun, gentle, and ridiculous enough to forget it’s exercise. The game
Sometimes it feels as if Internet platforms are turning everything upside down, from politics to publishing, culture to commerce, and of course swapping truth for lies. This week’s bizarro reversal was the vista of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a tech CEO famed for being entirely behind the moral curve of understanding what his product is platforming
If you work for someone else, you likely know the drill: in comes that annual email reminding you that it’s time for unconscious bias or sexual harassment training, and if you could please finish up this mandatory module by this date, that would be terrific. The email — not to mention the programming itself —
Software development companies tackling services for niche industries, like commercial real estate subcontracting, continue to find Los Angeles to be fertile ground for development. The latest company to raise funding from a clutch of investors is BuildOps, which raised $5.8 million in seed financing from some big names in the Los Angeles tech ecosystem. Led
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Google is acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion Google will pay $7.35 per share for the wearables company — an all-cash deal
Imagine a hypersonic passenger aircraft that would cut the journey time between London and New York to around two hours. At Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, the aircraft would complete a trip across the Atlantic in around 120 minutes. Mach 5 is more than twice as fast as the cruising speed of Concorde
The mobile version of Nintendo’s iconic racing franchise, Mario Kart Tour, will soon support multiplayer races, bringing the game closer to its competitive roots. A limited multiplayer beta test is planned for December, just in time for holiday laziness, but only for paying subscribers — the rest of us will have to wait. Mario Kart
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Kate and Alex broke the discussion into two main themes. The first dealt with early-stage companies, and the second, as you can imagine, later-stage affairs. Don’t worry, we don’t get to SoftBank for quite some time.
Climate risk, including extreme events and the related pressures our environment, are fundamentally affecting the way businesses and governments operate — both tactically and strategically. Increasing climate volatility is causing food supply disruptions and increasing pressure on Enterprises (including financial institutions, insurers and producers) to disclose what’s going on. The trouble is, while there is
We’ve known for a while now that Google was bringing the “Incognito mode” concept to Maps, allowing you to run searches and find routes without them automatically being tied to your account history. If you’ve been digging around trying to find the option without any luck, you weren’t just missing it. Though first mentioned back
As we move from a world dominated by virtual machines to one of serverless, it changes the nature of monitoring, and vendors like New Relic certainly recognize that. This morning the company announced it was acquiring IOpipe, an early-stage Seattle serverless monitoring startup to help beef up its serverless monitoring chops. Terms of the deal
Calling all tech-minded students, nonprofit and government employees — this is your moment. Come and join us at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December at a price you can afford — because great ideas and innovation come from every sector. Apply for our discounted Innovator passes for students and nonprofit or government employees and enjoy