Enterprise

A federal appeals court froze the FDA’s ban on Juul products Friday after the company sought an emergency administrative stay. On Thursday, the U.S. regulator took sweeping action against the e-cigarette maker, effectively killing its access to the U.S. market. The temporary stay will be in place essentially to buy time until the case can

Hello from America, where we are digesting some pretty big news. Given the portent and weight of what’s going on today, it may feel a bit weird to sit down and read about billions of dollars of someone else’s money. But this is a technology startup and financial news site. So, to work. Just know

For nearly all fintech startups, lending has long been the end game. A notice from India’s central bank this week has thrown a wrench into the ecosystem, scrutinizing just who all can lend. The Reserve Bank of India has informed dozens of fintech startups that it is barring the practice of loading non-bank prepaid payment

Any given year, the real unsung highlight of re:Mars are the dozen or so startups and researchers who show off their wares on the show floor. There are always a couple of cool projects that have somehow managed to escape our radar, thus far. Los Angeles-based Airrow jumped out with a clever product offering. The

Video streaming company Netflix said it has laid off 300 people — which represents 3% of its workforce — because of slowing growth and economic downturn. This is the firm’s second layoff spree in two months, after it let go of 150 staffers in May. In April, it also laid off a bunch of staffers

A decade ago, SumUp was one of the army of fintechs that made names for themselves with dongles that turned basic smartphones into card payment terminals. Today, the London-based company has expanded into a wider range of business services that are used by some 4 million small and medium businesses in 35 markets, and as

Sequoia India and Southeast Asia is broadening the range of its check size for the Surge program as the storied venture firm attempts to make its seed investments more “relevant for a larger set of founders,” it said Thursday. The venture firm’s check size for the three-year-old Surge program, which previously made $1 million to

At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company’s smart assistant. The most head turning of the bunch was a potential new feature that can synthesize short audio clips into longer speech. In

While Africa’s health systems are still reeling from the effects of the COVID pandemic, the adoption of digital health services has been revved in some countries. Telemedicine, the standout offering, witnessed massive adoption during the pandemic, and in the last five years, no other service has been launched more by healthtech startups. However, a particular

As Activision Blizzard faces numerous sexual harassment lawsuits and investigations, employee activists have rallied to get a seat on the company board to represent the voice of the staff. Despite major victories, like testers of Raven Software QA, an Activision division, winning the first union election at a major U.S. gaming company, shareholders quashed the

API-first companies are on the rise, not just in fintech but also in sectors like healthcare. This diversification is boosted by the fact that employees who have earned their chops on banking APIs are now applying their skills to other problems. Healthcare is one of the sectors that could benefit from API solutions. While there

A Cloudflare outage on Tuesday knocked out numerous popular web services, including major crypto exchanges FTX, Bitfinex, and OKX, raising questions about the stability of centralized crypto platforms. The CEO of OKX, which saw $1.47 billion in trading volume in the past 24 hours, tweeted asking for “web3 alternative in the future” after the company’s

Vahak is not only an open marketplace for truckers, but it also provides drivers with services like healthcare and discounted fuel cards. The Bangalore-based company announced today it has raised a $14 million Series A. The round was led by Nexus Partners, with participation from Foundamental, iSeed Ventures, Leo Capital, RTP Global and Tital Capital.

In January, I got under the skin of LG Nova — electronics and appliances giant LG’s internal startup incubator — and its search for a different way of doing a corporate accelerator. Today, NOVA (short for North American Innovation Center) is announcing the twenty startups it selected as part of its Mission for the Future

Iran’s relationship with the crypto mining sector is a love-hate one. The government is again restricting crypto mining activity as it tries to ease the strain on the country’s power supply, despite knowing the promise of crypto as a way to evade international sanctions. Electricity to all 118 government-authorized mining operators in Iran will be

It’s been a rough week for the crypto community as top tokens have seen massive selloffs, pushing some in the space to double down while leaving others to take stock off how the industry got to this point and what widely accepted truths need to be re-evaluated as the crypto internet matures. There haven’t been

Thanks in no small part to the fossil-fueled cult of obstructionism, we’re on track to blow past the 1.5 degrees Celsius global-warming threshold laid out in the 2016 Paris Agreement. Without sweeping change, we can expect “more melting ice, higher sea levels, more heatwaves and other extreme weather,” per the World Meteorological Organization. And that’ll

As several Apple stores across the country fight to unionize, workers in Towson, Maryland became the first to win formal recognition. Out of 110 eligible employees, the union received 65 yes votes and 33 no votes. This historic victory comes after concentrated efforts from Apple to discourage its retail workers from unionizing. Last month, the

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about layoffs and the Winklevoss rock gods. This week, we’re looking at a new layer of crypto doom and gloom. Get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday by subscribing on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. crash redux We’ve talked crypto crashes a couple times already in the

For years, startups addressing the recycling crisis labored in relative anonymity. But for those who have stuck with it — or survived the lean times — investors are now rewarding them with growing support, three founders told me this week at TC Sessions: Climate 2022 in Berkeley. “It’s been very hard to raise in the

Forgive me if I’m over here, in the corner, having vibrant flashbacks to the Commodore 64, my very first computer. Today, Pentaform launches its AbacusBasic, a computer built into a keyboard. It comes with Windows 10 and everything you need to do computer-y things. You still need a monitor, but there are a few solutions

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. There we go, today it’s Friday! We’re planning to spend some quality time with a headset and a collection of amazing TechCrunch podcasts — here’s our roundup of this week’s episodes, enthusiastically

TechCrunch has learned that Russia search giant Yandex is to switch from using yandex.ru as its main front page for Russian-speaking users to ya.ru — a less trafficked domain it’s owned since 2000 that, historically, has only hosted a basic search engine page. Imagine if Google decided to de-emphasize google.com in favor of a less

Huobi Thailand will shut down its exchange permanently on July 1, according to an announcement posted on its website. This marks the exchange’s short-lived ambition in the Southeast Asian country where crypto adoption is flourishing. According to blockchain analysis company Chainalysis, Thailand has one of the world’s highest adoption rates of DeFi, or decentralized financial

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. It’s Fridaa… wait, Thursday? Come on, will this week ever end? Don’t worry, we are all right, just looking forward to our impending vacation mode. — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top

Last year, a small group of Emory University graduate students at Goizueta Business School in Georgia began to examine the challenge of getting Black and other historically underrepresented founders access to capital. One way to do that, they reckoned, was to raise a generation of investors who would pay more attention to these groups. The

Kenya-based Crossboundary Energy Access (CBEA), a mini-grid infrastructure fund, has raised $25 million from ARCH Emerging Markets Partners Limited, Bank of America, and Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund to back renewable energy projects across the continent. The CBEA, a subsidiary of the investment group Crossboundary, said in a statement that the new funding will unlock an

If you’re a coach who’s ever thought, “Man, I wish there was a footwear-mounted performance tracker for my soccer team,” boy, do I have some excellent news for you. Playermaker, founded in 2016, is already in use by more than 250 teams, and the company today announced a $40 million fundraise, which will help it

The European Union is considering how to respond to a major blow to its antitrust enforcement after a court in Luxembourg sided with chipmaker Qualcomm — which had been appealing a €997 million ($1BN+) fine the EU levied against it back in 2018. At the time, the bloc’s competition regulator concluded Qualcomm had abused its

Coinbase has hired Arnab Kumar, former executive at Prosus Ventures, in the latest push to relaunch its eponymous cryptocurrency exchange in India. Kumar, who has previously also worked at influential think tank Niti Aayog and Deutsche Bank, is joining the exchange as director of India market expansion, a spokesperson said in an email. At Niti